education
sheril | November 23, 2008John Lynch over at Stranger Fruit recommended this quiz by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute featuring 33 questions designed to measure knowledge of America's founding principles, political history, international relations, and market economy. According to ISI, 71% of Americans fail and the average score is 49%.
I got 85% (28 out of 33). See how you do...
amillikan | November 20, 2008Education & Careers
"Inspecting an optical circuit after the wafer dicing saw step. Many labor tasks - from retail to security to manufacturing - seemed to go for triple redundancy." From Flickr, by jurvetson
“The double-talk: We won't fund you if you have been around since the first ice-age, but we don't take that into account, but having a big name PI on your grant helps'.AGGHH...its enough to make your head spin.“
Dr. Zeek on Is this affirmative action for younger investigators or something else?
grrlscientist | November 19, 2008tags: Boston Museum of Science, education, science, streaming video
This fun and interesting video makes me want to go to Boston for a daytrip so I can go to the fabulous Museum of Science! [3:28].
grrlscientist | November 17, 2008... and what I did to make it a success..
NOTE: this is reposted here from my original blogger site at the urging of my friend and colleague, Bora. Thanks Bora for noticing and remembering this piece!
When I hosted the 23rd issue of the Tangled Bank (TB23) on 9 March 2005, I didn't know what to expect because I had never hosted a blog carnival before and in fact, I had only recently figured out what a blog carnival actually is. Nevertheless, my primary goals were to have fun and to avoid the pitfalls experienced by previous hosts. One of the worst problems that recent issues of TB…
drorzel | November 17, 2008There's a link in today's links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There's some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret.
I would like to dissent mildly from one of their points, in the Better Axes post, specifically the advice about not starting at zero. In many cases, this is good advice, but like most rules of thumb, it shouldn't be followed too closely.
Take, for example, this post from one of my metastable xenon papers:
A strict application of the…
bioephemera | November 16, 2008Scibling Brian Switek over at Laelaps is in the running for the $10,000 science blogging college scholarship, and he needs your help to win. I'm amazed again just typing this that Brian is a college student. He writes more eloquent, insightful essays than most graduate students! (And if you don't read Laelaps, you should. . . his worst crime lies in blogging too much for me to keep up!)
Vote here (voting is open until Nov 20.)
bioephemera | November 14, 2008
These are Food Chain Friends. According to FAO Schwartz, "They're friends. They eat each other. It's a complicated relationship!" Uh. . . okay. You try to explain that to YOUR kids!
Via Boing Boing Gadgets
sheril | November 14, 2008by Philip H.
Now that the Election is over, there is the serious business of communicating and framing science to get back to. We learned a few things this year - science issues aren't yet ready for primetime debates, but if you ask cogent questions, and keep the number relatively small, you can get answers. Likewise, we learned that many Americans, and their politicians, still don't get the links between the science we practice, and the policies that candidates were debating. So, what's a scientist to do in these circumstances?
Well, I thought a little research was in order to help me…
clock | November 13, 2008Will Richardson is noticing an addiction to paper and he looks at himself:
Now I don't know that I've ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still…
bioephemera | November 13, 2008My friend Kiki created this awesome choreography to represent her PhD thesis on sea turtle conservation. Kiki explains,
The dance opens with aerial dancers. The suspended fluidity of their movements embodies swimming in the ocean. The swinging and dancing couples are sea turtles mating. In the wild sea turtles breed and nest in the same time and place that shrimpers fish and so the sea turtles can get caught in the nets and drown. This is depicted by the dancing trio as well as the aerial dancer. As the female sea turtle dancer leaves her mate to swim ashore and nest she is caught by the…
drorzel | November 13, 2008Over at Dot Physics, Rhett has just completed a two-part post (Part I, Part II) on quantum physics arguing against the use of photons in teaching quantum physics. Part I gives a very nice introduction to quantum physics, which is why I linked it, but Part II goes a little off the rails. There's not as much physics content, and it ends with a list of phenomena that are able to be described by semi-classical models of light, leading up to a question:
So, if there are no photons, why are they in all the textbooks? That is a great question. I am glad I asked it. I really don't have a great answer…
bioephemera | November 11, 2008The DonorsChoose challenge is over - and given the terrible economy and the distraction of the election, I feel very fortunate to have gotten over $2,000 in donations toward some incredibly creative science/art projects. Here's some of the feedback I've gotten from the teachers:
I am so excited about this project and am very grateful for your generosity. I really appreciate all that you have done to make learning interactive and a unique experience for my students. The chance to express themselves through art will hopefully open their eyes to new possibilities as well as enable them to begin…
drorzel | November 11, 2008Sometime commenter "Dr. Pain" asked, on a mailing list, for book recommendations for his son, who "wants to read up about physics, especially weird modern physics." He adds some qualifications:
Kid's books on physics are way too elementary for him, but the typical "naive adult" book is over his head. Does anyone have any good recommendations for something that would be an interesting introduction to physics at a young teen level?
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't know anything to recommend for this. Partly because it's been so long since I was in middle school, and partly…
drorzel | November 11, 2008Edward Glaeser has an op-ed in the Boston Globe arguing for more education funding:
The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size.
[...]Attracting better teachers will also require much…
grrlscientist | November 11, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, human evolution
As of yesterday, an impoverished pre-kindergarten through 3rd grade classroom from PS111 in the Bronx, NYC, learned that they will be able to learn about birds and other local wildlife because you, Seed Media Group and Random House Publishers donated enough for them to fulfill their funding request to purchase binoculars for the kids to use. Thank you!
Of course, I will be sharing all updates with you that they and all "our classrooms" send during the upcoming…
gregladen | November 8, 2008Earlier, I reported a poll indicating that "one third of British Teachers" support teaching creationism in the classroom. I thought this was vaguely interesting, which is why I mentioned it briefly on this blog, but I put the idea of pursuing this off for a later time.
Well, I have subsequently looked into it a little more and discovered that the poll is bogus. All of the links trace back to an entity known as "teacher's tv" and it is claimed that this entity conducted the poll. The only information provided by "teacher's tv" about this poll is a news item that looks kinda like a blog…
denialism | November 7, 2008It's that time of year, 4th year medical students (like me - kind of) are choosing their future careers and starting to interview all over the country in their residency programs of choice. I've been notably quiet - subsumed in work, study and applications - but I am catching up on writing about the clerkships I've done in the meantime (Pediatrics, Psych, OB/Gyn and Family Medicine). But since I'm applying for residency now (MD/PhDs have an abbreviated 4th year) I figured now would be a good time to tell people about what this is like, and in the coming months what cities I'm going to be in…
grrlscientist | November 6, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, human evolution
As of yesterday, an impoverished 9th grade classroom in Massachusetts learned that they will be able to learn about the evolution of hominids because you donated enough for them to fulfill their funding request. Thank you!
Of course, I will be sharing all updates with you that they and all "our classrooms" send during the upcoming school year.
9th Graders Study Evolution: Did We Really Evolve From Apes?
Dear GrrlScientist,
Thank you so much for your support! I…
drorzel | November 5, 2008Slate (who, by the way, drive me up the freaking wall with their habit of giving each story about six different headlines, depending on where the link is) has hit the ground running with a panel of distinguished right-wing types discussing what the Republicans should do now. Jim Manzi gets the ball rolling with an idea that's sure to be a winner: market-based education reform.
No amount of money or number of "programs" will create anything more than marginal improvements, because public schools are organized to serve teachers and administrators rather than students and families. We need, at…
sporte | November 4, 2008This quarter, I'm using a wiki with my bioinformatics class and posting sometimes about the things that I learn.
Two things I've been experimenting with are:
Setting up pages for individual students so they can take notes while they're working.
Embedding a Google form into one of my wiki pages for student assessment.
Here's a diagram showing some of the pages in my bioinformatics class wiki site.
Syllabus: I suppose this reflects on my own lack of organization, but I use the syllabus as a dynamic document, making changes and adding information throughout the course. There are…