Twitter in Business Schools

My initial reaction to the financial meltdown caused by the housing bubble was “Are our business leaders really that stupid?” Things like this news squib from Inside Higher Ed make me suspect the answer is “yes, they are that stupid”: Business schools — including such prestigious ones as those of Columbia and Harvard Universities — […]

Links for 2010-07-29

Meet the real victims of Bush-era lawlessness: his lawyers. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine “Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely offering legal advice, and nonlawyers cannot be held accountable […]

When Should You Open Your Car Windows? An Experiment

Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term– say, leaving your car parked outside all day– I hope everyone will agree that […]

Links for 2010-07-28

The Art of Sleeping in Seminars | Department of Physics at the U of I “Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple errors. For advanced students, these rules […]

Measuring Temperature by Counting Atoms: “Suppressed Fluctuations in Fermi Gases”

When one of the most recent issues of Physical Review Letters hit my inbox, I immediately flagged these two papers as something to write up for ResearchBlogging. This I looked at the accompanying viewpoint in Physics, and discovered that Chris Westbrook already did most of the work for me. And, as a bonus, you can […]

Distilled Faculty Outrage

Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education’s response to the world economic crisis: The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded– science and engineering will necessarily […]

Links for 2010-07-27

slacktivist: To bigotry no sanction “During Washington’s presidency, of course, most Americans did not “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” The man who wrote “to bigotry no sanction” also imagined he had the right to own other humans and the authority to vote on Martha’s behalf. But yet we can see here […]