education
pontiff | June 25, 2008No, no, I'm not leaving academia (yet :) Pfffffft! That's the sound of me thumbing my nose at the world.) But recently I was thinking about about people who get a Ph.D. in, say, physics, or are a new postdoc, and then are faced with what to do next. As Peter Rhode, writes in a post today (or whatever day it is in the upside down part of the world) entitled "Farewell physics":
The academic system has some serious problems. Most notably in my opinion, there is very limited scope for promotion. For every permanent position there are countless postdocs competing for that position. It simply…
gregladen | June 24, 2008Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ...
Yet another item from the first day of the conference, the pre-conference teachers day sponsored by Evolution 2008 and the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MnCSE) ...
The Minnesota Citizens for Science Education presented Ken Hubert with an award. I am blanking on the name of the award right now, but eventually, the MnCSE web site will probably have a page on this, or an announcement about it. (We need time for some dust to settle.)
Who is Ken Hubert?
Well, when it comes to the Evolution - Creationism 'debate…
gregladen | June 23, 2008Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ...
Karen Oberhauser talked about the "single species" approach to pedagogy. This involves focusing on a single species and using it throughout an entire course. Karen has taught classes on this approach for teachers' professional development programs.
The species she uses is the Monarch Butterfly.
Karen is a world class expert on this insect, and runs a major research project with them.
The idea of a single-species approach is that a student learns a great deal about one particular species, to the extent that this…
bioephemera | June 23, 2008My friend Rhett alerted me to this little word game, which is kind of like Balderdash: you pick the correct etymology or definition from a group of fakes created by tricky readers. I did quibble with a couple of mistakes (one definition was off, one word was misspelled) but I tried three times and couldn't beat it. Can you?
Other wordy recreations:
this is my all-time favorite hard online word quiz. . . I scored 183 and broke a sweat doing it.
this is an addictive Boggle-style game from Flash By Night.
gregladen | June 22, 2008It has been said that home schooling is a bit suspicious because it is possible for people to keep their kids home to abuse them. This is probably very very rare, but yes, it is possible and there are examples of it. however, home schoolers often (at least the most vocal amongst them) insist this is impossible and that it is merely a ploy to ... ah, do to something, I'm not quite sure what.
As these arguments waft and weft across the intertubes, there is a very common kind of pseudo-logic that we hear. This is what is looks like:
"Home schooling is not bad because public schools are bad…
clock | June 22, 2008This should be interesting to all of us, be it people who study capabilities of online education or people who study teen online behavior. It also appears to be a part of gradual shift from media scares about "online predators" to a more serious look at what the Web is bringing to the new generations and how it changed the world:
Educational Benefits Of Social Networking Sites Uncovered:
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income…
gregladen | June 21, 2008Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference.
This is a well done and highly recommended book.
Birds... is highly specialized. It deals with only one topic: Bird flight. I like that. Who needs just another book on birds. Demonstrating to the little ones that there are questions that can be…
denialism | June 20, 2008Surprisingly, it's not due to the horribly misguided abstinence education nonsense. In fact, I can't even begin to wrap my mind around this one.
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies--more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town.…
mikethemadbiologist | June 18, 2008For the last two decades, give or take, charter schools have been a cause celebre for conservatives. Yet they seem to have abandoned them as a political issue. Here's one reason why (italics mine):
Bill Burrow, the associate director of the Office on Competitiveness under the first President Bush, has noted that school choice is "popular in the national headquarters of the Republican Party but is unpopular among the Republican rank-and-file voters who have moved away from the inner city in part so that their children will not have to attend schools that are racially or socioeconomically…
drorzel | June 18, 2008A bunch of academic bloggers have been talking about the American Scholar essay by William Deresiewicz. The always-perceptive Timothy Burke offers some insightful comments about the general problems of elite education.
Burke is also a lot kinder to Deresiewicz than I'm inclined to be. Because, frankly, the piece pisses me off, from the very first paragraph:
It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2008tags: evolution, beak and body size, Geospiza fortis, inbreeding, mating patterns, reproductive isolation, sexual imprinting
A family tree depicts the evolution of the 14 species of "Darwin's finches".
(The focus of this study, the Medium Ground Finch, Geospiza fortis, is denoted with a red dot).
[larger image].
I have always been fascinated by the process of speciation throughout my scientific career because speciation is the "engine" that generates biological diversity. But what are the evolutionary mechanisms that lead to speciation? We know that mate choice can be one important…
bioephemera | June 16, 2008
Via Rag & Bone Blog
By Christopher Tovo
Are we falling out of love with books?
I realized a little while ago - when yet another book arrived from Amazon and was thrown on the to-read pile - that I'm no longer the bibliophile I once was. I love the idea of reading books, but I'm not making time to do it. Recent fiction isn't appealing - I don't seem to have the patience or interest. (I feel like Jessica Crispin in that respect). And nonfiction, which I have been reading occasionally, seems too much like a part of my job.
I'm really disturbed by this trend. I self-identify as a devoted…
drorzel | June 15, 2008Another year in academia, another graduation ceremony. It poured for a lot of the day yesterday, so everybody was a little nervous coming in, but the weather turned out to be good-- clear blue skies, a few puffy white clouds, and temperatures that were a little warm for sitting outside in long black robes, but quite reasonable other than that.
This year's Physics class was the largest in recent memory, and one of the very best. They distinguished themselves not only in physics classes, but on the campus in general-- we don't get a lot of majors who are widely known on campus, and exert a…
mikethemadbiologist | June 15, 2008I've discussed Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's public support for creationism before. What's galling is that his idiocy can't be laid at cognitive deficiency or ignorance. I was in the same graduating class as Jindal, and I know that every biology major had considerable exposure to evolutionary biology.
Clearly, Jindal is being willfully ignorant to avoid theologically inconvenient reality. Now Jindal is further attempting to lower the value of my degree: he performed an exorcism, and believes that it cured the 'possessed' woman of cancer.
(Don't tell Orac, or his head might explode…
bioephemera | June 11, 2008
My boyfriend, an uber-networked Congressional staffer, has fallen out of love with his Palm, and is counting the days until he can acquire a 3G iPhone. I'm trying to accept that I bought one half as good for twice the price a few months back. . . after all, I did enjoy the self-satisfied glow of the semi-early-adopter, fielding all kinds of covetous glances and inquiries from strangers on the Metro. ("No, it's not an iPod Touch.") But I can pass the techno-torch to the next generation gracefully. Maybe.
At least I can console myself with the wave of new third-party apps, many of which will…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2008Here's a letter from the journal Nature from a Mexican author about creationism:
In Mexico, there is no creationist movement and the teaching of evolution is encouraged. The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México has developed high-school programmes based around sequence comparison and phylogenetic reconstruction techniques, as well as the origin of life, early cell evolution and evo-devo issues. There are good reasons for this. First, as every practising scientist knows, understanding evolutionary processes is enriched by an eclectic attitude towards traditional palaeontology and…
sheril | June 10, 2008Well, it seems Facebook just wasn't cool enough for the aspiring Ph.D... Heard of Epernicus? According to the tagline, it's 'Where Science Meets.'
Only you have to be invited.
In fact, you must 'use the name under which you publish, if applicable', so the webhosts can review your request and determine whether you're worthy of an invitation.
The idea is simple. A social networking site to connect with others in your field and share information on research, honors, pedigree, and publications. There's even a blog. I can see this being useful.
Of course, profile photos, chat, and email…
grrlscientist | June 6, 2008tags: physics, second law of thermodynamics, unmixing a solution, streaming video
The second law of thermodynamics: the overall entropy, or disorder, of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium, or at maximum disorder.
Okay, we all know that, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you cannot unmix liquids after they've been mixed, right? Okay, all you smart people, here's a streaming video for you to watch and to explain, where a mixed solution is unmixed by reversing the stirring process. [2:19].
In the…
drorzel | June 5, 2008In the last few weeks, I've been wrapping up E&M, which has included talking about Faraday's Law and induced currents. I did the traditional demonstration using a PASCO ring launcher to demonstrate Lenz's Law, showing that the induced current flows in a direction that creates a field opposing the change in magnetic flux. The ring launcher uses an alternating current in a solenoid to shoot a metal ring a meter or so up in the air, which always gets a good reaction.
The extreme version of the same basic physics is the Meissner Effect, in which currents in a piece of superconductor…
drorzel | June 4, 2008I'm giving the last lecture of new material in my intro E&M class today, on Maxwell's equations and electromagnetic waves. In the last couple of weeks, I've been struck again by the way our trimester system (three ten-week terms, instead of two 15-week semesters) is a lousy match for the standard curricula. Or even new curricula, like the Matter and Interactions course we've started using this year.
In this case, it's not a matter of needing to rush to fit things in, though. It's a matter of peaking at the wrong time
M&I is different than the standard textbooks in a lot of respects,…