What else am I to conclude from recent UFO reports out of Texas, except that no one in the entire town had a cell phone with a camera? Or a digital camera? Do the aliens use data from cell phone usage and digital camera usage when they decide where to do their joy riding?
Oh, and I will be happy to update this post when photos emerge! (I grew up reading UFO books, by the way. I credit them with developing an idea for what science is and is not.)
Foxworthy Material
You know you’re in rural America when…
Reminds me of one of my favorite bumper sticker ideas of a few years ago (less true today): “Buy American: Do Meth!”
Research Grant Dollars
Over at Life as a Physicist Gordon Watts notes the email we received here at the University of Washington from our university president yesterday which told us that last year, for the first time, UW received over a billion dollars in research grants. Only John Hopkins receives more money. Of course the main reason for this is the UW’s school of medicine which brings in over half a billion dollars in funding every year. Holy moly that’s a lot of research grant dollars.
This got me thinking about research funding and I thought an incredibly stupid thought. Which is of course what this blog is for: sharing my incredibly stupid thoughts…in the public…so everyone can laugh at me. A big issue which comes up in physics graduate programs is the fact that the supply chain for academic jobs in physics is severely out of wack. The number of faculty positions versus the number of people who want these jobs is the source of an incredible amount of frustration and pain for the vast majority of graduate students and postdocs who will not obtain faculty positions. This is, of course, true across a multitude of fields, not just physics, but I’ll stick to physics as it is the field I know more about.
Of course part of the problem is that the incentive system for faculty members is askew: you get rewarded for bringing in money which supports graduate students. So in some form, the number of graduate students you mentor is a proxy for a measure of your success as a faculty member. Indeed there is very little incentive for a professor at a research institute to not add even more graduate students to the meat factory of the academic job market.
Now there are many things we can think about to fix this situation, almost none of them will probably ever come to fruition, simply because there isn’t much incentive to do so from the “winners”, who are also the ones who would be responsible to fix the system. From my own perspective I’m a big advocate of science departments owning up to the problem and providing a setting where, while research and the academic system is the core of graduate school experience, departments do a lot more to emphasize the general applicability of the degree they are earning. Physics, in particular, suffers greatly from the attitude that only a faculty position at a top research school is acceptible, ignoring the huge amount of success that physicists have had departing from this path (and yes, I think about this path myself, nearly every day, especially when my research isn’t working the way I want it to. Of course this is probably the reason I’m in my current position.) Of course, I’m sure there are those who don’t think there is a problem at all. If you’re one of those people you might as well stop reading now, since there ain’t no way what I’m going to say next is going to do anything beside cause an increase in your blood pressure.
So back to the stupid idea. My position at the University of Washington is as a research assistant professor. What this means is that I am supported entirely by grant money I raise. Of course one particular side effect of this is that it is much harder for me to take on a lot of graduate students. So my stupid idea was what would happen if this setup was much more widely in place. What if faculty were rewarded a lot more for paying their own salary than they currently are? What if the proportion of research faculty was much more in line with the proportion of funding coming in to a university? What if the proportion of research faculty to faculty rewarded more for teaching was more in line with the actual source of funding dollars? This would definitely change the ability to fund graduate students at the level they are currently funded.
But, of course it is a stupid idea. Increasing the number of research professors would cause all sorts of havoc with teaching. And really, do I want more people to have to raise their salaries like I do and the suffer the slings and arrows of funding fortunes? Maybe what I really need is someone to comiserate with 🙂 But it is an interesting model to consider: what happens if a university acknowledges the central nature of research in its endeavors and tries to accomidate this by more research positions, more teaching-emphasis positions, and a reduction in the number of traditional tenure positions? I’m not sure I know the answer, but I’d be curous to know if there are any examples of schools which have pushed in this direction and what the (probably insane) consequences of such a move have been.
On the Presentation of Data
This talk from TED2006 by Hans Rosling demonstrates some pretty cool visualization of data software which you can play with here.
128 Bit Madness
Get your own 128-bit number here!
Speaking of which, what would happen if I designed a system which used a digital rights management system with my own 128-bit number and used this system to spread the HD-DVD 128-bit number? Then they would have had to cracked your system to know that you had cracked their system… Does the legal system just blow up into an infinite loop at this point?
Speaking of which, how many bits of the number do you have to publish? What if I leave off the last five bits? What about if I create a superposition of numbers such that with a one in one hundred chance you get the right 128-bit string? Is publishing such a quantum state a violation of the DMCA?
They Fired the Quantum Physicist!
Quantum physicist fired from BBC Apprentice TV Show. She was fired by Sir Alan Sugar in a highly non-neutral manner
Delivering his final verdict, Sir Alan said: “This is the real world love, this is not your scientific protons and neutrons.
“I’m wondering, have I got another one here who should really stick to what they know? … You’re fired!”
One Link, Many Link, Social Link
Just back from an awesome lecture by Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo Research/U Wisconsin) entitled “Community Systems: The World Online.” Wow. The talk should be online here soon. In my head I’ve always kind of associated social websites like flicker, youtube, etc as “stuff for fun” so to speak. But Raghu makes a strong case, I think that these sorts of websites are actually the manner in which make the next step towards improving the responsiveness of the web. Okay so maybe that wasn’t his main point, but I’d like to argue that this idea was a valid conclusion to draw from his talk. Indeed, some might even claim that the new boom (Are we at the beginning? Hop on quick youngsters!) in websites with a “social” aspect (by which I mean all sites which have a community aspect, not just those with a “social” component) is all about the increased usefulness of exploiting the community link networks for increased functionality on using the web. It is almost like, as Google moved beyond Altavista (and others) use of one link in anchor text to many links, these social sites are experience a similar revolution in the mining of the community information links beyond the simple one link stage.
Quantized Celebrity
I’m sure all of you are well aware of the fact that Carmen Electra recently split up with Dave Navarro. Oh, what? You’re not? And why am I bringing this up? Check out this article. You’ve got wade down to the last paragraph. Okay I’ll wade for you:
In other Electra news in the notable quotables from Star Pulse Carmen drops this wonder:
“I’m really into quantum physics. Some of my friends are into it, some of them aren’t, so I’m trying to get them excited about discovering all these interesting things about thoughts and the power of thoughts.”
“It gives me chills thinking about it. It’s fun.”
Well, okay, I’m pretty sure that “the power of thoughts” and “quantum physics” is Deepak Chopra nonsense, but on the other hand, I’m happy that I share in common with Carmen Electra the belief that thinking about quantum physics is fun.
A Calculation
Sweet, just in time for my trip to the Allerton conference in Illinois, a partial lift on the ban on liquids (also known as the “Coke kills” rules) in carry-on luggage. Have to put it in a nice little baggie, though. Good thing because I was just going to buy and ditch my new liquids in Illinois. Either that or stink out the other participants!
And while I wait in line tomorrow, I’m going to try not to think about this calculation!
The Real Starbucks Story
Forget the war over customers finding creative ways to use milk at Starbucks. The real story here in Washington and Oregon coffeeland is that the mermaid’s hair has been moved back in Starbuck’s logo. And I can report that, indeed, children all over Seattle are now running around crazied. The logo appears to have fried their Puritanical neurons.