Category: Teaching
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How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Unambiguous and mutually understandable communication is non trivial. One needs to think deeply about what the audience may or may not know and what the unspoken assumptions might be. To illustrate this, I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches following instructions written by four of the team members along with…
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Writing a PhD Dissertation “Bird by Bird” (h/t Anne Lamott)
One of the best books that I’ve ever read on the process of writing is Anne Lamott‘s book “bird by bird.” The title refers to a grade school report on birds that her brother procrastinated on until the last night before it was due. The phrase “bird by bird” refers…
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Just Because You Can, Should You? An Interactive Discussion on Ethics in a Scientific Context
Link to recording of research discussion 2025-01-15 @ FRIB room 1200 APS The Back Page (June 2010): “Scientific Fraud (or scientific misconduct if you dislike using the term fraud)” by David Goodstein TL/DR: Goodstein’s Framework for Scientific Fraud: “In my experience three factors are nearly always present whenever fraud occurs…
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Required Reading For Prospective Grad Students
This book is a collection of narratives on the act of creation, but this description does not really do the book justice. It contains a broader perspective on the process of performing challenging tasks through the lens of art loosely defined. The themes include: This book is now required reading…
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The Purcell Club
At the request of Aiden, the whole team is now practicing how to carry out order of magnitude estimates. We meet every Tuesday from 16:00-17:00 and pick a Purcell problem at random from his series published in the 1980’s called The Back of the Envelope in the American Journal of…
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Spinlab Best Practices
This collection of information was on an internal facing wiki page for the group, but I was recently asked to share it with the outside world. There is very little original information here but this post does in one place collect useful insights from others who are much more experienced…
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Purcell Cards (Order of Magnitude Physics)
Ed Purcell developed a set of constants/numbers that one could use to estimate physical quantities quickly. These notes could fit on a postcard and could be used for “back of the envelope” calculations. I obtained a copy of these notes from my Caltech PHY 103b Order of Magnitude class from…
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2023 Donald F. Koch Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award
MSU Today: Faculty and staff honored, celebrated at MSU Awards Convocation FRIB’s Jaideep Singh receives Donald F. Koch Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award This award recognizes teachers who take pride in and are committed to quality undergraduate teaching and who demonstrate substantial continuing involvement in undergraduate education. All current fixed term,…
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A Behind the Scenes Look at PHY 451: Advanced Lab, Part 1
[This is the first in a series of posts about our efforts to improve the instruction in PHY 451: Advanced Lab. They are written by my collaborator Matthew Rossi who is an assistant professor of writing in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture. His research focuses on citizen science,…
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Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
A few years ago Arthur Obermayer found an essay Isaac Asimov wrote in 1959 on how to foster creativity within a group setting. This essay titled “On Creativity” was published in MIT Technology Review in 2014 and can be accessed via this link. The process of creativity appears to be universal and…
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