Education
drorzel | November 5, 2009
TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine | My philosophy: Alan Sokal
"Physicists, when they do philosophy, often do it badly. They're often confused about the conceptual foundations of their own physics, because sometimes you can compute and get the right results even if you don't understand conceptually very well what you're doing. That's a criticism that not only philosophers but also mathematicians make of physics. Because I'm half a mathematician I respect that criticism too. So it's absolutely true that physicists often make a botch of the conceptual foundations of physics, especially when it…
oracknows | November 4, 2009Oh, hell. I actually used to like Smashing Pumpkins back in the 1990s. Unfortunately, its leader, Billy Corgan, has just revealed himself to be as medically ignorant as Jenny McCarthy in a recent blog post:
If you follow some of the links I have been supplying as of late, you'll notice many are focused on the propaganda build up to our day of reckoning with the Swine Flu virus. I say 'propaganda' because, in my heart, there is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic. merican President Obama has declared a…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2009Michael Ruse has a very bad op-ed in The Guardian. Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers have already laid into him (here and here respectively), but why should they have all the fun? Ruse writes:
If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn't think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists,…
gregladen | November 2, 2009From a Yale press release:
Yale University researchers have detected the effects of natural selection among two generations of contemporary women and predict their descendents will be slightly shorter and chubbier, have lower cholesterol and blood pressure and have their first children earlier in life.
The predictions, which were made in the Oct. 19 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were based on an analysis of women who have participated in the famous Framingham Heart Study, that began in 1948. The results illustrate the medical value of evolutionary…
cortex | November 2, 2009Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits:
If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts--such as music, dance or theater--strengthens the brain's attention system, which in turn can…
clock | November 2, 2009As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.
Trevor Owens is the community lead for the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. He blogs at the eponimous blog and tweets.
At the conference, Trevor will do an Ignite-style talk "Data mining the literature with Zotero" and will participate in the session about "…
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2009"If the president's [budget] proposal is enacted similar to what he recommended, it will have a chilling effect on abstinence education across the country...We're in a race against time to keep these people in business"
So says Leslie Unruh, rightwing nutjob extraordinaire (and a driving force behind this). I'm not sure why anyone in the Coalition of the Sane should care, in light of these results of abstinence-only misinformation (italics mine):
In the beginning, the public-health community was open to the programs. The United States did, after all, have the highest teen pregnancy rate in…
dsalo | October 28, 2009I pointed out Mike Lesk's slideshow in my last tidbits post, finding it a good critical précis of the data problem. It's pleasantly aware of human problems, human problems many treatments of cyberinfrastructure (including, unfortunately, this otherwise useful call to action from Educause) wholly ignore.
So wince and flinch at the design (black Arial on white? really? in 2009?), but read the slideshow anyway.
I do want to pick apart the slide from which I took the title of this post. I reproduce the said slide's text in full:
Can we just give the problem to the libraries?
As a professor in a…
clock | October 26, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Thank you, Bora
I am a lucky individual who was given a chance to exist, create and interact with other living beings on…
khannula | October 22, 2009I'm back from the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I promised to blog about my session. So... here it is.
Techniques and tools for effective recruitment, retention, and promotion of women and minorities in the geosciences. It's a mouthful, and included a lot of different perspectives, from information on the state of diversity in the geosciences today to suggestions for where we need to go to specific programs that have been developed to... well, to my talk, at the very end.
The session began with a personal perspective from Pamela Hallock-Muller, a marine scientist from…
nisbetmc | October 19, 2009In today's Washington Post, former editor Leonard Downie and communication scholar Michael Schudson preview the release of a major new study on the future of news. Below are some of the key recommendations of the report which reflect similar themes I have described in recent articles and at this blog specific to new models for science journalism. In particular, Downie and Schudson echo the need for government funding of new journalism ventures in areas such as science and health and the vital role at the local level that public media organizations and universities can and should play. […
pharyngula | October 16, 2009Ah, this is going to be painfully dreary. Why do I let myself get dragged into these podium battles with kooks? I'm committed, anyway. Come on out to the UMTC next month for a game of kick-the-puppy. I'm going to be coming down off a real high that weekend, the IGERT symposium on evo-devo, where I'm actually going to learn something, and the next day I have to stand up with these clowns. Do me a favor and show up to ask some leading questions about science in the Q&A so I can talk about some interesting stuff.
This is the ad copy from the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. They're…
drorzel | October 14, 2009
AdLit.org: Adolescent Literacy - William Farish: The World's Most Famous Lazy Teacher
"Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Franklin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for René Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato.
But there is one thing unique about the education of all these…
pharyngula | October 12, 2009I was sent this scan of a delightful article from Watchtower Magazine — you know, that bizarre piece of pulp from the Jehovah's Witnesses. Look at their list of wicked temptations that might lead a faithful person into a life of sin. Take special note of #2.
"A well-intentioned teacher urges you to pursue higher education at a university." Oooh. Sends a chill down my spine.
I guess I'm even more evil than I, or the Jehovah's Witnesses, can imagine. I've urged many students to go on to graduate school, which as all of you advanced students know, is where all the real licentiousness,…
terrasig | October 10, 2009
This month, DrugMonkey is hosting the Diversity in Science Blog Carnival, started by DN Lee of Urban Science Adventures! to celebrate the scientific contributions of individuals from underrepresented groups. To celebrate US Hispanic Heritage Month, DM asked for us "to write and submit your posts in honor of scientists whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central or South America."
One of the greatest rewards of being an academic scientist is watching remarkable people pass through your laboratory and classroom who then go on to do amazing things. Upon reading Drug's…
clock | October 9, 2009Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time:
Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone - 'How do you know you're not sleeping right now?'
50 Useful iPhone Apps for Science Students & Teachers
OA Week at the University of Belgrade in Serbia
Let's have the ScienceOnline2010 program finalized in ten days
Science class at SI Academy gets worldwide play (with Miss Baker)
The 'WiFi At Conferences' Problem
Uses of Nobel Causes: the case for Obama
- RT @ezraklein Obama also awarded Nobel prize in chemistry. "He's just got great chemistry," says Nobel…
bcohen | October 9, 2009Philip Graham is a writer and professor at the University of Illinois. Friend of the World's Fair Oronte Churm recently interviewed him. (Mr. Churm, aka John Griswold, also teaches at Illinois and is also a writer -- check out his beautiful new novel Democracy of Ghosts.) It's a good interview, right here at this link.
Graham wrote a series of dispatches over at McSweeney's about his sabbatical year in Lisbon. His new book brings them together as The Moon, Come to Earth. That would be fascinating just on the face of it since Graham's a fellow dispatcher at the McSweeney's website (as is…
gregladen | October 9, 2009A recently published statement on current scientific knowledge on cosmic evolution and biological evolution from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences concludes: "The extraordinary progress in our understanding of evolution and the place of man in nature should be shared with everyone. ... Furthermore, scientists have a clear responsibility to contribute to the quality of education, especially as regards the subject of evolution." The statement appears in the proceedings of "Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life," a plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of…
sciencewoman | October 7, 2009We're a week into our 2009 DonorsChoose challenge, and as of 11 am EDT, we've raised $250 for science education of high poverty students around the country. In 2007, we raised $1104, and last year: "Forty-two Sciencewomen readers contributed a total of $1863 to help 917 needy kids learn about science and engineering." If we're going to get anywhere near that number this year, we need to pick up the pace a bit. I understand that money is tight for all of us, this year more than ever, but money is tighter than ever for public school teachers, who spend an average of $500 to $700 per year out of…
drorzel | October 3, 2009
Effect Size (Again) « Easily Distracted
"I agree that if a researcher can establish that a particular effect or phenomenon has a statistically significant influence or role in social behavior, it matters, that this is a finding worth reporting. The problem is, as McCloskey notes, that some findings matter more than other findings, and that the reason they matter more or less can only be worked out through something other than statistical argument, that the weight we should give such a finding has to come from some philosophical, moral, political or normative claim. "
(tags: statistics…