professor

From Seed:

In mathematician Steven Strogatz’s recent book, friendship and integrals collide, yielding a math story of unusual poignancy.

The students in Michael Dubson's physics class at the University of Colorado fell silent as a multiple choice question flashed on a screen, sending them scrambling for small white devices on their desks.

Within seconds, a monitor on Dubson's desk told him that 92 percent of the class had correctly answered the question on kinetic energy, a sign that they grasped the concept.

NOTE: The scientist who made this discovery, Jeff Wilson, will be writing about it himself here on 3QD on Monday.

Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio:

Hartosh Singh Bal interviews Professor T Padmanabhan about the work for which he was awarded the 2009 Infosys Prize for the Physical Sciences, in Open Magazine:

Q You combine your interest in science with pursuits that can loosely be termed ‘spiritual’. Are these not at odds? What do you make of the assault on religion by someone like Richard Dawkins?

The theme throughout all the answers to TED 2010’s title “What the World Needs Now”was the need for innovation in everything from nuclear energy to education to foreign aid to disease prevention to music to graphic design.   So where does the world need to innovate?

Games and the idea of play

Over at the Boston Globe's excellent blog Brainiac:
Intuition, or apprehension of certain facts or conclusions by the mind alone, sometimes without the intervention of reason, is in theory genderless. But at the website Experimental Philosophy, a professor at the City University of New York, Wesley Buckwalter, presents evidence that men and women intuit different conclusions when faced with the same sets of facts.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

From The New York Times:

From The New York Times: