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 […]
Inspired by the creation of the pump.io open, federated social protocol in 2013 [1] and the need to bridge posts between a diversity of social networks (Pump.io, GNU Social [2], Diaspora [3], Twitter, and Facebook), I recently released an alpha version of a social network bridge, named NavierStokes. An homage […]
I haven’t posted in a while. The current global Ebola panic, spread mostly by social media and the media and not so much by the actual global threat of Ebola, has spurred me from complacency. Specifically, a WHO ethics panel today unanimously authorized the use of unproven, untested, experimental Ebola […]
For the second time, I will be attending the Rencontres de Blois, a yearly conference that represents a convergence (perhaps even a conversation) between cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics, and particle physics. Held in the Chateau de Blois, a castle perched above the Loire River in Blois, France, this conference will bring […]
I am Stephen Sekula, an Assistant Professor of Physics at SMU conducting research on the ATLAS Experiment. These comments will be my own, and I will try to take a broad view. Let me begin by thanking the members of the Panel for this opportunity to speak, and let me […]
Jan. 26, 2014 – 03:18 CET I am on AA50 to Heathrow. We land in about 7 hours, leaving me 2 hours to connect to my flight to Geneva. Right now I am hopimng for two things: dinner and 5 hours of sleep. Dinner is on its way. I cannot […]
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 […]
Data ownership is a serious issue on the internet, especially given the revelations that spy agencies like the NSA have been sneaking into back doors in companies like Google and collecting massive amounts of our personal metadata. While the courts and other US public institutions wrestle with the difficult constitutional […]
When I think back to my youth, I recognize a series of key moments that happened that led to my becoming a physicist. I often speak of one of those moments when I discuss physics with students or the general public. My father once recorded a documentary about physics entitled […]
General Mills (in a blog post written by Tom Forsythe) announces that Cheerios, a flagship cereal for the company, will no longer be made with genetically modified ingredients [1]. What’s wrong with this announcement? General Mills is adding labels to its food products, like Cheerios, that read “not made with […]
I keep a special feed on Google News called “Nonsenseville” [1]. It’s an rss stream that results from a search for keywords that typically appear in pseudoscience articles. Normally, I scan the headlines to get a sense of how credulous is the science reporting on a topic. Today, I saw […]