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
A long post with some thoughts on student evaluations of teaching, and a guest essay on similar themes. Part 1: I suggest that such evaluations should be done a year after a course, rather than immediately at its end. Part 2: (Guest post) On the difference between “good” and “effective” teaching, and our failure to differentiate … Continue reading On Teaching Evaluations (with a bonus guest essay…)
It’s time again to think back on my favorites of the books I read last year. (Links: the 2015 and 2016 posts.) Looking back at my notes, it’s striking how many of 2017’s books were awful; usually I have better luck. Awful Books The “abyssmal” category for fiction includes Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne (an inept … Continue reading Highs and lows: Books, 2017
Days and weeks often go by in a blur, packed with meetings and emails, leaving my “to do” lists perpetually unfinished. Where does the time go? Why is there so little time for learning new things, reading papers, working in the lab, and other activities that one might naively think would be part of a … Continue reading Where does the time go? Let’s see…
The Fall term here will start next week, and I’m once again teaching Physics of Energy and the Environment, a course for non-science-majors, that I’ve written about a few times before. Here, I’ll describe two experiments related to teaching this course, with the hope that the descriptions will be useful to others. One experiment was … Continue reading Writing about writing about a class
Review articles — papers that summarize a topic or a technique, assessing our present state of understanding and our hopes for the future — are useful and often enjoyable to read. In Physics, these are well respected but rather rare. In Biology, it sometimes seems like the ratio of primary articles to review articles isn’t … Continue reading The Once and Future Light Sheet
The Eighteenth Elephant 