Last year I posted on Altmetric for Scopus where you can find metrics, like tweets, blogs, and saves to citation managers, that are alternatives to the traditional citation counts. Altmetric now has a tool to allow you to see these metrics for articles that you are viewing in your browser. I installed this Altmetric bookmarklet to my bookmarks bar. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Just a few weeks ago, a new quasiparticle, known as the ‘dropleton’, was discovered. Scientists in the States and Germany discovered this new liquid-like particle when they were studying excitons and the effects that lasers have on semiconductor elements. Exciton, like dropleton, is another quasiparticle, and is a pair of an electron and a hole bound together by electrostatic forces. (As a sidenote, a quasiparticle is a collective excitation within a material that behaves like a fundamental particle.)
Researchers created this new quantum particle by firing high-speed lasers at gallium-arsenide quantum wells. These dropleton have a lifetime of 25 picoseconds (one-trillionth of a second), long enough to be scientifically studied properly. These quantum droplets are created when the firing lasers excite electrons to form a number of excitions which combine to form one whole quantum droplet system, the dropleton. These quasiparticles are stabilized by Pauli’s Exclusion Principle and have properties relate-able to those of liquids.
Liquid-like dropletons are supposed to reveal invaluable information on how electrons react to different stimuli in solids and eventually lead to a better understanding of the solid state, and better electronic devices.
For more detailed information, do check out the original article, which was published in Nature 506,471–475 (27 February 2014).
Growing up in a small town, I was sure I wanted to go somewhere huge. When I was accepted into McGill, I knew this was the place I wanted to be- it was big, located in a metropolitan city, and totally different from my small town.
When I told my friends – most of whom chose to attend small liberal arts colleges – many were shocked. “Forty-thousand people?!” people told me, and I would just shrug them off like “Yeah, it’s a big place!” I would think about the number, but never actually process it.
But then I actually came here. And I realized something: there is a huge difference between imagining the number 40,000 and living surrounded by it. I knew it was a large amount of people, but being in classes of 1400 students, dealing with lab sections that fill up in a day, and having professors who don’t even know the name of a single student in their class really put it into perspective.
This is a big place.
I wondered why it never occurred to me just how large a number 40,000 was. After some research, I realized the reason this came as such a shock to me is because our brain is just not evolved enough to process large numbers. This idea is called “scalar variability”. It basically says that the larger the number you are processing, the fuzzier the estimate or visual representation you will get.
Try it! Imagine five people standing in a room. Really, it isn’t that hard of a feat. But now imagine a thousand people in a room. Are you really able to picture the magnitude of these people with the same clarity? It becomes much more of a challenge.
Now, try 40,000.
I can honestly say that the first few months of my transition from a small town to a gigantic university, like any first year college student, were very difficult. I was not used to the mass quantities of people in classes, in my residence, in the libraries, or even in the streets. I felt very alone at times.
However, while I was scared of the large numbers at first, I now welcome them. They have encouraged me to build my own community and surround myself with friends who I found through the different clubs I joined. They allow me to meet new people every day. And I know, once the class sizes shrink in upper years, they will give me access to some of the top professors in math and science research in the world.
While I found the huge number of people who go to this university intimidating at first, I realized it has allowed me to become more independent, and to surround myself with people and friends who I can truly say I care about and found on my own. Having that support from a smaller community within this large institution makes it all the more worthwhile. While my brain may never truly know what 40,000 is, the ten or so close friends I surround myself by are much easier for my brain to manage, and I don’t know where I would be without their support. And that is what has helped me deal with the transition to this huge university.
We all know there are apps for everything. But now there is an app that can create something out of nothing. Imagine typing up the next great novel by simply tapping your fingers on a desk. Florian Kräutli is an industrial designer living in the Netherlands who has designed an app that can allow you to do just that. His invention can literally turn any surface into a keyboard for your iphone. For his master’s degree in cognitive computing from the University of London, he created the Vibrative Virtual Keyboard, an invention that is less like transmitting Morse code and more like playing air guitar. Unlike similar designs that allow users to type onto a laser-projected keyboard, his app requires no additional hardware other than your nearest flat surface. The app works by taking readings from the iphone’s internal accelerometer which measures vibrations near the iphone. The user spends some time teaching the iphone what certain taps mean, and the software figures out the rest. The app is in its early stages and the readings from the iphone’s internal accelerometer are not always spot on. However, Kräutli claims that “if you made the accelerometer more sensitive you could improve the accuracy quite easily” (The Telegraph). In the meantime, the app relies on a spell checker to get words right. Here is the app in action.
How do you get your keyboard without a keyboard installed on your iphone? The app is still in its proof of concept phase and has yet to be commercialized. So for now, you’ll need some hardware or at least a pen and paper to get started on that novel!
Image from Goldsmiths, University of London
A
s April announced, this semester, the Turret will have a few new bloggers from the CCOM-206 class. The next new blogger I would like to welcome is Grace. She travelled from a small town in Alaska to Montreal. She will soon share with us her experience about this transition.
I was just on the American Journal of Physics website and I noticed that they had made this 1976 article, from Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez, freely available to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So very interesting.
Associate Professor Bradley Siwick, a Canada Research Chair in Ultrafast Science, delivered a Cutting Edge Lecture in Science in January (I’m falling behind on my posts!): Lights, action, camera – Making movies of molecules and materials. I have a background in microbiology so I was keen to hear about some of the tools and techniques that he has been using in his lab.
During his talk he pointed out how the 20th century was all about the development of new tools, like the electron microscope (one of the greatest Canadian inventions, as voted on by CBC watchers, just six spots behind the poutine). In the 21st century we can expect to see scientists pushing the limits of these tools. His research is taking a novel approach to electron microscopy, using femtosecond lasers to produce ultrashort/ultrafast pulses.
Visit Bradley Siwick’s research site to learn more.
I highly recommend attending one of the upcoming lectures as well, if you get the chance.
Close your eyes and picture an engineer. What do you see? A man in a suit? A young lad in a hoodie? A train driver?
Or do you picture a woman?
When a female such as myself enrols in college and selects a major such as engineering, the reactions she hears range from “Really? I would never have thought so” to “Wow, you must be REALLY smart!”
Indeed, the persistent bias towards women in male dominated fields can be damaging to one’s self-confidence, and self-confidence is something that one needs in order to tackle the growing responsibility as we advance in our careers. Maintaining confidence is crucial to success. However, finding this inner strength becomes a challenge when anatomy determines whether you are taken seriously. Because I am female, I know that I automatically have to prove my worth in such a field. And this is the core of the problem that we face today.
There is no easy way to explain why more women are not encouraged to follow these career paths. I took physics on a whim in high school out of simple curiosity, but had the sheer luck of falling in love with the subject. The difficulty but ability of physics to explain so many things around me – yet with so much left to discover – left me thirsty for more. However, I was perplexed as to why I had never even considered a career in engineering until then; was it because I had never heard of a female engineer on the news? Was it because there was a total of around 7 girls out of 30 in my physics class?
This feeling of perplexity never left me, but I brushed it off. It was not until an exchange I had during a college interview that this nagging feeling came back in full-force. The alumna (who was a successful businesswoman) hit me with the hardest question I’ve ever had to answer in my entire life: “Why do you suppose there are more men than women in the domains of economics, engineering, and math?” I was left speechless.
So I did some research and I began self-reflecting. I read up on the (lack of) women who had received Nobel Prizes throughout history – how in 2012, apart from the European Union, all of the Nobel laureates were men. How, to date, only 43 women have been awarded a Nobel Prize out of 862 people and organisations who have been named laureates. Why? Because three of the prizes are for science. Women faced endless barriers to entering higher education, with no access to labs, no connections, and few opportunities. That was my first clue – opportunity. So my quest to answering my interviewer’s question continued. Books such as “Who Succeeds In Science? The Gender Dimension” by Gerhard Sonnert have furthered my research, categorising the answer to such a question into two models: the deficit model (women are treated differently in science), and the difference model (women act differently in science).
It wasn’t until I saw this advertisement that I began to connect the dots:
The concept of selling engineering/building toys to girls (with the purpose of increasing their confidence in problem-solving and introducing them to engineering) made it so clear to me that the problem lay in social norms and in a culture that has been created over time. And one way to progress is to educate our daughters differently. When one walks through a girls’ toy aisle, it is pink and full of barbies, princesses and dolls. The legos sold to girls are a feminized spin-off, featuring pink and purple blocks, and characters that do things like sit at home or run a bakery. We are taught implicitly from a very young age that our goal is to become princesses and/or mothers. I myself loved playing with barbies and other typically girly toys, but I equally loved playing with my brother’s train tracks and legos. It was thanks to him that I was exposed to such toys (that were not gifted to me because I was a girl). And the contrary holds true too – he often came to play barbies with me. With the nature vs. nurture debate aside, there is no doubt that advertisers have capitalised on gender preferences, steering each gender to their specified section and ultimately broadcasting a more general message regarding gender roles and expectations in society. Identity becomes ideology.
So maybe there are millions of girls out there who are engineers. They just might not know it yet. Is it time to “disrupt the pink aisle”?
Progress is being made and times are changing – as my grandmother says, “you don’t give us enough credit, we couldn’t even vote a few years ago!” I therefore try to avoid thinking negatively about the male-female ratio, because ultimately, I believe that it’s all about doing what you love.
So if finding what you love depends on the opportunities presented to you, would you buy your daughter legos?
This amazing image is a crater on Mars taken by a high resolution camera, a High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera to be precise. NASA released it this week, although a space rock caused this crater between July 2010 and May 2012 when they were imaging the site.
The crater is 30 metres in diameter and the resulting explosion threw debris as far as 15 kilometres away.
Visit this site if you’d like it to be your new wallpaper too.
Image from: The University of Arizona
