Academia
catdynamics | December 18, 2013What should a high school student do to get on a track to become an astrophysicist?
Reworked from a rework from an oldie.
Something prompted me to think it is time to lightly update and republish this series, possibly with added bonus parts!
So, you're in high school wondering what to do with yourself, and you think: "hey, I could be an Astrophysicist!"
So, what should YOU do, wanting to get into a good university and an astro/physics major?
1) Take all the math that is offered, and do well in it.
The limiting factor for most students wanting to do astronomy or astrophysics is poor math…
catdynamics | December 18, 2013An interesting new twist for the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society will be the "Augmented Reality" poster - an instantiation of the very rapidly growing augmented reality features appearing everywhere through smartphone apps or google glass.
V838 Mon poster by Vogt et al
will have a layar augmentation:
[caption id="attachment_3642" align="aligncenter" width="200"] Vogt et al poster viewed through layar app on an iPhone
(click to embiggen)[/caption]
using layar creator, tags are added to the poster which pop up when viewed through the app providing links to sources, videos,…
jdupuis | December 10, 2013This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders.
Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see.
Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…
drorzel | November 18, 2013In comments to the Sagan post, Niall asked about how I spend my time. This is about to change, as today is the last day of my class for the fall term, then we have an extended break, but it's probably interesting in a life-in-academia way to put up my schedule at the moment:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday
06:00 - Alarm goes off. Wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Release dog, start breakfast prep.
06:30 - Wake SteelyKid, take her downstairs, give her breakfast. The usual division of labor is that I get the food, then carry her upstairs to go to the bathroom (because she's tired…
drorzel | October 30, 2013An article titled "Individualism: The legacy of great physicists," by Ricardo Heras. crossed my various social media feeds a half-dozen times on Tuesday, so I finally broke down and read it, and I'm puzzled. The argument is very straightforward-- single-author publications used to be common, now they're not, this might indicate a lack of truly independent work, that would be bad-- but a lot of it is at odds with my reading of the relevant history.
The most jarring thing about the article is the "Individualistic Team" graphic above, including a bunch of pictures of famous physicists who are…
drorzel | October 28, 2013A couple of weeks back, DougT won this year's Nobel betting pool, and requested a post on the subject of funding of wacky ieas:
could you comment on this: http://www.space.com/22344-elon-musk-hyperloop-technology-revealed.html and the phenomenon of the uber-rich funding science in general. It seems to me that there used to be more private funding of science, and there still is a lot. But is government funding crowding out private funding (political question), is government funding necessary for Apollo and CERN b/c it’s so huge, is private funding more “out there” and therefore on the tails of…
jdupuis | October 22, 2013Sarah Boon (Twitter, blog) has organized a series of posts on science policy in Canada over the next month or so to be published in the iPolitics online magazine. The first four are out with another eight (two approximately every Monday) between now and November 18th. Which is just in time for the upcoming Canadian Science Policy Conference in Toronto starting November 20th.
The articles are available open access. I'll list the first bunch here, including my own contribution comparing what's going on at Library and Archives Canada with similar assaults on science. I will update this post as…
drorzel | October 14, 2013It was looking like we were going to slip through the entire Nobel season without a winner in the Uncertain Principles Betting Pool, but at the eleventh hour, we got one: DougT correctly predicted that the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel would be shared by Eugene Fama (remember, the requirement to name all the laureates for a particular prize applied only to votes for a Higgs boson prize in physics).
So, congratulations to Doug! Email me to claim your valuable prize.
catdynamics | October 10, 2013 When it is darkest, men see the stars.
This afternoon I needed to check something urgently, and as is my habit in this day and age, I jumped to a website where I knew the information was available.
A few seconds later, with some irritation I went to hit "refresh" as the request failed to go through, and then realized that it was a *.nasa.gov address, at Ames, as it happens, and I was not going to be getting that bit of data this afternoon, not without some old fashioned legwork.
A bit later I realized with increasing dismay that a signficant fraction of the illustrations for my class…
catdynamics | October 10, 2013the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education had a few interesting tidbits in last week's issue:
How a College Took Assessment to Heart, Lebanon Valley College takes an accreditors warning to heart - the key issue being that the informal committee of "General Officers", the Vice Presidents, with the college President, were making all decisions, and all were focused on revenue.
The turnaround, so far, involves a new President and the departure of the VP for Finance with a focus the college actually achieving its academic goals.
There may be more colleges going down this path.
This is followed…
drorzel | October 6, 2013There was a great big New York Times article on women in science this week, which prompted no end of discussion. (I also highly recommend Bee's response at Backreaction.) It's built around the personal story of the author, Eileen Pollack, a physics major at Yale who decided not to go to grad school, and her story is compellingly told, providing a nice frame to her investigation of the question of why there continue to be so few women in the sciences.
Pollack comes out very much in favor of the notion that many women choose not to go to graduate school in the sciences because they don't…
drorzel | October 4, 2013SteelyKid's kindergarten teacher is big on incentives and prizes-- there are a number of reward bags that get sent home with kids who excel in some particular area. I'm not entirely sure what's in these, because SteelyKid hasn't gotten any yet.
This isn't because she misbehaves-- from all reports, she's very good-- but she's in a class with 21 other kids, and they've only been in school for a couple of weeks. Still, she regards this as a grave injustice, and I occasionally get aggrieved reports about the distribution of reward bags when I pick her up from after-school day care. I try to…
drorzel | October 2, 2013We had a faculty meeting yesterday, at which one colleague suggested that in addition to our "Writing Across the Curriculum" requirement, we should have a "Speaking Across the Curriculum" requirement to teach students oral presentation skills. This provoked a bit of tittering about the possible acronym, but it's not an obviously awful idea. The basic problem is the same as with the WAC requirement: there isn't actually all that much that really crosses the curriculum. Presentation standards and styles are dramatically different between disciplines, whether you're talking about oral or written…
drorzel | September 27, 2013Another year, another fall, another disbursement of dynamite money from our friends in Scandawegia. The 2013 Nobel Prize announcements are almost upon us. Which means it's time for the game everyone loves to tolerate: the Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Betting Pool. As always, the core rules are simple:
Leave a comment to this post predicting at least one of the winners of one of this year’s Nobel Prizes. If one of your guesses turns out to be correct, you win the highly coveted right to choose the topic of a future blog post.
There's one small modification this year, though, regarding the…
drorzel | September 24, 2013In a comment to yesterday's post about the liberal arts, Eric Lund makes a good point:
The best argument I have ever heard for doing scholarship in literature and other such fields is that some people find it fun.
I single this out as a good point not because I want to sneer at the literary disciplines, but because with a little re-wording, this could apply to just about anything. The best reason for studying any academic subject is because it's fun.
This is, as I alluded to in a later comment of my own, a significant source of tension for Delbanco's book and a lot of other arguments about…
drorzel | September 23, 2013Sunday evening, as a part of the kick-off to the new academic year, we had a talk by Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia and the author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. This was intended as a sort of affirmation of the importance of the sort of educational experience Union offers, but ultimately, I found it pretty frustrating.
Admittedly, a lot of that was because the talk was at an inconvenient time, 5pm on a Sunday evening being a point when I would normally be home making dinner for the family. Sunday is a school night, to boot, so I needed to get home for dog-walking and…
drorzel | September 20, 2013The JCC day care is closed today for one of the fall cluster of Jewish holidays, which means I'm spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift so I can teach my class. Thus, this is more of a tab clearance sort of exercise than a thoughtful examination of the underlying issues. But having spent a bunch of time in the recent past on gender gaps of various sorts, these are some recent links that struck me as interesting enough to pass along.
-- Via Crooked Timber, Anca Gheaus offers cheers for being the "token" woman at academic conferences. This is mostly…
jdupuis | September 18, 2013It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…
drorzel | September 12, 2013Over at NPR, Adam Frank has an ode to the use of chalk for teaching science, including a bit of warm fuzzy nostalgia:
I have powerful memories of tracking through derivations presented in class when I was a student. When done well, they pinned my attention down. The act of copying what was appearing on the board was a kind of meditation. You had to stay awake and aware, like a man walking across a frozen pond. Let your mind wander for a moment and BAM! You were lost. You couldn't see how the professor had gotten from one step to the next. But keep your focus and you'd be rewarded with that…
drorzel | September 9, 2013While I was away for the weekend, intending to mostly ignore the Internet, Steve Maier tweeted:
#FantasyFootball ?
What if #FantasyPhysics existed--who would be your picks?
This, of course, ended up sucking up a huge amount of mental energy for the rest of the weekend, because it's such perfect blog fodder. If I'd had a laptop with me, I might've ended up staying up late writing it up, but instead, I'm skipping the second half of a horror-show game between my Giants and the hated Cowboys to write it on Sunday night...
So. Fantasy physics. For those not up on their pop culture, this is a…