Comments on: Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium

By: Catching Up: Lisa Randall, Parents, Toronto and New York | Cosmic Variance

Catching Up: Lisa Randall, Parents, Toronto and New York | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 02:58:26 +0000

[…] This is not an easy subject to make accessible at a general level; I found it hard enough recently doing it for a scientifically trained, but non-physicist audience, never mind a general educated one. But Lisa did a wonderful job, focusing on warped extra dimensions (as one might expect) and getting across the main motivations, ideas and consequences. While string theory was given its proper recognition for providing motivations for the Randall-Sundrum constructions, Lisa didn’t focus on that, and instead presented the idea mainly as a phenomenological construction. I thought this worked very well and allowed the audience to focus on the more immediate applications and testable aspects of the models without throwing up the many other questions that go along with string theory. […]

By: Rob Knop

Rob Knop — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:35:29 +0000

I caught the end of a piece on “All Things Considered” about an annual soccer game between string theorists and non-string theorists. Was that this conference?

By: a

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 07:05:57 +0000

somebody presents practical applications, others present results, theorethical physicists present speculations. Are you sure it is a good idea?

By: LucysGranddaughter

LucysGranddaughter — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:32:28 +0000

This jives well with the study that made headlines a couple of months ago about people making better buying decisions after a good night’s sleep…I’d suggest a word of caution, though, in advising struggling students to sleep instead of study. Recalling my own college experience with tough science exams, if I hadn’t studied well, then getting a full night’s sleep didn’t make one iota of difference on the final (low) score.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 19:14:24 +0000

I’d be interested to know whether others are already familiar with the benefits of sleep for learning from their personal experiences.

I was just up until 4am writing a paper, and right now I’m more interested in the benefits of sleep for walking in a straight line.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 19:12:55 +0000

The method was to take two groups of students (who, apparently, are a plentiful and cheap source of subjects for these experiments)

Yup… experimental psychology’s dirty little secret is that they have to assume college students are a representative sample of humanity. It gets the job done…

By: Belizean

Belizean — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:29:37 +0000

I’ve been aware of this effect on my own learning since high school. It’s not a subtle effect.

I’d be interested to know whether others are already familiar with the benefits of sleep for learning from their personal experiences.