Science
bioephemera | September 14, 2011Recently, Scienceblogs/National Geographic decided it would no longer host pseudonymous science bloggers. As a result, many of my former colleagues have left. I think this decision was wrong. Read on for my reasons.
One: simple fairness. Several well-established pseudonymous bloggers had been active here for years. While it's perfectly reasonable to set up a media site from scratch and institute a "no pseudonymous blogging" policy at that time, it's quite another to change the rules and evict members of an established community. It violates my sense of fairness; it's why we usually expect…
catdynamics | September 13, 2011 Earlier, Matthew Bailes and collaborators discovered a planet mass, carbon rich crystalline object orbiting a pulsar.
It was a very nice discovery, published in Science, and received a lot of attention, mostly all positive.
Matthew has now written a very interesting OpEd at The Conversation:
Diamond planets, climate change and the scientific method
It is a very perceptive piece and make some very important points.
Please read it and join The Conversation.
"The scientific method is universal. If we selectively ignore it in certain disciplines, we do so at our peril."
drorzel | September 12, 2011In typical fashion, no sooner do I declare a quasi-hiatus than somebody writes an article that I want to say something about. For weeks, coming up with blog posts was like pulling teeth, but now I'm not trying to do it, it's easy...
anyway, that's why there's the "quasi-" in "quasi-hiatus," and having been reasonably productive in the early bit of the weekend, I have a few moments to comment on this column by Ben Goldacre about bad statistics in neuroscience. It seems lots of researchers are not properly assessing the significance of their results when reporting differences between measured…
pharyngula | September 11, 2011One of my favorite science books ever is Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm, which does a beautiful job of going case-by-case through postulated adaptive explanations for female orgasms and showing the deficiency of the existing body of work. It's a beautiful example of the application of rigorous scientific logic; it does not disprove that female orgasms have an adaptive function, but does clearly show that the scientists who have proposed such functions have not done the work necessary to demonstrate that fact, and that some of the explanations are countered by the evidence.…
bioephemera | September 8, 2011
This video from Xperia Studio very effectively conveys how data visualization can both leverage and challenge our conceptions of "reality." The night sky we've seen since childhood, like everything else we see, is just a tiny slice of the spectrum - only what we can perceive with our limited physiology. An app that lets us "see" otherwise invisible wavelengths is not merely a prosthesis that cleverly enhances our sensory perceptions, it's a tool to expand our worldview, by reminding us that what we see is only a limited subset of the whole: we could as easily see quite a different world, and…
pharyngula | September 8, 2011What do you know…I just got back from a morning spent lecturing on the historical evidence for an old earth, and James Kakalios has a post on the contemporary evidence for an old earth. We all agree! The earth is very, very old! And we've known this for at least two centuries.
Could someone get the word to Rick Perry? They might need to do it on horseback with a missive written on parchment using a quill, because I don't think he believes in anything newer. Other than cameras.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | September 6, 2011All right, so you don't think you can flit off to some conference somewhere whenever you feel like it. This is the 21st Century! Do it virtually! You may not be aware of this, but the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is an awesome resource that provides tons of information for free to the public. Among those resources are their annual holiday lectures, presented live on the web, and this year featuring Bones, Stones, and Genes: The Origin of Modern Humans.
Where and when did humans arise? What distinguishes us from other species? Did our distant ancestors look and behave like us?
When Darwin…
drorzel | September 6, 2011It's been a while since I did any ResearchBlogging, first because I was trying to get some papers of my own written, and then because I was frantically preparing for my classes this term (which start Wednesday). I've piled up a number of articles worth writing up in that time, including two papers from an early-August issue of Nature, on advances in experimental quantum computation (the first is available as a free pdf because it was done at NIST, and thus is not copyrightable). These were also written up in Physics World, but they're worth digging into in more detail, in the usual Q&A…
sb admin | September 6, 2011
Photo of Vermont highway courtesy of Kyle Cornell
Last week, I had my long-awaited vacation semi-ruined when, thanks to Hurricane Irene, my flight back from the West Coast was cancelled. I had to rent a car and drive across the country in a rush - not my favorite way to spend three and a half days. But based on what I saw passing through New York, and what I've heard about the damage in Vermont, I can't complain: flooding has overturned homes, isolated entire towns, and destroyed everything some families own.
Vermonters are a notoriously self-sufficient bunch, and I haven't seen that much…
drorzel | September 1, 2011While I was out in Denver, Joss Ives had a nice post asking what courses are essential in a physics degree?. This is an eternal topic of discussion in undergraduate education circles, and I don't really have a definitive answer. It's an excellent topic for a poll, though, so here you go:
Which of the following courses are essential for an undergraduate degree in physics?
"Essential" here means "it would be kind of ridiculous to award a physics degree to a student who hadn't had this class." A class that is nice to have, but could be picked up in graduate school if necessary does not count as…
drorzel | September 1, 2011As previously noted, I'm planning to do more active-learning stuff in my intro mechanics courses this fall (starting next Tuesday), and as a result have been reading/ watching a lot of material on this (which, by the way, includes far too many slickly produced sales videos and not nearly enough "here's an example video of a full class using this technique"). This is doing little to make me less apprehensive-- most of these assume both a leisurely semester calendar and TA-led recitation sections for teaching problem-solving-- but I still like the idea, and want to give it a go.
One of the…
drorzel | August 30, 2011Back when I reviewed Mann's pop-archaeology classic 1491, I mentioned that I'd held off reading it for a while for fear that it would be excessively polemical in a "Cortez the Killer" kind of way. Happily, it was not, so when I saw he had a sequel coming out, I didn't hesitate to pick it up (in electronic form, this time).
As you can probably guess from the title and subtitle, 1493 is about what happened after Europeans made contact with the Americas. This covers a wide range of material, from straight history, to biology, to economics, but the central theme of the whole thing is basically…
drorzel | August 30, 2011I get a lot of publicist-generated email these days, asking me to promote something or another on the blog. Most of these I ignore-- far too many of them are for right-wing political candidates-- but I got one a little while back promoting a program airing tonight, called Project Shiphunt, which included a link to watch a preview of the show. And since I needed stuff to watch on my laptop while SteelyKid falls asleep, I checked it out, and it's pretty good.
As the title suggests, it's a show about finding a sunken ship. Specifically, finding a sunken ship in Lake Huron, that went down a…
sb admin | August 26, 2011
Gold Cortex
16 x 20, 2010
Greg Dunn
I used to have a beautiful gold Japanese folding screen, which was purchased by my great-grandmother's feisty sister on a trip in the 1920s. I loved the gold patina and the surprisingly modern impact it had on my wall. At the moment, it's loaned to a friend, but looking at Greg Dunn's artwork, I couldn't help but be reminded of the best aspects of my screen: the gold leaf, crisp black patterns, and way that the scene seemed half natural, half abstract.
The biggest twist Greg, a 6th year graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania,…
bioephemera | August 26, 2011
Gold Cortex
16 x 20, 2010
Greg Dunn
I used to have a beautiful gold Japanese folding screen, which was purchased by my great-grandmother's feisty sister on a trip in the 1920s. I loved the gold patina and the surprisingly modern impact it had on my wall. At the moment, it's loaned to a friend, but looking at Greg Dunn's artwork, I couldn't help but be reminded of the best aspects of my screen: the gold leaf, crisp black patterns, and way that the scene seemed half natural, half abstract.
The biggest twist Greg, a 6th year graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania,…
drorzel | August 26, 2011The week before last, I finished writing up a pedagogical paper I've been meaning to write for some time, and sent it off to The Physics Teacher. A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that I could probably post that to the arxiv. So I did, just before I left town for an extended weekend reliving my college days:
Investigating Systematic Uncertainty and Experimental Design with Projectile Launchers
The proper choice of a measurement technique that minimizes systematic and random uncertainty is an essential part of experimental physics. These issues are difficult to teach in the introductory…
stoat | August 26, 2011 This post is more an appeal for info than anything useful in itself. But I'll probably update it if I get anything. Fukushima refers. My question, in the context of the area around Fukushima that is contaminated by radioactivity, is
how much is actually contaminated, in the sense of now having radioactivity levels higher than naturally occurs in granite-based areas like Cornwall? How much has been officially declared "contaminated" isn't a very interesting number
In response, M points me to radioactivity.mext.go.jp/en/distribution map around FukushimaNPP/; here for example is July 2011 (take…
lborkowski | August 25, 2011I felt a sense of déjà vu Tuesday morning when I heard NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reporting on Senator Tom Coburn's attacks on National Science Foundation-funded research. I realized that the same thing happened last August, and I wrote about it in a post called "Scoring Political Points by Misunderstanding Science." Last year, the report mocked research into addiction and older adults' cognition (among many other projects) because the projects involved administering cocaine to monkeys and introducing senior citizens to Wii games. This year, the projects up for ridicule include research…
drorzel | August 23, 2011As long as I'm picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with-- they found that graduate students who had teaching responsibilities as well as research responsibilities did a better job of writing research proposals than graduate students who only did research. From all appearances, it's a good study, and makes a valuable point.
And yet,…
drorzel | August 23, 2011A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau's Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn't Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well, helping them improve. This produced a bunch of scoffing in a place I can't link to, basically taking the view that people are either good at what they do, or they're not, and if they're not, you just fire them and hire somebody else. I was too busy to respond at the time, but marked that doen as something to come back to. So I was psyched when I saw this paper in Science about a scientific…