@Danu If I'd had my way we'd being going to a sedate little regional conference, but the student who is actually presenting has had her heart set on a big one.
Those things are always absolute zoos.
On the other hand, I can introduce them to some people which is good.
The third student was only added this week when he decided he could "call in some favors" to get to Baltimore. I have no idea how that works, but OK.
why is it that this academic work is all about who you know and who knows you? Seems to me like a community that only tollerates their like-mindeds. I know it's not that severe but still ...
strange property for a community that should be open minded
@MarcelKöpke It's not about like mindedness, it's about trustworthy evaluations. This student is good, that one is not bad, the other you can't get cause Harvard'll snatch him up.
My nominal business is Big Science (tm) and I can't count the number of times I've heard things like "We asking X to join. He's an asshole but we know he can handle [some tough problen on this experiment]".
well that's how a community seperates their like mindeds. By recommendations and connections. Sure that's not a bad thing in general. But I guess today it's like "So you have no recommendations from your prof or your supervisor wasn't chatting with me on that conference? well you're out!"
@MarcelKöpke Sure, getting the student some exposure is part of what is expected of a supervisor. In the end the student has to make the most of that, but you have to give them the chance.
I'm at an all undergrad school, so I send (or rather, take) undergrads.
And it give me a good reason to request funding for the trip.
well I don't question that, but what I question is that most of the jobs are given secretly by means of connections and stuff. I might be wrong but that's how it seems at my university at least
there is just no way to get into a work group if you haven't "pleased" someone else before (extremly speaking :D )
same goes for paper reviews. some huge connection bias there I guess. Sure submitions are anonymous but it's quite easy to figure out who submitted by just checking refrences and stuff
@Danu Mr. HSM, have there been any scientific revelations since the epicycles that required less math than the existing theory? (I'd doubtful of the epicycle thing too, because you really need a notion of calculus for Newtonian orbital mechanics.)
The shocking thing is his main point was so badly made, at the end he convinces the plebicide he's dictating to that they will be rewarded for their ignorance of mathematics by understanding someone elses hard work, I mean he completely defeats himself in a hilarious Freudian slip at the end, just so unbelievable...
The ancient Greeks had a theory that the sun, the moon, and the planets move around the Earth in circles. This was soon shown to be wrong. The problem was that if you watch the planets carefully, sometimes they move backwards in the sky. So Ptolemy came up with a new idea - the planets move ar...
@Danu No offense taken because you are right. The versions she showed me started bad, and were getting significantly better while we went back and forth. Then she made some "final adjustments" and submitted that.
A sine wave is either characterized by it's argument $x$, i.e. the $x$ in $sin(x)$, or by it's amplitude, frequency, and phase. A Fourier series just says a function is like a big (collection of) sine wave(s) on a finite interval, and shifts the description of, say, $x^2$ to it's A-F-P description, a Fourier transform is just that on the whole interval, so yeah I guess you could Fourier just about anything right?
They're tedious as hell and nobody likes them, but you can get somewhere
The classes I took (mandatory) had me go through 5-6 versions of a paper before finally submitting it
I also had a real funny professor who, during the third week of the semester, guaranteed me an A so that I could write more freely :) I guess he believed in me, heh.
@Danu Don't really know. My school is in the midst of a big transition from "Writing Across the Curriculum" to "Writing in the Disciplines", which means they are shoveling some of the burden of teaching writing on to everyone outside English and the humanities.
We're trying, but we are also clearly beginners at this...
Those classes also made me realize how god-awful most people are at writing (of course, it didn't help that I was doing an English-taught degree in Holland)
@dmckee Okay, fair enough. We had dedicated "academic writing for the sciences" classes (although I took the regular one instead)
The prof for those classes was a science journalist (also PhD in physics), which I think is a good choice.
Any way, I think scientists should practice writing in school so I have my upper-division classes do term-papers. Mixed results so far, but I'm getting better at supervising and supporting the work.
@0celo7 he's trying to make the point that the next advancements don't need advanced mathematics, because learning modern advanced math is like learning the mathematics of epicycles, which is clearly wrong because Copernicus etc... showed the planets follow elliptical paths, also science is like a religion and Einstein hated math, so you can discover the new paradigm too!!!
@Danu A measure of how much work the class is supposed to be. A unit is roughly one hour a week of formal instruction. There are about 130 in a physics degree (inclusive of stuff they take for breadth and basics in other departments).
@bolbteppa It's a shame that he's missing the interesting point that it is true that now-difficult (or at least viewed as such) mathematics will be regarded as much easier later on.
@dmckee Hmm okay. Wow, that's so little!! My bachelor's degree had about a 1.5 hrs/point ratio and we had to take 180. Urgh, I get really annoyed about this because I've heard from some sources that US uni's often regard EU undergraduate degrees as inferior
Is he one of those people who (think they) know that the Higgs field is a quantum field which gives mass and think this constitutes a complex understanding?
My AP Psychology teacher was like that until I handed him Shankar and he shamefully gave it back to me two months later after capitulating in the first chapter.
@Danu I had 184 as an undergrad, but terms were 10 weeks (quarters) Terms at my current school are 15 weeks (semesters) so it's about the same amount of classroom time.
@Danu Sounds like it. I never met a student from Europe who had trouble with in-major stuff. I have met a couple who seemed week on what we call "general education". But then most of my classmates were week on that too and they were rare among my European colleagues.
