Vice Presidents Flourish at the University of Oregon

The University of Oregon (UO) has budget problems, a shortfall of around 25 million dollars per year that will expand if unchecked about 65 million dollars per year, driven largely by falling out o…

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A historical course enrollment visualizer

If you’ve ever wondered: What has the enrollment in the introductory “Physics with calculus” (PHYS 251) course at the University of Oregon (UO) been over the past 30 years? What a…

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Online courses, supply and demand, and academic integrity

What makes a college course popular or unpopular? I’ve long been interested in courses for non-science majors that satisfy “general education” requirements, their aim being to fos…

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Space mirrors, solar panels, fools, and their money

I wonder if fraudulent or foolish investment schemes are more likely to attract victims if the schemes involve high technology, saving the planet, or, especially, both. This came to mind when readi…

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Some Like it Hot: Plant Edition

There are basic facts about the living world that we learn when very young. One is that mammals and birds are warm-blooded. More technically, mammals and birds fall into the category of endotherms,…

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Reading Like It’s 1937

About two years ago, I read a string of books that were all published in 1965. It was a fun exercise and I found some wonderful books I might not have otherwise read (described in this post). Why n…

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An Informal Overview of US Science Funding

How does public funding for science work in the United States? How much money is there? Who gets it, and how? How much does a graduate student cost? Even normally, science funding is a rich topic w…

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Are we missing 400 students?

How many out-of-state (non-Oregon-resident) students are there at the University of Oregon (UO)? This is an easy question to answer: about 9000, or about 45% of the total undergraduate student popu…

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The most important, and the most pointless, course I’ve taught

Last quarter, I taught for the first time the first term of the introductory undergraduate physics sequence, the standard “physics with calculus”:” class that exists in some form …

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Why Don’t Academics Care About Artificial Intelligence?

It’s February 2025 and this, like some of my other recent posts (here, here), could be a snapshot of a landscape being transformed by the roaring river of artificial intelligence. But it isn&…

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Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2024

Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an …

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The Year in Books, 2024

Once again, highlights of the books I read in the past year, featuring the end (for now) of my education in twentieth-century semi-organized crime, a book on semi-organized twentieth-cent…

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How did the press do on that “black spatula” story? Not so great. | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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A gut-wrenching tale of bacteria and immune cells

About a recent paper from my lab: Julia S Ngo, Piyush Amitabh, Jonah G Sokoloff, Calvin Trinh, Travis J Wiles, Karen Guillemin, and Raghuveer Parthasarathy, “The Vibrio Type VI Secretion Syst…

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