Link of the day: Stanford commencement speech by Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia gave the 2007 Stanford commencement speech about the deteriorating importance of diverse and high quality culture in American society. This topic has interested me in the past; see the following posts on 17 June 2005 and 4 February 2005.

Gioia proposes:

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.

Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

So I'm going to take this test. (Note to make it fair, the athletes and American Idol finalists must also be living Americans.)

Active American NBA players: Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwayne Wade, Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marsbury, Steve Francis, Carmelo Anthony

Active American MLB players: Alex Rodriguez, Curt Schilling, Greg Maddux, Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, Tim Linceum, Barry Zito, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Mike Piezza

American idol finalists: Fantasia

Living American poets: Allen Ginsburg, Robert Pinsky, (unfortunately T.S. Eliot is already dead)

Living American playwrights: (unfortunately August Wilson died and Tom Stoppard is not American)

Living American painters: ummm.... (I think Georgia O'Keefe and Jackson Pollack are dead already)

Living American sculptors: Maya Lin (there was this Guggenheim exhibit I went to featuring a sculptor but I can't remember his name)

Living American architects: I.M. Pei (Frank Lloyd Wright is long dead)

Living American classical musicians, conductors, composers: Michael Tilson Thomas, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, van Cliburn, Wynton Marsalis

Living American scientists: Barbara McClintock, Bruce Alberts, (can't think of any American chemists), physicists: Alan Guth, Sean Carroll, Kip Thorne, Edward "Rocky" Kolb, Frank Wilczek, Bob Jaffe, Washington Taylor IV, Ed Witten, Peter Fisher, John arris, John Joannopoulos, Matthew Fisher, Dan Fisher, Leon Balents, Phil Anderson, Steve Girvin, Doug Stone, Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, Eric Hudson, Don Eigler, Mike Crommie, Paul McEuen, Rob Schoelkopf, Dan Prober, Sean Barrett, Jack Harris, Dave DeMille, David Awschalom, Isaac Chuang, David Pritchard, Dan Kleppner

Living American social thinkers: (I guess Malcolm Gladwell is Canadian)

Total
20 active American NBA/MLB players and American Idol finalists
10 living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, conductors, composers
33 living American scientists

If you omit scientists (I'm just a little advantaged), I'm doing mediocre on my culture. I can explain this with several reasons. First, the high culture scene is much more international than the NBA/MLB or American (hullo) Idol. Also, I don't spend much time on modern (1960+) culture except for music. But Gioia is right that there is hardly any media coverage of arts in America.

Link of the day: APS Virtual Journals

The APS Virtual Journals aggregates journal articles from APS, AIP, Nature, Science, IEEE and others for various hot topics in physics. The articles are selected by a board of editors. Currently, Virtual Journals includes sections on applications of superconductivity, biological physics, nanoscience, quantum information, and ultrafast science. Pretty cool!

Humor from the perspective of a Stanford chemistry grad student

Sam Lord manages to keep life light despite slaving away in a physical chemistry lab at Stanford. Here are a few humorous posts from his "best" post list:

• Laboratory "motivation" posters
  
• Worst figure ever (good? science): How to tell if your rabbit is dead
  
• Worst figure ever (definitely bad science): correlation between fatness and stupidity
  
• how to become a pretentious chemistry grad student
  

Quantum coherence in photosynthesis

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry report in Nature (subscription required to access paper) that they have observed quantum coherence in a photosynthetic protein called FMO. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has a press release here.

Teaching: Chemistry problems website

My sister also sent me a link to a problems website run by the Harvard Chemistry and Chemical Biology Departments.

A databank of good and interesting problems is a great idea. (I don't know much about chemistry, but my sister claims that these are good problems.) Just as it is hard to find good textbooks, it is difficult to find good problems -- they should do this for every quantitative subject. There is the additional problem of cheating, but that's another topic...

Aside #1: I think that most students can tell the difference between the professor who is giving them random problems from the book and the professor who genuinely wants them to learn and only assigns problems that he/she would actually be willing to do. If students actually enjoy doing the problems (at least after solving them) and the problems tie in well with the course, then you have a successful class.

Aside #2: I used to think that my teachers brilliantly came up with their own problems, but I quickly learned that. For example, one of my best undergrad classes was the second and third semester of the quantum mechanics sequence. It turns out that one heroic and brilliant professor developed all the course materials and they get used over and over again (though sometimes people add a little something new). As my high school English teacher told me, the best teachers "steal."

Title IX in science?

Many scientists (both men and women) have proposed the idea of enforcing Title IX in academia. Here is an article from the perspective of a chemist. The idea is to replicate the success of Title IX in high school and college sports.

It's a good idea in principle, but I see some problems. In particular, athletic teams have a very high turnover rate and there isn't much at stake. Unless you have a nationally ranked basketball or football team, athletic teams are not a big part of the university budget. In contrast, university faculty jobs are lifetime tenured positions. For a Title IX plan to work, I think we would have to give up the tenure system. If you have an all-male math department, what are you supposed to do? Hire women for the next thirty years? Hire adjunct women professors?