Education
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2010And 'suburban' is code. Monday, I responded to a rich twit's complaint about how difficult his life was at $450,000 of annual income (Note: Since then, said twit has removed the post. Fortunately, Brad 'Deling' DeLong is aware of all internet traditions, and has saved the post for posterity). In that post, I wrote:
Perhaps Henderson's outburst should be chalked up to the influence of degenerate white culture or our finishing school 'elite' educational system. But I digress.
Most readers got the snark, but the first commenter worked himself into high dudgeon over the degenerate white…
gregladen | September 20, 2010Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ... many things have been going on and I have more to report than time to report it. But I will get to all of it, I assure you. Tonight, I just want to cover part of today's Education Symposium (moderated by your's truly) ... not all of it at once, thought, as it is kind of complex.
If you happen to work for the University of Minnesota or know anyone who does, best to not read this or let anyone know about it. This is a little to heavy to be spoken of openly. (Since there are only 11 of you who read my blog, I think we'll…
gregladen | September 17, 2010Amy Binder and John H. Evans, associate professors of Sociology at the University of California at San Diego, have written a piece on efforts to force religion in the guise of Intelligent Design and Creationism down the throats of children in Texas.
a repost
A proposal before the Texas Board of Education calls for including the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution in the state's science curriculum. This initiative is understood by supporters and opponents to be a strategic effort to get around First Amendment restrictions on teaching religion in science class. The proposal is a new round…
tfk | September 16, 2010Every now and again, the Disco. 'tute's blog rolls out some breathless announcement. Sometimes they've been invited to join other creationist groups at a public forum, or maybe they're angry at a newspaper article claiming they have ties to religion, or they might just have come up with another reason to claim evolution is at odds with their theistic understanding.
My favorites, though, are the times when they invite a new contributor to their blog. First it was the incomparable Michael Egnor. Then Martin Cothran, who is such a stereotypical wingnut that I'd have had to invent this…
oracknows | September 7, 2010After chilling out for part of the weekend, yesterday I became so engrossed in writing my part of a training grant for my postdoc that, before I knew it, it was way too late to provide you with the Insolence you crave for today. Oh, well. Tomorrow for sure; there's a lot that has been waiting for my attention. Besides, I haven't even really taken a vacation this summer; so I deserve a day or two (or three) off from time to time. In the meantime, I'll post a couple of bits of "classic" (if you can call it that) Insolence. This particular bit of insolence dates back nearly four years, all the…
kcollins | September 3, 2010We need everyone's help to get the word out about the USA Science and Engineering Festival and we appreciate all the blogs and posts that happen out there. We cannot get the word out without the help of everyone out there! Here eGFI, one of our partner organizations, is getting the word out about the Festival. Thanks!!
Kicking off with a songfest and building up to a huge expo on the National Mall, a two-week series of events in October will answer the question "How do you make science and engineering fun?" -- in hundreds of ways.
All activities at the first USA Science and Engineering…
gregladen | September 3, 2010Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design is a must read for those interested in the Evolution - Creationism controversy. In particular, this volume is an essential part of the personal library of every science educator, for reasons that I will describe below. If you know a Life Science Teacher, this is a perfect birthday present. If you have a child in the public K-12 education system in the US, or the analog somewhere else, donate a copy of this book to the appropriate life science teacher!
In this important book published by Oxford University Press in 2004, Forrest…
oracknows | August 24, 2010I tell ya, I go away for a few days and something always seems to happen that I'd be all over if I were at home and blogging normally. Either something major happens in the anti-vaccine movement or there's a new study being touted by woos or womthing else big happens. In the old days, I'd try to cover it anyway, but lately I've learned just to let it go until I get back home. If I'm still interested in it, the end result will usually be better, and if I'm not still interested in it then it's probably better that I never bothered writing about it anyway. This particular bit of blog material…
oracknows | August 23, 2010
One of the main topics that I've covered over the last four or five of laying down a swath of not-so-Respectful Insolence directed at pseudoscience is the relatively rapid, seemingly relentless infiltration of pseudoscience into what should be bastions of science-based medicine (SBM), namely medical schools and academic medical centers promoted by academics who should, but apparently don't, know better. This infiltration has been facilitated by a variety of factors, including changes in the culture of medical academia and our own culture in general, not to mention a dedicated cadre of…
rallain | August 20, 2010I am not normally a book-review-kind-of-guy. However, in this post I will make an exception. My wife (who clearly knows me very well) bought me this book - Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World (amazon link)
The basic idea of the book is to look at how the author (Mark Frauenfelder) started doing more and more Do-it-yourself type stuff (DIY). He goes through his efforts to grow his own stuff, raise chickens, build guitars and stuff like that. Very enjoyable read. It wasn't so much about how to do stuff as much as it was about making stuff rather than buying stuff. (do…
kbonham | August 19, 2010[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
I've played video games most of my life. Starting with Tom Sawyer's Island and Matterhorn Screamer (both released in 1988), the early Final Fantasies and Secret of Mana  on Super Nintendo in middleschool, games like Starcraft and Half-life (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat etc) in high school, and Halo in college. Grad school finally ended my 3 year love affair with World of Warcraft. I've always played for fun, but two papers in last week's Nature show how video games can be put to even better use (both are behind pay-walls…
oracknows | August 16, 2010Over the years, I've written a lot about cell phones and the scientifically highly implausible claim that radio waves from cellular telephones can lead to brain cancer and other health problems. For example, two years ago, when the then director of the respected University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center, Dr. Ronald B. Herberman issued a warning to the faculty and staff of UPCC to limit their cell phone use because of the risk of cancer, I had a definite bone to pick with him. The evidence upon which Dr. Herberman based his hysterical warning, which was duly picked up by the press and spread…
sastyk | August 12, 2010Actually, it isn't all that slow, because a decade ago, all of this would have been largely unthinkable. The problem is that we don't see the gradual decline and fall - we are only vaguely aware that some things aren't quite what they used to be, and our progressive narrative tells us that they will soon be much better. But the problem is that's not necessarily true - there's little evidence for it. Even the most optimistic economists (and I don't recommend the most optimistic economists ;-)) have to admit our long term economic problems are extremely pressing. Add in resource depletion…
lborkowski | August 10, 2010Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn have released a report on "100 Stimulus Projects that Give Taxpayers the Blues." Their introduction rails against "torrential, misdirected government spending," and short descriptions of the 100 projects singled out for ridicule are evidently supposed to disgust readers. What disgusted me, though, was an apparent lack of respect for scientific research.
Around one-fourth of the 100 projects involved scientific research, and I have to wonder whether their criteria for inclusion was a word that might make a sixth-grader giggle. Monkeys! Ants! Hot flashes!…
lborkowski | August 9, 2010In a recent New York Times article, Celia Dugger reports on encouraging results from two studies on interventions that help women in South Africa and Malawi reduce their risk of HIV infection. The first study found that women using a vaginal microbicidal gel were 39% less likely to contract HIV than those using a placebo. It has been published in Science, and its authors write in their abstract:
The CAPRISA 004 trial assessed effectiveness and safety of a 1% vaginal gel formulation of tenofovir, a nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitor, for the prevention of HIV acquisition in women. A…
jdupuis | August 9, 2010Eugene Wallingford of the blog Knowing and Doing was at the SIGCSE Computer Science Education conference this past spring and as usual he provides a very fine report over a number of posts.
SIGCSE DAY 0 -- Media Computation Workshop
I headed to SIGCSE a day early this year in order to participate in a couple of workshops. The first draw was Mark Guzdial's and Barbara Ericson's workshop using media computation to teach introductory computing to both CS majors and non-majors. I have long been a fan of this work but have never seen them describe it. This seemed like a great chance to learn a…
oracknows | August 6, 2010If there's one aspect of medical education that I consider to be paramount, at least when it comes to understanding how to analyze and apply all the evidence, both basic science and clinical, it's a firm grounding in the scientific method. I advocate science-based medicine (SBM), which is what evidence-based medicine (EBM) should be. SBM tries to overcome the shortcomings of EBM by taking into account all the evidence, both scientific and clinical, in deciding what therapies work, what therapies don't work, and why. To recap, a major part of our thesis is that EBM, although a step forward…
drorzel | August 5, 2010This Slate story on the number of Americans who can't swim was kind of surprising to me:
In a 1994 CDC study, 37 percent of American adults said they couldn't swim 24 yards, the length of a typical gymnasium lap pool. A 2008 study conducted by researchers at the University of Memphis found that almost 54 percent of children between 12 and 18 can do no more than splash around the shallow end of a pool. The difference between the two studies is somewhat surprising, as the CDC study suggested that children tend to be better swimmers than adults.
Having grown up in a town that features a large-…
jrosenhouse | August 3, 2010Here's Rod Dreher giving lectures about civility:
What is it with science-oriented advocates who consider contempt a virtue? Who, exactly, do they think they are going to persuade? (You could say the same thing about sneering political bloggers, sneering religious bloggers, and, well, sneerers in all forms of public discourse, inasmuch as sneering seems to be a popular pose these days.) Most of us are tempted to sneer every now and then (I certainly am guilty of this), but some of these people adopt sneering as a basic intellectual stance to the world.
Here's Rod Dreher hectoring Anne Rice…
oracknows | August 3, 2010One of the things that disturbs me the most about where medicine is going is the infiltration of quackery into academic medicine. So prevalent is this unfortunate phenomenon that Doctor RW even coined a truly apt term for it: Quackademic medicine. In essence, pseudoscientific and even prescientific ideas are rapidly being "integrated" with science-based medicine, or, as I tend to view it, quackery is being "integrated" with scientific medicine, to the gradual erosion of scientific standards in medicine. No quackery is too quacky, it seems. Even homeopathy and naturopathy can seemingly find…