education
sporte | April 8, 2008I love using molecular structures as teaching tools. They're beautiful, they're easy to obtain, and working with them is fun.
But working with molecular structures as an educators can present some challenges. The biggest problem is that many of the articles describing the structures are not accessible, particularly those published by the ACS (American Chemical Society). I'm hoping that the new NIH Open Access policy will include legacy publications and increase access to lots of publications about structures.
It would also be great if other funding agencies, like the National Science…
drorzel | April 8, 2008An ad-lib from yesterday's lecture about interactions between electric fields and neutral matter, paraphrased:
So, we can divide macroscopic objects into two categories, based on what happens when you bring large numbers of atoms together. In materials that are insulators, the electrons aren't free to move. The atoms hold onto their electrons very tightly. They're kind of like Republicans.
In materials that are conductors, on the other hand, the electrons are free to move. The atoms share their electrons freely through the whole material. They're basically Communists.
Semiconductors are like…
mikethemadbiologist | April 7, 2008A survey of Florida teens' sexual health knowledge yielded some very disturbing results:
A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.
There's been a lot said in favor of real sex ed and against abstinence-only 'education' (and rightly so), but, if the consequences of unwanted pregnancy and HIV weren't so serious, this other finding would be funny:
The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Louisiana now has an Academic Freedom Act in the works. Academic Freedom Acts are right wing ploys to force specific issues ... or more commonly, specific politically or religiously motivated version of issues ... into the classroom at various levels. Academic Freedom Acts also typically are designed to silence faculty who teach things that conservatives, evangelicals, global warming deniers, and so on do not want to hear.
From a commentary in The Daily Advertiser:
Gov. Bobby Jindal's first regular-session legislative plan is designed to help Louisiana schools train a better work-force. So…
gregladen | April 6, 2008Catholic Ex Wife looking rather holy.The players:
Dad. David Ryan, atheist. Plaintiff, represented by Ed Kagin of American Atheists.
Mom. Susin Bisig, Catholic (That's her in the photo, wrapping herself around the cross, it would appear.)
Kid. Michael.
The question: Where does Michael go to school, a Catholic School where both he and his mom want him to go, or to an academically equivalent public school, where his dad wants him to go?
This is a case being decided in Kentucky and pertaining to state constitutional law regarding religion. The case was effectively decided several…
pontiff | April 4, 2008The very first AP class I took in high school was the Computer Science AB test. Today, I learn from the Washington Post, that the Computer Science AB test is on the chopping block (along with Italian, Latin literature, and French literature.)
The AP Computer Science AB test is a superset of the AP Computer Science A test, yet I cannot help but thinking that this is a sad day for computer science education. Among the topics which are (or were) in the AB test but not in the A test are (or were)
Two-dimensional arrays
Linked lists (singly, doubly, circular)
Stacks
Queues
Trees
Heaps
Priority…
drorzel | April 4, 2008I had the first lab of the term yesterday in my introductory E&M class. This is the first time I've taught out of this book (Matter & Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood), which actually includes the basic elements of this lab as suggested activities in the second chapter of the text. The lab was more successful than I expected (I've done the lab before), and I even managed to add a somewhat more free-form element to it, that worked out well.
The materials for the lab are extremely simple: One roll of "invisible" tape for each group, plus some sort of stand for them to stick tape to.…
drorzel | April 4, 2008The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century":
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…
neurophilosophy | April 3, 2008From my inbox:
First Interdisciplinary NeuroSchool of the European Neuroscience and Society Network,
EMBL, Monterotondo (Rome)
Sept. 28th-Oct. 5th
We are pleased to invite applications to the first interdisciplinary 'NeuroSchool' of the European Neuroscience and Society Network, a five year programme involving leading neuroscientists and social scientists from eleven European countries in collaborative research and debate. The aim of the school is to foster learning in a interdisciplinary symmetrical environment. It is intended for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows…
gregladen | April 3, 2008Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don't need to go that far, he reminds us -- it's as simple as asking a teacher "How can I help?" He asks that we share our own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School.
drorzel | April 3, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family's money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores…
drorzel | April 3, 2008Kevin Drum points to a report comparing international education systems from McKinsey and Company management consultants. The report (9.5 MB PDF) does double duty: it serves as a useful and important contribution to the study of education reform, and also as a case study in how to use PowerPoint to generate documents that are well nigh unreadable-- it's tarted up with so many pointless graphics that it makes even FoxIt run annoyingly slow.
Kevin's got the key conclusions, though: if you want better schools, you need better teachers, and if you want better teachers, you need to make education…
drorzel | April 2, 2008I have a doctor's appointment this morning, and then class, so here's another Dorky Poll inspired by the fact that I'm teaching intro E&M:
What system of units do you prefer for E&M: SI, or CGS?
This is even dorkier than usual, so I suppose I should provide some context...
The CGS system of units uses Centimeters, Grams, and Seconds as the base usints for everything, as opposed to the metere, kilograms, and seconds of the Systeme Internationale (also called MKS in some places). This doesn't make very much difference in mechanics, but it's a big deal in electromagnetism, because the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2008I recently argued that, rather than sending out tax rebates to stimulate the economy, the money should be sent to state and local governments because they're hurting and will spend the money. Case in point, Boston's public schools:
The new superintendent of Boston's Public Schools (BPS), Carol Johnson, dropped a bombshell this past week, declaring that her department has discovered an unanticipated budget problem so severe that millions of dollars' worth of programs must be cut -- some schools may even be forced to close.
....According to the BPS and Menino's office, if no cuts are made,…
gregladen | March 28, 2008
The University of California Board of Regents today (March 27) voted unanimously to appoint Mark G. Yudof, current head of the University of Texas system and a recognized leader in American higher education, the 19th president of the University of California.
The appointment was made during a special meeting of the board following a search committee's recommendation last week. Yudof will succeed Robert C. Dynes, who last August announced his intention to step down by June 2008 after nearly five years in the position.
Yudof's appointment will become effective this summer, with the exact date…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2008Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) sent me this:
SEA is holding a workshop to train scientists to run for office on May 10th at Georgetown University. If you are a scientist or engineer and have been considering running for office or working on an election campaign, then join us for a crash course on how it's done. Below is a video for the workshop featuring Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
Interesting.
denialism | March 28, 2008At long last I have finished my surgical requirements. After 12 weeks of nonstop surgery rotations, despite enjoying it thoroughly, I'm ready to try something else for a while. Or at least I'm looking forward to waking up at 6AM rather than 4AM for a few months. It seems like such a small difference, but it's literally the difference between night and day. Especially during the winter, starting at 5 on the wards and finishing usually well after dark, you begin to wonder if you'll see the sun again. Being able to walk into work when it's actually light out is very appealing.
My traffic…
drorzel | March 28, 2008My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I've begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I'm teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We're starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I've been making up new lecture slides.
At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I'd be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I've wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them…
drorzel | March 27, 2008The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons:
The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up the ladder, but the rest of us have to do our time first. It's a sort of penance for not having wealthy parents. I know our society worships money, but there should be some kind of limits. It implicitly defines higher education as a purely private good, which I reject out of hand. (This isn't just the…
gregladen | March 26, 2008Anne Coulter sends me emails now and then (she doesn't know who I am ... don't tell her) so I get the inside anorexia, I mean, the inside skinny on some of the moves the hard right wing are making now and then. Astonishingly, very little of this is ever of any interest. But the latest tidbit is somewhat interesting. The righties are creaming in their jeans about the republication (which actually happened last year) of Sebastian Adams' "time line of history."
This document from the 1870s is historically interesting because it is one of the early "time lines" and it does reflect what some…