sandr034

My blog name was inspired by a quote from Feynman. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? - Feynman From this it is perhaps obvious that I own his Lectures in Physics. I also own (and memorably read during a summer I spent working at the Planetarium at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore) " The Please of Finding things Out ", by Feynman. I recall reading about his "adventures" with women - definitely not my favourite part of that book. I actually have a strong  (and hopefully accurate!) memory of sitting on a wall in the Inner Harbour in Baltimore reading about him choosing to study Portguese because the class had more pretty women than the Spanish class. When I think about it now it's obvious he wouldn't have seen me (as a then 19 year old reading his book) as a physicist, and that does make me uncomfortable. Honestly, I do...

 I recently read  this paper about the interest level of girls in physical sciences and was fascinated by the conclusion. They tested the impact of five different experiences on the level of interest (US) high school girls expressed in physical sciences careers.   The experiences were:  * Single-sex class * Women scientist guest speaker * Female teacher * Discussion of the work of women scientists * Discussion of the underrepresentation of women in STEM  They found that by quite a margin the biggest impact was found by girls having had the last experience (with a mild effect from the second to last). The first three were found to have no significant impact (although female teachers were found to be more likely to run the last two experiences).   Anyway I thought it was neat to see this kind of evidence based analysis of the effect of different experiences, so I wanted to share.  (Full disclose I knew Zahra Hazari when we were both working at...