Academia
drorzel | April 10, 2013For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler's classic essay "The Simple Art of Murder" last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950:
In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn’t get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read…
drorzel | April 4, 2013Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It's basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, with a few updates to the slides that don't require a new upload to SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel
The pitch that I make, if you don't want to flip through the slides, is that communicating to a…
drorzel | March 25, 2013Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a bit of a rant about what students perceive as grading on a "curve":
Moreover, many students have only the foggiest idea of what a curve is. Many (though probably not all) of their high schools had fixed grading scales with fixed percentages for each letter grade. The A/A- range is 90% or above, or 85% or above, or whatever. The B+/B/B- range is whatever percentage range below that. And so forth. If we set the grade markers anywhere below the ranges they saw in high school, that constitutes “a curve” in their eyes. We could base those ranges…
drorzel | March 25, 2013Kind of short notice, but if you're in the appropriate bits of Ohio, you might be interested to know that I'm giving two talks at Wright State this Thursday. At 11am, I'm doing the Physics Department Colloquium in 202 Oelman Hall, "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Social Media Can Help":
Budget cuts and funding instability are a constant source of anxiety for professional scientists, and public uncertainty about science threatens to derail critical policy actions in areas like climate change and public health. I will argue that these…
jdupuis | March 24, 2013The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, a big publishing conglomerate. According to Brian Mathews, while he was in the middle of putting together a special issue on the future of libraries he received notice that the editorial board was resigning due to conflicts with the publisher around what kind of author rights regime the journal should use. Here is the note he received from the board:
The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS…
jdupuis | March 23, 2013What makes one a librarian?
Goodbye, Faculty Status
Library employees protest changed title: New designation for incoming employee provokes heated debate
why should librarians learn python? (a better answer)
Why Not Grow Coders from the inside of Libraries?
Alt-Ac: Breathing Life into Libraries or Eroding the Profession?
Of Hybrarians, Scholar-Librarians, Academic Refugees, & Feral Professionals
Fending off university-attacking zombies
Defining the library ... reflexively
The Powerful Art Of Resilience
Pages of History (end of the scholarly journal article?)
Topic Pages: PLoS…
jdupuis | March 22, 2013You would think that such apple pie issues as public science, basic research and the free and open exchange of scientific information would be hard to disagree with. You would think that a resolution in the Canadian parliament would to such effect would meet with resounding support, resulting in a unanimous vote, the room resounding with shouted Yays.
You would think that anyone who would vote nay to such a resolution would be a virtual pariah in an open democratic society, a society that values an informed citizenry and evidence-based decision making.
Apparently you would be wrong.…
drorzel | March 20, 2013As you may or may not know, I'm currently at work on a book called How to Think Like a Scientist. This raises the fairly obvious question in the post title, namely, why should people think like scientists? What's the point?
In a sense, this is (as Ethan Zuckerman pointed out at lunch the other day) the underlying question at the heart of the whole endeavor of science communication. I mean, I've written two books about modern physics for a general audience, and when I have time, I write this blog aimed at non-scientists. What's the point of doing all that, anyway? What is it I hope to achieve…
drorzel | March 18, 2013We're entering the heart of College Admissions Season-- the offers are out, and students are doing the high-stress decision thing-- which means it's time for the New York Times to begin their annual series of faintly awful reports on the state of academia. And right on cue, there's this weekend's article about poor students who excel in high school not applying to top colleges.
To their credit, this at least isn't another article about how very, very hard it is for kids from affluent Connecticut suburbs to decide between several different elite schools. And as someone who grew up in a less…
drorzel | March 14, 2013In the twelve years I've been at Union, there are only two times I've tried to go to an evening speaker and been turned away. Once was 4-5 years ago, when Maya Angelou spoke on campus, the second time was last night, when Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke. I managed to make it to the foot of the steps of Memorial Chapel before they hit the fire code (939, I think they said the number was) and turned everybody away. There were probably 20-30 students behind me in the line, so even if I had made it all the way to the front, I might've stepped aside and let one of them in instead.
It's worth…
jdupuis | March 11, 2013I have a son who's currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well.
By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in computational approaches to science.
There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs
The ten commandments of student science blogging…
jdupuis | March 8, 2013Just like the author of this piece, I too attended a recent talk by Cory Doctorow -- a brilliant talk relating the life and death of Aaron Swartz with the theme of his latest novel Homeland -- and similarly I often marvel at how lucky we are that the web is free and open.
Enjoy this wonderful little satire and shudder at the possibilities.
The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL!
The World Wide Web has been great, but to be honest, it's also been a lot harder than it needs to be. I know some of you love creating new web pages and participating in online discussions, but the last thing most…
drorzel | March 6, 2013There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the "Finkbeiner Test" to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the "Bechdel Test" in pop culture, which asks "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", only because we're scientists, it's more complicated, hitting seven points:
To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention
The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child care arrangements
How she nurtures her underlings
How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other…
jdupuis | March 2, 2013(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world.
How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…
drorzel | February 28, 2013Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren't enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.
The NPR piece is about eating and exercise habits, and the way families struggle to do what they know they ought to:
More than half of children ate or drank something during the "crunch time" window that can lead to unhealthy weight gain, as perceived by their parents. And more than a quarter of…
drorzel | February 26, 2013Over in Twitter-land, Ben Lillie of the Story Collider asked an interesting question, which sparked some discussion that he's Storified on a Tumblr blog (just in case the date stamp wasn't enough to mark this as 2013...). The original question was:
Partly I’m wondering if there is a reason to have an event series for “other scientists,” but also wondering about the bigger question: is there something about being a scientist that makes it easier to understand other bits of science? I suspect the answer is “a bit,” but really want to know specifically what one could say to scientists they…
jdupuis | February 22, 2013Cracked is as Cracked does. Especially in this case, where some researchers do some especially cracked things. Or more precisely, things they only could have thought of after being cracked on the head.
Librarian researchers, don't try this at your library!
The 5 Most Badass Things Ever Done in the Name of Research
5. Thor Heyerdahl Crosses the Pacific Ocean on a Raft
On the 101st day, they made it. The "boat" hit a reef in French Polynesia and beached on an uninhabited island. But it didn't prove his point; even though Heyerdahl had proved that the journey was possible, no one believed that…
drorzel | February 22, 2013We've got calls out to the local grad programs, and I've mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, but it can't hurt anything to post it here as well: we've got a huge overabundance of first-year engineering students that is forcing us to open extra sections of our intro physics classes to accommodate them. The problem is, we don't have people to teach the new sections. Thus, we are looking for an adjunct to take one section of intro physics or introductory astronomy labs, starting in April and running through mid-June.
If you're within convenient distance of Schenectady, NY, and might be…
drorzel | February 15, 2013Yesterday's post about differences between intro physics and chemistry sparked an interesting discussion in comments that I didn't have time to participate in. Sigh. Anyway, a question that came up in there was why we have physicists teach intro physics courses that are primarily designed to serve other departments.
It's a good question, and in my more cynical moments, I sort of suspect it's because engineering faculty are canny enough to outsource the weeding-out of the students who can't hack it in engineering. But I think there are good reasons, particularly at a liberal arts school like…
drorzel | February 14, 2013Not long ago, I had a meeting with the Dean, who is a chemist. One of the things I talked about was my plan for distributing teaching assignments in the next few years, which ran into an interesting cultural difference. I explained how I was trying to make the distribution of assignments a little more regular and uniform, getting everybody to teach both intro and upper-level courses, and he said (paraphrased), "That's funny. We never have a problem with that in chemistry-- the organic chemists teach Orgo, and the rest of us teach general chemistry, and that's that."
It took me a minute to put…