[Edit, Sept. 25, 2016: In retrospect, this is a confusing post. The overall point is fine, but my contrived illustration is not a good one.] At an otherwise excellent talk some time ago, the speaker put up a graph like this (look below — not the cheetah)… …and said that the two sets of data points, … Continue reading You may not be interested in noise, but noise is interested in you
As I briefly mentioned in my end-of-year book recap, one of the best books I read in 2015, and one of the best popular science books I’ve read ever, is Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. Geoengineering refers to the intentional manipulation of climate, usually in the context of combatting … Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love geoengineering
As I noted a few months ago, I co-taught this past term a graduate workshop on scientific ethics. It was an experiment — this is the first time we’ve offered a course like this in Physics at Oregon — and overall I think it was fairly successful. We had a series of lively discussions, consistent … Continue reading Course recap: Scientific Ethics (Spring 2016)
Assessing exams I’m fond of analyzing the outcomes of exams I give. My favorite assessment is to look at how the score on each exam question correlates with the overall total score, and to plot this correlation coefficient versus the fraction of students who got that question correct. Roughly, I’d like the plot to turn … Continue reading Graphs and Grading: Winter 2016
I’ll guess that most people reading this don’t believe in homeopathy, astrology, or the existence of lizardlike extraterrestrials that walk among us. This is probably not because any of us ourselves have researched these topics, but rather because we are unconvinced by their proponents, and also perhaps because these ideas have not managed to break … Continue reading Scientific publishing for non-scientists
I’ll continue describing a graduate biophysics course I taught in Spring 2015. In Part I, I wrote about the topics we covered. Here, I’ll focus on the structure of the course — books, assignments, in-class activities, and the students’ final project — and note what worked and didn’t work. (What didn’t work: popsicle sticks.) Click … Continue reading Recap of a graduate biophysics course — Part II
In Spring 2015 I taught a graduate biophysics course for the first time. It was a first in several ways: the course didn’t exist before, so I developed it from scratch, and it was also the first graduate course I’ve taught in my nine years as a professor! I’ve been thinking for months that I … Continue reading Recap of a graduate biophysics course — Part I
In Part I, I wrote about how I started exploring the topic of machine learning, and we looked briefly described one of its main aims: automating the task of classifying objects based on their properties. Here, I’ll give an example of this in action, and also describe some general lessons I’ve drawn from this experience. … Continue reading Learning about (machine) learning — part II
Machine learning is everywhere these days, as we train computers to drive cars, play video games, and fold laundry. This intersects my lab’s research as well, which involves lots of computational image analysis (e.g.). Nearly everything my students and I write involves writing or applying particular algorithms to extract information from data. In the past … Continue reading Learning about (machine) learning — Part I
(A more technical post than most, in which we look at bacterial population densities, and watch a movie.) This term I taught a graduate biophysics course, about which I’ll write a recap later. Bacteria came up a lot in the course, both because they’re important but also because they offer many nice illustrations of how … Continue reading Bacteria and Boltzmann
The Eighteenth Elephant 