Check out yesterday’s “PhD Comic” comparing the average salaries of University administrators, professors, grad students and football coaches.
Here’s a different graphic, focusing on the professors and coaches
(sort of my own mini cartoon-off, like between Randall Monroe and Farley Katz)
What Makes Science ‘Science’? (free registration may be required)
Apparently, they isn’t.
Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these hopeful young trainees possibly teach science to children so that they become scientifically literate? How will school-kids learn to distinguish the questions and problems that science can answer from those that science cannot and, more importantly, the difference between science and pseudoscience?
Update: Commentary over at Effect Measure
Letting go of Newtonian mechanics
Conscientious physics teachers fear that without a thorough understanding of motion and forces, students will not be able to grasp subsequent topics in physics. This turns out to not be the case. Very little of the sky falls if you move on from mechanics before it’s fully fermented.
[I]f any physics teachers could tell me why *they* read blogs, that will help me write something to convince other physics teachers why this could be a good use of their precious time!
So if you teach physics, read physics blogs, but somehow don’t already read sciencegeekgirl, please go over and answer the question.
The two blogs I can think of that are the closest to actual physics instruction would be Built of Facts and Dot Physics. They both do a great job of covering the kinds of things that a beginning physics student might find useful.
A little while back there was a flurry of discussion about what science blogs can and can’t do, and while the above-mentioned blogs aren’t a replacement for teaching, they are filling a niche and can act as an adjunct to instruction. I think, looking at the wider picture of physics blogs we’ve been seeing glimpses of the spectrum of blogging, in form and function. The subject matter, the level of audience that can appreciate various posts, the peripheral topics when science isn’t foremost on he blogger’s mind, and the level of rigor one wants to use, anywhere from “here’s a detailed breakdown of this” to a quick “look at and perhaps try this” youtube link (and it’s nice to get validation for doing that)
I notice that Donors Choose is being championed by some physics-y blogs, and others are supporting those blogs rather than compete and dilute the pool.
My endorsement is up for grabs. Convince me whom I should choose. Bribe me.
Here are the ones I’ve seen with Donors Choose posts
Uncertain Principles
The Quantum Pontiff
Cosmic Variance
(CV starts off with a handicap after Sean got me into a bit of trouble with Allyson)
What am I bid, what persuasion can be offered, for turning an entry in the above list into a hyperlink?
From one of my adopters:
[W]hat is the easies part of Physics
My reply:
That’s actually a tough one to answer, since the classes you take are usually adjusted to be challenging — you get “easy” physics at the start, but things aren’t easy when you don’t understand them. And even though classes you take later on are harder, it’s not really as hard as having to learn it “cold,” because you have had the earlier classes. Similar to almost anything you do — it gets easier with practice, and that lets you try more difficult challenges.
So beginning physics, like kinematics, is probably the easiest, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t demanding.
——
Something to add to this, pointed out in the link in my previous post:
The beginning physics is made more difficult because students tend to have misconceptions that have to be corrected. While the later physics is more conceptually difficult, the odds are better that you start with a clean(er) slate.
Assuming you haven’t already majored in something. And no, I don’t get a referral commission, as far as you know.
Letter to High School Students: What to Major in over at Dot Physics
Do it because it isn’t easy.
It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great. Jimmy Dugan’s other piece of good advice.
Seriously — doing what’s easy isn’t really going to prepare you to do anything beyond college. Don’t take the easy path, take a challenging (though not impossible) one.
I’ve gotten a few questions from my adopters on when I decided to study physics. I had actually made that call in high school, so I went into college already having declared my major. I didn’t really know what a physicist did, but the subject was more interesting to me than the other science classes I had taken, and the thought of what I would do with the degree hadn’t yet entered my mind. My parents encouraged me, but they didn’t have a science background, so that was a general push toward learning and not so much in the direction of science.
Bad teaching wasn’t a factor in my decision. My middle-school teachers were good, and in high school I had a good teacher for earth science, but the material didn’t excite me tremendously. I had the same teacher for chemistry and my first physics course, so there was no bias there. But there were parts of chemistry that just didn’t click with me. Being sick and missing a week of school while we were learning LeChatlier’s principle didn’t help. Trying to learn new material while being spotty on basic concepts is a huge hurdle to overcome. Biology was eliminated very early in the game — I never took it in high school because a dissection was something that would make my joints and muscles turn to jello, and then there was the propensity to be ill. Yuck! I do enjoy learning about biology-related things like evolution and paleontology, just as long as I’m not exposed to greasy grimy gopher guts or the equivalent.
The other thing pushing me toward physics was my next-door neighbors. The father (Mr. H) was an engineer and he had a son (Tom) who was a few years older than me. We did several projects that were physics-related, though I didn’t really know it at the time. Mr. H loved steam engines, locomotives (especially steam-driven ones) and dams (hydro power, either electrical or mechanical), and I recall going on outings to see all three kinds of things. They had a small steam engine model (one mousepower) that we played with, as well as some other “toys.”
When Tom started taking physics and learned of the monkey-and-hunter problem (monkey in tree, and drops as soon as you shoot — where do you aim? Right at him, since gravity pulls both the monkey and bullet down at the same acceleration: g) we set up an experiment in his basement. A blowgun and a target that was attached to an electromagnet, and would drop when the dart left the barrel of the blowgun (the dart touched a thin wire that completed a circuit and opened a relay) and sure enough, if you aimed at the target, it would generally hit it. I was hooked. Even though formal instruction into basic physics was sometimes a little dry, I kept with it, because of the hints of really interesting things later that paid off.
The Lake Wobegon Distribution at The Universe of Discourse
[T]he remark reminded me of how many people do seem to believe that most distributions are normal. More than once on internet mailing lists I have encountered people who ridiculed others for asserting that “nearly all x are above [or below] average”. This is a recurring joke on Prairie Home Companion, broadcast from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” And indeed, they can’t all be above average. But they could nearly all be above average. And this is actually an extremely common situation.
To take my favorite example: nearly everyone has an above-average number of legs.
The post goes on to use some baseball statistics, in a way that probably won’t give Chad apoplexy, arguing that professional baseball players shouldn’t follow a normal distribution, because they are not selected at random from the population. They should represent the part of the distribution several standard deviations above the average.
One flaw in the reasoning is that not all highly skilled athletes with the right abilities become baseball players, but I think the basic argument is sound.
Of course, college students probably aren’t a normal distribution. Schools screen their applicants, and there can be further skewing within that population; students drop out of classes, and not all courses are created equal. Take physics, for example — there are typically different levels of introductory physics: a so-called physics-for-poets class, a class that require just algebra, and one that requires calculus. Generally speaking your physics ability would correlate somewhat with the class you are taking. Even if the physics-taking population as a whole comprised a normal distribution, each individual class should not: the easiest class should be deficient in students at the high end, and the hardest class should be missing the low end.