Science
drorzel | January 30, 2012There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in favor of this, but Aram says one thing that bugs me a bit:
Just like the walled gardens of Compuserve and AOL would never grow into the Internet, no commercial publisher will ever be able to match the scope and ease of access of arxiv.org. Nor can they match the price. In 2010, there were about…
oracknows | January 29, 2012It's rare that I have much in the way of reluctance to leap into writing about a topic. Any regular reader of this blog should know this to be true, given the topics I regularly take on and how often my writing draws flak my way from various proponents of quackery and pseudoscience, in particular the antivaccine crowd. Still, sometimes a topic gives me pause, although, I must admit, the reason is that blogging about it will bring embarrassment to me. Usually, I can overcome this reluctance, as I have done in discussing, for example, how my alma mater, the university from which I obtained both…
drorzel | January 27, 2012I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:
That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and everything... You can see it above, next to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and various clutter on my desk, for scale.
There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.
carlyo | January 27, 2012As many educators know, the elementary and middle school years are critical periods in which students' interest in science can "wither on the vine" if efforts are not made early to engage young learners in such subjects in exciting and creative ways.
This is why global biotech leader Life Technologies -- as it prepares to return as a major Sponsor of the USA Science & Engineering Festival next spring.-- will devote a major portion of its outreach exhibits at the finale Expo to wowing elementary and middle school students through a wide range of interactive science activities.
"We know…
oracknows | January 25, 2012It's been nearly a year since I last discussed a most unusual malady. Part of the reason is that the opportunity to discuss it hasn't occurred recently; usually I need some spark or incident to "inspire" me to write about something, and there just hasn't been any Morgellons news that's caught my eye since then. However, another part of the reason, I must admit, is that writing about this particular condition almost always brings sufferers out of the woodwork, castigating me the way antivaccinationists like to castigate me for challenging the scientific basis of their preferred pseudoscience.…
drorzel | January 25, 2012The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would've banged out very quickly. I'm not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly works:
The graph at the bottom of that window is the entropy versus "time" for a lattice of 20 sites with a 25% hopping probability (either left or right). The window with the colored balls at the upper left is a graphical representation-- red dots are "occupied" sites, white "…
oracknows | January 25, 2012Ha! I must admit, I've said probably about 50% of these things at one time or another, maybe more:
Hmmmm. Maybe I need to come up with new "shit."
Oh, and, by the way, I've been mentioned on PZ's blog more times than I can remember over the last seven years. So there! (Oh, wait. Does that mean PZ won't ever mention me again. Never mind. I take it back.)
drorzel | January 23, 2012I'm fairly certain somebody has already done this, because it's such an obvious idea. It's a little beyond my cargo-cult VPython skills right at the moment, though (I can probably learn to do it, but not right now), and I none of the applets I Googled up seemed to be doing this, so I'm posting this sketchy description because I've spent some time thinking about it, and might as well get a blog post out of the deal.
So, as we said back in the holiday season, one of the most fundamental concepts in the modern understanding of thermodynamics and statistical physics is the notion of entropy. You…
drorzel | January 20, 2012While clearing the cars of frost Thursday morning, I was reminded of a difference of opinion Kate and I have about the best approach to a cold car. I tend to start the car up, and immediately turn the defrost on full blast; she prefers to let the car warm up for a while first, because it just blows cold air for a while. My feeling is that while the air from the defrost is not warm in an absolute sense, it's still passed over the engine on the way in, and thus is warmer than the outside air. Which means that it's going to increase the temperature inside the car somewhat, and thus will heat the…
carlyo | January 20, 2012
By Larry Bock
Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival
Ahh celebrities. From music and acting to the world of supermodeling and sports -- they are respected, admired, even worshiped, for their talent and magnetism. But herein lies the danger when these stars publicly espouse or endorse viewpoints and products in health and medicine without first thoroughly exploring the scientific validity of such claims.
Why danger? For segments of the population -- especially kids who are easily influenced by star role models -- celebrity statements and viewpoints (however misguided…
drorzel | January 19, 2012In the same basic vein as last week's How to Read a Scientific Paper, here's a kind of online draft of the class I'm going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. "Present" here meaning the more general "display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or just a graph taped into a lab notebook," not specifically standing up and doing a PowerPoint talk (which I've posted about before).
So, you've made some measurements of a natural phenomenon. Congratulations, you've done Science! Now, you need to tell the world all about it, in a compact form that allows the…
drorzel | January 14, 2012It's a sign of how good computers have gotten that I'm faintly offended whenever Google Translate fails to come up with something even halfway sensible. I mean, translating a blog post from one language to another is a ridiculously difficult problem, and yet they usually do a passable job. It's only when the vanity search turns up something like this blog post in Hebrew that it fails completely, and gives a string of disconnected and incoherent words and phrases.
So, here's to the amazing successes of Google Translate. And if anybody can tell me what in the world that blog post says about my…
drorzel | January 13, 2012I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time and timekeeping. How well do you think students learn the big ideas about how science works from these classes, as apposed to a more traditional general physics class? How much transfer do you see in students' understanding of the content of this course to understanding of science in general?
The…
drorzel | January 11, 2012Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture:
The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.)…
drorzel | January 10, 2012My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general "research methods" class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there's a lot more specialization by subfield), but I'm going to try to give as general an overview of how to approach scientific research as possible in a course with no prerequisites. The following is sort of a rough sketch of a lecture for next week, on how to approach the scientific literature, so comments and suggestions are welcome. This is…
oracknows | January 9, 2012I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at cranks, examining crank science (i.e., pseudoscience), and trying to figure out how to inoculate people against crankery. Because I'm a physician, I tend to do it mostly in the realm of medicine by critically examining "alternative" medical claims and discussing the scientific basis of medicine, both with respect to those "alternative" claims and to more conventional medical claims. However, I don't limit my skepticism and critical thinking just to medicine, although lately I think that I've been "specializing" too much, almost totally…
drorzel | January 6, 2012On last month's post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes:
In fact, there were a lot of readers who responded to the posts saying exactly what Roach suggested: He's been out of school too long. Others questioned why a successful businessman couldn't pass 10th-grade math. (I looked at FCAT 10th-grade questions and couldn't do them myself, but math has always…
oracknows | January 6, 2012It's no secret that I've been highly critical of The Huffington Post, at least of its approach to science and medicine. In fact, it was a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington launched her blog back in 2005 that I noticed something very distressing about it, namely that it had recruited someone who would later become and "old friend" (and punching bag) of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon, as well as the mercury militia stalwart David Kirby, among others. As a result, antivaccination lunacy was running rampant on HuffPo, even in its infancy. Many, many, many more examples followed very quickly.…
drorzel | January 5, 2012Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this kind of maddening, as it's pretty much the opposite of what professional physicists do-- we tend to work primarily with equations in abstract, symbolic form, and plug numbers in only at the very end of the problem.
Thus, very few people…
drorzel | January 4, 2012As mentioned a few times previously, the class I'm teaching this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I'm doing to the blog.
Today was the first day of class, so a good chunk of the time was spent on introducing the basics of the course (my PowerPoint slides, for those who care), and going through one slightly silly example.
The stated learning goals for SRS courses (students should learn how to formulate a research question, find and evaluate…