Academia
drorzel | July 21, 2015This past academic year was my 14th as a professor at Union, and my last as department chair. I'm on sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, doing my very best to avoid setting foot in an academic building, so it will be September 2016 before I'm teaching a class again. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on my experiences to this point, which in turn is a good excuse for a blog post. So, here are some things I've found out over the last 14 years of being a college professor:
-- Teaching is really hard. My first year, when colleagues from other schools asked how I was…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…
drorzel | July 3, 2015Another busy week of physics-y blogging over at Forbes. I'm pretty bad about remembering to post pointers to individual posts here, but I can probably just about manage to do a weekly links dump of what I've been posting.
-- What's The Point Of Science Without "Eureka!" Moments? Picking up on a conversation I had at Convergence, about whether there's any point in doing experiments whose outcome won't be a surprise.
-- Should We Have An Institute For Low-Energy Fundamental Physics Picking up a bit from one of the Convergence talks, where Savas Dimopoulos suggested forming an institute to…
drorzel | June 29, 2015I've been doing a bunch of conferencing recently, what with DAMOP a few weeks ago and then Convergence last week. This prompted me to write up a couple of posts about conference-related things, which I posted over at Forbes. These were apparently a pretty bad fit for the folks reading over there, as they've gotten very little traffic relative to, well, everything else I've posted during that span. Live and learn.
Anyway, I'm fairly happy with how both of those turned out, and on the off chance that they'll do better with the ScienceBlogs crowd, let me link them here:
-- What Are Academic…
drorzel | June 27, 2015I've been pretty quiet about educational matters of late, for the simple reason that I was too busy teaching to say much. The dust having settled a bit, though, I thought I would put some notes here about what I did this past term, and what worked.
I had two sections of the introductory Newtonian mechanics course in the Spring term; this was off the normal sequence for engineering majors (the engineers mostly take this in the Winter term of their first year), but this year we had yet another larger-than-expected engineering class, and needed to open another section. I picked up both of these…
jdupuis | June 26, 2015There's lots of discussion out there right now in the twitter and blog world concerning Bjorn Brembs' call to librarians to jumpstart the mass migration to Open Access by essentially unilaterally cancelling all the journals they subscribe to. This act would force the hands of all the various players in the ecosystem to immediately figure out how to make Open Access work.
Which is a great idea. I actually kind of mused about this sort of scenario a while back in a post called An Open Access thought experiment. Except what I wasn't smart enough or brave enough to do was imagine a scenario…
drorzel | June 19, 2015I've been really busy with year-end wrap-up stuff, but have also posted a bunch of stuff at Forbes. which I've fallen down on my obligation to promote here... So, somewhat belatedly, here's a collection of physics-y stuff that I've written recently:
-- Using Atoms To Measure Tiny Forces: A post reporting on some very cool atom interferometry experiments, one working to measure the very tiny (but known to exist) force of gravity, the other searching for a possible "fifth force" sort of thing.
-- Making And Shaking New Materials With Ultracold Atoms: A post reporting on a couple more DAMOP…
drorzel | June 16, 2015Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion:
From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the most high-achieving, “desirable” district we can afford is open-and-shut. TB and TG are wildly smart kids who will rise to the expected level; I want the level to be high. That strategy also has the benefit of higher resale value for a house, since other parents make the same calculation…
drorzel | June 14, 2015Commencement was today, the 14th of those that I've been to as a faculty member. As usual, the procession was led in and out by the Schenectady Pipe Band; I realized that after many years of this, I'm coming to associate "Scotland the Brave" with graduation...
This was a really unpleasant year for me in a lot of respects; happily, our students had nothing to do with that. They've been consistently terrific, and this was a good class. Not having them around the department will be pretty weird, at least for a while.
So, congratulations to Salina, Alex, Stephen, Will, Caleb, and Eason, the…
drorzel | June 7, 2015Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it's not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn't have anything all that concrete to say beyond "Huh. That's interesting." So it languished in one of the many, many open tabs cluttering up Chrome, too interesting to just close but not anything I could see a clear angle to comment on. And eventually it was sort of forgotten until I set about paring down open tabs before an out-of-…
jdupuis | May 21, 2015Elsevier has released a new scholarly article sharing policy which is definitely more disappointing than really any cause for cheer.
Basically the crux is that the only place that authors are allowed to have the final publication version of an article in a non-open access Elsevier publication is on the Elsevier website itself. Of course, after any embargo period has elapse or if the author has paid an author processing charge and published in a hybrid or gold open access journal, they are allowed to post the article on their own webpage or institutional repository.
During the time that the…
jdupuis | May 15, 2015What is digital governance in the first place?
Digital governance is a discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards. A digital governance framework, when effectively designed and implemented, helps to streamline digital development and dampen debates around digital channel “ownership.”
-- From the Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design website.
Universities
Intellectual autonomy and stubbornness of staff
-- From the index, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, p. 229
Time to take a little medicine! All those…
drorzel | May 15, 2015A few things about the academic job market have caught my eye recently, but don't really add up to a big coherent argument. I'll note them here, though, to marginally increase the chance that I'll be able to find them later.
-- First, this piece at the Guardian got a lot of play, thanks in part to the dramatic headline Science careers: doomed at the outset but even more thanks to the subhead "Has it become harder for graduate students to thrive, and are our best potential scientists giving up on academia?" Most of the people I saw re-sharing it used basically just that last clause, often…
drorzel | April 25, 2015This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the "featured image" above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section meeting of the American Physical Society.
If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public…
jdupuis | April 14, 2015Colin Adams's Zombies & Calculus is one of the coolest, funniest, most creative science books I've read in a very long time.
What's interesting about that statement is that we're not talking a non-fiction book here. We're talking a novel. Yes, a novel. Zombies & Calculus is pure fiction. Fortunately. Now I'm a big fan of the Walking Dead tv show and the comics too (though I'm a bit behind on the trade paperback collections) so I"m quite glad it's fiction. Basically, the premise of this novel is, "What if Rick Grimes had been a university math prof instead of a police officer."
The…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I continue to struggle to avoid saying anything more about the Hugo mess, so let's turn instead to something totally non-controversial: gender bias in academic hiring. Specifically, this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science titled "National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track" with this calm, measured abstract that won't raise any hackles at all:
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at…
drorzel | April 10, 2015We're into admitted student season, that muddy period when large numbers of anxious high-school seniors visit college campuses all over the nation, often with parents in tow, trying to decide where to spend the next four years. As a result, I'll be spending a good deal of time over the next few weeks talking to high-school students who are interested in physics, trying to convince them to come here.
So, since I'm putting time into that anyway, I typed out a version of the argument in favor of going to a small liberal arts college (Williams, or Union, or some lesser school) to major in science…
drorzel | April 1, 2015A few years ago, I taught one of our "SRS" classes, which are supposed to introduce students to research at the college level-- I blogged about it while the course was in progress. I taught it again in the recently-concluded Winter term, but didn't blog much about it because I was mostly doing the same stuff as last time. I did re-adjust the content a little, as I've changed some things about the way I like to present stuff since 2012, but they were mostly cosmetic tweaks, with one big exception.
In the previous round, I went with the base course description, which just specifies that…
drorzel | March 31, 2015Everybody and their extended families has been sharing around the Fareed Zakaria piece on liberal education. This, as you might imagine, is relevant to my interests. So I wrote up a response over at Forbes.
The basic argument of the response is the same thing I've been relentlessly flogging around here for a few years: that while I'm all for a broad education, the notion that studying a STEM subject and studying "the human condition" are in opposition or even cleanly separable is just foolish. But it's a great excuse to start that argument at Forbes, so...
drorzel | March 27, 2015That's the title of the talk I gave yesterday at Vanderbilt, and here are the slides:
Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science from Chad Orzel
The central idea is the same as in past versions of the talk-- stealing Robert Krulwich's joke contrasting the publication styles of Newton and Galileo to argue that scientists spend too much time writing technical articles aimed at an audience of other experts, and need to do more "Galileian" publication aimed at a broad audience. And that social media technologies offer powerful tools that can enable those who are…