Too Many Events Today

In my fog of too many things to do, I forgot to tell you about this event, which happens today at 5:30. I only remembered this morning as I dug a slightly better than normal shirt (for the event) out of the laundry pile and started to iron it:

At USC’s Annenberg School of Communication:

“Does Science Get A Fair Shake in the Media?”

USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism and Scientific American presents a discussion with leading journalists and scholars to “examine all the elements that go into informing the public about the latest scientific discoveries and the challenges the media faces in getting the science right for a story. Guests include author and journalism professor K.C. Cole, astronomy and physics professor Clifford Johnson, biological sciences professor Michael Quick, Reuters biotechnology reporter Lisa Baertlein, and author and environmental journalist Marla Cone. Scientific American editor in chief John Rennie will moderate.

Reception follows discussion.

So that’s going to be great. I recommend it. Location and travel information here.
(I borrowed the picture above from their publicity site.)

I have a dilemma. On the one hand, we have an interesting colloquium today in the department at 4:15pm:

“Challenges in predicting rainfall changes under global warming—and how physicists might help”, by David Neelin of UCLA.

Climate models cannot explicitly resolve the small-scale processes that produce rainfall. The ensemble average effect of these scales must be represented as a function of large-scale variables, such as temperature and moisture, in approximations known as convective parameterizations. Despite the enormous amount known about rainfall producing processes, and decades of work on convective parameterizations, climate models exhibit an embarrassing scatter in their results when faced with problems for which they have not been previously tested, such as changes under global warming. Examples of what the climate models currently do—and don’t—capture will be provided. In contrast to the apparent messiness of this problem, I’ll present results from a collaboration with O. Peters, a statistical physicist. The properties of the transition to strong convection are shown to conform rather neatly to those of a continuous phase transition, including power law […]

Read the rest of the abstract here.

And on the other hand, in the Visions and Voices series, at 4:00pm, I see:

“Hip-Hop America”

USC social scientists Josh Kun and Todd Boyd rap about rap’s growing influence on American politics and pop culture.

With its global reach, hip-hop increasingly defines how the rest of the world sees us — and how we see ourselves.

L.A. Times music critic Ann Powers moderates an entertaining and thought-provoking discussion between USC School of Cinematic Arts professor Todd Boyd, author of The Notorious Ph.D.’s Guide to the Super Fly ’70s, and USC Annenberg School professor Josh Kun, author of Audiotopia: Music, Race and America.

Read more about this event here.

It’s just not fair. I can’t go to all three! Perhaps some of them might be of interest to you if you’re in town. So, whichever you go to – enjoy!

-cvj