At least they're being explicit about it.

The Texas Republican Party platform for 2012 is out (pdf).  I've complained about previous incarnations before.  This time they include this gem: 

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.  [Emphasis mine - DN]

Wow.   They explicitly oppose teaching students to think critically, because that might be a threat to their fixed beliefs.  Wow.  And somehow these people keep winning statewide office.  Boggles the mind.  As a bonus, they also say:

We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

So, they like the idea of challenging scientific theories with new data, but they don't like critical thinking.  Right.

Precision engineering.

Here's an experimentalist complaint for which I do not think there is an analogous theorist problem.  In my lab we have a piece of equipment of European manufacture that is very good and beautifully engineered.  The one problem is, it's so precisely made that it's impossible to service.  For example, after years of repeated thermal cycling, an electrical connector has failed and needs to be replaced.  The problem is, the way the system was put together, there is essentially no slack in the relevant cabling.  They strung the cable through during the original assembly, cut it precisely to length, and then attached connectors that make it topologically impossible to take apart without their removal.  One can't replace the connector without either cutting cabling and inserting more connections, or other approaches with similar levels of inconvenience.  This is the lab equivalent of having to remove half of the guts of a car in order to get to the oil pan.  Ahh well.  Let this be a lesson to mechanical designers:  It's never a bad idea to design a complex system with the possibility that it may need to be taken apart nondestructively someday.

Grants and ethics

I recently came across this story.  I'd heard about it at a NSF panel but hadn't gotten all the details.  This person (who plead guilty and has not yet been sentenced that I can see) did at least two bad things.  First, and obviously illegal, he had a NIH award in which there was supposed to be a significant subcontract to another institution, and instead he spent that money on something else (possibly even on personal stuff).  It's actually amazing to me that he didn't get caught earlier on that by his institution's research office.  As chronically understaffed and overworked as ours is, they are zealous about making sure that subcontracts and reporting are properly handled, so I don't see how something like not passing along $500K could happen.

Second, and potentially trickier, after getting an award from the NSF, he applied for a grant from the DOE's ARPA-E for basically the same work, without telling either the DOE or NSF about the overlap.  That's also illegal, though I suspect it's more common simply because there are shades of grey possible here.  Research projects can have overlap - particularly if a PI has a particular technique or tool that they've developed and want to push in many directions - the question is, how much commonality is too much?  This particular case was egregious.  Still, after reviewing some grants recently for a few places, I want to encourage my junior colleagues to take these issues seriously.  When you review a proposal and realize that you've actually already reviewed something with lots of overlap before from the same PI, and it was funded, yet the PI claims there is no overlap in the programs, it's not a good situation for anyone.

Classical elasticity is surprisingly robust.

This paper was just published in Nano Letters.  The authors use suspended, single-layer graphene as a template for the growth (via atomic layer deposition) of aluminum oxide, Al₂O.  Then they use an oxygen plasma to etch away the graphene, leaving a suspended alumina membrane 1 nm thick.  This is very cute, but what I find truly remarkable is how well the elastic properties of that membrane are modeled by simple, continuum elasticity.  The authors can apply a pressure gradient across the membrane and measure the deformed shape of the membrane as the pressure difference causes it to bulge.  That shape agrees extremely well with a formula from continuum mechanics that just assumes some average density and elastic modulus for the material.  That's the point of continuum mechanics and elasticity:  You don't have to worry about the fact that the material is really made out of atoms; instead you assume it's smooth and continuous on arbitrary scales.  Still, it's impressive to me that this works so well even when the total thickness of the material is only a few atoms!

The Higgs and the media

There are a variety of blog discussions going on right now concerning rumors of the Higgs boson.  Peter Woit's post about Higgs rumors sparked a back-and-forth about whether blog discussions of rumors are actually harmful to science, to the scientific process, and to the public perception of the science.  I agree completely with Chad Orzel's take on this:  Given that CERN's press office and many high energy physicists have continuously hyped this experiment for years, no one should be surprised that there is interest in its status.  Complaining about this is absurd. 

Assuming that the CERN collaborations do announce the discovery of a particle with Higgs-like properties at around 125 GeV, I would be willing to wager the following things:

1) Some fraction of high energy physics theorists will become completely insufferable.

2) Some fraction of high energy physics theorists will be quoted in poorly written popular media articles that imply the result favors (a) string theory; (b) the multiverse; (c) supersymmetry.  These articles will also imply that high energy physics is pretty much all of physics.

3) The phrase "so-called 'God Particle'" will shoot up in google's rankings.

4) There will be articles talking about the need for the next big accelerator.

Handy numbers to know

My thesis advisor has a mastery of an impressive library of handy physics tidbits, the kinds of things that have proven very useful to him and his group over the years.  These are facts that it's better to know from memory so you can hash problems out at a whiteboard without having to run to reference books.  Here are a few of his:

• One liquid liter of helium becomes about 700 gas liters at STP.
• One liquid liter of nitrogen becomes about 500 gas liters at STP.
• The latent heat of liquid helium is such that one Watt of heating will boil off one liquid liter per hour.
• For thermal conduction through metals, when the temperature difference between \( T_{\mathrm{hot}} \) and \( T_{\mathrm{cold}} \) is not small, the rate of heat flow is given by \( (T_{\mathrm{hot}}^{2} - T_{\mathrm{cold}}^{2})/(2 R_{\mathrm{th}}T) \), where \( R_{th} \) is the thermal resistance.
• The Wiedemann-Franz rule for heat conduction through metals means that an electrical resistance of 150 n\(\Omega\) corresponds to \(R_{\mathrm{th}} T = 6 \) K\(^{2}\)/W.
• 20 GHz is equivalent to 1 K in terms of energy.
• 1 meV is about 12 K in terms of energy.

Here are a few that I've adopted over the years in working with nanoscale physics:

• The conductance quantum, \( G_{0} \equiv 2 e^{2}/h\), is about 12.9 k\(\Omega\).
• A typical elastic mean free path for electrons in a polycrystalline good metal is 10-20 nm.
• Tunneling of electrons from a metal through vacuum drops off by about a factor of 7.2 for every additional Angstrom of distance.
• The density of states for gold at the Fermi energy is about \(\nu = 10^{47}\)/Jm\(^{3}\).
• The Fermi velocity for gold is \(v_{\mathrm{F}} = 1.4 \times 10^{6}\) m/s.
• You can go back and forth between the resistivity and the mean free path in a metal using the Einstein relation:  \( (1/\rho) = e^{2} \nu D \), where \(e\) is the electronic charge, \(\nu\) is the density of states at the Fermi energy, and \(D\) is the diffusion constant.  In 3d, \(D = (1/3)v_{\mathrm{F}}\ell\).
• In goofy energy units, 8000 cm^-1 is 1 eV.
• \(\hbar c\) = 200 eV-nm.

 There are others of varying degrees of obscurity.  Please feel free to add others in the comments.  To use math in the comments, you need to preface your LaTeX math with a \ and a (, and end your math expression with a \ and a ). 

MathJax = outstanding.

I've just found MathJax, which is a javascript-based rendering plug-in for either LaTeX or MathML formatted equations. It took me a few minutes to get the syntax working right in blogger, but it seems pretty excellent. If you have scripts turned off, then LaTeX code should show up as LaTeX source. However, if you have scripts turned on, then equations can be rendered very nicely, and can either be in-line, like this: \( -\frac{\hbar^2}{2 m}\nabla^{2} \Psi = E \Psi \), or as display equations, like this: \[ \nabla \cdot \mathbf{B} = 0. \] I'm going to have to donate money to these people - they've done a really nice job.

Swamped.

Just pointing out that real life has been very busy of late.  Hopefully I'll have more blogging time shortly.  In the meantime, definitely check out this post by Ash Jogalekar.  It's a topic I've written about more than once, and I've been thinking hard about what to do to address this.  Things like TedEd are intriguing.  It should be possible to do some about the remarkable aspects of condensed matter.  Heck, you could do a great one about Pauli Exclusion....

Buying out of teaching - opinions?

This is a topic that comes up at many research universities, and I'd be curious for your opinions.  Some institutions formally allow researchers to "buy" out of teaching responsibilities.  Some places actively encourage this practice, as a way to try to boost research output and standing.  Does this work overall?  Faculty who spend all their time on research should generally be more research-productive, though it would be interesting to see quantitatively how much so.  Of course, undergraduate and graduate classroom education is also an essential part of university life, and often (though certainly not always) productive researchers are among the better teachers.  It's a fair question to ask whether teaching buyout is a net good for the university as a whole.  What do you think?

Work functions - a challenge of molecular-scale electronics

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend this workshop at Trinity College, Dublin, all about the physics of atomic- and molecular-scale electronics.  It was a great meeting, and I feel like I really learned several new things (some of which I may elaborate upon in future posts).  One topic that comes up persistently when looking at this subject is the concept of the work function, defined typically as the minimum amount of energy it takes to kick an electron completely out of a material (so that it can go "all the way to infinity", rather than being bound to the material somehow).  As Einstein and others pointed out when trying to understand the photoelectric effect, each material has an intrinsic work function that can be measured, in principle, using photoemission.  You can hit a material surface with ultraviolet light and measure the energy of the electrons that get kicked out (for example, by slowing them down with an electric field and seeing how long it takes them to arrive at a detector).  Alternately, with a fancy tunable light source like a synchrotron, you can dial around the energy of the incident light and see when electrons start getting kicked out.   As you might imagine, if you are trying to understand electronic transport, where an electron has to leave one electrode, traverse through a system such as a molecule, and end up back in another electrode, the work function is important to know.

One problem with work functions is, they are extremely sensitive to the atomic-scale details of a surface.  For example, different crystallographic faces of even the same material (e.g., gold) can have work functions that differ by a couple of hundred millielectronvolts (meV).  Remember, the thermal energy scale at room temperature is 25 meV or so, so these are not small differences.  Moreover, anything that messes with the electronic cloud that spills a little out of the surface of materials at the atomic scale can alter the work function.  Adsorbed impurities on metal surfaces can change the effective work function by more than 1 eV (!).  To see how tricky this gets, imagine chemically assembling a layer of covalently bound molecules on a metal surface.  There is some charge transfer where the molecule chemically bonds to the metal, leading to an electric dipole moment and a corresponding change in work function.  The molecule itself can also polarize or be inherently polar based on its structure.  In the end, ordinary photoemission measures just the total of all of these effects.  Finally, ponder what then happens if the other end of the molecules is also tethered chemically to a piece of metal.  How big are all the dipole shifts?  What is the actual energy landscape "seen" by an electron going from one metal to the other, and is there any way to measure it experimentally, let alone compute it reliably from quantum chemistry methods?  Really understanding the details is difficult yet ultimately essential for progress here.

Catalysis seems like magic.

In our most recent paper, we found that we could dope a particularly interesting material, vanadium dioxide, with atomic hydrogen, via "catalytic spillover". By getting hydrogen in there in interstitial sites, we could dramatically alter the electrical properties of the material, allowing us to stabilize its unusual metallic state down to low temperatures. The funkiest part of this to me is the catalysis part. The metal electrodes that we use for electronic measurements have enough catalytic activity that they can split hydrogen molecules into atomic hydrogen at an appreciable rate even under very modest conditions (e.g., not much warmer than the boiling point of water). This paper (sorry it is subscription only) shows an elegant experimental demonstration of this, where gold is exposed to H2 and D2 gas and HD molecules are then detected. I would love to understand the physics at work here better. Any recommendations for a physics-based discussion would be appreciated - I know there is enormous empirical and phenomenological knowledge about this stuff, but something closer to an underlying physics description would be excellent.

 

Vanity journals: you've got to be kidding me.

I just received the following email:

Dear Pro. ,
Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit a paper to Modern Internet of Things (MIOT).

The Journal of Modern Internet of Things (MIOT) is published in English, and is a peer reviewed free-access journal which provides rapid publications and a forum for researchers, research results, and knowledge on Internet of Things. It serves the objective of international academic exchange.

Wow!  I feel so honored, given my vast research experience connected to "Internet of Things". 

The publisher should be shamed over this.  This is absurd, and while amusing, shows that there is something deeply sick about some parts of academic publishing.

The unreasonable clarity of E. M. Purcell

Edward Purcell was one of the great physicists of the 20th century.  He won the Nobel Prize in physics for his (independent) discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, and was justifiably known for the extraordinarily clarity of his writing.  He went on to author the incredibly good second volume of the Berkeley Physics Course (soon to be re-issued in updated form by Cambridge University Press), and late in life became interested in biophysics, writing the evocative "Life at Low Reynolds Number" (pdf).   

Purcell is also known for the Purcell Factor, a really neat bit of physics.  As I mentioned previously, Einstein showed through a brilliant thermodynamic argument that it's possible to infer the spontaneous transition rate for an emitter in an excited state dropping down to the ground state and spitting out a photon.  The spontaneous emission rate is related to the stimulated rate and the absorption rate.  Both of the latter two may be calculated using "Fermi's Golden Rule", which explains (with some specific caveats that I won't list here) that the rate of a quantum mechanical radiative transition for electrons (for example) is proportional to (among other things) the density of states (number of states per unit energy per unit volume) of the electrons and the density of states of the photons.  The density of states for photons in 3d can be calculated readily, and is quadratic in frequency.  

Purcell had the insight that in a cavity, the number of states available for photons is not quadratic in frequency anymore.  Instead, a cavity on resonance has a photon density of states that is proportional to the "quality factor", Q,  of the cavity, and inversely proportional to the size of the cavity.  The better the cavity and the smaller the cavity, the higher the density of states at the cavity resonance frequency, and off-resonance the photon density of states approaches zero.  This means that the spontaneous emission rate of atoms, a property that seems like it should be fundamental, can actually be tuned by the local environment of the radiating system.  The Purcell factor is the ratio of the spontaneous emission rate with the cavity to that in free space.

While I was doing some writing today, I decided to look up the original citation for this idea.  Remarkably, the "paper" turned out to be just an abstract!  See here, page 681, abstract B10.  That one paragraph explains the essential result better than most textbooks, and it's been cited a couple of thousand times.  This takes over as my new favorite piece of clear, brief physics writing by a famous scientist, displacing my long-time favorite, Nyquist's derivation of thermal noise.  Anyone who can be both an outstanding scientist and a clear writer gets bonus points in my view.

Models and how physics works

Thanks to ZapperZ for bringing this to my attention. This paper is about to appear in Phys Rev Letters, and argues that the Lorentz force law (as written to apply to magnetic materials, not isolated point charges) is incompatible with Special Relativity. The argument includes a simple thought experiment. In one reference frame, you have a point charge and a little piece of magnetic material. Because the magnet is neutral (and for now we ignore any dielectric polarization of the magnet), there is no net force on the charge or the magnet, and no net torque on the magnet either. Now consider the situation when viewed from a frame moving along a line perpendicular to the line between the magnet and the charge. In the moving frame, the charge seems to be moving, so that produces a current. However (and this is the essential bit!), in first year physics, we model permanent magnetization as a collection of current loops. If we then consider what those current loops look like in the moving frame, the result involves an electric dipole moment, meaning that the charge should now exert a net torque on the magnet when all is said and done. Since observers in the two frames of reference disagree on whether a torque exists, there is a problem! Now, the author points out that there is a way to fix this, and it involves modifying the Lorentz force law in terms of how it treats magnetization, M (and electric polarization, P). This modification was already suggested by Einstein and a coauthor back in 1908.

I think (and invite comments one way or the other) that the real issue here is that our traditional way to model magnetization is unphysical at the semiclassical level. You really shouldn't be able to have a current loop that persists, classically. A charge moving in a loop is accelerating all the time, and should therefore radiate. By postulating no radiation and permanent current loops, we are already inserting something fishy in terms of our treatment of energy and momentum in electrodynamics right at the beginning. The argument by the author of the paper seems right to me, though I do wonder (as did a commenter in ZZ's post) whether this all would have been much more clear if it had been written out in four-vector/covariant notation rather that conventional 3-vectors.

This raises a valuable point about models in physics, though. Our model of M as resulting from current loops is extremely useful for many situations, even though it is a wee bit unphysical. We only run into trouble when we push the model beyond where it should ever have been expected to be valid. The general public doesn't always understand this distinction - that something can be a little wrong in some sense yet still be useful. Science journalists and scientists trying to reach the public need to keep this in mind. Simplistically declaring something to be wrong, period, is often neither accurate nor helpful.

 

Heat flow at the mesoscale

When we teach about thermal physics at the macroscopic scale, we talk in terms of the thermal conductivity, k.  For the 1d problem of a homogeneous rod of cross sectional area A and length L, the rate that energy flows from one end of the rod to the other is given by (kA/L)(T_h-T_c), where T_h and T_c are the temperatures of the hot and cold ends of the rod, respectively.  Built into this approach is the tacit assumption that the phonons, the quantized vibrational modes of the lattice that carry what we consider to be the thermal energy of the atoms in the solid, move in a diffusive way.  That is, if a phonon is launched, it bounces many times in a random walk sort of motion before it traverses across our region of interest.  Phonons can scatter off disorder in the lattice, or mobile charge carriers (or even each other, if the vibrations aren't perfectly harmonic).  

However, phonon motion doesn't have to be diffusive!   If phonons don't scatter while propagating a certain length scale, their motion is said to be "ballistic".  In this paper, the authors have done a very clever experiment to look at whether there is a significant contribution of ballistic phonons to heat transport in silicon at room temperature on scales considerably longer than the "textbook" mean free path for phonon scattering under those conditions, about 40 nm.  The authors use the interference pattern between two "pump" lasers to produce a (sin^2) intensity pattern (and thus, because of absorption and the electron-lattice coupling, a (sin^2) pattern of elevated temperature) in a suspended Si membrane.  The change in local temperature leads to a small change in local index of refraction.  A low intensity "probe" laser can diffract off the grating pattern set up by the temperature variation.  Depending on how long one waits between pump and probe, the temperature pattern can wash itself out due to phonon transport.  So, by varying the delay between pump and probe and looking at the strength of the diffracted probe signal, they can monitor the time evolution of the temperature profile.  By changing the pitch of the initial interferogram, they can look at thermal transport over different length scales.   They find that there are significant deviations from the expectations of diffusive phonon transport (originally worked out by Klaus Fuchs, among others) up to micron scales, which is pretty darn cool, and important for understanding heat flow in, e.g., computer chips.   Very elegantly done.

Persistent currents and an impressive experiment

A long while ago, I brought up the topic of persistent currents in normal metal rings.  Please click the link to get the context.  The point is, even in a normal metal (as opposed to a superconductor), if you consider a metal ring small enough that the electrons remain quantum mechanically coherent in going about the ring, the electronic wavefunction must remain single-valued.  That means that the quantum mechanical phase accumulated by an electron diffusing around the ring back to its starting point (to speak in a semiclassical way) has to add up to an integer multiple of 2 pi. Since magnetic flux through the ring tweaks the accumulated phase (via the Aharonov-Bohm effect), a persistent current develops in the ring to make sure that the total phase (that from the electron motion and that from the resulting Aharonov-Bohm contribution) add up to a multiple of 2 pi.  As I'd discussed before, these currents and the magnetic fields they produce tend to be quite small and difficult to detect.

To make matters worse, when an electron scatters off static disorder in a solid, it acquires a phase shift that depends on that particular scattering site.  What this really means is, if you consider an ensemble of nominally identical metal rings, you'll actually get some distribution of persistent currents, because each ring has its own particular configuration of disorder.  Now Jack Harris' group at Yale has done a beautiful measurement, looking at many individual rings and examining the statistics of these persistent currents in the ensemble.  They place each ring at the end of a floppy cantilever.  In the presence of a magnetic field, the magnetic dipole moment from the persistent current exerts a torque on the cantilever, and the results can be detected optically via interferometry.  The experiment requires low temperatures, precision fabrication, and very clean technique.  Very nice.

Academic science researchers and economics

This article in the NY Times is rather provocative in several ways. First, it raises the question of whether there is a dramatic rise taking place in the number of journal article retractions (spread across all disciplines). The answer is, it's really not clear, given the enormous increase in the number of published articles. Moreover, it's certainly much easier for people to find, read, and compare articles than ever before. Google Scholar, for example, can see through most pay-walls enough to search for words and phrases, making it far easier than ever before to test for plagiarism. Moving on, the article then looks at whether the culture of academic science research is, for lack of a better word, ailing. There are some choice quotes:

[L]abs continue to have an incentive to take on lots of graduate students to produce more research. “I refer to it as a pyramid scheme,” said Paula Stephan, a Georgia State University economist and author of “How Economics Shapes Science,” published in January by Harvard University Press.

In such an environment, a high-profile paper can mean the difference between a career in science or leaving the field. “It’s becoming the price of admission,” Dr. Fang said.

The scramble isn’t over once young scientists get a job. “Everyone feels nervous even when they’re successful,” he continued. “They ask, ‘Will this be the beginning of the decline?’ ”

...

“What people do is they count papers, and they look at the prestige of the journal in which the research is published, and they see how many grant dollars scientists have, and if they don’t have funding, they don’t get promoted,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s not about the quality of the research.”

Dr. Ness likens scientists today to small-business owners, rather than people trying to satisfy their curiosity about how the world works. “You’re marketing and selling to other scientists,” she said. “To the degree you can market and sell your products better, you’re creating the revenue stream to fund your enterprise.”

I don't want to quote any more for fear of running afoul of fair use. Read the article. This does hit some of the insecurities felt by any reasonable US faculty science or engineering researcher. I would dispute the pyramid scheme comment because it's based on a false premise, that every doctoral student is looking to become a professor and is crushed if they don't get a faculty position. The prestige paper comments are more worrisomely accurate.

Getting the most out of an experimental technique

This post is a mini-summary of a Perspectives piece I wrote for ACS Nano.  One conceptually simple way to measure the electronic properties of materials at the atomic scale is to use a "break junction".  Imagine taking a metal needle touching a metal surface, and slowly lifting up on the needle.  At some point, the needle will come out of contact with the surface.  As it does so, at the last instant, the contact between the two will take place only at the atomic scale.  If you hook up one end of a battery to the needle and the other through an ammeter to the metal surface to measure the flow of current, you can measure the electrical conduction throughout this process.  Thanks to the availability of high speed electronics these days, it is possible to record conductance, G, vs. time data throughout the process.  A standard analytic approach is then to compile a histogram of all the data points, counting how many times each value of G is measured.  As explained here, the most stable junction configurations naturally have more data points, and this will lead to peaks in the conductance histogram at the values of conductance corresponding to those configurations.   Molecules may be incorporated into such junctions (as I've written about here).  Since it's possible to set up a system to make and break junctions repeatedly and rapidly in an automated way, this approach has proven very fruitful and revealing.

Of course, only looking at the histograms is wasteful.  You actually have an enormous amount of additional information contained in the G vs. t traces.  For instance, you can check to see if the occurrence of a "plateau" in G vs. t at one conductance level always (or never!) correlates with a similar plateau at a different conductance value.  These kinds of cross-correlations are best represented in two-dimensional histograms of various types.  Makk et al. have written a very clear and tutorial paper about how this works in practice, and what kinds of things one can learn from such analyses.  It's definitely worth a read if you work on this stuff, and it's also a great lesson in how as much of your data as possible.

DOI numbers, Web of Science, and article numbers

Two recurring complaints about bibliographies and citations for papers and proposals:

• Most people really like DOI, a system meant to assure that reference materials like journal articles get an effectively permanent web address, something that will "always" point to that article.  It's become very very popular, and every online journal that I know provides a doi reference for each article.  It shows up in every Web of Science reference these days, too, if it exists.  So, why can't Web of Science make those doi numbers a clickable link?  That is, instead of forcing me to copy and paste the doi into a browser URL line with "http://dx.doi.org/" stuck in front, why not just make the doi itself a link to that?  I mean, why would anyone just want the doi without the link??  Is this some weird bs rule about Web of Science not wanting to have direct links?
• How come Physical Review handles bibliographic information so badly when it comes to article numbers?   A number of years ago, Phys Rev switched from old-fashioned page numbers for articles to 6-digit article numbers.  Unfortunately, when you try to export bibliographic information for reference management software, for many Phys Rev articles, the automatic response is to stick the article number (which replaced the page number for all practical purposes) in some completely random field, and instead list the page numbers as either blank or the oh-so-useful "1-4" for a four-page article.  Can someone please fix this?  

Both of these are trivial, silly things, but I'd be willing to be that hundreds of person-hours (at least) are lost per year dealing with the latter one.

Commitment and conflicts

One of the various hats I wear right now is chair of Rice's university committee on research, and one topic that has come up lately (in the context of the US government's new regs about conflict of interest) is the discussion of "commitment". Conflict of interest is comparatively simple to explain to people - everyone grasps the idea that financial or other compensation that may give the appearance of affecting your scholarly objectivity is potentially a conflict of interest. Commitment is a more challenging concept. Most universities expect their science and engineering faculty in particular to spend some of their time doing things that are not immediately, directly connected to their simplest academic duties (teaching courses, supervising research students and postdocs, performing university service). For example, technical consulting isn't that unusual. Likewise, there are other broadly defined academic duties that can come up (serving on advisory or editorial boards; professional society work) that can enhance the academic mission of the university in a higher order way. However, it's clear that there have to be limits of some kind on these auxiliary activities - we would all agree that someone who does so much alternative work that they can't teach their classes or adequately do their normal job is having problems with time allocation. The general question is, how should a university manage these situations - how are they identified, how are they mitigated, and what are the consequences if someone is knowingly going over the line (e.g., spending three working days per week running the day to day operations of a startup company rather than doing their academic job)? Things get particularly complicated when you factor in disciplines that basically demand external work (architecture, business school), and the increasingly common practice of special appointments at foreign universities. If anyone has suggestions of universities with what they think are especially good approaches (or lousy ones, for that matter) to this issue, please post in the comments.