Heather Logan

For *reasons* I feel I have to say that I have never and will never use genAI in anything to do with my job other than generating examples of how useless it is so I can put students off using it. I have my own brain and quite enjoy using it.

Method: I fold back the front cover of all the answer booklets, shuffle them, and then start marking. Repeat for each subsequent problem, then add up the points. Then, still blinded, I histogram the scores & decide whether to renormalize. I only check names at the end when entering the grades.

... on one question from influencing how I mark another, as well as by preventing my own emotional biases involving individual students from influencing how I mark their work.

It's also less distressing when a student I've had nice conversations with turns out to not do great on a problem! 😫

This midterm exam season I'm experimenting with "blinded" marking [grading], where I take extra care to mark (e.g.) problem 1 independently from 2 and 3 and also to ensure I don't know whose work I'm marking while I'm marking it.

I think this maximizes fairness both by preventing performance ...

If I'd been giving the talk one day later, and known about International Wombat Day, I would have been sure to include some wombat-related content, but as it is the world will sadly have to make do with a talk entirely devoid of wombats. :(

bsky.app/profile/alex...

My talk was recorded, and is now up on the SAC's YouTube channel! youtu.be/6CSRsDNUnSQ

A bunch of other past talks also have recordings, all linked from here: sac.cap.ca/events/the-p...

Tomorrow at 6pm Eastern!

A non-slur proxy already exists, and it's intellectual disability. But that isn't it either, since many non-speaking autistic people don't in fact have an intellectual disability.

Covalent bonding.

Study strengthens link between shingles vaccine and lower dementia risk A new analysis of a vaccination program in Wales found that the shingles vaccine appeared to lower new dementia diagnoses by 20% — more than any other known intervention.

It may also reduce dementia risk!

med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

*side, dammit

Eligibility starts when you turn 50; no prescription/referral needed -- just ask any pharmacist. (It costs $$ though.)

I just got my second (shingles) shot last weekend! 💪 Really minimal dide effects.

I'm writing a colloquium for next week on CP violation and symmetries in particle physics (senior physics-undergrad level), to be delivered online through the Canadian Association of Physicists' Student Advisory Council's Physics Hour [scroll down]: sac.cap.ca/events/the-p...
⚛️🧪 All welcome!

There's a similar scenario in the opening scene of a Charles Stross novel, in which a (short-lived) character sees the Cherenkov light from neutrino scatters *in their own eyeballs*.

It's midterm season, and the most valuable thing #HigherEd staff can do right now is to reduce the stress load on students. They have enough stress studying their course material; they don't need more from being put the wrong exam room or having proctors whispering loudly while they're writing.

Does this mean that Shakespeare was One Of Us? 😃

Photograph of a pale green Romanesco broccoli (culinarily more like a cauliflower).

MathVeg!

I still think these are super cool.

As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease.

There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done."

1/🧵

I gave my talk today, on the "(In)consistency of the Real two-Higgs-doublet model", for the Scalars 2025 conference! 🎉 I had to give it remotely, because I still can't travel due to chronic fatigue. 😢

3 other speakers were in similar situations; kind of glad I wasn't the only 'weird' one. 😬

These days, I'm almost inclined to assume that if there's no named author, it means the article was barfed out by a chatbot.

I've gotten emails with exactly that wording. (Just fill in the journal name with whatever random thing totally unrelated to what I do.)

I've even been personally invited to a dentistry conference based on a paper about composite Higgs.

Fantastic news! Congratulations!

And yes, these ultra-faint dwarf galaxies are some of the most dark matter-dominated systems we know of.

It's only a galaxy if it's dark matter-dominated; everything else is just a sparkling star cluster. 😉

I also learned that some of these ultra-faint dwarf galaxies have so few stars that astronomers had to come up with a new definition for a galaxy -- it only counts if the stars' velocity distribution is non-Newtonian (based on visible matter only).

Amazing colloquium today by @burcinmp.bsky.social on "The Smallest and Faintest Galaxies: Clues to the Nature of Dark Matter and Galaxy Formation"!

#CarletonU ⚛️🧪

Update: I think it's a dance studio. 🤷‍♀️

Age verification? I write code in FORTRAN.

I thought that this post was about French politics and started wondering who Dekhele was. 😂

Ahaha holy shit