Education
clock | January 2, 2009
Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference:
Talia Page is a future astronaut, senior staff at Talking Science, writer for Space Lifestyle magazine, Chief Editor for the Imagine Science Film Festival, and a blogger on Space Cadet. She will be on the panel Blogging adventure: how to post from strange locations.
Neeru Paharia is a doctoral student who is starting to build AcaWiki, a wiki of open-access long abstracts of peer-reviewed research, which she will present as a demo.
David Palange is a student and blogger in the Nicholas School of the…
clock | December 31, 2008
Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference:
Greg Laden is an anthropologist, a part time independent scholar and part time associate adviser with the Program for Individualized Learning at the the University of Minnesota and a prolific SciBling blogger. He will be on the panel
Hey, You Can't Say That!
Benjamin Landis is a student in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke.
Patric Lane is the Health and Science Editor at UNC-Chapel Hill News Services.
Les Lang is the Director of Research Communications and Assistant Director of Public…
clock | December 29, 2008
Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference:
Kevin Emamy is coming to do a demo of his CiteULike reference management platform.
Kay Endriss teaches statistics in Career Center High School in Winston-Salem (see the Wikipedia page).
Martin Fenner is the Clinical Fellow in Oncology at Hannover Medical School in Germany. He blogs on Gobbledygook and will lead a session on Providing public health and medical information to all.
Matt Ford is a writer for Nobel Intent and will co-moderate a session Science blogging without the blog?
Suzanne Franks is my…
clock | December 28, 2008
Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference:
Russ Campbell is the Communications Officer at Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
Patricia Campbell is the powerhouse behind the Campbell-Kibler Associates, the FairerScience and the FairerScience blog.
Roy Campbell is the Director of Exhibits at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
Paul Cancellieri is a science teacher at Durant Road Middle School and he also writes a blog - Scripted Spontaneity.
Bill Cannon runs the new Science in the Triangle site.
Yang Cao is a Pediatric Epidemiology researcher at NIEHS…
clock | December 27, 2008
So, let's highlight some of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference:
Eva Amsen is a newly-minted PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, and she blogs on Easternblot, Expression Patterns and Musicians and Scientists.
Melissa Anley-Mills is the News Director in the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Samia Ansari is a Biochemistry Undergraduate student at the University of Georgia, and she blogs on 49 percent. She will co-moderate the session on Race in science - online and offline.
Apryl Bailey is the Creative Director…
clock | December 27, 2008Visual Areas Of Brain Respond More To Valuable Objects, Brain-imaging Shows:
Dollar signs for eyes - cartoonists have been drawing them for years, and the artists, while whimsical, may have been onto something. According to new research from UC San Diego, areas of the brain responsible for vision respond more strongly to objects of value.
Medical Myths For The Holiday Season: True, False Or Unproven?:
In a study published in the Christmas 2008 issue of the British Medical Journal, Aaron Carroll, M.D., M.S., and Rachel Vreeman, M.D., M.S., of the Indiana University School of Medicine, explore…
gregladen | December 26, 2008Children from low-income families in the US and Britian are disadvantaged in school, according to research just now coming out from the University's Centre for Market and Public Organisation. From a press release:
...According to the study, children from low-income backgrounds are raised in environments that fail to promote their cognitive, social and health development adequately and, as a result, they are more likely to begin school with deficits in their learning ability and social behaviour.
The key findings of the research are that:
The poorest fifth of children in the UK are equally…
tfk | December 24, 2008In the Wichita Eagle, we get Santa Claus and the Establishment Clause:
This time of year, every public school administrator has to know a simple fragment of Constitutional law. It has many implications in the school setting during the holiday season. "Jingle Bells" is OK. Christmas hymns with denominational themes are not.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." is part of the First Amendment. This segment is called the "Establishment Clause" because it prevents the government and all of its federal, state and local…
sb admin | December 22, 2008President-elect Obama's news release on Sunday, Dec 21 said that VP-elect Joe Biden will be chairing a new White House Taskforce on Working Families.  I was surprised, but thrilled to see that workplace safety standards are part of this group's charge.  I am not kidding. Seriously, it says, "Restoring labor standards, including workplace safety."   Very cool.  I'm encouraged to know that the Obama-Biden team recognizes that what happens in the workplace does NOT stay in the workplace, but affects the heart, soul and health of working families. Whether it's the physical toll…
drorzel | December 19, 2008
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
It's possible there are other solutions than EFCA. But it needs to be solved, one way or the other. EFCA has its problems, but pretending that it's somehow a perversion of workplace democracy as compared to a world in which 25 percent of organizing campaigns see a worker fired is absurd.
(tags: politics economics US class-war)
Stop picking on the Newbery Medal, the premier award in children's literature. - By Erica S. Perl - Slate Magazine
Is a Newbery winner right for every kid? No--but what book is? Some kids will give the tougher tomes a try…
drorzel | December 18, 2008
The Art of SATergy - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
"Consider the following question for the GMAT (the test given to MBA applicants). Unfortunately, issues of copyright clearance have prevented us from reproducing the question, but that shouldn't stop us. "
(tags: science education academia psychology social-science)
Op-Ed Contributor - It's a Narnia Christmas - NYTimes.com
"That I'm not a Christian doesn't much hinder my enjoyment of either the holiday or the book, but the presence of Father Christmas bothered many of Lewis's friends, including J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien, whose Middle-…
pharyngula | December 17, 2008Some online news organization has revivified the Cincinnati Zoo/Creation "museum" controversy, and they have blamed me for it all. Thank you, thank you, I appreciate the credit, but really, it must be shared with the thousands of people who responded with their letters, and particularly with the zoo administrators, who so quickly saw the folly of forming an affiliation with an anti-science/anti-education organization like Answers in Genesis.
However, Mark Looy of the Creation "museum" generously credited me by name as the ringlea…um, criminal mastermi…uh, instigator of the campaign to…
jstemwedel | December 17, 2008Do scientists see themselves, like Isaac Newton, building new knowledge by standing on the shoulders of giants? Or are they most interested in securing their own position in the scientific conversation by stepping on the feet, backs, and heads of other scientists in their community? Indeed, are some of them willfully ignorant about the extent to which their knowledge is build on someone else's foundations?
That's a question raised in a post from November 25, 2008 on The Scientist NewsBlog. The post examines objections raised by a number of scientists to a recent article in the journal Cell…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2008I finally can get around to writing about Jan Kemp, the University of Georgia professor, who, even as Georgia was winning football championships, had the courage to point out that the football players were graduating utterly unprepared for post-collegiate life. Kemp herself put it best:
"All over the country, athletes are used to produce revenue," she told The New York Times a month after the trial. "I've seen what happens when the lights dim and the crowd fades. They're left with nothing. I want that stopped."
For her honesty, she was fired, but successfully sued for compensation. During…
evolvingthoughts | December 12, 2008I received a query from reader Jodi, of Nova Scotia (I so want to visit there one summer) about how to learn about a scientific subject as a layperson. Of course being a philosopher I was able to answer her quickly, but readers may wish to comment more authoritatively and knowledgeably, as we know philosophy is not bound by little things such as facts. This comes from a comment I made in my talk recently about getting one's theory of evolution from Dawkins or Gould... [Now there's a red rag to a certain curmudgeonly bull in Toronto]. Below the fold:
Jodi wrote:
Hi there,
My name is Jodi ...,…
clock | December 12, 2008Food for thought:
Bill Farren: Insulat-Ed:
Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to…
sb admin | December 12, 2008The Washington Post obtained a copy of a draft report on mercury that Food and Drug Administration sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget, and reports that it contains advice that alarms scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency. At issue is advice about fish consumption for women of child-bearing age, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children. All of these groups can benefit from fishâs omega-3s, but the mercury that contaminates many fish can interfere with neurological development in fetuses and young children.
FDA regulates mercury in commercially…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2008In spring of 2007, after nearly two years without a contract, the faculty of the 23 campuses of the California State University system (of which my university is a part) voted to ratify a contract. Among other things, that contract included raises to help our salaries catch up to the cost of living in California. (Notice the word "help" in that sentence; the promised raises, while making things better, don't quite get the whole job done.)
The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-…
pharyngula | December 6, 2008Seth Godin is a marketing guy, and he recently turned his eye to the evolution-creation wars and offered a marketing perspective. That's useful, but I don't think he looked deeply enough, and his suggestions don't really help much. In particular, he compares the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution to Newton's "law of gravity" and tries to extract a message about why one is unquestioned and the other is not.
1. If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.
Nobody had a seriously described theory of gravity…
sb admin | November 28, 2008MarkH is going through the process of deciding what to what to do when he grows up. This is a much more difficult and important decision than many may realize. In order to understand the gravity of this process, I'll have to refresh your memories a bit regarding medical education.
In the U.S., to apply for medical school, you must have completed a (usually) 4-year bachelor's degree from a university. During the final year, you take what amounts to an entrance exam (the MCAT), and send out preliminary applications (often with fees). If the schools like your preliminary applications, they…