In The Field
APS April 2008: Textbooks getting worse
I came across an interesting little poster the other day. John Stewart, a physics professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, decided to look at lexical trends in physics textbooks. He used a method developed by the late, great Don Hayes, a sociologist at Cornell University, who looked at trends in all sorts of texts — from school books to SATs — to explain both the dumbing down of America and the jargoning up of science and technology.