Applied for an Associate Professor role in physics education in Brunei, as discussed here earlier. Got short-listed for it, and should have been flying out tomorrow for the interview.

But our level of debt has meant I had to withdraw my application. We need both of us working, and there’s no guarantee Suzie would get a job, or even a visa allowing her to work, in Brunei. Without that, it’s just not tenable to go.

If we’d made smarter financial decisions and not lived beyond our means in the past, we’d have a lot more freedom now.

Hope that’s helpful for others – for us, we need to slowly dig ourselves out.

http://religiousliberty.tv/film-review-“one-nation-under-god”-2011-misinterpreted-facts-and-frightening-conclusions.html?utm_source=ReligiousLiberty.TV&utm_campaign=f4a5ff261f-Hosanna_Tabor_and_Oklahoma1_13_2012&utm_medium=email

…with a happy ending.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/toddler-trapped-after-crawling-into-lift-well/story-e6freon6-1226245024119

I love this stuff, where people go digging to find out the facts: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/15/swallowed_by_a_whale_a_true_tale/

Of course, if Jonah had miraculous help, this stuff is irrelevant to understanding the Bible story, but it’s inherently interesting.

Great article that my mate Glenn Weare sent me. Makes a lot of sense to me… and I think once our finances and other concerns allow it, I’d love to spend a couple of years teaching high school again.

http://thepapergraders.org/?p=363

(guess it must be time to re-activate this blog, which has been dormant over the summer break)

So, just got the email message from Harvard, telling me that they’d had over 200 applications for the position, and I hadn’t made the short list. Not unexpected, but disappointing.

Still, I guess that’s one potentially massive life change off the radar for 2012. There are still a number of other possibilities, so I guess we’ll see.

Have to admit in one sense it’s also a relief: been spending lots of time with our daughters over the summer, and while it’s almost time for them to fly from the nest, I’d rather spend the next couple of years close to them and enjoy this time than be limited to Skype contact and the occasional visit.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/why-are-we-subsidising-ignorance-stupidity-and-hatred-20111214-1ov5x.html

Here’s Edward Said, author of ‘Orientalism’, in 1980. Over 30 years ago, and over 20 years before September 11, 2001:

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

Google Scholar now allows the creation of a citation profile for academics. Here’s mine: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=V9_-AtoAAAAJ&hl=en

Citation is when someone else quotes one of my papers in one of their papers. As you can see, Google Scholar can find 65 papers I’ve published throughout my career, and all together those have been cited 421 times. The top paper has been cited over 120 times, but it tails off fairly quickly after that.

Citation is a measure of how influential an academic is in his/her professional field. The h-index that’s quoted there is a similar measure, reduced to one number, and it’s hard to really make sense of that number in isolation. If physics was my field I’d want to be closer to 12 than 9 at this point in my career, but education papers tend to get cited less often, and I’d imagine 9 compares pretty well to other education academics in my field.

I have half a dozen papers under review at the moment, as well as a couple in press, so while the citations have dipped a bit in the past couple of years since a high in 2009, it’s likely that the curve will head upward again over the next few years.

I’d been feeling a bit odd for a while. It was worst when riding my bike, when I was constantly frowning a bit with my forehead. But the rest of the time as well, I just felt kind of disconnected from the world. I could see well – very clearly in fact, all the way to the distant radio antennas on the hills – but the world just didn’t quite seem real.

I wondered whether I was spending too much time in front of computer screens (almost certainly yes), and/or too much time in my own head (ditto). I even wondered, quietly to myself, whether it was some kind of mild, incipient mental illness like depression or something.

Went to the optometrist and he discovered that my left eye had got a lot worse in its vision – just more shortsighted than ever. I’d never thought to do the experiment, but closing my right eye with my glasses on showed me just how bad my left had got. I’d still had clear vision, but my right eye had been doing all the work.

In turn, that had robbed me of proper binocular vision, and therefore proper depth perception. That’s something that’s pretty important to have on the bike, and also, apparently, something that forms part of our feeling of being part of the world.

It took a week for the new lenses to come in, and now I had a name for the problem I was aware of it, but I picked them up this afternoon, and immediately felt the difference. It’s taking a little while for my left eye to get back into doing it’s share of the work – I almost feel like I should pirate-patch my right for a while to make it all equal.

But I’m back! Look out, world!

…and yes, most of what’s being done is exactly the wrong thing.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/09/what_real_education_reform_looks_like/

I still have Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ on the bedside table, and am making my way through it between novels.

This is a great little story of the ‘everything is connected in unexpected ways’ variety: http://blogs.nature.com/eva/2011/07/13/make-history-not-vitamin-c

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-superstition/

John Birmingham is an Australian novelist and author of opinion columns… like this one: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/why-conservatives-should-heart-gay-marriage-20111205-1ofmg.html

Just sent off an application for a science education position at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus… which doesn’t decrease the overall suspense!

A number of valued former colleagues from UQ work there, and I think it would be a very enjoyable and productive working environment for me.

Won’t say too much more here, and applications don’t close until January 16, so there’s plenty of time to wait before there’ll be a decision, but it feels good…

So, it’s all the hands of the gods… whose mills grind slowly but exceedingly fine.

…to posting here at some point.

I know it’s gone very silent, but there’s just too much and too little happening to post anything…

…but in the long run/There’s still time to change the road you’re on. – Led Zep

Here’s a post on this blog from 2005, when we were deciding whether to stay in Canada, go to Scotland or come back to Australia: http://www.bravus.com/blog/?p=225

And here’s one from 2009, when a similar dilemma presented itself, but we ended up staying here: http://www.bravus.com/blog/?p=1407

That time has come around again: the feet have started to itch, and a couple of opportunities have presented themselves, so we once again have three ‘possible futures’ in front of us.

Not sure how they got my name, but someone at Harvard emailed me directly to say they’re looking for a person in ‘learning technologies’ – which is where a lot of my recent work has been – and could I suggest anyone good or did I want to apply myself. I suggested someone good, and applied myself! It would be pretty amazing if it happened, but I’m not sure what the chances are¹. I could totally do it, and bring a wide range of experience and ability to the role, but of course for one of the world’s top universities the competition is going to be fierce{/Tyra}.

There’s always the possibility of staying here, of course. I have a great job at one of Australia’s top universities that I enjoy a lot, am up for promotion soon, have great colleagues and a lot still to do here. It’s the most probable outcome, and by no means a bad one. It would mean staying closer to the girls over the next few years, since no matter where we go they’ll probably stay around here.

But the Harvard application had got the feet itching, so I just looked around a bit at some other interesting possibilities. We’d talked about going to work in Brunei for well over a decade – it’s a very cool small country in our region which I might post more about later. There’d never been a job available, but this time when I looked Universiti Brunei Darussalam, the one major state university, was advertising for an Associate Professor of Physics Education… which is also something I’m very well suited to do. So I’ve fired off an application for that, as well.

It’d be lovely to get offered both roles, and have to choose… I suspect the timing and everything else will conspire against that outcome.

The three futures are very different:

Harvard would be amazing, and would give me much more access to be internationally influential and build a reputation, build links, gain large grants and do important research, and so on. It would be interesting in that we do tend to move on every 5-7 years or so, but always upward… I have about 18 years of my career left before retirement age, but there are really not that many upward moves as an academic from Harvard! It’s also Boston, which would be culturally interesting and a nice area to live in, and has seasons including below-freezing conditions and snow… white Christmas, but not so much with the all-year motorcycling.

Brunei would be amazing in a different way. It’s a great university and a really good place to teach. Most Bruneians speak English, and the medium of instruction would be English, but we’d want to learn Malay as well. The country is very small – a few hundred thousand people – and very wealthy due to oil and natural gas reserves. There’s no personal income tax and a rich set of benefits for academics (though a lower salary than Harvard so the finances all come out in the wash). It’s tropical, on the South China Sea, and has great beaches and rainforests. In terms of lifestyle and outdoor living, and in terms of the ability to really make a contribution to the development of the nation, it would also offer great benefits.

Staying here is also not a bad thing: we’d want to make some changes because Sue and I have both been working too hard and not enjoying life enough, but that’s doable. Certainly I’m very blessed and privileged in the job I have, which allows me huge autonomy and work I really enjoy. And Cassie is likely to be here for at least another year and a bit, and then to still at least be in Queensland and Alex has another couple of years study – and then who knows where she’ll be?

Uncertainty is… uncertain, but it’s very nice to have options and choices, and I definitely prefer it over a life lived all in one place, where a personhas some ceretainty about where they’ll be and what they’ll be doing for the next few decades…

1. And one of the things I’m aware of is that, if I get on the short list and they google me, this post may well come up… {waves to the nice Harvard people} – “you know I’m the best possible guy for the job!”

Same story on climate change as the graph a couple of posts down, but the Daily Show’s focus is on the media’s reporting of that study. Or rather, non-reporting.

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/koch_funded_global_warming_proof_goes_unnoticed/singleton/

It’s heartening, in a weird way: I tend to ascribe the level of ignorance on climate change to the populace sticking its head in the sand… but perhaps the media’s shovelling of the sand is more culpable.

…how recent this stuff is.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/10/25/grace-under-pressure/

Sure, the technological advances this story highlights are amazing enough… or the good science that got done without certain technologies, through sheer hard work.

But it’s the social advances that are most striking, within the working lifetime of one woman.

I’d say half the members of my quantum class this semester are women.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15373071

via Tim Minchin