Academia
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SALT
The New York Times, recently redesigned (discussed ad nauseum, notably by Slate’s Jack Shafer), has an article about SALT, the South African Large Telescope, now the Southern hemisphere’s largest telescope. This is just one of a series of scientific and technological investements being made in South Africa (by combinations of the South African and “western”…
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Vint Cerf
Went to see a talk at Imperial’s Department of Computing* by Vint Cerf, currently Google‘s “Chief internet evangelist.” But Cerf’s roots are deep in tech: at Stanford in the seventies he co-invented the TCP/IP protocol which controls how information moves around the internet. I discovered that this was mostly a Google recruiting talk for Imperial’s…
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Quick lunch-hour dispatch, all to be clarified soon: Last week I participated in a collaboration between the Dana Centre (the adult wing of the Science Museum) and some artists, entitled “Big Ideas.” Imperial College is to be leaving the University of London. Fantastic late-night Dinner last weekend, with (among many others!) Kosso, Rachel, Imp, Deirdre,…
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Helsinki
So, why Helsinki? I was here to be the “Opponent” for a Ph.D. examination for a student at the University of Helsinki. I felt like the host of a talk show: after short presentations by the candidate and me, we sat at the front of an auditorium, and I quizzed him on topics near to…
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To Sir, With Love
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Yesterday I had the privilege and the pleasure of teaching cosmology to some of the A-Level Physics students at the Maria Fidelis Convent School in London, where they are justly proud of their science curriculum. Despite the weird (to me) habit of calling all the adults “Sir” or “Miss” and the very Catholic (but not…
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Question for the community: Blogs and Teaching
Any good suggestions for or case studies of using blogs as part of teaching? The obvious possibilities: I could blog all of my notes (although I’m not actually teaching any lecture courses this year). But that’s just using a slightly different medium for an old task (and it’s hard to translate math into html!). Or…
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Big Academia is Watching Me
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Next week, I need to account for my time down to about 15 minutes, as part of Imperial’s TOAST (The Original Academic Staff Time) Survey. This will let the College figure out exactly how we (collectively and anonymously, or so we’re told) spend our time. Which, I presume, lets them figure out how to best…
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Postmodernists and Scientists, partying together
In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms — from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn‘s description of…
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Teaching
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Regular readers may have noted a slackening of my posting pace over the last couple of weeks. For the first time in life, I’m earning my keep doing what most people think a “University Lecturer” (a.k.a. “College Professor” in the US) gets paid to do: teaching (in fact, most of our professional stature and advancement…
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Working hard for our money
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OK, academic scientists are clearly upper-middle-class, and on a day when it’s more obvious than ever that the poor in this country get a raw deal in everything up to and including disaster relief, I don’t want to bellyache too much about how hard it is to do a job I love in an interesting…
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