education
jdupuis | March 11, 2013I have a son who's currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well.
By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in computational approaches to science.
There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs
The ten commandments of student science blogging…
lborkowski | March 8, 2013by Kim Krisberg
In a little less than a month, public health workers and their community partners in Macomb County, Mich., will set up at the local Babies"R"Us store to offer parents a free child car seat check. The Macomb County Health Department has been organizing such car seat checks for years now, knowing that proper child vehicle restraints can truly mean the difference between mild and severe injuries, or between survival and death.
The car seat check is taking place April 4 in observance of the fourth day of this year's National Public Health Week (NPHW) celebration, which officially…
esiegel | March 3, 2013"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit." -John Steinbeck
One of the great joys I've gotten to experience from my life has gotten to come not only from teaching, but from watching what my students do long after they've left my classroom for good. It's not a joy (with its ups-and-downs) exclusive to me, as Musiq Soulchild would sing you with his song,
Teachme.
Yes, I've had former students who are currently…
esiegel | February 22, 2013"When I say, 'I love you,' it's not because I want you or because I can't have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I've seen your kindness and your strength. I've seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are." -Joss Whedon
I bet you love science; practically all of us do, whether we realize it or not. As children, we all live as scientists, born with no knowledge or experience of this world, but with inherent ability to learn and adapt.
Image credit: ©2005-2013 ~cchhrriissttaa, of deviantART.…
jdupuis | February 13, 2013The biennial Western Conference on Science Education will be taking place this coming July 9–July 11, 2013.
I'm thinking very seriously of going and I think science/engineering librarians in general should consider doing so as well.
Here's how they describe it:
The biennial Western Conference for Science Education creates an ongoing organizational infrastructure that invites teaching and research faculty, librarians and other educational professionals, regardless of their experience level, to collaborate on the improvement of post-secondary Science education through the exchange of…
kbonham | February 12, 2013I spend a lot of time thinking about the scientific method. I don't mean that thing you learned in high school, where you make an observation, form a hypothesis, design an experiment etc etc. That's certainly part of the scientific method, but the linear formula that freshmen are typically forced to memorize sucks the life and interest out of what it is that my colleagues and I do on a daily basis.
Source: The fantastic "How Science Works" from UC Berkeley (click image)
The process of doing science is messy and complicated, and most of the time it doesn't work. There are false starts, bad…
lborkowski | February 8, 2013by Kim Krisberg
A couple years ago, two Johns Hopkins University public health researchers attended a public hearing about the possible expansion of an industrial food animal production facility. During the hearing, a community member stood up to say that if the expansion posed any hazards, the health department would surely be there to protect the people and alert them to any dangers. The two researchers knew that due to limited authority and resources, that probably wasn't the case.
"We felt like there was this false sense of comfort among the public," said Roni Neff, one of the two…
sa smith | February 5, 2013I hate scary stories. They annoy me.
Its the same reason I dont fall back on pop-culture 'viruses' to explain real virology-- I dont need to make up fake scary viruses. There are REAL scary viruses.
Likewise, you dont need to make up scary stories about 'mad scientists'. There are very real humans who were scientists who have done terrible, horrifying things. The New Yorker has a story up about one such scientist, Amy Bishop. A scientist who killed three and wounded three more of her colleagues in 2010 for denying her tenure.
A Reporter at Large A Loaded Gun-- A mass shooter’s tragic past…
gregladen | January 23, 2013In a good way!
This is a very interesting story; I'm going to pass along the press release without modification:
NEA PRESIDENT SUPPORTS SEATTLE EDUCATORS WHO REFUSE TO GIVE FLAWED STANDARDIZED TEST
***Standardized test takes away from student learning***
WASHINGTON—National Education Association (NEA) members at Garfield High School in Seattle, Wash., voted to not administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized test that is not aligned with state standards or the district curriculum. NEA has long urged for the careful consideration of the fact that these…
jtoney | January 23, 2013Thanks to Muhammad Saleem on OnlineColleges.net for sharing this compelling graphic.
lborkowski | January 18, 2013by Kim Krisberg
"To know you participated in building something in your city — it's just an experience, you know?"
Those are words from Austin, Texas, native Christopher McDavid, 22, a graduate of the city's newly established Construction Career Center. During his time at the center, McDavid got certified in flagger safety (flaggers direct the safe passage of traffic through construction areas), first aid and CPR, and basic concrete work and received his OSHA 10 certification, which he said "has opened my eyes to actually see the things that can be harmful to me."
Now, McDavid is looking for…
kbonham | January 15, 2013There are a lot of reasons that posts to this blog sometimes don't happen for months at a time, but one of them is that I can often get sucked down the rabbit hole that is Reddit. If you don't know about reddit yet, you may not want to click that link, but if you do know (and you're reading this blog), you may know about one of the communities (subreddits) there - a place called r/askscience. It's a forum where people can ask questions of a scientific nature (anything from "Why are pigeons so successful as an urban animal?" to "What's so special about the speed of light?"), and then actual…
lborkowski | January 14, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past.
"A lot of people are still developing cancer and dying from cancer due to workplace exposures, but only a small fraction of those are compensated, so people may think the magnitude of this problem is small," said Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Ontario, Canada. "I wanted to have better data."
And in just a few years, he will…
kbonham | January 13, 2013[This past fall, I taught a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor]
In my first lecture, I used Powerpoint (well, technically Keynote), but I personally like chalk-talks a quite a bit more. Never mind the fact that classrooms never seem to have chalk boards any more, I like taking the time to write out important points, draw diagrams on the fly and connect with the material a bit more than just clicking through to the next slide. My students did not agree. My…
jdupuis | December 31, 2012
OA and the UK Humanities & Social Sciences: Wrong risks and missed opportunities
One Size Fits All?: Social Science and Open Access
Statement on position in relation to open access(Institute of Historical Research)
The open access journal as a disruptive innovation
Openness, value, and scholarly societies: The Modern Language Association model
Public Library of Humanities: Envisioning a New Open Access Platform
Open Access: HEFCE, REF2020 and the Threat to Academic Freedom
More Issues in Open Access(#OA)
Open Access Publishing: Potential Unintended Consequences of the Finch Proposals…
kbonham | December 22, 2012[This past fall, I taught a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor]
Most of this post was written back in September, when it still seemed possible that I would be able to teach the class, write the blog and do science. Please forgive any anachronisms that I failed to purge.
Last time, I talked about what science is and why it's awesome. This is the first half of lecture 2, which was originally given on 11 September, 2012.
Lecture 2a (reading: Zimmer - The Tangled…
sa smith | December 5, 2012We all are familiar with the headlines:
"SCIENTISTS SAY BROCCOLI CURES CANCER????"
We all also know that pop-science articles are, functionally, useless. Sometimes its editors manipulating article titles to make them more 'catchy', sometimes journalists trying to stir up controversy, sometimes its scientists and PR departments trying to oversell interesting (sometimes not so interesting) research.
Average Joes and Janes cant peruse a science/heath/technology section and be confident in what they are reading.
Does eating broccoli really cure cancer? Does eating broccoli prevent cancer? Or is…
lborkowski | December 5, 2012This is a bonus addition to a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. To read the three-part series, which explores the science of pain management as well as physicians' and public health workers' roles in preventing opioid abuse and overdose, click here, here and here.
by Kim Krisberg
"If you really look at how pain affects people and what it means to have pain...you start to view it more as a social phenomenon."
These are words from Dr. Daniel Carr, a…
jtoney | December 2, 2012From the moment I learned about the impending "fiscal cliff," I was skeptical. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) recently wrote in an email blast with a subject line "An Artificial Crisis" something that should be shared widely.
Washington and the talk shows are captivated by talk of the “fiscal cliff”: the combination of automatic spending cuts and revenue increases scheduled to take effect at the end of the year. Unfortunately, this is the wrong conversation for America to be having.
The fiscal cliff is an artificial crisis created by renegades who used America’s statutory debt limit to hold the…
lborkowski | November 30, 2012This is the last in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. This week's story looks at the role of public health in curbing the opioid abuse and overdose problem. Read the previous stories in the series here and here. (We'll be publishing a bonus addition to the series next week — a discussion with Dr. Daniel Carr, director of the Pain Research, Education and Policy Program at Tufts University.)
by Kim Krisberg
A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the…