Christmas dinner 2007
So after some days of delay due to christmas holidays, here they are (
Picture Galleries), the pictures at Strofilia, the greek restaurant selected for our traditional Christmas dinner. It was a pitty that we didn't have the also traditional beers-after-dinner part, but I enjoyed the dinner a lot, and I'm sure you did too.
In case you liked the place and want to book a table, just check:
http://www2.resto.be/strofilia/
Scientific journalism
And going on with the scientific theme, in
this article we can find a very interesting reflection about journalism in science and how difficult (if possible) is to write good, accurate and still easy to understand articles about very specific topics. The writer is a Ph.D. student in chemical oceanography and also a member of the editorial team at NowPublic.com, an online participatory news agency, so he knows what he is speaking about...
Bad science
Each week, Ben Goldacre skewers the enemies of reason. If you're a journalist that misrepresents science for the sake of a headline, a politician more interested in spin than evidence, or an advertiser that loves pictures of molecules in little white coats, then beware: your days are numbered. The
Bad Science section of The Guardian is a good compilation of articles debunking common misbeliefs and badly explained pseudo-scientific press releases.
SciVee
From Slashdot: "The
National Science Foundation,
Public Library of Science and the
San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists",
SciVee". Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public."
It's a pitty there is nothing yet about physics and photonics, but keep an eye on that, it seems very nice and maybe you can even use it for releasing your next paper!
Hollywood physics
From the authors: "In this
article, we examine specific scenes from popular action and sci-fi movies and show how they blatantly break the laws of physics, all in the name of entertainment, but coincidentally contributing to science illiteracy."
A must read.
Farewell!
Dear Colleagues and Friends!
So I am leaving the VUB. But before I go, let me prove to you that science and scientist ARE popular and at the same time that THE SIMPSONS are the most scientifically literate show on TV. Check it out. It has been proven by NATURE (Volume 448 Number 7152) in an article and their podcast.
Thanks to all of you who have made my stay pleasurable! And don't forget to have fun doing science!
Intel announces the first 40Gbps Silicon Laser Modulator
As presented in their
press release, Intel has shown the first 40Gbps silicon laser modulator, as a component for a Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) mainly focused to future optical interconnects.
This is a great leap forward, reaching the same capabilities as current standard optical modulators. Achiving a similar performance to normal photonic materials in silicon is very challenging, because crystalline silicon does not exhibit the linear electro-optic effect used to modulate light in standard photonic materials. Engineers are forced to rely on the free-carrier plasma dispersion effect, in which silicon’s refractive index is changed when the density of free carriers is varied, to modulate light in silicon. This new high speed modulator is based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a reverse-biased pn junction in each of the arms, and by by modulating the phase difference between the interferometer’s two arms, they can modulate the intensity of the light transmitted through the interferometer.
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