Sunshine list 2014

Report: student debt and low-wage faculty labor are rising faster at state universities with the highest-paid presidents (US)

Key Findings:

• The student debt crisis is worse at state schools with the highest-paid presidents. The sharpest rise in student debt at the top 25 occurred when executive compensation soared the highest.
• As students went deeper in debt, administrative spending outstripped scholarship spending by more than 2 to 1 at state schools with the highest-paid presidents.
• At state schools with the highest-paid presidents, part-time adjunct faculty increased 22 percent faster than the national average at all universities.
• At state schools with the highest-paid presidents, permanent faculty declined dramatically as a percentage of all faculty. By fall 2009, part-time and contingent faculty at the top 25 outnumbered permanent faculty for the first time.
• Average executive pay at the top 25 rose to nearly $1 million by 2012 — increasing more than twice as fast as the national average at public research universities.

One of the last cartoons by Charlie Hebdo...

Physics behind swimming well explained by people at the Race Club.

All you need to do is to put the science into practice

Seasonal Greetings from Wester Creative Office

France finally supports a possible military action by the US. Time to rename freedom fries back to French fries?

Another crazy bird story

Here's another crazy bird story: a robin has setup a nest on our front door:

Not to stress out the poor mother-to-be we're forced to use the garage door.

But every time someone uses the front door, the robin has to flee her nest. Then one can see 4 cute blue eggs:

Most anti-science Canadian government?

Harper's government may well be remembered as the most anti-science Canadian government in the history of the country. Here's a chronology of the Conservative government's campaign against science since 2006 from the blog of John Dupuis. The results of such policies are already quite visible: according to the latest report of the Science, Technology and Innovation Council, Canada has dropped in rank from 16th to 23rd in overall expenditures on research and development relative to GDP compared to other economically developed countries. 

Economics:

It seems that spreadsheet is a major tool in Economics, and you'd better know how to use it. Two prominent economists from Harvard made a spreadsheet error, caught almost 3 year later by a graduate student. As it turns out, the paper based on the wrong spreadsheet was widely cited, and used as a basis for public policies. What is even more surprising to me, is that the spreadsheet was not openly available to other researches, and so no one was able to reconfirm the assertions of the paper, or even to reproduce the results for that matter. Paul Krugman also commented on the matter.

All that again raises the question whether Economics and science, you know...

Mother goose expecting babies

Campus news: mother goose expecting new babies on the ledge of the Middlesex College. Due soon. The only remaining question is how the new babies will survive on the ledge.

Picture taken from the window on the second floor. And the close-up:

Update: May 14.  The father would stay on the ground, but would protect the family-to-be by trying to scare anyone who enters the building. The staff had to put a special sign:

The thrilling story was followed by the whole building for several weeks. Apparently, the mother does not have to sit on the eggs all the time. Every morning she would fly down from the ledge to get some fresh grass. The eggs would be left open:

After the breakfast the mother would return to her nest:

The eggs should be turned around several times a day:

And the new babies are here! Only three made it.

The first steps are the most difficult ones:

And here's the happy family together:

But how are they going to get down? Well, the babies managed to get on the rim of the ledge about 16 hours after they were born.

Apparently, the mother pushed the first baby down, and the other two followed their sibling on their own. All three landed fairly safely. And now they are gone...

P.S. Photos is the courtesy of the Middlesex College staff.

Curious detective story about theoretical physicist Paul Frampton, distinguished professor at UNC.

I was wondering which 9 countries voted against Palestine's non-member observer status. So here's this glorious list (in alphabetical order):  

Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Panama, United States.

[As reported on Huffingtonpost.]

It is getting increasingly difficult to publish math papers, partially, because of the increased competition. However, it's not all that bad. A computer generated math paper has been recently accepted for publication by a real math journal (called Advances in Pure Mathematics, it is open access, but it is peer reviewed). The brilliant paper can be found on

That's Mathematics!

P.S. The journal is not yet indexed by MathSciNet, but given that the

database already contains over 2,000 items, it's only the matter of time...

Curious statistics: apparently, scientific papers published after having first been rejected elsewhere receive significantly more citations on average than ones accepted on first submission. That's according to an article in Nature. I wonder
if this article was rejected somewhere else before being published there...

Art book with no art...

I always thought that the first year calculus textbook is the worst deal possible. But this textbook beats any calculus text (or any textbook for that matter) hands down: Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800 — doesn't contain any images of art. Nevertheless, it costs $180 is a required textbook at Toronto's Ontario College of Art and Design. More about it here.

Israel's claim that Iran is the biggest thread to peace should be put into historical perspective. So how about identifying the military conflicts initiated by Iran/Persia in the last 400 year? Let's see:

• 1980-1988: Iran -Iraq war. Initiated by Iraq
• World War II: Iran was invaded by Germany and the Allies.
• World War I: Persia maintained neutrality.
• 1826-1828: Russo-Persian War. Formally, this was initiated by Persia, however, the roots of the conflict lie in the Treaty of Gulistan (see below).
• 1806-1813: Russo-Persian War. Initiated by the Russian Empire. The war resulted in signing the Treaty of Gulistan, which confirmed the inclusion of modern day Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Eastern Georgia and other territories into the Russian Empire.
• 1796: Persian Expedition. Initiated by Catherine the Great.
• 1722-1723: Russo-Persian War, Initiated by Peter the Great. All the annexed territories were returned to Persia in 1735.
• 1649-1653: Mughal–Safavid War. This was initiated by the Safavid Empire (Persia), but the military action was localized to Kandahar. 
• 16th century: Ottomans vs Safavids: neither side can be held solely accountable.

Well, if history teaches us anything, Iran has never been an aggressive player on the political arena...

Income inequality

Ontario has the largest increase in income inequality in Canada.
And here's a relevant link to a lecture by Elisabeth Warren at
Berkeley:

 

Protests: Canada vs Russia

Protests in Montreal (left) and Moscow (right). Find the differences...

politically motivated censorship

From Mrs. Clinton's speech at Newseum in Washington, D.C. January, 2010:

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their right of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship. We are working globally to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them, in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely. The United States has been assisting in these efforts for some time. Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is proud to help promote internet freedom. 
 
I wonder what Julian Assange thought about it...

Retardation of science

I recently discovered a remarkable science fiction story by a distinguished theoretical physicist Leó Szilárd called The Mark Gable Foundation. It was written in 1948 (published in 1961). A scientist who woke up in the 21st century after 90 years of cold-sleep is asked by a billionaire how to slow down scientific progress. The answer given by the scientist is this:

I think that shouldn't be very difficult... You could set up a foundation with the annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairmen at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year... 
 
How would that retard the progress of science?

it should be obvious... First of all the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn't would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion too...
 
The National Science Foundation of USA was created in 1950, although National Institutes of Health and U.S. Atomic Energy Commission existed before. Today the NSF is the only U.S. federal agency with a mandate to support all the non-medical fields of research...

Trillium

Perhaps one of the most recognizable labels of modern times is Nike's swoosh (yes even in France). Curiously enough it cost the company only about $35 for the wholeproject. For comparison here's the new symbol of Ontario:

 which is a redesign of the old one:

The upgrade took place in 2006 and cost the tax payers $219,000. This monumental graphics project was carried out by Bensimon Byrne, which proudly calls itself "the most efficient agency in Canada".