Science
carlyo | January 15, 2014Sometimes students get the wrong message from peers: that it is not cool to be smart in science and other STEM disciplines. But biologist Joe Hanson has a more positive signal that he likes to send to kids - in fact the name of his popular science show on YouTube (via PBS Digital Studios) says it all: “It's Okay to Be Smart”. Join us at the USA Science & Engineering Festival this April as Joe, in his trademark erudite but uber cool and engaging style, brings his down-to-earth, hip style of science to kids in an unforgettable stage show, shedding light on a wide array of topics, from…
drorzel | January 15, 2014One of the labs we do in the introductory E&M class I'm teaching this term involves investigating charged particles with sticky tape. If you haven't seen it before, "invisible" tape picks up an electric charge when it's peeled off a surface quickly, and with a little care, you can create both positively and negatively charged tapes and investigate their interactions.
For Monday's class, I wanted to do a demonstration of one of the questions we were discussing, which involved the attraction between two objects with opposite charges and how that changes when you insert something between…
oracknows | January 15, 2014Here we go again. In the wake of study after study that fails to find activity of various "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) beyond that of placebo, the campaign to a "rebrand" CAM as "working" through the "power of placebo" continues apace, in the wake of the successful campaign to "rebrand" various needle-based medical modalities as "acupuncture." Personally, I've argued that in reality this new focus on placebo effects as the "mechanism" through which CAM "works" is in reality more a manifestation of the common fantasy that wishing makes it so. Meanwhile I've argued that this…
drorzel | January 14, 2014The other morning, I was lying in bed and for some reason, found myself wondering what the population of Niskayuna is. While this is easily Google-able, as I said, I was in bed, and didn't want to get up to get a device with Internet connectivity. So I tried to Fermi-problem my way to an answer using numbers I could come up with without opening my eyes.
The starting point for the estimate was the fact that SteelyKid's kindergarten class has 20-odd kids in it, and there are three kindergarten classes in her school. The school is one of five elementary schools that Niskayuna operates (Birchwood…
oracknows | January 13, 2014One aspect of science-based medicine (SBM) that I perhaps don't spend enough time and effort on is the intersection of law and medicine for areas in medicine other than the infiltration of pseudomedicine like "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academia and the never-ending quest of quacks like naturopaths to gain state licensure in states where such pseudomedicine is not licensed and to expand their scope of practice in states where it is. Instead, Instead, I'll look at something going on in my state, namely an effort to expand the scope of practice of a group of medical…
drorzel | January 13, 2014When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton's anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn't really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in the form of approving re-shares on my social media feeds, and in direct responses such as a rebuttal from Chris Anderson himself and most recently a long piece by Christiana Peppard at Medium, which are getting their own collection of approving re-shares. So I guess I ought to…
drorzel | January 10, 2014The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven't really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I'm going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post.
--A few people, mostly in places that aren't conducive to linking, raised versions of "You never know what will be useful" as a justification for having a list of boxes to check. And I don't entirely disagree with that. I'm not against the idea of forcing students to take a broader range of stuff than they otherwise might…
drorzel | January 9, 2014As a follow-up to yesterday's post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a "poetry for physicists" kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating about a lot of "crisis in ____" discussions is the lack of specific suggestions, so throwing out a "here's a problem, good luck with that" post would be suboptimal behavior on my part. This required some reflection on the question of just what I got out of my "liberal arts" classes back in the day--…
carlyo | January 8, 2014Efforts Will Bring Together Children, Families, Teachers, Businesses and World Leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
The USA Science & Engineering Festival (www.USAScienceFestival.org), supported by presenting host sponsor Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT], is pleased to announce the passage by the U.S. Senate of Senate Resolution 329, which “Express(es) support for the goals and ideals of the biennial USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. and designati(es) the last week of April 2014 as ‘‘National Science Week.” The resolution was introduced by Sen.…
drorzel | January 8, 2014One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age.
What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal arts education. I had specifically chosen to go to williams in part because of the small size (having grown up in a small town, I found it more congenial), but also because I was never only interested in science. I always enjoyed reading books and discussing history and politics, so I didn't need a…
drorzel | January 8, 2014A couple of weeks ago, I got a cool picture of snow hanging off SteelyKid's playset, and posted a call for people to suggest physics-y ideas about that. I only got one response, probably because nobody really read the Internet over the holidays.
Anyway, the next time I'm likely to have the free time to write anything substantive is next Tuesday morning, so let me renew that call now, while people are trapped indoors by the POLAR VORTEX! with nothing to do but think about the physics of cold things. So, if you have physics-related ideas about the photo above (there's a view from a different…
drorzel | January 7, 2014I'm teaching introductory E&M this term, so it's kind of fun to play around with silly applications of Coulomb's Law. For example, let's imagine that gravity suddenly switched off, but we wanted to keep the Earth in its orbit. How much charge would we need to move from the Earth to the Sun for the electrostatic attraction to take the place of gravity?
The key here is to set the gravitational force, which we can reasonably approximate by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation:
$latex F_{grav}=G\frac{M_1 m_2}{R^2} $
(where the M's are the masses, R is the distance between them, and G is a…
catdynamics | January 6, 2014You are at university.
Do you like stars, and stuff?
We revisit old ruminations on career paths 'cause it is topical...
Another rehashed blast from the past.
Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from a colleague’s previous freshman seminar for our majors):
Do you like stars and stuff?
If not, you probably should look for an alternative to astronomy, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like.
If you do, good for you.
Now, do you have the aptitude?
Professional astrophysics/…
catdynamics | January 6, 2014So, now you’re at university, and you’re thinking about heading for grad school …
A seasonal revisit of some old rumblings*
*NB: this discussion should not be construed to be anything but hypothetical ramblings, they do not reflect in any way the official position of any academic institution, department or graduate program, especially not the one I am part of!
So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 1.5: thinking about grad school
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on January 16, 2012
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drorzel | January 6, 2014Classes for the Winter term start today, and I'm totally prepared for this. Yep. Uh-huh. Losing a bunch of prep time to snow and ice last week hasn't thrown anything into disarray.
Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I've ended up departing from my plan to not do any new preps while I'm stuck being Chair, and I'll be teaching intro E&M this term. This isn't a completely new class, but the last time I taught it I was very much in traditional lecture mode, and this will be my first pass using more of an active learning approach. Which will mean a lot of time re-working slides and that sort of…
oracknows | January 5, 2014Believe it or not, even your ever-lovin' box of colored blinking lights can malfunction, and it happened to me over the weekend. Actually, sometime around New Years, I caught some sort of crud, and have been battling it since. There's nothing like hacking up a lung and not being able to sleep well for days to put one in a perfect mood to be particularly Insolent. And so it would have been, until my part of the country managed to be buried in snow all day and night Sunday, necessitating multiple rounds of going out to use the snow blower in spite of my condition and having to get up super…
drorzel | January 3, 2014I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there's anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo!
To break it in, I got the kids to help out by re-creating a classic slow-mo physics trick: the slinky drop:
Note that when SteelyKid lets it go, the bottom doesn't really move until after the entire length of the spring has relaxed. You can clearly see this in the still frame that's the "featured image" at the top of the post.
And since The Pip has…
carlyo | January 2, 2014By Stacy Jannis
Kavli Science Video Contest Manager
The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts. Follow #SciInSciFi on twitter to for contest updates.
Dr. Joanne Budzien is an Assistant Professor of Physics at MacMurray College. Dr. Budzien's research is in materials science simulation and she has been at Frostburg State University, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and…
drorzel | January 2, 2014This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as "placebo technoradicalism." The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn't actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the opening, most of the grand promises made in TED talks have yet to pan out: "So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change."
I found this kind of amusing, because a day earlier the link being passed around a lot of my social media…
drorzel | January 1, 2014I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn't done yet.
The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages (space-and-a-half) and 96,807 words. I don't remember the word count from the original contract, but this is more than that. Which is pretty typical of my writing, really.
Because I wrote it down as part of the final checks, here's the approximate table of…