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A historical course enrollment visualizer
If you’ve ever wondered: What has the enrollment in the introductory “Physics with calculus” (PHYS 251) course at the University of Oregon (UO) been over the past 30 years? What about Business...
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Online courses, supply and demand, and academic integrity
What makes a college course popular or unpopular? I’ve long been interested in courses for non-science majors that satisfy “general education” requirements, their aim being to foster overall...
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Space mirrors, solar panels, fools, and their money
I wonder if fraudulent or foolish investment schemes are more likely to attract victims if the schemes involve high technology, saving the planet, or, especially, both. This came to mind when reading...
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Remembering the year when I almost went on strike
On a Sunday evening in March, nine months ago, I sat on an airport floor in Los Angeles staring at my laptop, attending an online meeting of the University of Oregon’s faculty union, facing the...
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Some data on homework and its correlations
Does homework matter, in a college gen-ed science course? I’ve been thinking more about this question over the past year or two, as AI tools are able to quickly and correctly answer nearly all...
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Course Recap: Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, Spring 2025
Last term, I taught The Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, a course for non-science-majors at the University of Oregon. I’ve taught this course several times and I wrote a blog post about it in...
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Are we missing 400 students?
How many out-of-state (non-Oregon-resident) students are there at the University of Oregon (UO)? This is an easy question to answer: about 9000, or about 45% of the total undergraduate student...
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The most important, and the most pointless, course I’ve taught
Last quarter, I taught for the first time the first term of the introductory undergraduate physics sequence, the standard “physics with calculus”:” class that exists in some form at nearly every...
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Why Don’t Academics Care About Artificial Intelligence?
It’s February 2025 and this, like some of my other recent posts (here, here), could be a snapshot of a landscape being transformed by the roaring river of artificial intelligence. But it isn’t....
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Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2024
Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an...
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Is Our University President Poorly Paid?
Salary negotiations are currently underway at the University of Oregon (UO) between the faculty union and the administration. If this sounds familiar: graduate student salary negotiations concluded...
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The Active Seating Zone (An Educational Experiment)
How can we make a large class more lively? I tackled this question last term by allowing students to self-partition into different sets, with dramatic, and remarkably encouraging, results. Last term,...
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A strike, averted
On January 5, 2024, the graduate student union at the University of Oregon (UO) announced that they would go on strike, giving notice that it would begin on January 17. On January 15, the union and...
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AI and exams in May 2024
You will find this post either shocking or obvious. If it’s obvious, you may nonetheless be shocked that others don’t find it obvious, or by how quickly the situation it describes has gone from...
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Course recap: “The Physics of Life” Winter 2024
This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my...
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Recap of a Graduate (and Undergraduate!) Biological Physics Course
Several times so far I’ve taught a graduate course on biophysics. Last term I taught it again, but with a twist: it was a combined graduate and undergraduate course. There were two motivations for...
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Zoom Interview Questions and Other STEM Faculty Hiring Tidbits
There’s a lot of advice out there for prospective applicants for academic faculty positions [1], so you don’t really need mine. However, some advice is outdated and some is incomplete, so I thought it...
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Statistical Mechanics Has a Good Beat and You Can Dance To It
Last Spring, I taught the second term of University of Oregon’s statistical mechanics / thermodynamics for physics majors course (syllabus). I might at some point describe how the course went and what...
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A Few Flavors of Microscopes — SAIL recap, 2023
What makes one microscope better than another? A few weeks ago I co-ran a week-long Physics and Human Physiology day camp for high school students, part of the University of Oregon’s “SAIL” program...
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Introduction to Biological Physics — an old and new course
I’ve taught several times a graduate course on biophysics, the first instance of which I blogged about here. I love teaching this class, and students seem fond of it as well. I’m teaching it again...
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