Nothing about science today, and not even a drawing or painting — just a photo I took while biking home yesterday that reminded me that I have one of the best commutes on the planet. It rained yesterday, perhaps marking the start of the wet season in Eugene and the end of the typically dry, … Continue reading Yesterday’s traffic report
NOTE: This will only be of interest to a subset of the very small number of people who calculate things related to two dimensional viscosity. For the rest of you, here’s a link to the previous post, on witchcraft! SYNOPSIS: I describe and provide MATLAB code (here) to calculate the hydrodynamic drag and diffusion coefficients … Continue reading Membrane Diffusion Software
A few months ago, I read parts of “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande” (E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1937). I like cultural anthropology, and I much prefer descriptions of the creative ways that humans have constructed societies to the more “scientific” anthropology that now seems more prevalent, and so it’s not surprising that I found Evans-Pritchard’s … Continue reading Witchcraft, Guts, and Statistics
Yesterday I spent over 3 hours reviewing a paper for a journal, capping off a jam-packed day of semi-improvised discussions with high school students, grant proposal writing, a very tiny bit of lab work, and more. A friend of mine, coincidentally, also spent several hours yesterday reviewing a paper. This morning, I read a blog … Continue reading Peer Review, and Lying Injured on the Sidewalk
The bio-science journal eLife is trying out an remarkable new approach to peer review: letting authors decide how, or even whether, to revise their manuscripts in response to reviewers. The well-written announcements are here and here. I’m glad to see experimentation with new scientific publishing methods, though I’m skeptical about this one. Fundamentally, the new … Continue reading eLife’s Peer Review Experiment
Synopsis: A blurb about a recent paper from my lab [1], on our discovery that the bacterium that causes cholera can manipulate the mechanical environment of an animal gut to expel resident bacteria. Introduction: cholera’s tools, and ours Cholera killed more people in the 19th century than any other epidemic disease, and it continues to … Continue reading New Tricks from an Old Bacterium
When borrowing an elephant femur a few weeks ago I was reminded of the nascent Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, which we’re constructing at the University of Oregon as a center for translational or applied life-science research. The femur was for my Physics of Life class, as I’ve written about before [link]. In brief, … Continue reading On Elephants, Oregon, Science, and Art
Our visitation days for prospective Physics graduate students at the University of Oregon — people who have been admitted and are deciding whether or not to come — will occur this Friday and Saturday. There’s a poster session, and it occurred to me that we don’t have any posters from my lab that provide a … Continue reading A lab overview poster
All departments at the University of Oregon are being called upon to create metrics for evaluating our “scholarship quality.” We’re not unique; there’s a trend at universities to create quantitative metrics. I think this is neither necessary nor good — in brief, quality is better assessed by informed, narrative assessments of activity and accomplishments, and … Continue reading Cite this post! (On publication metrics)
In my last post I wrote about student course evaluations, with the suggestion that we’d glean more useful information from them if they occurred well after a course ended. With a delay, students could reflect on whether the course impacted their views of the world or provided skills that proved to be useful. Responses might … Continue reading Addendum on student teaching evaluations
The Eighteenth Elephant 