Category: Items of Interest

Survey says: Science careers are ‘family unfriendly’

io9 reports:

In a survey taken of over 4,000 scientists across the globe, 70% of whom were men, researchers found that people consider science a “family unfriendly” career.

The survey itself (PDF), conducted by the Association for Women in Science, summarizes the findings like this:

Attracting workers into science and technology fields could be hampered by work-life integration issues according to a new international survey. Drawing data from 4,225 publishing scientists and researchers worldwide, the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) finds that lack of flexibility in the workplace, dissatisfaction with career development opportunities, and low salaries are driving both men and women to re-consider their profession.

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Math Madness #1: The Upset

It is conventional wisdom that every sensible bracket includes one and only one #12 seed upset over the #5 seed.  Is getting the #12 seed the basketball equivalent of a +8 sword with double damage against the undead?  If we look at the historical frequency of upsets in the round of 64 compared to the difference in seed[1], we see that the probability of upset decreases linearly as the difference in seed between the two teams increases (r2=0.96).

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1950’s Post-Apocalyptic Covers

My collection of 50’s sci-fi books that have at least a tangential connection to the post-apocalyptic subgenre. Unfortunately, I don’t have have a vintage edition for many of these.

Michael Dirda on John Carter and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Over at BN Review:

In 1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business. In earlier years he’d served in the Seventh Cavalry, worked as a rancher and gold miner, started an advertising agency, sold light bulbs and candy and uplifting books door-to-door, and not really made a go of anything.

As a thirty-something who’s barely supporting a family after a string of not-successes, Burroughs sounds like my kind of guy.

Pi Day?

In the irrational American way of denoting dates, today is 3-14-2012, which makes it Pi Day as the irrational, mathematical constant π=3.14… The suitability of 14 March as Pi Day is highly dependent on cultural context.

What π really represents is the ratio between the radius of an ideal circle and its circumference (C=2πr) or its area (A=πr2). We can determine the day of the year that best expresses this ratio if we treat the 365.25 days of the calendar year as either the circumference or area of the circle and calculating the day that would be the “radius”. In the case of the circumference, r~58 or 27 February. In the case of the area, r~11 or 11 January. Personally, I prefer to think of the year as the circumference, as it is linear and repeating, but you may pick your poison. I have both on my calendar and like to think of them in the same way as Catholic and Orthodox disagreements about the timing of Easter.

And, now is the point where I retract my earlier assertion that 16 February should be Phi Day. The more precise expression of the ratio gives us Day 226 (Φ~365/226) on the calendar, which is usually 14 August (except in the leap year). Please revise your calendar’s appropriately.