I haven’t vanished, but Foo Camp is a remarkably busy event, and I truly have zero time to blog. In addition, I need to sit down and figure out what the rules allow me to say. But for now, let me just say that I’m having a tremendous time here. Google is a great host (much more about that soon) and from morning to late night one is continuously in sessions and fascinating discussions with fine minds from an array of disciplines.
Just to mention one specific for now, yesterday I was part of a lively and productive session on the politicization of science, led by Gavin Schmidt (of RealClimate). In Science Foo Camp fashion, this led into a fun and interesting dinner conversation with Gavin and others. You wouldn’t believe some of the innovative ideas some non-scientists have for helping “encourage” the media to play fair on science!
Anyway, I must get up, shower, and get over there for the last half-day of sessions.
August 13th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
[...] This weekend there’s an interesting extension of FOO going on at the Googleplex called sci foo. This is, as far as I know, only the second time FOO has been directly extended, being co-organized by O’Reilly folks (the first was Pooh Camp at Disney in March). [...]
August 16th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Thanks for checking in. OFF TOPIC: Any chance that you’ll be commenting on these related recent headlines from the UK?
Physics too tough for today’s pupils
Physics student numbers in decline
Physics fails to make the grade in our classrooms
Concern over decline in physics
A farewell to physics?
Irresistible decline of physics
Apologies if you’ve already discussed this extensively.
August 17th, 2006 at 10:13 am
It’s all because I stopped teaching physics in the UK and, indeed, left the UK altogether. The country is now officially screwed as a result.
One bright note is that the IOP ‘Advancing Physics’ course is good; like the Nuffield Physics course from which it came, however, it requires teachers who are really good at physics and who are also brave enough not to go for the obvious courses like the joke that EDEXEL offers.
Schools with enough well-qualified teachers of physics do pretty well in terms of physics throughput. The real problem, I think, is that there aren’t enough of those people in physics education and the problem, already really bad, is going to get a lot worse as the babyboomers retire. As a capitalist pigdog, I’d say that the payscale should be broken and specialists in great demand should be paid a wage sufficient to attract them into the job; this wage will be significantly higher than the payscale, which is, apart from one or two points for ‘recruitment and retention’, uniform across subject specialisations. That’s tough luck for PE teachers and English teachers and the like (who are more in surplus) but I don’t see how the problem can be reversed otherwise and the sooner the better, because less A Level students of physics means less applicants for physics at University which means less people qualified to teach physics and around and around.
November 14th, 2006 at 7:56 am
The Perils of Poor Science Journalism
When I lived in England and when I go back to visit, I often treat myself to two newspapers — The Guardian, for reasonable reporting of the national and international news, and The Daily Telegraph, for its crossword, to which I am particularly p…
November 15th, 2006 at 10:38 am
[...] Monbiot quotes such an expert – Gavin Schmidt, a well-known climate scientist, blogger, and all-round good guy to have a beer with. His claims about the Stefan-Boltzmann equation have been addressed by someone who does know what he’s talking about, Dr Gavin Schmidt of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He begins by pointing out that Stefan-Boltzmann is a description of radiation from a “black body” – an idealized planet that absorbs all the electromagnetic radiation that reaches it. The Earth is not a black body. It reflects some of the radiation it receives back into space. [...]