Ruth Howes

Why Many Undergraduate Physics Programs Are Good but Few Are Great

No single action, activity, or curricular reform will rescue a struggling physics department. Rather, it takes many elements, interacting over time, to make a department thrive.

Technical debate over patriot performance in the gulf war

The performance of the Patriot PAC‐2 theater missile defense system in the Gulf War sparked a prolonged public debate of unprecedented proportions. We review the technical dimensions of the debate over Patriot, concentrating on the two official Army studies of Patriot performance and the analysis of Patriot performance carried out by two MIT scientists using video tapes taken by the commercial news media during the Gulf War. We find there is an absolute contradiction between the Army scores for Patriot performance during Gulf War for all engagements and the scores based on the video data. We analyze in detail all of the technical challenges raised against the video analysis and find these challenges largely wanting. We conclude that the video tapes contain important information about Patriot performance in the Gulf War, and that the Army should have made use of the video information in its studies of Patriot performance. We identify three lessons from the Patriot debate that are likely to be applicable in...

Different drums: contrasts between scientific communication and journalism

The qualities which symbolize excellence in a scientific paper contrast in many respects with those that characterize excellent journalism. In part, this dichotomy arises because significant science, based on careful assessment of uncertainties and possible errors as well as prior results, intrinsically lacks qualities that provide journalistic interest. In addition, journalism and scientific communication follow widely divergent traditions which value differing skills. We document these divergent values through the results of a survey and a focus group interview with journalism and physics educators, editors and research physicists.