Dear Physics Community,

I read this article in Universal Hub today that I found somewhat reassuring.  As I have mentioned before, I do not generally believe the pandemic forecasts and this one is no exception.  However, this one does have an error band (a factor of two) and the Baker administration is using it to predict what medical resources they will need in the worst case.  From the story and reporting in the Globe, they are some of the ways of acquiring the resources they need for the citizens of Massachusetts.  Data-informed decision making like this should be the rule, not the exception.  Maybe it is in the Baker Administration – I have to confess I have not paid much attention to them until this week.

Physics Department Events

• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 4-5 pm – Colloquium – Prof. Alan Guth, MIT, “Inflation”
• April 1-3, Admitted Graduate Student Open House, details to come.
• Wednesday, April 1, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Undergraduates with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “How we are doing with Remote Teaching So Far?”
• Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduates with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Physics Department

Open House – starts tomorrow and goes through Friday.  If you are involved, you should have the schedule information from Cathy and Syd.

Alumni – Quanta has an article about a new paper by Steve Weinberg resurrecting an old idea about why in the Standard Model, things come in threes.  Weinberg is one of the architects of the Standard Model wrote his famous paper while on leave from Berkeley at MIT. Following his leave from Berekely, he was a professor at MIT 1969-1973.

Theorist Phillip Anderson passed away on Sunday.  Anderson was a major figure on condensed matter physics but his ideas spanned all of physics.  I first heard of him when I read his paper called, More is Different, an attack on reductionism.  Many in our Department knew him well.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

• TA tipsheet – Teaching Remotely
• Community support in the time of COVID-19
• Thesis submission guidelines
• Securing zoom – here is why you should

Academic Council parked itself on top to the 8 am meeting, so they left me to run the meeting, so I queried those remaining (staff and Department Heads) about how the first day of remote learning went and how everyone was thinking about exams.

I also queried Physics instructors about the first day of remote instruction went.  I’d say everyone succeeded in getting their classes up and running.  Other Departments had similar experiences.  There were technical glitches and everyone is still learning how to pace themselves – I think everyone is finding it takes 50% longer to do anything online.  I did not hear of anything that crashed and burned.  Emma Tang reported that 65 online language class in her Department all went well.

Janet Rankin of TLL had a lot of advice about pacing, breaking things up with concept questions and other activities, breaks, etc.  TLL does a great job with this – for instructors, there is teachremote.mit.edu and students learnremote.mit.edu.  They also run online seminars and videos.    TLL also sent out some tips for TA from MechE, posted above.

Following the 50% rule, many classes are removing some assignments and, if the syllabus has changed, the new syllabus has to be out by the end of the week.

Micheal Fee of BCS mentioned that he hung around for a time on zoom after his lecture ended and had a very productive talk with the student in his class about other things.  If students and faculty have time, it might help everyone to have a little hung out time before or after lecture.

Jacob White of EECS reported that he sent his students home with a bag of parts and they have a final project to make something and demo it, in lieu of a final exam.

On the subject of online exams, it appears many classes will just do without exams entirely or make their exam open book due 24 hours after it is assigned.  Some classes are using the MITx system that allows entering of equations and automatic grading.

In all this, keep in mind it was a small sample of instructors.

By the way,

Peter