Education
gregladen | May 24, 2013Recent reconfiguration of federal funding for STEM education has resulted in important programs at the NIH losing their funding. Below is information on Health and Biomedical Science Education Programs Aimed at
Grades K–12 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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In the proposed FY 2014 budget, President Obama has set a policy that all STEM education funding be consolidated into three institutions, the NSF for graduate and undergraduate training, the Dept. of Education for K-12 STEM and the Smithsonian for informal education. Justification for this…
denialism | May 8, 2013And the best article on the implications of this, surprisingly, comes from Huffington post authors Young and Kirkham:
The database released on Wednesday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lays out for the first time and in voluminous detail how much the vast majority of American hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures billed to Medicare. The database -- which covers claims filed within fiscal year 2011 -- spans 163,065 individual charges recorded at 3,337 hospitals located in 306 metropolitan areas.
...
Within the nation’s largest metropolitan area…
catdynamics | May 4, 2013They were amateurish videos, often black and white, sometimes just a disembodied hand writing simple equations on a blackboard as a quirky voice from off screen gave well practiced short lectures highlighting the essential learning elements.
The pedagogy was revolutionary, university level material freely accessible by vast, unimaginable numbers - set to revolutionize education.
Yes, The Open University was a revelation when I discovered their late night television broadcasts as a callow teen, bored with O-level chemistry. Here was real learning, advanced material presented much better than…
carlyo | April 26, 2013Save the date: the USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo is just one year away! We are so excited to bring you the largest celebration of science & engineering for the 3rd time! Leading up to the Expo we will have affiliate events, the return of the Nifty Fifty (x3), contests, and school programs! The Festival week will kick off with the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference, the launch of X-STEM Extreme STEM Symposium (Thursday, April 24) and Sneak Peek Friday (April 25)! The free and open to the public finale Expo will be the weekend of April 26-27, 2014!
The spotlight on STEM (…
lborkowski | April 19, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Eric Rodriguez and his colleagues at the Latino Union of Chicago quite literally meet workers where they're at — on the city's street corners. Many of the day laborers who gather there during the morning hours are hired to work construction at residential housing sites. Work arrangements are hardly formal, to say the least, and day laborers are frequently subjected to unnecessary and illegal dangers on the job. Unfortunately, worker safety is often kicked to the curb in the street corner marketplace.
For years, Rodriguez, who started as an organizer and is now the union's…
oracknows | April 15, 2013It's been a while since I've done this, but somehow now seems to be the right time, particularly after doing such a long post yesterday on the intellectually dishonest promotion of "brave maverick" cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. Unfortunately, dubious clinics like the Burzynski Clinic are not the only place where I find highly questionable medicine. Sadly, as I've discussed many times, there is a phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine," in which quackery is administered and studied in actual academic medical centers. Indeed, it's hard for me to believe that it was nearly years ago that…
drorzel | April 12, 2013One of the reasons I held off on commenting on the whole E. O. Wilson math op-ed thing, other than not having time to blog, was that his comments were based on his own experiences. And, you know, who am I to gainsay the personal experiences of a justly famous scientist?
At the same time, though, this is one of the big things that makes the original piece so frustrating. He's speaking from his personal experience, but it feels like he's chosen to draw exactly the wrong lessons from it. The relevant anecdotes are:
During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright…
oracknows | April 10, 2013I guess that the antivaccinationists didn't listen to me last time when I suggested that maybe—just maybe—using Holocaust analogies when discussing autism and vaccines is just a wee bit inappropriate, such an overblown analogy that it spreads far more heat than light. At least, Kent Heckenlively didn't, and, because his invocation of the Nazi card came in the context of dealing with an issue that I blogged about before, I couldn't resist commenting on it again.
But first, the gratuitous Nazi analogy, courtesy of that "nice guy" Kent Heckenlively, which comes near the end of his post:
When I…
esiegel | April 7, 2013"Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human." -Albert Ellis
In my experience as a human being, I've seen far too often what evils can come from judging people who are different from you and the groups you identify with. We're all unique creatures, and we all will face many of the same challenges and fears in our lives, as Natalie Merchant reminds us in her rendition of the folk classic,
Poor Wayfaring Stranger.
I don't have the right to speak for anyone other than myself, of course, but I have…
esiegel | March 28, 2013"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." -Benjamin Franklin
Recently, a number of people -- of widely different ages and levels of education -- have contacted me for advice on whether or not pursuing a PhD in astrophysics/physics/science-in-general is right for them. Of course, I can't tell you whether a path is the right one for you or not, but there are certain questions I think everyone should ask themselves if this is, in fact, something you're considering. I'm going to be speaking mostly from my own experiences, both from what I've lived and from my peers, mentors and…
drorzel | March 18, 2013We're entering the heart of College Admissions Season-- the offers are out, and students are doing the high-stress decision thing-- which means it's time for the New York Times to begin their annual series of faintly awful reports on the state of academia. And right on cue, there's this weekend's article about poor students who excel in high school not applying to top colleges.
To their credit, this at least isn't another article about how very, very hard it is for kids from affluent Connecticut suburbs to decide between several different elite schools. And as someone who grew up in a less…
oracknows | March 10, 2013One of the strategies that Stanislaw Burzynski will undoubtedly use to "prove" in Eric Merola's new Stanislaw Burzynski movie that antineoplastons work in cancer will be to highlight "success stories." Last year, Burzynski apologists frequently pointed to a girl with an inoperable brain tumor named Amelia Saunders as a success story when the U.K. press widely featured her going to school in September but, very sadly, her family saw her tumor begin to progress again in December, ultimately resulting in her death about a month and a half ago. In the process, Burzynski did what he all too often…
choofnagle | March 6, 2013Denialism blog readers, especially those at academic institutions that have/are considering outsourcing email, may be interested in my essay on UC Berkeley's migration to Gmail. This is cross-posted from the Berkeley Blog.
Many campuses have decided to outsource email and other services to “cloud” providers. Berkeley has joined in by migrating student and faculty to bMail, operated by Google. In doing so, it has raised some anxiety about privacy and autonomy in communications. In this post, I outline some advantages of our outsourcing to Google, some disadvantages, and how we might…
lborkowski | February 8, 2013by Kim Krisberg
A couple years ago, two Johns Hopkins University public health researchers attended a public hearing about the possible expansion of an industrial food animal production facility. During the hearing, a community member stood up to say that if the expansion posed any hazards, the health department would surely be there to protect the people and alert them to any dangers. The two researchers knew that due to limited authority and resources, that probably wasn't the case.
"We felt like there was this false sense of comfort among the public," said Roni Neff, one of the two…
jdupuis | January 31, 2013Some colleagues and I are presenting tomorrow at the latest Ontario Library Association Super Conference. Here's the info:
Session: #1307:
Friday 3:45 PM 5:00 PM
IF I KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW
Career development
Speaker(s)
John Dupuis, Acting Associate University Librarian, Information Services, York University; Tanis Fink, Director, Seneca Libraries, Seneca College; Amanda French, Manager, Sciences and Business Dept, Mississauga Library System; Klara Maidenberg, Virtual Reference Services & Assessment and Evaluation Librarian, Scholars Portal, OCUL; Zachary Osborne, Head Librarian,…
gregladen | December 27, 2012What about a picture of Charles Darwin burning in hell to teach kids about flames?
I don't think so. Although I personally am not like some of my fellow secularists in reacting viscerally to any and all stylistic or symbolic references to Judeo-Christian religious themes, I am aware that there are recognizable religious visual or literary elements which, if used as part of a teaching tool, can be easily construed as promotion of a religion. "Promotion" is not standing on a soap box preaching, or telling students that a particular religion is bad while another is good, or giving extra credit…
jrosenhouse | December 20, 2012This is encouraging:
The Orleans Parish School Board, which controls the curriculum and policies for six schools in New Orleans, voted Tuesday to ban the teaching of creationism as science and a “revisionist” history course touted in Texas.
Although none of these six New Orleans schools currently teaches creationism or “intelligent design,” outgoing Orleans Parish School Board President Thomas Robichaux is making sure they never will, The Times-Picayune first reported in November.
The newly approved policy bans teachers from including “any aspect of religious faith” in science courses and…
carlyo | December 5, 2012WASHINGTON, DC – The USA Science & Engineering Festival today announced Lockheed Martin as its founding and presenting host, unveiled a new website, and detailed year-round activities leading up to its return to Washington, DC on April 24-27, 2014.
The USA Science & Engineering Festival creates the thrill of hands-on science for America’s youth, getting them interested at an early age so more students will pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.
“This nation suffers from a severe shortage of up-and-coming scientists and engineers,” said Dr. Ray O. Johnson, senior…
lborkowski | December 5, 2012This is a bonus addition to a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. To read the three-part series, which explores the science of pain management as well as physicians' and public health workers' roles in preventing opioid abuse and overdose, click here, here and here.
by Kim Krisberg
"If you really look at how pain affects people and what it means to have pain...you start to view it more as a social phenomenon."
These are words from Dr. Daniel Carr, a…
oracknows | November 28, 2012If there's one thing that antivaccine cranks tell us that has a grain of truth in it, it's to be wary of pharmaceutical companies and their influence. Their mission is, of course, to make profits, and sometimes the search for profits can lead them to do things that are less than savory. Of course, antivaccine cranks take reasonable skepticism and wariness of pharmaceutical company influence and amp it up to ridiculous heights, in much the same way that they take concerns about potential side effects of vaccines and amp them up to even more ridiculous heights. It's what they do. In any case, I…