Computers and software:
Believe it or not, there is the remote possibility that I may get to have some influence in getting a web application built, that I can use in teaching, that will do something that I want. Unfortunately, I know very little about the relative merits of AJAX/JavaScript vs. Flash vs. a custom C++ plug-in, that does something with WX Windows...
Posted on March 20, 2008 9:10 AM • 12 Comments •
It's not Linux.
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Posted on March 19, 2008 5:23 PM • 6 Comments •
I've been writing quite a bit this week about my search for a cross platform spread sheet program that would support pivot tables and make pie graphs correctly. This all started because of a bug that my students encountered in Microsoft Excel, on Windows. I'm not personally motivated to look for something new, since Office 2004 on Mac OS 10.5...
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Posted on March 14, 2008 2:31 PM • 21 Comments •
I think all of us; me, the students the OO advocates, a thoughtful group of commenters, some instructors; I think many of us learned some things that we didn't anticipate the other day and got some interesting glimpses into the ways that other people view and interact with their computers. Some of the people who participated in the challenge found...
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Posted on March 13, 2008 6:42 PM • 0 Comments •
Okay OpenOffice fans, show me what you can do. Earlier this week, I wrote about my challenges with a bug in Microsoft Excel that only appears on Windows computers. Since I use a Mac, I didn't know about the bug when I wrote the assignment and I only found out about it after all but one of my students turned...
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Posted on March 12, 2008 12:50 PM • 35 Comments •
Your canopy is disappearing, you're likely to freeze. NASA's Earth Observatory reports that over 1,110 acres of forest were illegally logged, during the past four years, in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in central Mexico. Monarch butterflies travel here from all over the United States and Canada. Images from the Ikonos satellite tell us though, that future migrating butterflies are...
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Posted on March 11, 2008 10:04 AM • 5 Comments •
The other day, I wrote that I wanted to make things easier for my students by using the kinds of software that they were likely to have on their computers and the kinds that they are likely to see in the business and biotech world when they graduate from college. More than one person told me that I should have...
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Posted on March 11, 2008 8:00 AM • 33 Comments •
The NASA Earth Observing System is an incredible resource for both science and education. One of the amazing things about it is all the different kinds and quantities of data are assembled together into pictures that even grade school kids can immediately comprehend. How do they do it? Each of the EOS satellites delivers a terabyte or more of data...
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Posted on March 10, 2008 9:31 AM • 0 Comments •
What could be more fun on a rainy day than a relational database?
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Posted on February 11, 2008 8:54 AM • 8 Comments •
A few weeks ago I attended a education conference at Pacific Science Center entitled, "A Conversation that Can Change the World."...
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Posted on February 10, 2008 12:17 PM • 6 Comments •
A long standing debate in my field is whether or not biologists, who work with computers, need to learn how to program. I usually say "no." Let the programmers program, the biologists interpret the results, and let everyone can benefit from each other's expertise. Well, I've changed my mind in one respect. Most biologists need to work with some kind...
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Posted on February 9, 2008 5:55 PM • 21 Comments •
I am a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepreneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology (Geospiza Education).
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