Archive by date | December 2008

Materials Girl: The bell curve doth toll

Posted by Stuart Cantrill | Categories:

Posted on behalf of Materials Girl Finals are, at last, over and winter break has begun! ‘Tis the season for living at home, sleeping in, catching up on blogging, and checking grades online obsessively! (More precisely, I am procrastinating on studying for the GRE. Ugh. The vocabulary words I’m familiar with nowadays are on par with trimethylxanthine, eigenfunction, and nanorod, not termagant, eleemosynary, and nadir). As far as grading goes, some form of curving seems standard among non-humanities classes. My science professors tend to aim for “nice” exam averages of 60-80, then curve results so that the wretched students scoring  … Read more

All I want from Santa…

Posted by Catherine Goodman | Categories:

One year in high school I was a ‘secret Santa’, where I was anonymously responsible for getting presents for another person. Last year in the NPG office we had a gift exchange where people randomly got silly things and then we played an elaborate game to decide who got what. There are many kinds of these little holiday adventures, yet none to do with science. Why not?  Read more