This weekend is drawing to a close. I write this not from Dallas, where Jodi and I finally returned home 2 weeks ago after a brief (and originally unplanned) vacation in Wisconsin, but from the SMU campus in Taos, NM. It is Sunday morning. The past week – the first […]
Faculty Life
50 posts
This past week was my last week at CERN during my two-week trip to the laboratory. It was a week filled with many activities: we has an awesome group dinner; I got a tour of the ATLAS Fast TracKer laboratory; I got involved in a short-fuse project to study CPU […]
I am on an approved leave from teaching and university service this semester so that I can focus on research. While I’ve had a number of things going since before the New Year, the last two weeks have been the start of the “traveling” phase of my semester. For me, […]
I am in the middle of spending two weeks at CERN. Week 1 just ended, and Week 2 has just begun. I reflect on ducking away from SMU for two weeks of research at CERN during a crucial time for new members of our SMU ATLAS group. The first week […]
This was the best start to a semester that I have had in a long time. My first day of class was Tuesday, and my course has hit a major milestone this semester. My ATLAS colleagues and I are making excellent progress on analysis work and a conference note for […]
Recently, snark and sarcasm about my University’s Sportball program led me into the seedy, human-waste-filled undertow of the Social Web. Here are my thoughts on my experience, and on the danger of social twits imbuing a faculty member with more power than they actually possess. Update, Nov. 22, 2015: NOT […]
The following is the underlying text I wrote as the basis for a talk at the TEDxSMU-sponsored event, “Loyd on the Lawn.” It was held at Loyd Residential Commons at SMU, where I was invited to give a short (~10-minute) talk last Sunday night. Enjoy!
Writers are born young. Good writers learn their craft through practice, trial, and error. Failure is the best teacher. Given my view of writing, there is much my own University’s weekly campus paper, the SMU Campus Weekly, can learn from this recent article that claims to assess the “Paleo diet.” […]
Science is a process by which reliable information is obtained by repeated use and assessment. In science, all claims are up for revision; however, absent better information when there is enough reliable information to make a decision it is usually considered wise to do so, even if future revisions (which […]
This is the week before classes start at SMU. It’s going to be a busy one. After a travel-heavy summer, with projects not advancing as fast as they would have in a perfect world (where everything works always at once all the time… never been to that world before but […]
For the first day of class yesterday, I tried a new trick. We usually poll the class about issues that have a real science component, like vaccination or alternative medicine. It helps us to understand what they think they know. We added a new component yesterday, something we’ve talked about […]
It is the first day of classes for SMU’s spring term, 2014. I am again co-teaching our University’s only “Introduction to the Scientific Method” course – one of only about 25 such courses at Universities and Colleges nationwide. With a new semester, I also want a new perspective on my […]