Links for 2011-05-25

  • “For 15 broad categories of majors, such as engineering, physical science, and business, the report explores the median and quartile pay, the percentage of the major comprising women and minorities, and the percentage of individuals from that major who went on to get graduate degrees. The report also breaks down those groups and explores similar data for 171 individual majors.

    Some of the results are to be expected. Science, engineering, and business majors tend to be better-off financially than majors in liberal arts and humanities, education, and counseling. In addition to a wide discrepancy among average salaries, the study finds that the most popular majors have not been the ones leading to high-paying jobs, that female and minority students have tended to cluster in low-paying fields, and that graduate degrees have been essentially required for some undergraduate majors if those students were to find good jobs.”

  • During the conference on the methods of differential geometry in physics in Warsaw in June 1976, Professor Wheeler gave an interview for the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics A. After Professor Wheeler authorized the English version in January 1977, the Czech translation was published in \v{C}eskoslovensk\’y \v{c}asopis pro fyziku A (1978) and soon afterwards the Polish translation appeared in Postepy fizyky. After John Wheeler’s recent death it occurred to me that it would now be appropriate to publish the original interview from 1976 so that it would not be lost to English readers; and so, despite being more than 30 years old, the interview appeared in the special issue on quantum gravity of “General Relativity and Gravitation” dedicated to the memory of J. A. Wheeler. 
  • Yes, it has happened. “Physical Impossibilities in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” For our project, we had to find three scenes from any movie or TV show and use physics to find out if something was or wasn’t possible. I got 100% on it.