education
clock | September 1, 2006Teaching Carnival is back from summer break and the edition #11 is up on WorkBook.
grrlscientist | September 1, 2006
My hero, Zero, such a funny little hero,
But 'till you came along,
We counted on our fingers and toes.
Now you're here to stay
And nobody really knows
How wonderful you are.
Why we could never reach a star,
Without you, Zero, my hero,
How wonderful you are.
What's so wonderful about a zero?
It's nothing, isn't it?
Sure, it represents nothing alone.
But place a zero after 1
And you've got yourself a 10.
See how important that is?
When you run out of digits,
You can start all over again.
See how convenient that is?
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tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
clock | August 29, 2006Previously unopposed, "...the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." The election is non-partisan and the serious challenger is Tom Sawyer. You can get all of the details from Ed Brayton (as well as additional views by Chad, John and Kevin). Ed writes:
"Sawyer is the former mayor of Akron, a former state legislator and an 8 term US congressman from Ohio. Sawyer's bonafides for a board of education seat are impressive. He is a former school teacher, and husband of a school teacher. He was the…
clock | August 23, 2006Carnival of Education #81 is up on Education Wonks.
Carnival of Homeschooling - It's a Swamp Thing - is up on Patricia Ann's Pollywog Creek Porch.
grrlscientist | August 18, 2006
Electricity at rest is called static electricity.
Like in the winter, wearing a heavy coat,
You get a shock off the doorknob.
Or you scrape across a carpet
And sneak up on your very best friend,
And zap 'im on the ear with a shock of-
Electricity, Electricity
Current flowing to and fro, makes a circuit of
Electricity, Electricity
Voltage is the pressure that makes it go.
It's pushin' uh... Electricity, Electricity...
Watts will tell you just how much
You'll be usin'
Uh... Electricity, Electricity
Yet another installment from the Schoolhouse Rock series.
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tags: schoolhouse rock,…
mikethemadbiologist | August 14, 2006Here's some interesting articles I pulled off the internets for you:
Publius argues "The fact that Iraq was so incompetently executed is actually the least of its problems. The bigger problem is that the idea of it represented a staggering failure of vision and judgment in terms of anti-terrorism policy. It's simply not possible to devise an anti-terrorism policy more at odds with the nature of the threat facing us."
An interesting NY Times magazine article by Michael Young on how Hizbollah relates to the Lebanese political scene (as opposed to the War on Terra).
Neil the Ethical Werewolf…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2006By now, you might have heard about the Science article examining the acceptance of evolution in 34 countries. I don't have much else to say that PZ, Shelley, John, and Nick Matzke haven't said already. But I have some additional good news and bad news. The bad news is that we're even more stupid that we thought: 30% of Americans don't know what year the 9/11 attacks were, and five percent can't identify the month and the day of the 9/11 attacks.
The good news is that I was at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory to give a lecture about antibiotic resistance to high school teachers…
drorzel | August 11, 2006As noted in a previous post, I'm teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I'll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that's one of the options, whether people think it's a good idea or not.
These days, it seems like everybody has their own college rankings (the Washington Monthly just came out with a new version of theirs, for example), but very few people provide what's really important: realistic ratings of physics graduate programs. So let's see what…
grrlscientist | August 11, 2006
So when you're happy (Hurray!) or sad (Aw!)
Or frightened (Eeeeeek!) or mad (Rats!)
Or excited (Wow!) or glad (Hey!)
An interjection starts a sentence right.
Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Hey!) or emotion (Hey!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.
Interjections show excitement or emotion,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah... YEA!
This episode is one of several that really sticks out in my mind.
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tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
drorzel | August 10, 2006The discussion surrounding the recent post about jobs continues to bubble along nicely, both in the original post, and the follow-up. I love it when a plan comes together.
There's been a lot of discussion of following the advice in the Katz letter and seeking non-academic careers, but Jeff F. (who I know from my post-doc days) puts his finger on a major problem with this plan: The faculty who advise students on career choices don't know, well, much of anything:
Unfortunately, I was mostly on my own in making the jump from academics to industry. I chose to do a postdoc on a project with my…
clock | August 10, 2006 This - "Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids" - is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why.... (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005):
Chris is so nice. Way too nice. And naive. He actually contacted David Horowitz and offered to do a study that has a potential to PROVE Horowitz's claim that conservatives are discriminated against in the Academia. Read the whole episode here.
As you can see, my title is just an euphemistic version of what Horowitz called Chris!…
clock | August 8, 2006 Do you want to know more about my kids and how we are raising them? If so, this post from March 21, 2005 may be interesting to you.
I have two kids: an 11-year old son (Coturnix Jr.) and an 8-year old daughter (Coturnietta). They are really smart and cool kids and I love talking with them about all sorts of things: school, science, music, computers, video games, Boy Scouts, ...whatever they want to talk about (or the good old days when I was a kid and had to walk to school ten miles uphill both ways - to which they yawn and run away). But we never talk about politics or religion. Sure, when…
grrlscientist | August 8, 2006
Image appears here with the kind permission of its creator, John Kyrk.
A friend sent me a link to an interesting website. John Kyrk, an artist and biologist, has recreated a huge variety of biology topics using interactive flash animations, ranging from animo acids and proteins to water chemistry, from meiosis to electron transport. All of the material on this site looks like great teaching aides and they are also really fun to play with.
One of these animations is a timeline through the evolution of life beginning with the Big Bang. I am still poking around John's site, but I think the…
grrlscientist | August 4, 2006What is global dimming? It is a cooling effect that appears to have partially masked the effects of global warming. Global dimming is caused by a reduction in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth due to the presence of aerosolized particulate pollution, such as jet contrails. These airborne particles reflect sunlight back into space before it hits the surface of the earth, reducing warming and thereby masking the effects of global warming.
This streaming video (below the fold) by Nova shows how the average temperature range in the United States jumped by more than one degree celsius (two…
drorzel | August 4, 2006Friday's a good day for lightweight blogging, so here's something fun, via Roberto Alamino: A big collection of physics flash animations from the University of Toronto. It includes everything from three-body graviational motion to the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to how to use an oscilloscope.
Our DSL has been a little slow this morning, so I haven't been able to watch that many of them, but the ones I looked at are pretty cool. I'll probably be adding this link to my class webpages in the future, because you can never have too many physics-based videogames...
clock | August 3, 2006 I wrote this on March 03, 2005 on Science And Politics and reposted it on December 10, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. The title says it all...
I guess it is the time of year when college professors get their student evaluations back and, of course, some of those who blog have written about their experiences. For instance Bitch PhD cites some really hillarious ones, but concludes with this:
IMHO, while evaluations are important, one down side is that
they can and do encourage this kind of "customer service" attitude towards the
professoriate--an attitude that I think is inimical to really…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2006It looks like supporters of reason won out over sectarian ideologues in Kansas. Josh at Thoughts from Kansas writes:
The Board is back in moderate hands no matter what. The night is, on balance, a victory. It'd be nice to further marginalize the extremists by winning the remaining races in November, but we've got a majority that will implement the science standards recommended by the scientists, educators and parents of the science standards committee. The Board can focus on bigger issues. They can dig into ways to address the special challenges of rural districts, and to find solutions to…
clock | August 1, 2006The Carnival Of Education # 78: Ferris Wheel Edition is up on This Week In Education
Carnival of Homeschooling #31 is up on Phat Mommy.
grrlscientist | August 1, 2006I am sure that some of you have read this already, but here is a printable version of the cogent article published last year in the excellent magazine, The New Yorker, that discusses so-called "intelligent design". This article, entitled Why Intelligent Design Isn't, was published in May 2005 and is still relevant today.
This article should be required reading for all high school and college students who are studying biology.
Several issues it explains regarding "intelligent design", including the scientific refutations of these ID assertions;
ID is not Biblical literalism.
Behe's…
clock | July 31, 2006First they came after evolution. They say they wanted to "teach the controversy".
Now, they are after history, and no controversy-teaching is allowed:
One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.
By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United States when last month they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has officially replaced the study of…