randform

Just a quick link to an interesting article in the Washington monthly about possible future developments within the US and other high-tuition-dependent-educational systems ->College for $99 a Month

very, very short summary: the article explains that cheap online education (eventually outsourced to India etc.) may lure college students into taking standard classes in the internet instead of in a typical college. This development could be accelerated due to the economic crisis. Standard courses usually “nurture” the more specialized classes, hence it can be feared that the overall quality may suffer from this.

Last weakend we were doing a visit to the Deutsche Museum.

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Some images from the Curie museum in Paris featuring among others the investigation of radioactivity by Marie Curie and coworkers.

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I just came across these funny videos from the mission of Man System Integration Standards which were mostly shot at skylab. See e.g. this video about how to use paper.

The videos and documents display the problems of finding a well-adapted architecture for space travel. For that the Skylab investigations into anthropometry and biomechanics were apparently necessary.
Similar investigations were also undertaken in Australia. In particular the australian government was recently seeking 2000 volunteers for the ADF Aircrew and Crewstation Anthropometry Project which was organized by the Centre for Applied Anthropometry.

Most of scientists will meanwhile probably already know about the current uproar in the french science community. However just in case someone missed it, this blog post here.

The french uproar was not only but partially triggered by a speech by french president Sarkozy, which used not so nice descriptions of scientists. From a nature report:

In a speech on 22 January, as he set out his plans for a national strategy on science and innovation, French president Nicolas Sarkozy lambasted the country’s university system as “infantilizing” and “paralysing for creativity and innovation”. Sarkozy implied that French researchers were fainéants (layabouts) with cushy jobs, and no match for their supposedly more industrious British counterparts.

His speech made even a french fields medallist(website) (the fields medal is a mathematical analogue of the nobel prize) write an open letter in response (Read open letter by Wendelin Werner in Le Monde).

Merci A Elsa pour l’information.

A reader called Ingeborg was asking

>>>”Do you think that teaching did impair your research?”

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Last friday I attended a talk, which was organized by the munich center for nanoscience. The talk was given by Tim Liedl from the Shih Laboratory.

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The extremely giant Quantum Information Theory Group at the LMU Munich has now a new homepage, cited at the LMU theoretical physics website. Here the long list of its group members.

Since my postdoc ends end of march and there are no more open postdoc positions currently available and given the not so easy website handling, I am not so sure it was worth the effort to mention me.