Should Ph.D. students choose to teach?

In Australia, most Ph.D. students are fully funded by scholarships to allow them to focus on their research. This is unlike in the USA where many students must be TAs (teaching assistants) to be paid. 

In most Australian universities, such Ph.D. students can earn extra income by being tutors (same as TAs) for undergraduate courses. Many do, as earning extra money is attractive. Ph.D. students doing teaching saves universities tons of money as it means they don't need to hire and pay permanent academic staff to do this tutoring.

What is my advice to students who have this option? Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages for a Ph.D. student doing such tutoring.

Advantages

You earn additional income.

Having teaching experience listed on your CV may help you get a faculty position at some institutions. For example, in Australia, this seems to be almost a pre-requisite these days. Furthermore, if you can be innovative, and get high student evaluations, that may be viewed favourably. But that really concerns lecturing and not tutoring.

You usually learn a lot from teaching, even lower-level courses.

It can be enjoyable and satisfying. It can provide a break from thinking just about your Ph.D. research.

If you are fortunate enough to eventually get a faculty position this experience will make it easier to handle the formidable challenges of starting out teaching.

It may create some goodwill towards you in your department. You may be seen as a team player and a good departmental citizen.

You may need the money. For example, if you are supporting a family or if you are from a Majority World country and want to send money home to extended family.

Disadvantages

Foremost, it can consume a large amount of time and energy that reduces your research productivity. It reduces your mental space. You may lose research momentum and not complete your Ph.D. on time.

There can be a significant financial opportunity cost. Suppose that doing the teaching delays you completing your Ph.D. by six months. The lost six-month salary will probably be much greater than the amount you earned from doing the teaching.

It can be frustrating to deal with students who are not that interested in learning and are only concerned with grades. Furthermore, there may be the added stress of having to deal with students who make formal complaints about your teaching or their grades.

It may not add a lot to your CV, particularly if your student evaluations are average. They will probably be average or even below average since you are starting out.

If you don't do a stellar job and/or there are a few disgruntled students your reputation in the department may suffer, perhaps unjustly.

On balance, I think it depends on the individual: their personal financial situation, personality, career goals and stage in the Ph.D. In some cases, I encourage people to do this, although only for one or two semesters. In other cases, I discourage it. The main thing is to make a well-informed decision which takes into account the pros and cons. 

Students also need to be wary of the vested interests of faculty and university management that will push them towards teaching, possibly against the student's best long-term interests.

Aside. I often forget what posts I have written in the past. I really thought I had written this post before. All I could find is one on Should postdocs teach?

I welcome comments, particularly from current and former Ph.D. students who have negotiated this issue. What would you advise?

Straining gnats and swallowing camels on campus

The world is being run by accountants, lawyers, and marketing consultants. They work for corporations, universities, trade unions, and government. Some are "rent seekers" and parasites who project themselves as standing for justice and fairness.

We also live in a world where people are not allowed to make even small mistakes.

These painful realities were highlighted to me this week in an email some colleagues received from the President of their university.

"I am writing to advise staff about the outcome of a pay review initiated in October 2021 and the actions taken as part of this to further strengthen our pay systems and processes. 

The University commenced this external review to ensure our staff are paid accurately and in accordance with our Enterprise Agreement (EA) applicable at the time.

The review took 18 months. How much staff time and money was spent to engage these external consultants on this review? 

While staff were paid for the time they worked, the review identified 2 areas of our EA were not always correctly applied. These relate to the minimum hours of engagement for casual academic and casual professional staff and the use of a different pay rate for casual academic staff with a relevant PhD.

As a result, the University has determined that over a 7-year period (January 2017 to December 2023), an amount of $7.88 million (excluding superannuation and interest) should have been paid to 9743 staff. The median amount to be paid is $243.03.

Note. This corresponds to staff being underpaid by less than one dollar per week! 

I unreservedly apologise to those staff who have been affected by these errors – they should not have happened. I want to assure our community that affected staff will receive all the pay due, including superannuation and interest for the relevant period.

This week, we are writing individually to affected current staff outlining the payment due, with these payments to commence from 14 June.

We will also be writing individually to affected former staff outlining the payment due and the process for remediation.

A comprehensive program is underway to upgrade our systems and processes to further ensure ongoing pay accuracy. Actions being taken include the introduction of a whole-of-Univ timesheet system, compulsory training for managers and staff and additional fortnightly payroll reporting.

Does this mean faculty will now fill out time sheets? 

We are also investing further in our HR systems, with new time and attendance and payroll systems planned.

Sounds like a whole new layer of bureaucracy. 

Throughout this process we have worked closely with the Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman and have advised them of these outcomes.

Again, I apologise that this has occurred and reaffirm our commitment to ensuring staff are appropriately and accurately paid for the work they do on behalf of the University."

Meanwhile I don't hear of any external reviews or apologies for the treatment by university management of people such as Gerd Shroder-Turk, Drew Pavlou, Paul Frijters, or James Allan, ...

Two thousand years ago the following was written.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence."

More superconductivity in Hollywood

I wrote a post about superconductivity being central to the plot of the cult-classic movie, Joe Versus the Volcano. A commenter on the post kindly pointed out that the movie Avatar also features superconductivity. It is nicely captured in this scene.

The Wikipedia entry for Unobtanium is interesting as it describes the long history of the term, predating the movie by decades. I had not heard the term before. It does capture much of the hype and fantasy about research in "advanced materials".

About Avatar the entry states

In the 2009 film Avatar,^[23] "Unobtanium" is the common name of a rare-earth mineral found exclusively in the exomoon Pandora (where the movie takes place, being the fifth moon of the gas giant Polyphemus, which orbits Alpha Centauri A), highly prized (and priced) because of its application as a powerful superconductor material; because of its unusual magnetic properties, entire mountains with high concentrations of unobtanium "levitate" in the atmosphere of Pandora.

Superconductors in Hollywood

 Recently my wife and I watched the movie, Joe Versus the Volcano, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. What I did not expect was that making superconductors commercially viable was central to the (silly but amusing) plot. 

The plot summary on Wikipedia says

a wealthy industrialist named Samuel Graynamore needs "bubaru", a mineral essential for manufacturing superconductors. There are deposits of it on the tiny Pacific island of Waponi Woo, but the resident Waponis will only let him mine it if he solves a problem for them...

Here is the relevant scene...

The movie was made in 1990, just after the discovery of cuprate superconductors and at that time there was a lot of hype about commercialisation. I wonder if the scriptwriters drew on that.

A light conversation about condensed matter physics

Three weeks ago I did a local book launch for Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction.

It was at a wonderful independent bookstore, Avid Reader, It is a vibrant part of the local community and has several author events every week.

I had a conversation about the book with my friend, Dr Christian Heim, an author, composer, and psychiatrist. My wife and daughter were surprised it was so funny. Most people loved it, but a couple of people thought it should have been more technical. I think that is not the point of such an event or of the Very Short Introduction series.

Here is a recording of the conversation, including the Q&A with the audience afterwards.

Many thanks to all the friends who came.

David Mermin on his life in science: funny, insightful, and significant

 David Mermin has posted a preprint with the modest title, Autobiographical Notes of a Physicist

There are many things I enjoyed and found interesting about his memories. A few of the stories I knew, but most I did not. He reminisces about his interactions with Ken Wilson, John Wilkins, Michael Fisher, Walter Kohn, and of course, Neil Ashcroft.

Mermin is a gifted writer and can be amusing and mischievous. He is quite modest and self-deprecating about his own achievements.

He explains why we should refer to the Hohenberg-Mermin-Wagner theorem, not Mermin-Wagner.

One of his Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, stimulated Paul Ginsbarg to start the arXiv.

I was struck by how Mermin's career belongs to a different era. The community was smaller and more personal. Doing physics was fun. Time was spent savouring the pleasure of learning new things and explaining them to others. Colleagues were friends rather than competitors. His research was curiosity-driven. This led to Mermin making significant contributions to quantum foundations. And, he only published about two papers per year!

Teaching was valued, enjoyable, and stimulated research. It was also a way to learn a subject, regardless of the level at which it was taught. For eight years, Mermin and Ashcroft spent half their time writing their beautiful textbook!

I look forward to hearing others' reflections.

Opening the door for women in science

 I really liked reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. She is an amazing writer. I recently reread some of it for an extended family book club. Just check out some of these quotes. 

A colleague suggested I might like Lessons in Chemistry, a novel by Bonnie Garmus. I have not read the book yet, but I have watched the first two episodes of the TV version on AppleTV. I watched the first episode for free.

The show contains a good mix of humour, love of science, and feminism. The chemistry dialogue seems to be correct. The show chronicles just how in the 1950s how awful life was for a young woman who aspired to be a scientist. Things have improved. But there is still a long way to go... 

A light slow start to the year

Best wishes for the New Year!

Over the holidays my son introduced me to the humorous wonders of Philomena Cunk. Here is a short sample.

Quotes to entice and entertain the reader

Some authors make use of epigraphs in their books. An epigraph is a short quotation at the beginning of a chapter that aims to set the stage for what follows. My general observation is that many of the epigraphs are rather obscure and the connection to the content of the chapter is not clear. Perhaps, I am just too ignorant about classical literature, or perhaps some authors are just trying to be too clever. But, sometimes I think they are creative, enticing, and even humorous.

I tried having a go at using epigraphs for Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction. Unfortunately, after doing this I discovered that epigraphs are no longer allowed in the VSI series.

Anyway, I had fun doing it and so here I present the epigraphs I came up with.

1 What is condensed matter physics?

… thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” … [they] called the bread manna. [Manna sounds like the Hebrew for What is it?]  It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey.

Exodus 16 

2 A multitude of states of matter

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

Hamlet

3 Symmetry matters

The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree...

Aristotle, Metaphysics

4 The order of things

John Milton, Paradise Lost

5 Adventures in Flatland

Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes — we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices

Edwin Abbott, Flatland

6 The critical point

Aristotle answers: "Because only particulars can be perceived, and science is of  universals." ...out of numerous particulars the universal becomes evident.

George Henry Lewes 

7 Quantum matter

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." 

Richard Feynman

8 Topology matters

A mathematician who does not know the difference between a doughnut and a coffee mug is a topologist.

9 Emergence

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.” 

Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.” 

10 The endless frontier

"New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier.

John F. Kennedy

What do you think about epigraphs? 

Can you give a book in which you thought they were particularly good?

What do you think of those above?

I welcome alternative suggestions.

The very human side to universities

My wife and I started watching the series The Chair, a comedy about an English department in an affluent liberal arts university in the Northeastern USA. We thought the first episode was a bit too soapy and stopped watching. But then, I read an article claiming that The Chair Is Netflix’s Best Drama in Years: "The near-perfect show elegantly skewers the subject of free speech on campus." So, we kept watching and were glad we did. But, I think it is really about much more than "free speech".

What I appreciate the most is that it brings out just how human (fallible, creative, caring, contradictory, selfish, egotistical, ridiculous, ...) all the players in the university are: students, faculty, administrators, families, ... There is much to laugh at, to groan about, and to celebrate. And, this is why we need the humanities.

For me, the best scene is the disciplinary hearing in the final episode. The embattled English department Chair says:

“Why should [students] trust us? The world is burning and we’re sitting up here worried about our endowment? Our latest ranking on U.S. News & World Report?”

She then asks the Dean, "when did you last teach a class?" [I think all senior managers should be required to do some teaching.]

Nancy Wang Yuen has a nice article in the LA Times, I’m an Asian American woman in academia. Here’s what ‘The Chair’ gets right

One thing I think the series got badly wrong was how engaged the students were. They came to class, had done the required reading, asked questions, and were not on their phones! Oh, to teach a class in Hollywood!

If you have watched the series, what did you think?

Where might condensed matter physics be heading?

Will there be big new discoveries? Will old problems be solved?  

I have finished my draft of, "An endless frontier" the last chapter of Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction.

I aim to give a balanced perspective that is optimistic but realistic. Have I? Obviously, this is highly subjective.

I am interested in general feedback, particularly on whether your aunt or uncle or an eager undergraduate would find this interesting and engaging.

Besides your own research area :), are there particular topics that you think are ripe for exploration?

Perhaps, a cartoon about predicting the future. Maybe one of these two?

Classic fails about predicting the scientific future

There are many statements that are attributed to famous scientists that turn out to be widely wrong. A decade ago I wrote about one from Brian Pippard predicting the end of condensed matter physics in the 1960s.

However, just like Einstein quotes, it turns out that many of these statements in the popular folklore are often wrongly attributed. For example, according to the Wikipedia entry on Lord Kelvin,

The statement "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" has been widely misattributed to Kelvin since the 1980s, either without citation or stating that it was made in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900).^[86] There is no evidence that Kelvin said this,^[87][88] and the quote is instead a paraphrase of Albert A. Michelson, who in 1894 stated: "… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."^[88]

I love Bill Bryson's book A Brief History of Nearly Everything.  I recently read in it that the Surgeon General of the United States of America, William Stewart, said in 1967:

“The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases. We have basically wiped out infection in the United States.”

Wow, that sure was wrong. There are now 9 million covid-19 cases and more than 200,000 deaths in the USA. I was going to write a blog post about this. But, then I discovered these two nice articles.

In 2015 an article in the New Yorker
One of Science’s Most Famous Quotes Is False By Michael Specter

A 2013 article in the journal Infectious Diseases of Poverty
On the exoneration of Dr. William H. Stewart: debunking an urban legend 
Brad Spellberg and Bonnie Taylor-Blake

Basically, Stewart never said this, nor held this view. In contrast, many of his contemporaries did.

And then there is all the hype about current materials research leading to revolutions in computing, medicine, transportation, commerce, ...

What science tattoo would you get?

At the UQ condensed matter theory group meeting, we had an interesting discussion about this question?

A Google image search produces some interesting options.
I don't know if these are real or some are photoshopped.

Would you get an equation, a molecule, a phase diagram, or  .... ?

From condensed matter, nothing particularly stands out to me. But I do think that Einstein's gravity equations (above) are pretty amazing.

Maybe
                                              The Theory of Everything

BTW. I am no fan of tattoos and can never imagine getting one of any kind.

So, what science tattoo might you get?

How do you maintain work-life balance?

This friday I am giving a 5-10 minute talk on work-life balance to a group of postdocs and young faculty from the School of Mathematics and Physics at UQ. I was asked because I previously gave a School Colloqium about mental health.

There will be three speakers and time for discussion.

Humorous aside: When I was asked in person to give this talk, I thought I heard that the invitation was from the ``Early career comedy". So I thought, ``I guess they are using comedy (such as skits) to cope with the stress of their work situation. But, I am surprised that they asked me because I am not really that funny."
After a few minutes of discussion, I realised that I had misheard. The invitation was from the ``committee" not for a ``comedy"!

What do you think I should say or not say?

Here are a few preliminary thoughts.

Start with empathy.
I remember this life stage as stressful and I did not always manage it well. Indeed, several times I have had mental health problems, which possibly could have been avoided if I had a better life-work balance.
I don't want to give a long list of do's and don'ts, but rather suggest some things to think about and discuss.

Know yourself.
Everyone is different. Don't compare yourself to others.
What are your values? What is most important to you?
What are the sources of stress, pleasure, satisfaction, and relaxation for you?
What are your expectations and presuppositions?
(e.g., if I work X hours a week, I will get a paper in a luxury journal, and then I will get a permanent job in academia.)

Know your environment.
Have a sober and realistic assessment of your chances of a permanent job in academia. It has more to do with chance than how many hours you work, the number of luxury papers, or grant $.
Universities don't necessarily want what is best for you, but rather what is best for senior management. Too often, their platitudes about work-life balance seem to be corporate well washing.
What aspects of your environment (phone, internet, boss, peers, family, ..) makes it hard for you to have a good work-life balance?

Be pro-active.
Set boundaries. Say no!
Do the basics (eat well, drink well, sleep, exercise, downtime).
Take breaks and vacations.

Small group discussion questions.
What do you do for ``downtime"?
Are you living consistently with your values?
How can you support one another to have a better work-life balance?
What boundaries do you need to set?

What do you think?

John Wilkins (1936-2019): condensed matter leader

I was sad to hear last week of the death of John Wilkins. He was a mentor to a whole generation of condensed matter physicists and a generous servant, both individuals and institutions. This obituary and memories from some colleagues gives a nice description of his many contributions.

I was privileged to do a postdoc with Wilkins at Ohio State University in the early 1990s. He had a significant influence on me, both scientifically and professionally. Much of the practical advice I write on this blog relating to jobs, writing, and giving talks, I learned from Wilkins. Even ten years after I worked with him I would still occasionally phone him for advice, particularly with negotiating and deciding on job offers.

Real leadership does not involve having a position, but rather having influence. Servant leaders are not concerned with advancing their own interests, but rather those of others in their community. They do this by investing in people and institutions. Wilkins did this in many ways. He invested heavily in his own graduate students and postdocs. He advised and mentored countless other students, postdocs, and young faculty, for whom he had no formal responsibility or anything to gain from their success. He was proud of the fact that he never held an administrative position in a university. Nevertheless, his influence was far greater than most department chairs and deans. He served the American Physical Society in countless ways, particularly their publishing activities and the Division of Condensed Matter Physics. He wrote innumerable reference letters, referee reports, and grant reviews.

Reflecting on Wilkins, I was reminded of these recent words of David Brooks, written in a different context.

I had a feeling of going back in time. Why did it feel so strange? It was because I was looking at people who are not self-centered. They’ve dedicated themselves to the organization that formed them, and which they serve.

A few other basic but important things I learned from Wilkins:
Write clearly. Rewrite. Talk to people. Theory should relate to real materials and real experiments. Defining the problem clearly can be an important contribution. A concrete calculation on a concrete model is valuable.

Wilkins did have significant scientific achievements, but they tend to get dwarfed in comparison to his influence over people. Perhaps, the most significant relate to the Kondo problem. This began with his student Krishnamurthy, who used Wilson's numerical renormalisation group to understand all the different regimes of the Anderson single impurity model. Later with his students Dan Cox and Gene Bickers, Wilkins applied slave boson techniques to describe a wide range of experimental properties of valence fluctuation associated with magnetic impurities in metals.

In classic Wilkins style, he convened a group of distinguished theorists to meet in Los Alamos one summer to write a definitive early review article on heavy fermions.

Wilkins was larger than life. He laughed a lot and was a tease. He could also be intimidating. Before his groups' annual pilgrimage to the APS March meeting, everyone had to give a practice talk to the group and Wilkins. A fellow postdoc confided to me that each year he was more nervous about giving the practice talk than the real talk! One time, Wilkins got frustrated that too many of us had small fonts on our overhead transparencies. He made us all chant together: ``22 point type is the smallest! 22 point type is the smallest! ...."  again and again until we got the point.

It was well known that Wilkins did not like his picture taken. On his department web page he put a picture of another John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society. However, my wife did not know his aversion. In 1992? Kevin Ingersent hosted a group Thanksgiving dinner at his house. Later to my shock, I discovered my wife took the photo below. ``What?! You took a photo of Wilkins?!"

Wilkins was a great role model as a scientist, a faculty member, and a servant of a professional community.

Is this an enlightened use of metrics?

Alternative title: An exciting alternative career for Ph.Ds in condensed matter theory!

There is a fascinating long article in The New York Times Magazine
How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory 
The club is finishing a phenomenal season — thanks in part to an unrivaled reliance on analytics.

This is in the tradition of Moneyball. Most of the data analytics team at Liverpool have physics Ph.Ds. It is led by Ian Graham who completed a Ph.D. on polymer theory at Cambridge.

On the one hand, I loved the article because my son and I are big Liverpool fans. We watch all the games, some in the middle of the night. On the other hand, I was a bit surprised that I liked the article since I am a strong critic of the use of metrics in most contexts, especially in the evaluation of scientists and institutions. However, I came to realise that, in many ways, what Liverpool is doing is not the blind use of metrics but rather using data as just one factor in making decisions.
Here are some of the reasons why this is so different from what now happens in universities.

1. The football manager (Jurgen Klopp, who has played and managed) is making the decisions, not someone who has never played or has had limited success with playing and managing (a board member or owner).

2. The data is just one factor in hiring decisions. For example, Klopp often spends a whole day with a possible new player to see what their personal chemistry is. Furthermore, he has watched them play (the equivalent of actually reading the papers of a scientist?).

3. A single metric (cf. goals scored, h-index, impact factor) is not being used to make a decision on who to recruit. Rather, many metrics are being used, to develop a complete picture. Furthermore, a major emphasis of the Moneyball approach is finding ``diamonds in the rough'', i.e. players who have unseen potential, because their unique gifts are being overlooked (because they are currently undervalued because they score poorly with conventional metrics) or they would be a potent combination with other current plays. The latter was a decision is recruiting Salah; the data suggested he would be a particularly powerful partner to Firmino. On the former, the article discusses in detail the analysis that led to Liverpool recruiting the Ghanian midfield,  Naby Keita.

Keita’s pass completion rate tends to be lower than that of some other elite midfielders. Graham’s figures, however, showed that Keita often tried passes that, if completed, would get the ball to a teammate in a position where he had a better than average chance of scoring. What scouts saw when they watched Keita was a versatile midfielder. What Graham saw on his laptop was a phenomenon. Here was someone continually working to move the ball into more advantageous positions, something even an attentive spectator probably wouldn’t notice unless told to look for it. Beginning in 2016, Graham recommended that Liverpool try to get him.

What might be an analogue of this approach in science?
A person who does not attract a lot of attention but has a record of writing papers that stimulate or are foundational to significant papers of better-known scientists?
A person who does very good science even though they have few resources?
A person who is particularly good at putting together collaborations?

Other suggestions?

Ideas worth throwing out?

Unfortunately, like many universities, UQ has become a construction site in the rush to build shiny new buildings, particularly to accommodate the ever increasing expansion of senior management and nice facilities to ``enhance the student experience.''
An extra floor was added to the physics building for the Office of the Executive Dean of Science.
Faculty and grad student offices are being shuffled around campus to accommodate this construction. I am now making my third move in less than eighteen months. I took this opportunity to downsize and toss a lot of old files. While filling a dumpster I saw something I thought was pretty ironic and funny.

Absurd to the n'th degree, not chemical cricket

It is easy to take for granted many scientific ideas and results that seem commonplace and reasonable to us today. However, when some ideas were first proposed or discoveries made they were greeted with scepticism, and even ridicule.

In 1913 the Braggs determined the crystal structure of sodium chloride. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915. However, as late as 1927, the following letter appeared in Nature.

[Double click if you want to read a larger version].

I recently became aware of this in Crystallography: A Very Short Introduction by A.M. Glazer.

Laughing at your life in science

I watched Ph.D Movie 2: Still in Grad School, which is based on the legendary Ph.D comics, written by Jorge Cham.



It is worth watching as it is quite funny. On the other hand, some of the caricatures are getting a little too close to reality....

While on the funny side of science, my wife and I have been enjoying watching Young Sheldon. I am a Big fan of The Big Bang Theory, but was not sure whether this new show would be as good. This was partly influenced by a moderately negative review in the New York Times (albeit based on one episode). I disagree as I think that both shows do have an interesting cast of characters.
On the other hand, Young Sheldon does not have as much science as TBBT, at least for the first six episodes that I have seen. Here Schrodinger's cat gets discussed.

Not all email is created equal

Every few years I write a post about problems that email creates. Such a post is here.
Over the past few years, I have become aware that smartphones have reduced the effectiveness and efficiency of email. Many people now read email on a smartphone and this increases the likelihood that
- they read it even faster and so are less likely to digest anything of substance
- they won't open or can't read attachments properly
- they are less likely to reply
- if they do reply, they are more likely to have a knee-jerk response
- it is a less important communication channel that SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp, ...
- they are more likely to forward a message that they should think twice about forwarding
- they will not take the action that the email requests.

If the email message is "Shall we meet at 1pm for lunch?" then none of this matters.
However, there are some email messages that consider weightier matters such a detailed discussion of a scientific question, a proposed new policy of substance,  a personal relationship issue, ...

I welcome suggestions on how to tackle this problem.