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Parrots, People and Pedagogies: A Look at Teaching and Education

tags: psychology, behavior, pedagogy, education, learning, teaching methods, model/rival technique, Avian Learning EXperiment, Avian Language EXperiment, ALEX, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club ALEX the African Grey Parrot and Dr Irene Pepperberg. Image: The ALEX Foundation. Like anyone who has taught science courses, and probably like anyone who has ever taught anything to a classroom in the history of mankind, I've wondered how to motivate my students to really care about the material they are learning, beyond simply "studying for the test." For example, I have…

"It's quietâtoo quiet;" with a digression into online social media

Other people are doing NPG vs. CDL link roundups better than I am, so I'll limit myself to a few links: Think this is a one-off moment of insanity on NPG's part? Bernd-Christoph Kaemper demonstrates the pattern. Steve Lawson of Colorado College shares text of an email he sent to faculty at his institution. He is graciously allowing the rest of us to plunder his wording. Go ye and spread the signal! The next domino? How many more will there be? Have you read Bethany Nowviskie's Fight Club Soap post yet? If you haven't, do. If you have, you might want to check back for the comments, some of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Study Finds How Organs Monitor Themselves During Early Development: Scientists at NYU School of Medicine have unraveled the signals in a feedback loop governing ovarian development. This work has been several years in the making and is being published on August 27 in the advance online issue of the journal Nature. This is a big, complicated and exciting study in Drosophila. Scientists Discover Memory Molecule : Scientists have succeeded in erasing memory in animal models. These findings may be useful for the treatment of disorders characterized by the pathological over-strengthening of…

Parasite of my parasite is not my friend

Re-post from May 17, 2006, under the fold... When teaching biology, one has to cut up the syllabus into edible and digestible chunks, and it makes sense to cover various subdisciplines in separate lectures. As you know, I strive to find ways to make connections to students so they don't leave with a sense that all those subdisciplines are disconnected from each other, almost like separate sciences. One obvious way to do it is to place everything heavily into an evolutionary context. Another way - and the two go hand-in-hand - is to find really cool diseases, like malaria, in which findings…

The New Essentials?

This list popped up on my screen this morning, and I thought it was an interesting window into a worldview. The article lists ten things that despite the economy, we aren't cutting back on: Portable computers. The iPad might be the latest must-have gizmo, but the power of computers transcends trendiness. Brianna Karp, for instance, discovered lots of homeless people online, many logging in through their own laptops, like her. Shipments of notebooks have skyrocketed over the last three years, with sales in 2010 likely to be double what they were in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics…

Tracking investigators' findings about on-the-job fatalities

Hedilberto Sanchez, 26, was killed on Monday (Jan 11, 2010) at a construction site in Elmhurst, NY when an 18-foot high cinder block wall collapsed on him. He leaves behind his wife, and two sons, Luis, 6 and Edison, 3. Three other workers were injured in the incident, including Mr. Sanchez's brother. The men worked for a subcontractor (who I've been unable to identify) who was hired by the property developer Thomas J. Huang. Mr. Huang has been described in some circles as a one-man wrecking crew for his disregard for building codes, zoning rules and other laws. The New York Times'…

Ada Lovelace Day post: Justine Cassell

For my Ada Lovelace Day post, I wanted to focus on someone who is doing interesting and interdisciplinary work in computer science, and whose work has interesting and important applications. Justine Cassell, Director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University, is just such a person. I first heard about Dr. Cassell's work in this article: Using "virtual peers" -- animated life-sized children that simulate the behaviors and conversation of typically developing children -- Northwestern University researchers are developing interventions designed to prepare…

Does valuable information want to be free?

The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the "Google model" for disseminating information. Baum writes: I did a Yahoo search on "information wants to be free." The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because…

Mike the Mad Biologist Says... [The Rightful Place Project]

Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist. Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…

Mike the Mad Biologist Says...

Swine flu: pandemic pre-history

However this pandemic evolves, we are going to learn a lot about how pandemics evolve -- or maybe even start. A paper just published online in Nature sets out a bit more of what we know about this pandemic strain (yes, we can officially refer to it that way now) and makes some observations about its prehistory (its history before it became known and documented by we mortals). Maryn McKenna has an excellent run-down over at CIDRAP News, which you should read. Here's our take on it. First, we'd like to make a "meta-science" observation. This paper is unusual in several ways. The least…

Help me put together The Anthology of the Best Science Blogging!

You may have seen (or even bought and read) those annual collections of science-related articles that were published in print press over a course of a year, e.g., The Best American Science Writing 2006 or The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006. Wonderful stuff, written by real pros. But we are bloggers - the TIME persons of the year! We think differently. We want amateurs, not pros. We want best in the world, not just American. The idea about an anthology of best science writing came from Lulu.com, a local online publishing company, which has initially offered to print a…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Ken Liu

Continuing 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. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Ken Liu from Scivee.tv 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 your (scientific) background? KL: I am a serial entrepreneur…

Dr. Oz: America's doctor and the abdication of professional responsibility

Believe it or not, there was once a time when Dr. Mehmet Oz didn't bother me that much. At least, for all his flirting with woo, I never quite thought that he had completely gone over to the Dark Side. Although I probably knew deep down that I was fooling myself. Maybe it was because Dr. Oz is a surgeon--and not just a surgeon but a cardiac surgeon. After the enthusiastic embrace of pseudoscience by so many surgeons, and in particular Dr. Michael Egnor's embrace of "intelligent design" creationism and mind-brain dualism, maybe I didn't want to believe that yet another surgeon had fallen for a…

Gluten-free ≠ healthier

One of the more annoying health crazes going around right now is the gluten-free diet. While it’s a boon to the very small proportion of the population who have real celiac disease and thus truly cannot tolerate gluten, at the same time gluten has become the health demon that is touted as the cause of virtually all health problems, be they major or minor, with the cure—of course!—being the now nearly ubiquitous gluten-free diet. The gluten-free diet has become so popular that restaurants and food manufacturers ignore it at their financial peril. Indeed, restaurants that don’t have some gluten…

Article-Level Metrics at PLoS - Download Data (updated with links)

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are certainly aware that PLoS has started making article-level metrics available for all articles. Today, we added one of the most important sets of such metrics - the number of times the article was downloaded. Each article now has a new tab on the top, titled "Metrics". If you click on it, you will be able to see the numbers of HTML, XML and PDF downloads, a graph of downloads over time and a link to overall statistics for the field, the journal, and PLoS as a whole. Mark Patterson explains (also here and here), what it all means: We believe…

Thar's gold in them thar "cures"

One of the favorite gambits that alternative medicine mavens like to use to defend their favorite remedies when a skeptic starts asking uncomfortably pointed and specific questions their scientific and evidentiary basis is to accuse said skeptic of being "in the pocket of big pharma." Indeed, I've written before of the "pharma shill gambit," where alties accuse skeptics of being nothing more than shills for the pharmaceutical industry (to which I always respond that it would be a dream come true to be paid for doing nothing more than posting skepticism about non-evidence-based medicine to a…

The pain of not getting cited: oversight, laziness, or malice?

Those of us who publish technical research papers like to see our work cited by our colleagues. Indeed, it's integral to one's success as a researcher (whatever 'success' means) that others cite your work, in whatever context. You might not like to see the publication of a stinging attack that demolishes your cherished hypothesis and shows how your approach and data analysis (and maybe overall philosophy, intellect and ability to write) are flawed, but the fact is that someone has at least read, and is citing, your work... and that's still a sort of success. These days - sad to say - the '…

Schadenfreude again over David Irving

Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary. How do I deserve such "honors"? In any case, while I'm…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Rethinking The Genetic Theory Of Inheritance: Heritability May Not Be Limited To DNA: Scientists at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) have detected evidence that DNA may not be the only carrier of heritable information; a secondary molecular mechanism called epigenetics may also account for some inherited traits and diseases. These findings challenge the fundamental principles of genetics and inheritance, and potentially provide a new insight into the primary causes of human diseases. This wasn't new 50 years ago... Adaptation Plays Significant Role In Human Evolution: For…

Canadian isotopes fiasco foreshadows troubles for nuclear industry everywhere

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday that Canada is getting out of the medical isotope business. The implications of the decision, which appears to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid further political embarrassment, go beyond the confines of the country's health-care system. It also hints at some tough times ahead for those responsible for overseeing the world's nuclear industries. First, Canada until recently produced close to 40% of the world's supply molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays quickly to technetium-99, which is widely used to help diagnose cancers…

A neural system for mindlessness

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time not thinking about anything in particular. You read a couple papers, get a little work done, and then you stare off into space for a period of pleasant mindlessness. From a neuroscientist's perspective, we spend a lot of time determining how we react to particular stimuli or how we accomplish certain cognitive tasks. We tend to view the brain as a little black box that coordinates responses to particular stimuli -- admittedly elaborate responses, but responses nonetheless. What we don't spend much time doing is figuring out what we are doing…

Open Access publishing at ScienceOnline 2009

So ScienceWoman and I will be sharing live-blogging duties today, at least until our batteries give out. We're both starting at the Open Access publishing session, although I was also intrigued by Peggy Kolm's session about science fiction on science blogs. I'll have to catch up with her later. Also, please note: this is liveblogging. There may be grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, unfinished sentences. But it's hot off the press. I'll try to come back and clean things up afterwards. FYI. I wanted to go to the open access talk because my department is talking about publication needs…

Boreal and South American Birds

Fall, a very sunny, very breezy day on the lake, Amanda and I sitting in the cabin minding our own business. Suddenly, ...thwack... ... well, it was a sort of tiny miniature thwack, but a thwack nonetheless. Peering outside through the window, we could see the the last death throws of a tiny greenish bird that had run into the window. The lighting conditions must have been just right for this bird to think that it could fly through the cabin, because this was an odd and unusual event. (We later made further adjustments to the window to see to it that this did not happen again, of…

To Restore Science to Its Rightful Place, We Need to Redefine Elitism

Is the Speaker of the House Insane?

Just look at this transcript from Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, an interview with Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert: HASTERT: Well, you know, that doesn't do any good. You know, but look behind us at this convention. I remember when I was a kid watching my first convention in 1992, when both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party laid out their platform, laid out their philosophy, and that's what they followed. Here in this campaign, quote, unquote, "reform," you take party power away from the party, you take the philosophical ideas away from the party, and give them to these…

Good grad student advice from the Chronicle

A colleague of mine sent around this link to the Chronicle (behind firewall, boo!) for some advice on how to stay healthy, even perhaps happy, while working on your dissertation. See the ideas after the fold. By author Piper Fogg: Learn to recognize the signs of depression and anxiety and don't be afraid to seek medical evaluation and treatment. Consider various options -- such as therapy, medication, relaxation techniques, and other forms of alternative medicine. Familiarize yourself with the campus counseling center as well as off-campus options. Follow your mother's advice: Eat a…

Hot Politics: the dirt on climate change

Nobody emerges looking good in Hot Politics, a PBS Frontline documentary on the politics of the first Bush, Clinton and second Bush administrations. It aired last night, but the whole thing is available online. Not a lot we didn't already know, but it's sobering to be reminded that the inertia that has prevented serious action on global warming long predates the current federal government. For example... A lot of us had forgotten how poorly the Clinton Administration scored on the environmental front. Clinton and VP Al Gore (there he is again), started off gangbusters with a radical proposal…

Challenge to climate deniers: Can you top this?

The British (including the Northern Irish) have all the fun. Guardian columnist George Monbiot has just launched the Christopher Booker prize, to be awarded to whoever "manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change." It's named after a columnist at the competing Telegraph, a man who manages to get just about everything wrong, and not just about climate change. Booker's most recent column, in fact, is a collection of misrepresentations on the subject of biological…

Apple to sell DRM-free music

The University of Chicago's Randy Picker discusses the implications: Apple and EMI announced today that they would start selling higher-quality DRM-free music on iTunes at a price of $1.29 per track, 30 cents more than iTunes’s standard 99 cents price. This is an outgrowth of Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Music (my post on that here). The press conference slides indicate that 84% of surveyed European consumers would like to be able to move their music files between devices and this will make that possible. This is an interesting expansion of the iTunes business model, and one that should further…

The Blogging Personality

tags: Who Blogs, blog writing and personality, Big Five personality inventory, social psychology, technology, computers, internet, researchblogging.org You all read blogs, and many of you write them, too. But what sort of person writes a blog? Are there particular personality traits that make certain people more likely to write a blog? If so, what are those personality traits? Do you have them, too? A team of scientists, led by psychologist Rosanna Guadagno from the University of Alabama, wondered what personality traits made some people more likely than others to write blogs. To answer…

NASA team provides free satellite public health data to researchers and communities

by Dominika Heusinkveld, MD, MPH Researchers at NASA and the University of Arizona, among others, are hoping to make real-time air quality forecasting a reality in the next few years. The NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, or HAQAST, is collaborating with health departments, county and state agencies, and university researchers to get the word out about its satellite data. The data, available for free online, can help track air quality indicators, heavy metals in air, dust, and other atmospheric components which can affect human health. Photo courtesy of NASA Image Library…

If There is a Problem with Science Journalists, It's That They Are Losing Their Jobs...But There Is Hope In a New Model

Sometimes I just don't get it. Whether it is climate change, evolution, or vaccination, the more literal minded among science bloggers and pundits typically blame science journalists for breakdowns in public communication. Yet as I discuss in a forthcoming article at Skeptical Inquirer magazine, constantly blaming the media messenger deflects attention away from the fact that scientists and experts themselves make mistakes when it comes to public engagement (or that literal minded bloggers create more heat than understanding). As I often like to point out in talks, research shows that…

Gender Studies, Science Studies, and the Evo-Psych Researchers in Between: Part 2 with Martha McCaughey

Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 --- Part 2 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: How do you see the relationship between the academic fields of gender studies and science studies? And how has that relationship changed in the past two decades? I'm asking for a few reasons, but one of them is that I remember from graduate studies that many of the most persuasive accounts of the politics of science and technology came from feminist scholars. MM: It's a big question, so I'll offer but a start…

Skyscrapers as Farms: "Skyfarming"

Photo: Architectural Design by Rolf Mohr; Modeling and Rendering by Machine Films; Interiors by James Nelms ÂDigital Artist @ Storyboards Online A while back, I posted about apartment buildings that double as farms. New York magazine has a really interesting article about urban skyscrapers that would function as vertical hydroponic farms. I have no idea if this "skyfarming" could work, but the idea that cities, with abundant supplies of grey water (unpotable water that can be used in agriculture), could be the next food basket is tantalizing. It could really revitalize the urban and…

Around the Web: Bandwagons, Skills, Crises, Lectures and more

Before You Jump on the Bandwagon ... (MOOCs) It’s not about skills (hiring the right people and letting them do their job) All is revealed: the real crisis on campus Crafting an Engaging Lecture MOOCs' Missing Pieces MOOCs' Contradictions Publishers Double Down (GSU copyright case) Doing DH versus Doing Digital Digital Textbooks Still Not Catching On With College Students Time to go it alone on Open Access As Students Scatter Online, Colleges Try to Keep Up (email is so 2011) Hats off to Amazon (for cornering a whole bunch of ebook markets) The Plagiarism Perplex MOOCing On Site (site-based…

Around the Web: Irreverant scientists, Bookstores & choices, Myths about women in tech and more

True scientists are irreverent Bookshops, You Have Three Choices The three biggest myths about women in tech On thumb twiddling (how not to run your IR) Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the 'Children's Online Privacy Protection Act' Tightening the Net: Intellectual property micro-regimes and peer-to-peer practice in higher education networks The Creepy Librarian Stalker Hypothesis Students Push Their Facebook Use Further Into Course Work Hacking (Higher) Education: An Intro (Some) garbage in, gold out Building the perfect data repository…

It's like they're just begging me to crash it

How can I resist when they name it THE GOD POLL? There are several questions there: Does god exist (currently tied between yes and no)? Is there life after death (roughly tied, with yes in a slight lead)? Do humans have souls (yes is leading, 50%:34%)? Can an atheist be ethical (Yes is way ahead, fortunately)? Is evolution accurate (yes is at 64%, not bad)? Vote on 'em all! I think we have discovered the most pathetic online poll ever. The creator is jacking around the numbers now to whatever he feels like; he has left a comment here to complain; he's playing a little game of sockpuppetry ("…

There's something wrong here

Grrlscientist is pushing another of those online quiz thingies—What's Your Theme Song?—and it was quick and easy, so I took it. Now I'm horribly scarred. Especially compared to my fellow science bloggers, I got a result that disturbs me deeply. I may end up getting kicked off scienceblogs over this. Your Theme Song is Oops I Did It Again by Britney Spears "It might seem like a crush But it doesn't mean that I'm serious" Heartbreaker, superflirt, player... you've been called all of those. You're not that innocent, and you know that you have a super sexy vibe! What's Your Theme Song…

Looking for good educational biology movies

I am teaching my BIO101 again starting this Monday. The class is very small, so the discussions and student presentations will not last very long. Thus, I will have extra time at the end of each lecture. This can be a good time to show some videos. So, if you know of good movies available online or that can be ordered as CDs or VHS tapes, let me know in the comments (check the link for the topics I need to cover). I have a couple of ancient tapes whcih will do in a jiffy, but I am looking for more recent and better stuff. Keep in mind that this is VERY basic biology. Thus, the cool…

Autism cranks going after bloggers

It's time to open up a can of Streisand. The author of the autism blog Neurodiversity, along with many other blogs and other online entities, has been subpoenaed to produce what amounts to her entire life to aid in some frivolous autism suit. The only thing they didn't ask her to do was submit to a speculum exam (don't get any ideas, bastards!). This is truly outrageous. It is a clear attempt by a group of (forgive me, please PP) demented fucking wackaloons to intimidate a humble New Englander who enjoys writing. Time to get the word out! (Hat tip LizDitz) Addendum: Orac and others…

Britain has some wacky beliefs, too

Perhaps my fellow Americans feel a little dismayed at the news of all those young creationist school teachers…well, a recent poll in Britain showed that people have some awfully materialist opinions about god. Only 1% of people think of God as female, with 62% considering God to be male, the online survey conducted earlier this month of 1,050 adults in Britain found. Weird. So god has a penis, and a Y chromosome? Some day, they've got to ask people some other details of god's physical attributes. What shade is his skin color? What color eyes does he have? At his age, does he get regular…

Participate in an experiment - how do you compare to philosophers on solving moral dilemmas?

Eric Schwitzgebel, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and Fiery Cushman, a psychology post-doc at Harvard, are conducting an online experiment which involves comparing philosophers' and non-philosophers' responses to questions about moral dilemmas. They got plenty of philosophers to do the experiments, but they need more non-philosophers for the comparison group. Their "Moral Sense Test" asks respondents for their takes on various moral dilemmas. They say that people who have taken other versions of this test have found it…

Seed Writing Contest

Seed Magazine and Honeywell are having a writing contest. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, the contest is restricted to US residents over 18. The deadline is July 1st, the length limit is 1200 words and the topic is: What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century? How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it? Several of my SciBlings have blogged their thoughts and ideas about the contest and you should try entering: the first prize is $2500 and the second place wins $…

How Democratic Are You?

If I had to choose between being a democrat or a rethuglican, well, I'd choose democrat, however, I am more of a rational humanist than I am anything else. But just for shits and giggles, I decided to take this quiz, now that the democrats are hanging on to control of the congress by their fingernails. Hopefully they will accomplish something of value rather than being dick-heads by completely shutting down congress as someone else did did a few years ago, just to prove their had bigger political penises than their adversaries. You Are 80% Democrat You have a good deal of donkey running…

What Does Your Latte Say About You?

tags: latte, online quiz What Your Latte Says About You When it comes to what you like, you have your own unique tastes. And people don't really understand them. You are a very serious person. You don't have time for silly antics. Intense and energetic, you aren't completely happy unless you are bouncing off the walls. You're addicted to caffeine. There's no denying it. You are responsible, mature, and truly an adult. You're occasionally playful, but you find it hard to be carefree. You are complex and philosophical, but you are never arrogant. What Does Your Latte Say About You? Okay…

European Bee-eaters

tags: ornithology, birds, avian, National Geographic A dragonfly has no stinger, but a European bee-eater, Merops apiaster, will beat it senseless anyway, the same way it handles its namesake prey. If the fly's wings break off, they are discarded, not eaten. The insect is then devoured as a single morsel, not as a mini-buffet of bite-size bits. Image: JÃ¶zsef L. SzentpÃ©teri/National Geographic online. [larger view]. I mentioned this last week, but I think it deserves a second mention: My contact, an editor at National Geographic, just sent me a link to a story and photoessay that…

Perfect Parking Test

Okay, after I finished writing that last piece of breaking science news, I am ready to relax with some thought-free fun and games for a little while. How about going out to a restaurant for something to eat? Oh, living in NYC as I do, I forgot that some people have to drive a car instead of hopping onto the subway. Of course, driving a car means that you have to park the danged thang, which can pose a problem in and of itself. Can you park a car without crashing it? This little test might interest you; it's a test that gives you 60 seconds to park that little yellow car in the highlighted…

Astro Cat Pics Needed

I need photos of cats. Cute, quirky or feline. Whichever. As long as they are cat only or cat dominated, they are your pictures (you took them and own copyright) and you're willing to let me use them online lightly photoshopped for text and trimming. I'll provide link, acknowledgement or anonymity as desired, but I need a couple of dozen or more photos. So send them in. Please.. UPDATE: thanks everyone. Between commenters and private e-mail I have a rather nice selection. Keep an eye out for your favourite wee beastie appearing in a subtly photoshopped kosmological concept. I'm still…

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