Education
scientificactivist | June 16, 2006Lurking beneath the surface here at ScienceBlogs is a force that compels people to do extremely gimmicky things on Fridays. Since I know that I'm no better than anyone else, I've decided to join in on the fun. Therefore, I introduce to you Fantastical Fridays at The Scientific Activist. From now on, every Friday I'll take a break from the more serious scientific activism to explore the stranger, more outlandish, and in general more lighthearted aspects of science.
Today's installment of Fantastical Fridays brings you a fascinating discovery reported in 2003: the creation of tiny people,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2006I'm busy today, so I decided to begin transferring and reposting some of my very old posts from my previous site. This was originally posted Nov. 29, 2004)
The Washington Post recently reported about the failure of the anti-segregation amendment to pass in Alabama (it was essentially 50-50). According to the CNN exit poll, 73% of Alabama voters were white. Assuming that the vote to keep the segregationist amendment was negligible among non-whites, this means that 68.5% of whites voted against the anti-segregationist amendment (or for segregation).
One of the lame excuses given was that some…
jstemwedel | June 13, 2006There's an interesting article in the New York Times about efforts by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote breast-feeding. Proponents of breast-feeding point to quite a lot of science that supports advantages -- for child and mother -- of breast-milk over formula. But there's also a real question about what we (i.e., individual families making choices, DHHS, employers, and society as a whole) ought to be doing in light of this information.
From the New York Times article:
"Just like it's risky to smoke during pregnancy, it's risky not to breast-feed after," said…
scientificactivist | June 13, 2006"Ph.D. programs don't really attract the most exceptional students," he said. I was having dinner with a few professors and graduate students from the Oxford Department of Biochemistry last night when one of the professors made that assertion. The topic of conversation was why so many graduate students in our program seem to lack a broad knowledge of areas of biochemistry outside of their specific area of research.
Feeling slightly offended, and fueled by the copious quantities of wine we had consumed, I pointedly asked, "Have you actually seen any figures that would back that up?" He hadn…
clock | June 12, 2006
This post is kinda personal. I wrote it first on July 27, 2005 on Science And Politics. Later, it was professionally edited and published on LabLit.com on March 3, 2006. Here is the unedited version:
I was just thinking today what a long and winding route I took in becoming a biologist. So, why not write a blog post about it?
As long as I can remember I loved animals. I have no idea where that came from. My family mostly had to do with theater, art, language and literature. I think they thought I was going to become an actor. My grandfather was a famous architect and I certainly have…
clock | June 12, 2006
This post is perhaps not my best post, but is, by far, my most popular ever. Sick and tired of politics after the 2004 election I decided to start a science-only blog - Circadiana. After a couple of days of fiddling with the templae, on January 8, 2005, I posted the very first post, this one, at 2:53 AM and went to bed. When I woke up I was astonished as the Sitemeter was going wild! This post was linked by BoingBoing and later that day, by Andrew Sullivan. It has been linked by people ever since, as recently as a couple of days ago, although the post is a year and a half old.…
terrasig | June 12, 2006A renowned, non-profit curriculum development organization in Colorado Springs, CO, called BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) has developed for NIH three FREE teaching modules for middle school teachers. The first is called, "Doing Science: The Process of Scientific Inquiry," and helps students in grades 7-8 to develop and refine their critical-thinking skills. The complete press release and info on the two other modules is below the fold. BTW, have I mentioned that these modules are FREE?
I'm obviously committed to doing what I can to reverse the tide non-scientific intrusions…
revere | June 11, 2006No surprise that the American public is more concerned about how to pay for higher education than they are about the ideology of its purveyors. If I had to pay for it today (and were still paying my kids' freight), that would be my number one concern, too. I'd still worry about what they were learning, too, and from whom. My highschool education in the 1950s was a daily diet of rightwing ideology we all thought was "normal." College at the turn of the sixties wasn't much better, and I went to a university with a notorious lefty reputation (I'm proud to say). It's no surprise that the public…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006Regular readers of this blog know that I periodically muse on the question of why there aren't more women in science. But since I'm not, say, an anthropologist, my musings have been rooted mostly in my own experience and the experiences of people I know.
Well, the Summer 2006 issue of Washington Square, San Jose State University's alumni magazine, has an article -- including interviews of an anthropologist and a sociologist -- entitled "A difficult crossing: Obstacles that keep women from science" (pdf). Some evocative anthropological insight from that article after the jump.
The notion of…
scientificactivist | June 9, 2006I published the following post on my former blog on June 3rd, but I'm republishing it here because it serves as an great introduction to the inspirational scientific activism currently taking shape in Oxford.
The only sounds were those of passing traffic and the whispers of interested observers as close to 1,000 people marched together in silence today down Oxford's High Street. Although the stated reason for the quiet was to avoid disturbing the many Oxford students currently taking their exams in the nearby Examination Schools, the symbolism was as tangible as the warmth of the brilliant…
tsmith | June 8, 2006The summer 2006 edition of Stanford Medical Magazine has devoted their issue to "The evolutionary war." Being the alumni magazine of a medical school, of course they have an article on "Darwin in medical school." It's a nice overview, discussing a bit of the history of "Darwinian medicine" and the pros and cons of teaching it in an already over-scheduled medical school curriculum. More after the jump...
Randolph Nesse, who I mentioned in this post and is considered one of the fathers fo "Darwinian medicine," argues for the inclusion of evolutionary medicine in med school curricula:
...…
stcynic | June 7, 2006We've got a sudden rash of ID activity here in Michigan. The MCFS board got word yesterday that the House Education Committee in Michigan was going to hold a hearing this morning on HB 5251, a bill that would require the teaching of all the major ID arguments in public school science classes. We had thought this bill was dead in light of HB 5606, which was signed into law in April. But the pro-ID language had been taken out of that bill, so the sponsors of 5251 have revived it. The language of the bill is as follows:
10) Not later than August 1, 2006, the state board shall revise the…
drorzel | June 7, 2006A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes.
The cookbook thing, though, is interesting from a different angle. The article Eugene linked has some interesting quotes from people in the cooking business, including this one:
"We're now two generations into a lack of culinary knowledge being passed down from our parents," said Richard Ruben, a New…
jstemwedel | June 6, 2006I want to note three recent articles about science education. They may be dots worth connecting to each other, or they may not. I welcome your hypotheses, well grounded or tentative.
Via Michael Berube: "Women Gaining on Men in Advanced Fields". It seems like we've heard this kind of result recently but here again, you have your choice of how to spin the story: are women catching up, or are men falling behind? From the article:Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate - from biology to business - and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine and other…
apalazzo | June 2, 2006Summers and the Allston expansion. Latest stats on gender and higher education. And free books! Ladies and Gentlemen start your hard drives. (all quotes+links below the fold)
From today's Boston Globe:
As Harvard University searches for a new leader, questions loom over its last president's most ambitious project: turning America's oldest university into the nation's hub for life sciences.
During his 5-year tenure as the university's president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers worked to put Harvard at the forefront of research on how the human cell works, a question the school'…
dmunger | June 2, 2006The Washington Post reports on the decline of school recess periods:
For many kids today, the recess bell comes too late, for too little time, or even not at all. Pressure to raise test scores and adhere to state-mandated academic requirements is squeezing recess out of the school day. In many schools, it's just 10 or 15 minutes, if at all. In some cases, recess has become structured with organized games -- yes, recess is being taught.
Parents are now fighting back -- armed with evidence from psychologists:
Academics and psychologists who study childhood development are growing concerned…
jrosenhouse | June 1, 2006I recently received an e-mail Ken Parejko, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Stout. He described his experiences in taking the PRAXIS II Content Exam in science. He points out that the exam is overwhelmingly based on the facts of science, with no attention paid to science as a process. I think he raises some important points, and I have posted below the fold, with his permission, a letter he sent to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on this subject.
I have some experience with training future elementary and secondary mathematics teachers, and can report…
jstemwedel | May 25, 2006Blogging has been light because grading has been heavy. But Chad has a post that started me to thinking. (Danger! Danger!) And, since he has stated his desire to avoid a flamewar at this time, it seems only fair that I do that thinking over here so his space can be unscorched.
The question at hand, initially posed by Scott Aaronson, is whether there might be a shortage of women in science because women are more prone to be "repelled by nerd culture" than men.
What do we mean by "nerd culture" here? This is Scott's characterization of it (along with his preferred strategy of making the…
pharyngula | May 20, 2006Seeing ourselves as others do can be a strange experience. Here's an article in the Humboldt County Times Standard that discusses Morris, Minnesota, and pretty much exclusively praises us.
Recently I was listening to Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." I had to pull my car over to the side of the road after he said that Morris -- a city located in Stevens County in his home state of Minnesota -- had a high school dropout rate of less than 1 percent. In addition, 95 percent of the high school graduates in that city and county go on to some kind of postsecondary education.
Well, yes…
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2006The New York Times is reporting that President Bush has chosen Larry Faulkner, a chemist and a former President of the University of Texas at Austin to head the National Math Panel:
The former president, Larry R. Faulkner, who led the university from 1998 until early this year, will be chairman of the National Math Panel, which President Bush created by executive order in mid-April.
The panel is modeled on the National Reading Panel, which has been highly influential in promoting phonics and a back-to-basics approach to reading in classrooms around the nation. Though that panel has been…