Education
clock | April 14, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Elia Ben-Ari of the To Be Determined blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…
clock | April 14, 2010From the USA Science & Engineering Festival:
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--It's the 30th Anniversary of the Rubik's Cube, and the USA Science & Engineering Festival is planning a You CAN Do the Rubik's Cube tournament in Washington, D.C., October of 2010. Teams from Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia are eligible to compete. Here's a video from the first You CAN Do the Rubik's Cube tournament held this spring in San Diego.
Rubik's Cube creator Professor Erno Rubik will receive a Lifetime Science and Math Education Achievement Award from the…
jstemwedel | April 12, 2010A reader sends the following query:
I've only recently begun teaching in a big state university, maybe tier C in the field I'm in. I'm in a quandary as to how to manage pressure to pass students who are under performing. The first semester, I had to lower the passing to a basically ridiculous level and the college still inquired why so many failed (10 %). Now, I'm again feeling pressure to pass students who do not deserve to pass. I'm getting very disillusioned by this type of practice. Grade inflation seems to be so common that I even have students who think that a 60 is a B. I'm…
clock | April 12, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Carmen Drahl, Associate Editor for Science/Technology/Education at Chemical & Engineering News (find her as @carmendrahl on Twitter) to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more…
terrasig | April 10, 2010Last July we wrote about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and spoke of Buzz Aldrin's autobiography about his battle with alcoholism in the years following. The post drew a comment from a reader who I've renamed "Anon."
Thank you so much for this post.
I am a recovering drug addict and am in the process of applying to graduate programs. I have a stellar GPA, have assisted as an undergraduate TA, and have been engaged in research for over a year.
I also have felony and was homeless for 3 years.
I don't hide my recovery from people once I know them, but I sometimes, especially…
drorzel | April 9, 2010
Physics Buzz: 490 billion nanometers tall
"There are seven SI base units: meter (m), kilogram (kg), second (s), ampere (A), kelvin (K), mole (mol), and candela (cd). The other SI units are derived from these seven: acceleration is m/s^2, density is kg/m^3, magnetic field strength is A/m, etc.
According to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the keeper of the units, the SI is "a living system which evolves, and which reflects current best measurement practice."
Here is a quick rundown of the basis for the SI base units, as defined by the governing body, the General…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and see if I could find one where the author list included at least one surname for every letter of the alphabet. There wasn't one every week, but it wasn't that hard (particularly with large numbers of physicists from China, where family names beginning with "X" are more common).
Every so often, somebody…
scientificactivist | April 6, 2010Oh boy, it was a real scorcher in our nation's capital today... at least by April standards! With temperatures in some locales surpassing 90 degrees, several area daily high temperature records were broken.
As I sweated through the day, I got to thinking: where are all of those oh-so-clever political cartoonists and global-warming-denying Republican politicians who just a couple of months ago were incessantly using February's record-breaking snows to "mock" the idea of global warming?
(Bueller...? Bueller...? Bueller...?)
The fact is that this is largely an irrelevant*** question (well,…
vlicata | April 5, 2010The National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences each are spearheading programs designed to get more accurate science into the movies, and they have two somewhat different approaches to this same "problem". Each presented its plan during a couple of sessions at this year's AAAS National Meeting. The National Academy of Sciences had a session on its "Science and Entertainment Exchange" program, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary. This program acts as a matchmaker service for Hollywood producers and directors, who can contact the Exchange and ask for an "expert…
tfk | April 2, 2010I've never written a law review article, and my first stab at the genre turned into a bit of a beast to wrangle. While most of the papers in the journal ran to perhaps a dozen pages, mine weighs in at 68, in which I offer a brief exploration of evolution for the lawerly set, a review of creationism's legal and social history, a short defense of the Kitzmiller decision striking down ID in public schools, and a review of current anti-evolution efforts, especially so-called academic freedom laws. For all that, I think it hangs together nicely, a tribute to the students at the University of St…
kcollins | April 2, 2010I think at some point most kids think: I want to be an Astronaut!! How cool would it be to be launched amount the stars and see the Earth from space? Many kids go through this phase, they might buy a telescope and dream up moon landings, but very few at the age of 6 decide: I'm going to be an Astronaut and actually go on to be one.
But Dr. Don Thomas did just that. He was a mere six years old on May 5, 1961, when the first Americans went into space and he thought: I want to do that. He served as an astronaut between 1994 and 1997 flew as a mission specialist on four different Space Shuttle…
jstemwedel | March 31, 2010
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That's the question posed by a piece of research, "Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?" by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and…
jdupuis | March 30, 2010The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference.
What's it about?
What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading, writing and publishing. Ebooks have arrived, and with them great changes are afoot. BoomCampTO 2010 will focus on what happens next, how this big shift to digital is changing different parts of the book business, and how we are adapting. Our focus is not so much on ebooks as everything else.
When:…
jstemwedel | March 29, 2010
In the last post, we looked at a piece of research on how easy it is to clean up the scientific literature in the wake of retractions or corrections prompted by researcher misconduct in published articles. Not surprisingly, in the comments on that post there was some speculation about what prompts researchers to commit scientific misconduct in the first place.
As it happens, I've been reading a paper by Mark S. Davis, Michelle Riske-Morris, and Sebastian R. Diaz, titled "Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files", that tries to get a handle on that…
oracknows | March 23, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging. This is one of those times. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in April 2007 and be assured that I'll be back tomorrow. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years, it's new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
From fellow ScienceBlogger Abel, I'm made aware of an excellent post on the Health Care Renewal Blog about the financial reality of being an academic physician in a modern U.S. medical school. It's an excellent overview of how medical…
cagapakis | March 23, 2010I read R.C. Lewontin's Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA over the weekend and was struck in particular by one line in his wonderful diatribe against biological determinism and reductionism:
"Intellectuals in their self-flattering wish-fulfillment say that knowledge is power, but the truth is that knowledge further empowers only those who have or can acquire the power to use it."
This is something that was really hard to read at first, especially as someone who is overeducated and clearly spends a lot of time thinking about educating other people about science. But I realized that it…
clock | March 22, 2010The 2010 North Carolina Science and Engineering Fair will be held at Meredith College in Raleigh on March 26th-27th. You can see the details here. The part that is open to public will be on Saturday March 27th from 2:30 - 4:00 pm.
From the NC Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center:
Young scientists from across the state will gather at Meredith College in Raleigh on Sat., March 27, to participate in the N.C. Science and Engineering Fair (NCSEF). Students from 3rd grade through 12th grade will present original science and engineering research. NCSEF showcases the highest level of…
razib | March 13, 2010In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt:
At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year.
...
The Apollo Group -- which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix -- derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.
For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama…
tfk | March 11, 2010Attention conservation notice: A couple thousand words of reply to questions about why I think NCSE does what it does, delivered in my capacity as a random blogger not as an NCSE staffer. People who don't care about accommodationism or about how I read the NCSE website should probably just go back to pondering diehard scientists.
In comments at Larry Moran's blog, I noted what I regard as a serious error in his description of NCSE's position about science and religion. He initially claimed "As you know, it's the official position of the National Center for Science Education" that "science…
thusspakezuska | March 10, 2010This is the third and final part of a multi-part presentation of a sample chapter from a forthcoming book, The Madame Curie Complex. Part One can be found here. Part Two can be found here.
Recently I was approached with an offer to share with my readers a sample chapter from a forthcoming book called The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. A caveat: I have not read the whole book, and offering the sample chapter here for you to read does not constitute an endorsement by me of the book. But I was sufficiently intrigued by the sample chapter I read to think it…