Things I would blog about, if I weren’t on blogging vacation.
- A short piece I wrote for Seed about the arrow of time is now on the web. It’s basically a summary of the scenario that Jennie Chen and I are suggesting for spontaneous inflation. On a related note, Karmen at Chaotic Utopia has a series on complexity and time, starting here.
- Cocktail Party Physics advertises a call for proposals from Feminist Press.
Girls and Science: Call for Proposals
The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.
I don’t know; seems to me, if we start encouraging girls to become scientists, pretty soon they’ll be replacing equations with hugs and instead of performing experiments we’ll just talk about our feelings or some such thing. That can’t be right.
- Janna Levin, author of the uniquely compelling How the Universe Got Its Spots and the brand-new A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, appeared on the Colbert Report! I can’t actually get the video to play, but maybe you can.
- Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science is now out in paperback. So all you poor liberals who couldn’t afford the hardcover edition now have no excuse.
- Speaking of books, Alex Vilenkin has come out with Many Worlds in One, about eternal inflation and the multiverse. Alex was the one who first realized that inflation could be eternal, and is a world-class cosmologist; whatever you may think of the issues, he’s worth listening to. (And don’t tell me that we cosmologists can’t have a little fun.)
- And Michael Bérubé also has a book out, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?. So many books. Don’t these people know they’re wasting valuable time that could be spent blogging?
- George W. Bush has decided to close EPA regional libraries, to protect the public from information they don’t need.
What has been termed, “positively Orwellian”, by PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, is indeed frightening. It seems that the self-appointed “Decider”, George W. Bush, has decided to “end public access to research materials” at EPA Regional libraries without Congressional consent. In an all out effort to impede research and public access, Bush has implemented a loosely covert operation to close down 26 technical libraries under the guise of a budgetary constraint move. Scientists are protesting, but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006.
- On the other hand, John Kerry draws support from unseemly quarters, at least according to Yousuf al-Qaradawi.
Kerry, who ran against Bush, was supported by homosexuals and nudists. But it was Bush who won [the elections], because he is Christian, right-wing, tenacious, and unyielding. In other words, the religious overcame the perverted. So we cannot blame all Americans and Westerners.
So we really shouldn’t complain about the President.
- Weak lensing, uploaded to flickr by darkmatter. Amazing photos.
I’m interested, Jeffsan; I haven’t heared about this.
The Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen was suffering declining enrolments in S&T disciplines, especially physics, chemistry, math. About eight years ago a new Dean of Science came onboard. He commissioned a survey of local high school students to find out their perceptions of his faculty and its teaching. The survey indicated words like “boring” “too hard”, etc. All the typical things. The Dean launched a two-part campaign to change things around. Part One was a promotional campaign targeted to youth via websites, etc. Part Two was a major curriculum and teaching reform. At the undergrad level, they created multidisciplinary programs to attract students with broader scientific interests (natural science, molecular life science, information science, environmental science.) They also created new masters level courses.
But here’s the innovation I found most interesting: For physics, the Dean instituted a tutor system designed to help students with difficult course content. He recruited high school physics teachers to advise on the introductory course content to ensure a good transition from high school. These teachers were available to tutor students if needed. They also provided feedback to professors on their teaching methods. They attended lectures, evaluated the teaching, and gave profs feedback on how to improve! You can imagine how the profs liked that! The Dean got a great deal of push back from the profs. They recruit new profs based on research excellence, not teaching excellence. They warned him that the university would gain a mickey mouse reputation and lose lots of its research funding. End of story: the Dean persisted, the profs came around (albeit grudgingly), research funding went up, enrolments went up, drop out rates declined.
If you’re interested in the OECD conference and studies, see their final report at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/16/30/36645825.pdf
I guess it’s too late in the thread to ask this, re Sean’s Arrow of Time story, but here goes anyway: as I understand it, one of the problems that inflation is supposed to solve is the horizon problem. We look out into space in opposite directions and see the same thing. Now inflation says: this is surprising because there has not been time for all this stuff to reach equilibrium, and inflation is supposed to allow equilibrium to be reached. But why do inflationists *expect* the initial state to be out of equilibrium in the first place? Surely if the universe just springs into existence, the most likely state for it is equilibrium? I understand that the initial *gravitational* degrees of freedom are far from equilibrium and that this is something that we don’t understand yet, but if inflationists have some reason to expect the *other* degrees of freedom to be far from equilibrium, then why don’t they have a reason to expect gravity to be far from equilibrium?
Thanks, Jeffsan!
The presentation and the methodology of physics:
Albert Einstein managed to reveal some of the most fundamental properties of the universe by visualizing the problem in his head, so clearly there must be alternative ways to beautiful science (other than Current Latin).
It’s time to make an appeal to every genius out there for a new comprehensible mathematical language; MISC (Mathematician’s Interpreted Symbolic Code) that works instantly both on paper and computers!! 🙂