Policy
drorzel | March 24, 2017I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I'm thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn't go into much detail. It's probably worth explaining at greater-than-Twitter length, though, and a little too inside-baseball for Forbes, so I'll write something about it here.
At its core, the "CERN invented WWW" argument is a "Basic research pays off in unexpected ways" argument, and in that sense, it's fine. The problem is, it's not…
drorzel | June 17, 2016The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...)
You can listen to the…
drorzel | May 22, 2016I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for... months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.
But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type…
drorzel | February 5, 2016In yesterday's post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring binge, but in the absence of flipping great wodges of cash, change comes more slowly.
This, naturally, sparked a sort of morbid curiosity about whether the scale of this problem would be quantifiable, and of course, there's the AIP Statistical Research Center offering numbers on all sorts of…
drorzel | March 25, 2015I mentioned last week that I'm giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it:
It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone.
After all, two of his popular science books are How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Orzel, an associate professor of physics at Union College in New York and author of the ScienceBlog “Uncertain Principles,” is scheduled to speak on campus at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 26.
As…
drorzel | November 25, 2014I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track.
Fifth in this round is a bio major who now works on sustainably managing Atlantic coastal fisheries.
1) What is your non-academic job? Fishery Management Plan Coordinator at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (management agency for fisheries)
2) What is your science background…
drorzel | September 17, 2014There was a article in Scientific American about diversity in STEM collecting together the best demographic data available about the science and engineering workforce. It's a useful collection of references, and comes with some very pretty graphics, particularly this one, showing the demographic breakdown of the US population compared to the science and engineering fields:
Demographic breakdown of general population vs. science and engineering, from the Scientific American post.
This is a very professionally made graphic, but also misleading in the worst way. When I first looked at this, I…
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…
drorzel | November 15, 2012Everybody and their siblings have been linking to this Minute Physics video, an "open letter" to President Obama complaining about the way that most high school and even intro college physics classes don't teach anything remotely modern:
I'm not entirely sure where the date of 1865 comes from, but it's true, the standard intro physics sequence doesn't really touch what's normally called "modern physics," a term which is itself laughably out of date, as it generally refers to special relativity and quantum mechanics as it stood around 1935. We don't teach really new stuff until about the 300…
drorzel | May 9, 2012One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most obvious when Tyson or other space advocates talk about the need for "inspiring" people, but it shows up even in what ought to be relatively concrete discussions of actual science.
Take, for example, the argument over humans vs. robots. Given the success of the robotic missions to Mars and other bodies,…
drorzel | May 3, 2012I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated by this book.
This is largely my own fault, because I went into it expecting it to be something it's not. Had I read the description more carefully, I might not have had such a strong negative reaction (which was exacerbated by some outside stress when I first started reading it, so I put it aside for a few weeks, until I was less mad in general, and more likely to give it a fair reading). I'm actually somewhat hesitant to write this up at all, for a number of reasons, but after thinking it over a bit, I think I have sensible reasons for being…
drorzel | August 21, 2011A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it's with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh.
The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that's been around for a long time, with lots of different people working on it. GE's technology is based on an idea from some Australians back in the 1990's, and they appear to think they can scale it up to industrial scale. Predictably enough, there's a stark difference of opinion about the…
drorzel | August 4, 2011I didn't pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF's proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say something on the blog, too.
The main source of complaint is the "Broader Impacts" section of the grant, a category that has always been sort of nebulous, but which the new standards attempt to clarify:
Collectively, NSF projects should help to advance a broad set of important national goals,…
drorzel | July 22, 2011The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair, most of the people choking my Twitter feeds with Shuttle-related comments are space obsessives anyway, so it's not that new). I got a little grief for that over in locked LiveJournal land, so I thought I might as well say a bit more about it here.
While there is some part of me that feels a little…
drorzel | July 23, 2010Earlier this week, there was some interesting discussion of science communication in the UK branch of the science blogosphere. I found it via Alun Salt's "Moving beyond the 'One-dinosaur-fits-all' model of science communication" which is too good a phrase not to quote, and he spun off two posts from Alice Bell, at the Guardian blog and her own blog, and the proximate cause of all this is a dopey remark by a UK government official that has come in for some justifiable mockery.
Bell and Salt both focus on the narrowness of the "dinosaurs and space" approach-- a reasonably representative quote…
drorzel | July 6, 2010As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point to the next time I get asked.
So, what communications skills should scientists have? The answer depends on what kind of science you're going to do, and what you want to do with it.
First and foremost, though: If you want to be a successful scientist, you need good communications skills. Full stop.…
drorzel | June 30, 2010The kerfuffle of the moment in the science blogosphere once again relates to Chris Mooney, who is pretty much a kerfuffle looking for a place to happen at this point. This time around it centers around a Washington Post op-ed that is basically the executive summary of a American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper that is itself the executive summary version of a series of four workshops on science and the public. You can get a reasonable sense of the kerfuffle from the links in Chris's responses to the responses.
I'm currently making one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person--…
drorzel | April 9, 2010The National Science Board made a deeply regrettable decision to omit questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2010. As you might expect, this has stirred up some controversy.
I wasn't surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the omission a couple of months ago, when I updated the slides for my talk on public communication of science-- the figure showing survey data in the current talk doesn't include those questions, while the original version has them in there. I noticed it, and thought it was a little odd, but it had no effect…
drorzel | March 25, 2010I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland
Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting:
Tuesday
In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…
drorzel | February 7, 2010My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well-- the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren't there, but want to know what I talked about, here are the slides on SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Weblogs Can Help
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
This flattens out some of the more animation-dependent jokes, but gets you the basic idea. It is, of…