Now on ScienceBlogs: Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski strikes again
Thoughts on physics, politics, and pop culture, by a physics professor at a small liberal arts college, plus occasional conversations with his dog.
You've read the blog, now try the books! How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner, and available wherever books are sold. How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books and will be available 2/28/2012, as foretold by the Maya.
"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
"Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)
Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.
Category: Humanities
Prompted by a number of people using the phrase "vast majority" recently, I wonder where the line between "majority" and "vast majority" is. Thus, a poll: What is the minimum level of support that constitutes a "vast majority" Assume for...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 12:18 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humanities
As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann's 1493 (see also this interview at Razib's place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:44 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Pop Culture
Back 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...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 1:26 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:01 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Education
A 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...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:54 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Jobs
The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields: This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:56 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Keeping the week's unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest "kids these days" study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 12:22 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Education
One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of "merit pay" programs...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:41 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people's attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:02 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Data Presentation
This morning, via Twitter, I ran across one of the most spectacular examples of deceptive data presentation that I've ever seen. The graph in question is reproduced in this blog post by Bryan Caplan, and comes from this econ paper...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 12:47 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
thoughts from kansas 02.29.2012
universe 02.29.2012
greg laden's blog 02.29.2012
starts with a bang! 02.29.2012
erv 02.29.2012
