Physical Sciences
thusspakezuska | August 8, 2007By way of the LA Times, we learn that women are flocking in droves to Caltech this year:
According to preliminary figures, 87 women are entering a freshman class of [235] students in September. That 37% share is Caltech's highest since it began admitting undergraduate women in 1970, when pioneering females comprised 14% of the entering class.
Has Caltech gone soft and squishy? Though they protest that standards were not lowered, the LA Times does not seem convinced.
Although Caltech insists that it did not lower its notoriously tough admission standards or practice affirmative action for…
loom | August 8, 2007Okay. So, the other day I asked an innocuous question about whether scientists get scientific tattoos. I also invited people to send in their own example. I didn't quite bank on this site becoming a clearinghouse for science tattoos. The traffic of readers coming in from reddit, etc., is startling enough. But the stream of tattoo pictures coming into my inbox is causing me to freak out, ever so slightly. Seriously, think about this: people with Ph.D.'s, who study esoteric aspects of physics and insect neurology are baring flesh, snapping pictures, and sending them to me, a stranger. Just…
cortex | August 8, 2007As the author of a book that's equally divided between descriptions of neuroscience and descriptions of art, I've spent far too much time pondering the organization of book stores. How should books be classified? Is my book a "science" book, or does it belong in the neglected "Criticism and Essays" section? Personally, I've always been drawn to the books that elude neat categorization. For example, one of my weirder hobbies is checking to see where bookstores put William James. I've seen him shelved in any number of sections, from "Science" to "Philosophy" to "Essays" to "Mysticism".
Which…
denialism | August 6, 2007Ah Egnor. The chief purveyor of foot-in-mouth disease at Evolution News and Views takes on Dunford's recent post on the intellectual dishonesty of the intelligent design creationist movement and shows exactly why Dunford has a point.
Intelligent design is a cheesy attempt to smear a patina of scientific legitimacy on creationist ideas. Dunford quite reasonably points out that at least the creationists are honest about their objectives, while the ID cranks play a game of hiding their creationist dogma behind psuedoscientific nonsense. Egnor takes offense, and suggests that Dunford is…
pharyngula | August 2, 2007A few readers sent me a link to this interview with Alister McGrath; most thought it was worth a laugh, but one actually seemed to think I'd be devastated. I'm afraid the majority were correct: everything I've read by McGrath suggests that here is a man whose thoughts have been arrested by a temporal lobe seizure that he has mistaken for a lightning bolt from god. He'd probably be flattered to be compared to C.S. Lewis, but I see some similarities in the shallowness of their thinking that they believe they've deepened by tapping into theological tradition, but I'm sorry — my bathroom tap…
clock | July 31, 2007
If you are one of the few of my readers who actually slogged through my Clock Tutorials, especially the difficult series on Entrainment and Phase Response Curves, you got to appreciate the usefulness of the oscillator theory from physics in its application to the study of biological clocks. Use of physics models in the study of biological rhythms, pioneered by Colin Pittendrigh, is an immensely useful tool in the understanding of the process of entrainment to environmental cycles.
Yet, as I warned several times, a Clock is a metaphor and, as such, has to be treated with thought and caution…
sb admin | July 30, 2007
(This post is tagged for submission to the scientiae-carnival. I am sure there is a less obtrusive way to do this tagging... suggestions?)
A while back at this blog's former site, I wrote a post entitled A Career and a Life. Now that my career is on the precipice of undergoing a tremendous change, I thought it might be interesting to revisit that post.
First of all, everything I said before in there I still agree with.
But I want to go beyond that. As I described in that post, I willingly risked being seen as "not serious enough" by not allowing my faculty position to suck up all of my…
clock | July 28, 2007
Sleep-Wake Controls Identified: Implications For Coma Patients And Those Under Anesthesia:
How do we wake up? How do we shift from restful sleep to dreaming? Researchers at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) have discovered a new brain mechanism that just might explain how we do that. This new mechanism also may help us understand how certain anesthetics put us to sleep and how certain stimulants wake us up. In their first published study on this topic, researchers in the UAMS Center for Translational Neuroscience found that some neurons in the reticular activating system…
jstemwedel | July 27, 2007Chad and Rob have already noted this piece of news about soon-to-be-published research indicating that the order in which high school students are taught physics, chemistry, and biology makes very little difference to their performance in science classes at the college level, while a rigorous math curriculum in high school gives their college science performance a significant boost.
I have a few things to say about this.
Good math instruction is good for students.
As Chad points out, it helps you build problem solving skills and think systematically. To the extent that these skills are…
sb admin | July 27, 2007Chad links to an article about a study that shows that good preparation in high school math helps students perform in all science disciplines in college, whereas studying one science in high school doesn't help their performance in other science disciplines in college.
There are a few conclusions that are drawn. The article quotes people who suggest that the "Physics First" movement— that argues Physics should be taught first, with biology and chemistry later— doesn't hold water. Chad resonates with the article, having observed that college students often have woeful preparation in math,…
pharyngula | July 27, 2007High school education makes a difference, but not quite in the way I'd hoped or expected. A recent correlational study looked at the effects of more discipline-specific education at the high school level on grades in college. That is, if a student took heaps of physics as a high school student, how much will it help her in biology, chemistry, and physics? We'd expect that it should help the student perform better in college physics — she has a head start, after all — but one might naively hope that better mastery of a foundational science like physics would also help with chemistry and…
drorzel | July 27, 2007That's the conclusion of a new study from Harvard and the University of Virginia, anyway:
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia have found that high school coursework in one of the sciences generally does not predict better college performance in other scientific disciplines. But there's one notable exception: Students with the most rigorous high school preparation in mathematics perform significantly better in college courses in biology, chemistry, and physics.
This is not terribly surprising to me, as the biggest weakness I see in entering students is usually in…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007
The average American's lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it's socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier's new…
denialism | July 23, 2007So, who has heard of the Rife Machine? It is a quack device that purports to destroy diseases by homing in on their resonant frequency, and disrupting them with radiofrequency (RF) waves (like a soundwave shattering a wine glass). I've met true believers of this stuff before, and there is little you can do to dissuade them of the magical power of these machines, that when dissected reveal they're little more than batteries with flashing LED-lights - and no capability of generating specific radio frequencies. I just got an email this weekend about recent hucksters selling these in…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007One of the traditional ways to explain a scientific subject is the historical approach: start at the beginning of the endeavor and explain why people asked the questions they did, how they answered them, and how each answer blossomed into new potential. It's a popular way of teaching science, too, because it emphasizes the process that leads to new discovery. Middle World: The Restless Heart of Matter and Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Haw, exemplifies the technique. Not only is it effective, but this one slim book manages to begin with a simple, curious observation in 1827 and ends up…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I'll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of…
pharyngula | July 12, 2007
I've been reading a strange book by Stuart Pivar, LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which purports to advance a new idea in structuralism and self-organization, in competition with Darwinian principles. I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery of the book.
There exists a real difference of opinion between two approaches to biology, the functionalist and structuralist views, and it influences how we look at evolution. The functionalist position is the one most people are familiar with:…
clock | July 11, 2007
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:
In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare…
razib | July 10, 2007Chad's response to Dave Ng's meme attempt asking people about their own field and relationship to other fields included this:
I'm particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be statistical. Clean and unambiguous results are rare, and that would drive me absolutely crazy. They're one small step removed from social science.
Chad admitted in the comments that he was just trying to foment some conflict for entertainment value. But I'll bite because this is a "teachable…
evolgen | July 10, 2007Dave wants to know whether we biologists have physics envy, as the physicists often claim. I'm quite happy being a biologist and I wouldn't want to study physics, but there are certain skill sets I wish I had. My envy is not for the questions other fields address, but for the tools other people in my field have at their disposal.
Enough with the foreplay; here are my answers to Dave's three questions:
What's your current scientific specialty?
Evolutionary genetics, in general. Specifically, the molecular biology and evolutionary dynamics of genomes.
Were you originally pursuing a different…