Degradational is when the science or the scientists are depicted as evil or as the cause of problems – you know the type: Jurassic Park and such. Inspirational (which might need some subcategories) – is when there is science in a piece of art, but the science is just there as set decoration, or because a main character is a scientist, or because some minor plot points hinge on some sciencey-sounding mumbo-jumbo-speak that (supposedly) makes the audience feel that serious science has saved the day (or at least moved the plot forward incrementally). Inspirational SciArt is the bulk of what is out there – pushing 98% in my opinion (mostly because of a significant decrease in degradational SciArt, which used to occupy a sizable portion of what was out there).

In the minority, however, is informational SciArt. I am not talking about documentaries here – or Nova specials – they are clearly informational and have a lot of artistry to them, but in my opinion are in a different genre than SciArt. So what is informational SciArt: it is a play or a movie that stands on its own in terms of plot or character but at the same time has a LOT of real and accurate science in it (or culture of science – how scientists act and such). Can you think of many of these? Not many out there, eh. And many of the ones that are out there are medically oriented (because people can relate better to something medical – as opposed to say, something about neutrinos or identifying a new species of frog).  Movies like Contagion or Contact or Gorillas in the Mist or Awakenings, or October Sky, or And the Band Played On, or the classic 2001 – these are at least moving in the direction of informational SciArt – and they are definitely more than inspirational.  What sets these movies apart from “inspirational” ones?  The fact that you can walk away from these movies and actually have learned some real science (or science culture) – even among these, however, the amount of science information is wildly variant (and mostly on the lower side).  Think of “A Beautiful Mind” – is it informational because there is a 30 second recap of one of John Nash’s therories?  Or is it really more suitable for the “inspirational” category?

Why bring this up?  I feel that the informational SciArt category has long been in the minority and largely because the commercial side of the SciArt couple is afraid that audiences don’t want to see things with lots of real information in them – movies or plays.  Yet in day to day conversations, with scientists and non-scientists alike – I continually hear people say that they really enjoy learning new science through movies or television shows or even plays (although the fraction of informational SciArt plays is even lower than that for movies and television).  So why not trust that people want to pack some of their entertainment with science and let’s start seeing more informational SciArt – or at least information heavy SciArt.  When you see something labelled as SciArt – something funded by the Sloan Foundation or something in the Imagine Science Film Festival – both fantastic programs, but both of which support 98% inspirational SciArt – when you see SciArt – talk it up – did you learn any science from it?  If not – ask: would it have been improved or more interesting if there had been more hard science in it?  There is certainly a place for inspirational SciArt – art that intrigues and excites us about science – but there also needs to be more of a place for informational SciArt out there – at least more than 2%, which, in my opinion, is even an optimistic estimate of what is out there right now.

For example, did you know that male Dayak fruit bats can lactate to feed their young (True according to this article in Nature)? 

Image from “Crime Against Nature”, written and illustrated by Gwenn Seemel.

However, the notion that female spotted hyenas have a “penis” is not entirely accurate. It turns out that high-ranking alpha female hyenas are very aggressive and provide their developing offspring with higher levels of androgen (male sex hormone) than lower-ranking females in late pregnancy. This androgen boost increases the offspring’s chance of survival as it makes them more aggressive at fighting for food and at mating earlier and more often than those receiving less androgen.  The problem is that the high androgen levels damage the mother’s ovaries and cause her clitoris to enlarge (up to 7 inches), thereby resembling a penis. Since the opening of the vaginal canal is at the end of the clitoris, it makes birthing a 2-pound cub through a 2-inch canal dangerous and often fatal for first time mothers. (Source: Michigan State University press release).  

To judge the book for yourself, click here.

While the average American young person will likely have no trouble detailing the latest antics of such stars as Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, or Kanye & Kim, most, sadly, would be hard-pressed to tell you who the following trailblazers in science were:

– Molecular biologist Rosiland Franklin, who was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). This paved the way for James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins to receive the Nobel Prize for the famous double-helix model of DNA in 1962. Franklin died at age 37 from ovarian cancer – four years before the three scientists were awarded the Nobel, based in many ways on her work.

– Charles Drew, the renowned African-American physician and surgeon who overcame barriers of racism and prejudice to pioneer blood transfusion and to become the first person to develop the blood bank. Later, during World War II, he established the American Red Cross blood bank, which today is the largest program of its kind in the world, saving countless lives.

– Fazlur Khan, one of the most influential structural engineers and architects of the 20th century. Born in Bangladesh, he later immigrated to America where his most famous works included designing the John Hancock Center building in Chicago, and Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), which, standing at 1,451 feet and 108 stories high, is the second tallest building in North America behind New York’s One World Trade Center.

While the achievements of these individuals are amazing, most of our children will complete their pre-college and college years without ever hearing of them and other often-forgotten heroes in science, which in many ways is a tragedy. We must ask ourselves: How can young students know where science is going if they do not know its past and the diverse array of innovators who helped mold it?

To celebrate and recognize such pioneers, the USA Science & Engineering Festival has introduced Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement, an inspiring website to motivate and inform young learners and others from all backgrounds about the noted contributions of women and minorities throughout history to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). I invite you to view the bios on Rosiland Franklin, Charles Drew, Fazlur Khan and a host of other remarkable innovators whom you most likely will not see in contemporary textbooks, by clicking here.

This site – updated on a regular basis with new bios — has not only been extremely well received by students from all over the country, but also by teachers and science professionals who welcome it as a personal and classroom learning resource. In addition, we hope the website serves to help spur an interest in STEM careers among minority and female students by introducing them to role models who in many cases have overcome formidable obstacles towards their achievements.

In fact, inspiring tomorrow’s young innovators is what the USA Science & Engineering Festival (the nation’s largest celebration of science and engineering) is all about — and our 2014 Festival and finale Expo weekend will be no exception. From our high-profile Nifty Fifty (times three) school visit program featuring some of the country’s premiere STEM professionals to our celebrated Lunch With a (Nobel) Laureate sessions, and the exciting X-STEM-Extreme STEM Symposium next April 24 in Washington, D.C. — the Festival is set to inspire students!

Plus, during Expo weekend, April 26-27 in DC, join us at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center for an unforgettable celebration of science when more than 750 STEM organizations and institutions from all over the United States will present a wide array of exciting hands-on science exhibits, stage shows and other activities with leading professionals to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Yes, heroes and role models do matter, and should not be forgotten. We invite you to discover why with us at the Festival!

Follow Larry Bock on Twitter: www.twitter.com/usasciencefest

This is surprising enough to be worth a little discussion on the blog, so we’ll give this the Q&A treatment.

See! I told you, homework is evil! And these people have proved it with SCIENCE! OK, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here. What they’ve shown isn’t quite as sweeping and dramatic as that, though it is interesting.

Killjoy. OK, what did they actually show? Well, they looked at a very large sample of students in the second term of introductory physics– a couple of years worth of classes with around 1000 students/year– and looked at the correlation between the amount of homework those students did and their scores on the exams for the course. They first separated the students into four groups based on “physics aptitude,” though, and looked at each group independently. For the highest-aptitude group, they found what you would expect: students who did more homework got higher scores on the exams. In the lowest-aptitude group, though, they found the opposite: students who did more homework got lower exam scores.

That’s… weird. But how do you sort students by aptitude in the first place? I mean, how do you know which students are good at physics before they take the exams? The aptitude sorting is based on grades in prerequisite classes. The specific course they looked at was the second term of intro physics, covering electricity and magnetism. Students taking that course needed to take two calculus courses and the first term of intro physics first, and the average grade in those three courses was the basis for the “aptitude” sorting. This average was reasonably well correlated with the grade in the second term of physics, and also with other measures of aptitude (SAT scores, conceptual test scores, etc.).

Couldn’t that just be a measure of general student skills, though? That is, students who get lousy grades in calculus also get lousy grades in physics because they have poor study skills in both? That’s one of the weaknesses, yes. If it were just a measure of poor attitude, though, you might expect the “low-aptitude” students to all blow off the homework, and that’s not what they see– the homework completion rates for all the groups are pretty similar. These appear to be students who are putting a reasonable amount of effort into the class, and just not doing well.

Speaking of which, shouldn’t you show us these results? You could look in the paper, you know.

Yeah, but then I’d have to click the mouse button two whole times. Just put a graph in the post, please? Fine, here you go:

Figure 1 from the arxiv preprint discussed in the text

This shows the cumulative exam score (three midterms and a final) on the vertical axis, with the percentage of the homework completed on the horizontal axis. The high-aptitude group is at the top, and the low-aptitude group is at the bottom.

Those points are kind of scattered all over the place, dude. Yeah, but that’s pretty good for social-science type data. And you can see a pretty clear trend indicated by the straight lines on each of those graphs. For the high-aptitude group, the line slopes up and to the right, indicating the more homework is correlated with a higher grade. In the low-aptitude group, the line slopes down and to the right, indicating that more homework is correlated with a lower grade.

How big an effect are we talking? Not all that big– very roughly, doing an additional 10% of the homework raised or lowered the exam total by about 2%. But it’s statistically significant, and the difference between groups is surprising.

Yeah, that’s definitely weird. What would cause that, or is this one of those “correlation is not causation” situations? Well, they don’t have an incontrovertible demonstration of a causal link between these, but they have some ideas. The education-jargon term for it is that doing more homework “placed an excessive cognitive load on low aptitude students.”

So,…. basically, “Mr. Osborne, my brain is full”? Not quite as pejorative as that, but yeah. The idea is that students who don’t have a solid framework for doing physics end up inventing ad hoc “schemas” for each homework problem they do, idiosyncratic ways of explaining how they got the answer. The more homework they do, the more of these they accumulate, and it becomes hard to sort out what, exactly, they’re supposed to be doing.

The higher-aptitude students, on the other hand, are in a better position to interpret the problems in terms of a smaller number of universal rules, and thus have an easier time keeping everything straight. When they confront a problem, they have a smaller set of more flexible tools to draw from, so finding the right approach is easier.

It’s a nice story, but is there any other suport for it? Sort of. They looked at each of the mid-term exams separately, and the correlation between doing the homework for the relevant section and the score on that exam (so, graphs like the above only plotting the grade on the first quarter of the class versus the percentage of the first quarter of the homework done, etc.). On the first couple of exams, the low-aptitude groups didn’t show much correlation between grades and homework at all, but on the third exam and the final, the negative correlation was very clear.

And how does that help anything? Well, the idea is that for the first few exams in intro E&M, they’re only dealing with electric fields, and the number of techniques that can come into play is very small. In the third quarter, they introduce magnetic fields, which follow different rules. In the “excessive cognitive load” picture, this introduces a problem because the low-aptitude students can get confused between electric and magnetic field approaches. There’s a significant increase in the number of techniques they need to know and use, and that triggers the “negative benefit” of doing more homework.

Couldn’t it just be that magnetic fields are harder to deal with? I mean, there’s all those cross products and stuff… That’s also a possibility. That probably wouldn’t produce a negative correlation with homework, though– if anything, you’d expect students to get better with practice.

Which brings up another thing: What does this mean for teaching? Should you stop making weak students do homework? That’s one of the frustrating things about this paper (and a lot of education research, for that matter)– they identify a problem, but don’t do much to suggest solutions. They do note that this finding seems to run counter to the usual advice– most of the time, we tell students who are struggling to do more homework, not less– but it’s kind of hard to tell what to do instead. To be fair, though, this is a surprising enough result that it’s worth publishing even without a suggested solution.

But is this going to change your approach? Not immediately. For one thing, the effect isn’t all that big, and I’d want to see it confirmed by somebody else. More than that, though, I’m not entirely sure that this is broadly applicable.

Why not? Well, this is a study based at the Air Force Academy, where all entering students are required to take two terms of physics. This includes the 40-ish percent of them who go on to major in non-scientific subjects.

While this is great from a sample size perspective– they’re teaching 1000 students a year in intro physics, so it’s easy to get statistical power in only a few years of testing– it might mean that their sample doesn’t generalize. Their lowest tier of physics aptitude is going to include a bunch of non-scientists who probably wouldn’t take physics at all at most other schools. The students I see in Union’s intro classes might not include any from the population showing the strongest negative effect in this study.

So, in the end, I think this is probably saying something interesting about the way students learn physics, but might not have that much practical application. Then again, a different approach to homework that turned the negative correlation around for the weakest students might well produce a dramatic improvement in the stronger students, as well. Which would be worthwhile.

As there isn’t any such approach on offer yet, though, I’m going to hold off on making changes until somebody suggests one. This is definitely something to keep an eye on, though.

And, as a nice bonus, it’s a great excuse for not doing my physics homework! I’m making a rational strategic decision to improve my grade! Well, as long as you’re happy with thinking of yourself as a low-aptitude student, that is.

Oh, yeah. Good point. I guess my ego does demand that I do my homework, after all. Vanity: a powerful force for good. In physics education, anyway…

F. J. Kontur, & N. B. Terry (2013). The benefits of completing homework for students with different
aptitudes in an introductory physics course Physics Education arXiv: 1305.2213v1

Image of atopic dermatitis from www.itchfreepet.com

Dr. Kerstin Lindblad-Toh at Uppsala University (Sweden) who specializes in comparative genomics and Dr. Åke Hedhammar, SLU (Sweden) recently identified a novel gene in German shepherd dogs, PKP-2, that encodes a protein (plakophilin-2) important for regulating proper skin structure and function. This protein was found to be associated with canine atopic dermatitis (i.e. doggy eczema), a condition that affects 3-10% of man’s best friends. Researchers hope that the discovery of this gene relationship may lead to better understanding of, and novel treatments for, eczema in both dogs and the 10-30% of humans who share this condition.

Source:

Uppsala University press release

A Cold War bunker at Loring Air Force Base in Maine that has been converted into a winter haven for bats. Image from: BBC News, USFWS/S. Agius

Scientists in Maine have converted two Cold War bunkers at Loring Air Force Base into winter havens for bats in an effort to protect the animals from the fungus that causes white nose syndrome. What is nice about using a man-made space is that they can actually clean up the area as opposed to trying to kill the fungus in a cave where multiple species of fungi may be affected, thereby disrupting the micro-ecosystem. The winter survival rate is not very high so far, only 9 out of 30 of the animals survived the stress of capture, transport, and captivity. The researchers have added roosts and closed captioning televisions to the bunkers to help study the animals. I hope their efforts at creating man-made safe havens for these bats works as this fungus has killed up to 6.7 million bats to date, and is continuing to spread.

For more information on these bunkers, visit BBC News.

For prior posts on white nose syndrome and bats:

North American Bats Face Possible Endangerment

White Nose Syndrome – Revisited

White Nose Syndrome and Evaporative Water Loss

Does Ketosis Occur During Hibernation?

Click here to download the PDF.

Click here to read my review of the book.

Click here to find out about other books and resources related to creationism.

Click here to find some resources for life science teachers.

Far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers, but both camps use similar strategies to promote their views. Genie Scott explores the connections, the similarities, and the divergent ideologies. Where: New York. When: 10/23/2011. Hosted by the New York City Skeptics.

Clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus).
Image credit: Thomas Kleinteich

Live Science posted a story recently on the sticking power of clingfish. Northern clingfish, like the one shown in the image above, live in turbulent waters off the Pacific Coast of North America. In order to cling to surfaces, the animals have what are called adhesion discs on their bellies that they use to hold on tightly to various surfaces.

Biologist Adam Summers at the University of Washington has been studying how these fish cling to surfaces. His research team put a variety of sandpaper textures into a tank of water and placed either commercial suction cups or dead clingfish on the sandpaper (to remove any physiological actors leaving just the adhesion discs to study). They then measured the force needed to pull either the cups or the dead fish off the various surfaces. The dead animals clung better to all but the smooth surfaces better than suction cups. The trick, they discovered, were tiny hairs (microvilli) that induce friction and help the adhesion disc stick to rough surfaces.

Summers and colleagues are now trying to create commercial adhesive structures similar to the microvilli on clingfish. They believe this technology will be useful in the advancement of medicine, home and technology.

Source:

Live Science