Chennai floods, R.I.P. Barry Cooper, and NSERC EG
I was shocked to hear this morning about the devastating Chennai floods, leaving the city immobilized and many stranded at the airport. I visited Chennai in 2011 enroute to a conference in Coimbatore. The people there are resilient and resourceful, and I wish them all the best. For now, the organizers of the International Conference on…
Memes are hard to spread: a mathematical model
A meme is a thought or action or behaviour that spreads in a social network. Memes are pervasive now with the abundance of on-line social media, ranging from fads like the ice bucket challenge, to popular gifs or sayings. The Big Bang Theory hilariously took on the topic of memes in the following clip. Network scientists have…
Before The Martian, there was Ben Bova’s Grand Tour Series
We are not alone in the universe. As cliché as it sounds, many of us conjecture it to be a fact. Just consider the number of places where life could form. Estimates are there are 1024 planets in the universe, with potentially trillions of planets in our galaxy alone. The possibility that we are the only form of life in…
Publish or perish: an introduction to publishing in journals
As I learned years ago as a graduate student, if you don’t publish in some form, you won’t get far as an academic. My own graduate students typically know very little about how academic publishing works when they begin their studies. The purpose of this post is to give some pointers to those just starting out on…