You will find this post either shocking or obvious. If it’s obvious, you may nonetheless be shocked that others don’t find it obvious, or by how quickly the situation it describes has gone from shocking to obvious. The topic is AI (artificial intelligence) and teaching, which I will illustrate with an example. Below are a … Continue reading AI and exams in May 2024
This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my pop-science book, So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (blog post; Amazon) — published in 2022 (and … Continue reading Course recap: “The Physics of Life” Winter 2024
Several times so far I’ve taught a graduate course on biophysics. Last term I taught it again, but with a twist: it was a combined graduate and undergraduate course. There were two motivations for this. First, biophysics is unfamiliar enough to physics graduate students that upper-division undergraduates aren’t at any significant disadvantage. In fact, I’ve … Continue reading Recap of a Graduate (and Undergraduate!) Biological Physics Course
There’s a lot of advice out there for prospective applicants for academic faculty positions [1], so you don’t really need mine. However, some advice is outdated and some is incomplete, so I thought it would be worthwhile to add a small bit of information based on experiences from my department’s search last year (Physics, University … Continue reading Zoom Interview Questions and Other STEM Faculty Hiring Tidbits
Last Spring, I taught the second term of University of Oregon’s statistical mechanics / thermodynamics for physics majors course (syllabus). I might at some point describe how the course went and what lessons might be drawn, beyond the key lesson that statistical mechanics is a wonderful subject. For now, something far less substantial: I often … Continue reading Statistical Mechanics Has a Good Beat and You Can Dance To It
What makes one microscope better than another? A few weeks ago I co-ran a week-long Physics and Human Physiology day camp for high school students, part of the University of Oregon’s “SAIL” program that especially targets low-income students. I’ve written about SAIL before (2019, 2017, 2014) — this was our 14th Physics + Human Physiology … Continue reading A Few Flavors of Microscopes — SAIL recap, 2023
I’ve taught several times a graduate course on biophysics, the first instance of which I blogged about here. I love teaching this class, and students seem fond of it as well. I’m teaching it again next Fall (2023) but with a twist: it will now be a combined undergraduate / graduate course. The motivations are … Continue reading Introduction to Biological Physics — an old and new course
This post couldn’t have been written a year ago, and one year from now it may seem quaint and archaic. Still, I’ll write it to serve as a record. As noted in the last post, I taught The Physics of Energy and the Environment this past term, a course for non-science major undergraduates at the … Continue reading ChatGPT takes my Energy and the Environment final exam
The quote in the title is from Woody Allen, and you’ll see below why it’s appropriate for this course recap. This past term I again taught “Physics of Energy and the Environment,” a class for non-science-major undergraduates at the University of Oregon. I enjoy teaching this topic and in some ways this round was better … Continue reading “Eighty percent of success is showing up” — Physics of Energy and the Environment, Winter 2023
Which college majors have exploded in popularity over the past decade and which have shrunk? Over the past two posts (#1, #2) I’ve discussed my analyses of the number of degrees awarded in various fields at US “R1” universities (“very high research activity”) between 2011 and 2021. I’ve wondered how I could convey the overall … Continue reading College Major Trends: The Movie
The Eighteenth Elephant 