T. Franklin Waddell, a doctoral candidate in mass communications at Penn State, conducted a huge study — we’re talking a study with thousands of participants — and never needed to schedule lab space or arrange the purchase and delivery of 2,300 bagels and a few hundred gallons of orange juice and water.
How did he do it? Continue reading How Online Field Studies May Save Thousands of Bagels
When you write about Penn State research, you have to be ready for a lot of knowledge and passion, maybe some controversy, and occasionally a big word or two that you pretend you understand during the interview, but immediately try to find its definition on your iPhone as you run back to the office to start the story. Not that this has ever happened to me.
You learn a lot. But some of the lessons never make it into the story. Continue reading Life, Death, and Research
Penn State’s museums are full of the majestic, the sublime, and the awe-inspiring. There, on display for all of us to see, are artifacts of science and objects of art that remind us of humanity’s ability to turn skill and knowledge into things of beauty and understanding.
These museums are also filled with something else that, for the most part, only human beings can produce and that, without a doubt, only human beings can appreciate: the really, really weird.
Just in time for Halloween, I’d like to take us on a trip to some of Penn State’s museums and find the best examples of Weird Penn State. As turns out, finding the really, really weird is really, really easy.
We’ll start our weird adventures at the Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State’s premier arts resource for the University and surrounding area. Continue reading Weird Penn State — A Halloween Night at Our Museums
When David Joseph Bohm arrived at Penn State in 1936, he was taking his first academic baby step on a journey that would place him in the pantheon of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century.
Bohm, a son of a Wilkes-Barre furniture store owner who also served as the town’s part-time rabbi’s assistant, would later work with some of the leading minds in physics. He studied under Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, he was a protege of Albert Einstein, working closely with him at Princeton University. The partnership between the two was so close that some scientists speculated that Einstein considered the Penn State grad to be his successor. Continue reading Penn State’s Hidden Treasures: David Bohm’s Path of Infinite Potential
My hometown — Tyrone, Pa. — has one favorite son: Fred Waring.
The man who taught America how to sing — and how to make a margarita more efficiently — is, by far, the most famous person to come from the small central Pennsylvania town of about 5,000 people that’s a little over 25 miles south of State College. There are some others: D. Brooks Smith, well-known as a federal judge and not as well-known as my cousin; Ethan Stiefel, a former principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, and actress Emme Marcy Rylan, of Bring It On 3 and soap opera fame, all have Tyrone connections. Continue reading Penn State’s Hidden Treasures: How my hometown saved civilization