Academic Productivity » CiteULike + BibDesk

A brilliant tip on how to mash up CiteULike and BibDesk (two of my favorite tools). It helps that my article-search workflow is identical to the author’s. If you browse and post to CiteULike, this is a great way to bring those articles into BibDesk.

Academic Productivity » CiteULike + BibDesk: Sync your references and live smarter

Physics Viewpoint

Take a look at physics.aps.org for my Viewpoint article on Efficient All-Optical Switching Using Slow Light within a Hollow Fiber by Bajcsy et al. The work demonstrates an all-optical switch that was built by inserting cold Rubidium atoms into the hollow core of a photonic-crystal fiber. These fibers have been used in a wide range of nonlinear optics experiments and this is yet another interesting application.

It’s not you, it’s my funding

I am wrapping up  my first year and recently faced the most difficult decision of my time here. Of course, there have been easy decisions and hard decisions all year, but they were all things that I expected from deciding to fail a smart student who turns in no homework to how do I respond to the top student who is still worried about passing despite having a 99.4% average. Many challenges arise in a given year, but last week I had to grapple with a tough one: how to tell a student that despite their academic strengths and interest in my research, I don’t have enough research positions in the lab this summer.

Teaching with Arduino

I’ve decided to use the Arduino in my electronics class this fall. The Arduino is an “open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.” Even from the description it sounds like just what an electronics course needs. I finally had some time to tinker with it today, and after a few minutes I had it’s LED blinking away, and then after another few minutes it was an oscilloscope. A few minutes later it was playing a pulse-width-modulated (PWM) melody. Not bad for an hour’s work.

With a little inspiration, and my new-found confidence, I took to my first project in hopes of having a little demo to show the intro students to recruit them for my class in the fall. An hour and a half later (including fielding questions about homework and our exam tomorrow) I had a photo-resistor theramin up and running.

Physics of Sound and Music

Over the next few months I am hoping to develop a course on the Physics of Sound and Music. Although this course isn’t on the books yet, it has been offered in the past, and it would fit into the new core model at Pacific. We have adopted a program that replaces the old “pick two courses from each column” breadth requirement. The new model is based on focal studies, which are course clusters containing coherent, cross-discipline content. To bring more non-majors through the department, and also to extend our overlap with the music and arts departments, it would work well to have a sound and music course, and a light and vision course.

For the time being, it looks like we will split up our two four-credit non-majors courses into four two-credit courses. This will let us tailor the topic more directly to the students, and in particular, to the focal study they elect to take. The result of this split will likely be: sound and waves; optics and photography; atoms, electrons, and fields; and mechanics. There are some obvious things missing, like thermodynamics, so we are going to have to consider this approach carefully. I’m happy to hear from people who have tought or taken sound/music classes from physics departments. Any things you liked or didn’t like?

PDFkit in Firefox

There was one reason I used Safari rather than Firefox, and it has recently evaporated. I read a lot of PDF files (>20 per day browsing papers etc) so I was tired of the extra files accumulating in my download folder. You may know that Safari uses Appe’s PDFkit to display PDF files in your browser window, no muss no fuss. Until recently, the options in Firefox were the Adobe plugin (slow) or a privately developed solution tht requires an Intel machine. Enter a fantastic add-on, available at firefox-mac-pdf – Google Code.

Squirt Sunset

Last semester, in Waves and Optics, we discussed Rayleigh scattering. I described some simple examples, including the famous blue sky, and orange sunset. Earlier in the semester, I had coincidentally noticed that Squirt soda in a clear glass tends to be a little blue in hue, and not surprisingly, looks orange if held in front of a white light. So it turns out that in addition to milk drops in water, Squirt soda also exhibits this effect.

Later in the semester, one of the students brought in a bottle of squirt to test my suggestion and did the demo for the whole class. After a little tinkering, it works best cut in half with water. This is for a large glass, so if you want to use a fishbowl or tank, you may have to dilute it even further.

Opinion Paper

I was recently invited to contribute an opinion on a paper by Stefan Schumacher et al. that extends some of my research on pattern-based all-optical switches to semiconductor systems. The paper appears in the January issue of Physica Status Solidi and should be available online now.

Download a PDF copy: A.M.C. Dawes, Towards a single-photon all-optical transistor, Phys. Status Solidi 3, A17-A19 (2009).

You may also notice this link will take you to my new website for the Photonics and Quantum Optics lab at Pacific.

acrobat.com

Now, finally some sweet looking competition for Google Documents. Of course, I have nothing against Google Docs, I used them all the time. But, I’m also a big fan of nice typefaces, PDF files, and screen sharing… all of which are features of the tools now available via acrobat.com. A free service (at least for now) acrobat.com has “buzzword” for wordprocessing and document collaboration, connectnow for screensharing, PDF creation (limited to a 5-document trial period), sharing and “My files”. All in all, an interesting set of features. Personally, I like being able to have documents online that use Adobe fonts. I have CS3 on both computers, but I’d rather not fire up InDesign just to write a letter with some nice fonts. Now if only I had some collaborative document I had to write…

Large Hadron Collider “Actually Worked”

For such a great moment in physics, I wish the PR had been controlled as well as the beam. Quotes like “Oh, wow, it actually worked!” don’t necessarily encourage government spending on 20-year-long half-billion-dollar research projects. There is enough skepticism working against science, I would have hoped for more confidence from the National Geographic press. On the other hand, I’m excited to learn more about the Higgs boson and see where things go in the high energy physics world. It should be a busy few years.