polls
drorzel | August 27, 2010I'm pretty sure I've used this topic before, but not with PollDaddy. And while I really ought to do a ResearchBlogging post today to make it a clean sweep for the week, I just don't have the energy.
So here's a poll: what's your favorite fundamental force?
What's your favorite fundamental force?online surveys
Those of us with corporeal existence should restrict our answers to the low-energy condition of the present material universe, not any of the higher energy unification scales.
drorzel | August 25, 2010This one's pretty self-explanatory:
Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software
You only get to pick one because that's the way it is. If you need me, I'll be over here scrambling frantically.
drorzel | August 23, 2010While I'm still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it's beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term:
Students who miss the first day of class in a new academic term should be:online survey
You can choose one and only one answer in this poll. Attempts to submit multiple answers will be given a failing grade, and reported to the Dean as a violation of the Academic Honesty policy.
drorzel | August 22, 2010In honor of the people down the street who are trying to unload some excess personal belongings, a poll:
When people take a bunch of stuff they no longer want, put it outside their house, and try to sell it to passersby, this is called:Market Research
You can only choose one of these terms in this poll, but I'll throw in all four if you give me $5.
drorzel | August 18, 2010Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee's Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning's Links Dump.
This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll:
How long will you keep working, continuously, on a difficult problem?Market Research
A bonus follow-up question, that I won't bother putting in poll form, is: How long should your subordinates spend working, continuously, on a difficult problem?
drorzel | August 13, 2010Over at the Whatever, one of Scalzi's guest bloggers has posted a ginormous list of upcoming live music shows in the DC area. This makes me sad, because when I used to live in the DC area, I was a grad student, and couldn't afford to go to any of the dozens of great concerts that came through there. Now that I have plenty of money I could spend on live music, I live in Schenectady, where we don't get anywhere near as many good shows, and I have a wife and child to boot, which makes it difficult to justify going out.
Anyway, whining aside, this seems like a good topic for a reader poll: What…
drorzel | August 9, 2010the hot topic in mathematical sciences at the moment is the draft proof that P≠NP (warning: PDF). This is one of the biggest issues in computer science, and one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Problems, so a proof would be Big News in math/CS, and earn the prover a cool $1,000,000. Reaction among blogging theorists is mixed, with some intrigued and at least one willing to bet against it.
So what do I think of the proof? Honestly, this is so far out of my areas of competence that I need Google to remind me what the symbols mean. About all I know is that it's a Big Deal in…
drorzel | August 6, 2010I was going to write something serious about physics, but it's my student's last day, so we're taking him to lunch. So here's a silly poll to entertain you until I get back:
If I suspected I might be living in a dream, but couldn't be sure, I would:survey software
You can only choose one answer... Unless it's all a dream! In which case, you should slap yourself repeatedly for dreaming about blog polls, because, really.
drorzel | July 29, 2010I'm going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of my day scrounging up adapters to connect two different classes of plumbing fittings. In honor of that, here's a poll question based on something that one research group used to do:
Sending a new graduate student to the lab down the hall to ask for a BNC to Swagelok adapter is:online surveys
Amusingly, I have seen something that easily could have been turned into a Swagelok to BNC adapter (in fact, I might still have one in my lab), that served a serious purpose.
(BNC is a type of electrical connection, Swagelok is a type of plumbing fitting…
drorzel | July 27, 2010We have a summer student seminar series in the science and engineering departments here, running two days a week at lunchtime with three students each day giving 15 minute presentations on their summer research projects to other students and faculty.
The student talks are split almost 50/50 overall on whether to provide an outline at the start of the talk or not. About half of the students put up a slide listing the component parts of their talk ("First, I'll give some motivation for the experiment, then I'll talk about the apparatus, then..."), and about half jump right into the talk,…
drorzel | July 22, 2010Pretty much what the title implies: for a variety of reasons, I find myself in a position where people keep holding or suggesting conference calls as a way of getting the relevant players together on the phone if not in person. I'm not wild about this, but I'm curious what other people think:
Conference calls are:customer surveys
Note that I'm talking about what Mike Kozlowski would probably call "legacy teleconferencing," which does not involve video of the conferees. Video conferencing is a different thing, with its own set of problems.
drorzel | July 13, 2010Yesterday's poll about "outreach" activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better version, using the "CHECK THIS BOX" count, is here:
These responses line up reasonably well with my own impressions of the term. I'm a little surprised that "Demo Shows" doesn't get 100%, even if you factor out the three people who clicked "I would not deign to know what outreach is." This probably…
drorzel | July 12, 2010Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can't read because it doesn't display properly in Firefox, but I'm sure is very interesting.
Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:
If the Tevatron were to discover the Higgs boson before the LHC does, that would be:Market Research
There's a 99.7% probability that this poll is completely meaningless. That doesn't mean it's not entertaining, though.
drorzel | July 12, 2010I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday's visit to Pub Dog had something to do with it...
We had a number of discussions about the meaning of the word "Outreach" in a physics context, which is one of those Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart, "I know it when I point at it" kind of terms. I'm interested in what opinions people outside the committee have,…
drorzel | July 9, 2010Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with:
All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I searched to see what the authors have done since and whether they've cited that paper, the only places I found them citing their own paper was in papers only marginally related to the work published in the glitzy place. So there was no follow-up, just something that was trendy enough to get into a…
drorzel | June 29, 2010The dogphysics karma joke is pretty much dead, as countries with current or future editions of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog have gone a dismal 1-3-0 in the first round of elimination play. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did, honestly.
The big story of the World Cup at the moment is the immense suckitude of the refereeing, which currently accounts for at least four screwed up goals (two not allowed for the US, one for England, and an improperly allowed goal for Argentina). It's gotten to the point where FIFA is being dragged toward the Century of the Fruitbat, and might start…
drorzel | June 15, 2010Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing.
I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…
drorzel | June 3, 2010This may be a job for the MythBusters, but I'll throw this out as a puzzle for interested blog readers. I don't know the answer to this (though it wouldn't be all that hard to determine experimentally), I just think it's sort of interesting. There's a poll at the bottom of this post, but it requires some set-up first.
So, it's coming up on summer now, and I've been doing a bunch of errand-running this week, which means a lot of getting in and out of the car in sunny parking lots. Which raises the question: If you have an air-conditioned car, is it better to leave the car windows open a crack…
drorzel | June 1, 2010Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe:
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree (38 think it's more recent, the rest are undecided). I've said it before and I stand by it: conservative Republicanism is incompatible with science.
But looking at the finer details tells us a lot. The only group - gender, race, or region - with anything like the Republicans'…