education
drorzel | February 14, 2012As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up and have them revise.
One of the many, many problems with teaching writing is that too many students regard the writing of drafts as pointless busy-work. Others have no real concept of what a rough draft is-- when I've collected drafts in the past, I often get things that would barely qualify as an outline, let…
jdupuis | February 13, 2012I was really angry riding home on the bus last Friday night. Not angry because the transit system here in Toronto is royally fudged in general or that transit to York University is fudged in particular.
No, it wasn't that particular aspect of the public sphere that had me upset.
It was the growing tendency of publishers of all sorts to try and take their works out of the public cultural commons and place them exclusively behind pay walls. It's their desire to monetize every reading transaction that had me hot under the collar.
Here's what I tweeted standing on the bus, altered a bit for…
jtoney | February 11, 2012
Photo source.
Such sad news today - Whitney Houston died at the young age of 48. I have always enjoyed, and admired, her soaring soulful voice. What will her legacy be?
Besides being a highly gifted artist, she has established a lasting legacy - a school devoted to the arts, just a few miles from my campus, based in East Orange, New Jersey.
Their mission statement is:
Whitney E. Houston Academy will strive to provide an environment in which every student learn and every staff member can grow. To achieve maximum success in this regard, we will provide challenging educational opportunites…
gregladen | February 9, 2012My State is better than your state! (Or Province or District.)
The No Child Left Behind Law, for better or worse, is a Federal program to make states to a better job in education. It is a fairly specific plan. But many states came up with their own plans which are different, yet in some cases, still considered effective. A state can apply for a waiver of the NCLB regulations if they have come up with an alternative that is as good or better.
The Federal government is reported to be prepared to grant waivers to ten states and they are, alphabetically: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana,…
drorzel | February 8, 2012Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class.
In the approximately chronological ordering of the course, we're now up to the late 1800's, and the next book we're talking about is Einstein's Clocks, Poincar$eacute;'s Maps, which talks about how Einstein and Henri Poincaré were (arguably) influenced by developments in timekeeping as they looked for the…
esiegel | February 7, 2012"If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education." -Harrison Schmitt
Last year, I asked a simple question with no easy answer: Whom Do You Trust For Your Science, Health, and Education? Because unless you yourself are the expert in a given field, it's often very, very difficult to tell what's trustworthy from what's not.
Images credit: Dr. Roy Spencer (top) and American Meteorological Society (bottom).
This is especially true when…
sastyk | February 6, 2012I am a homeschooler, a private schooler and a public schooler, and as such, don't have a strong ideological commitment to any of the above - I think they all have their place. My oldest son has severe autism and attends a private school for children with autism, but paid for and managed by the school district since they have no appropriate placement for him. My three younger boys are homeschooled, which we started not because of a dislike of public schools, but because our local school went to all-day kindergarten when my son Simon was ready to start. His birthday was late November, and at…
sa smith | February 3, 2012Im more than usually swamped for time right now, and dont have time to get more deeply into the conversation, but I wanted to post this glimpse into what I am doing in the lab right now:
I am infamous for several of those, plus I would have added "I am going to die here. I am going to die in this godforsaken place", plus I have never said "I should have gone to med school" because I am pretty sure I would have blown my brains out if I had to be an MD (no offense to those who do it, but I dont want to), but otherwise, this is a very accurate representation of shit grad students say.
I also…
jtoney | February 2, 2012
SpongeBob, that iconic, impossible character living in a pineapple under the sea. You've been living a lie, you know?
Here it is. The jig is up, so to speak.
Imagine this. An iconic figure revealed to be a lie. No, it's not the first time. When I was a boy, it was Dino the dinosaur from "The Flintsones," in his purple glory. Really?
Here's the amazing part. The designer himself has fessed up. It appears that the iconic undersea pineapple is changing its character, in response to brilliant Vi Hart's investigative, mathematical reporting. Don't believe me?
The "confession," such as it…
gregladen | January 31, 2012The vast majority of American public school students are not proficient in the level of science learning expected for their age group. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has issued "The State of Science Standards 2012" as part of an effort to assess the causes of this dismal state of affairs. Here's a map summarizing their results:
State Science Standards Grades, 2012
Notice that some of the battleground states for the "Evolution-Creationism Controversy" have reasonable ratings. Notice also the vast regions of D and F states. In fact, in order to convey the meaning of it all, I've created…
jtoney | January 28, 2012
OpenYale courses.
Looking for free, open source learning materials about any subject, from top experts in the world? I used to think that MIT's OpenCourseWare and Yale's OpenYale courses were a "one stop shopping" source for this, until I came across this stunning, worldwide, multi-lingual collection of course materials.
I invite you to explore this collection of free learning materials, including course syllabi, exams and study guides in a wide array of subjects, from the US, the UK, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, China...you get the idea.
Many thanks to Junqiang Zhou…
milhayser | January 27, 2012On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandra Porter imagines the fallout of HR 3699, a bill that would eliminate the requirement for free public access to NIH-funded research papers. Porter writes, "The reasoning behind this requirement is that taxpayers funded everything about the research except for the final publication, and so they have already paid for access." In small schools and community colleges without costly journal subscriptions, passage of this bill would effectively remove contemporary scientific literature from the classroom. Porter continues, "working in science, and…
lborkowski | January 27, 2012During his State of the Union address, President Obama spent more time talking about education than about healthcare, which he mentioned only passing. The two are connected, though, as a response from Dean Dad at Confessions of a Community College Dean reminds us:
In reference to yesterday's post about cost (among other things), a commenter asked how I could assert ever-rising costs for colleges in the face of flat salaries for faculty.
That's an easy one. Costs include much more than salaries.
The elephant in the room for any discussion of labor costs is health insurance. When the cost of…
drorzel | January 25, 2012The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would've banged out very quickly. I'm not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly works:
The graph at the bottom of that window is the entropy versus "time" for a lattice of 20 sites with a 25% hopping probability (either left or right). The window with the colored balls at the upper left is a graphical representation-- red dots are "occupied" sites, white "…
jtoney | January 25, 2012
Down Syndrome's Dolls.
One of this year's top finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search is a High School student studying self image of children with Down's Syndrome, using dolls.
Such creativity gives me hope for our next generation of scientists. This competition has launched many careers, including my own when I was a finalist in the then Westinghouse Science Talent competition {my topic was not as interesting, in retrospect.}
Below are the top 40 finalists. I love the diversity of topics!
California
Arcadia
Li, Jiacheng (Arcadia High School)
Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance for…
drorzel | January 19, 2012In the same basic vein as last week's How to Read a Scientific Paper, here's a kind of online draft of the class I'm going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. "Present" here meaning the more general "display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or just a graph taped into a lab notebook," not specifically standing up and doing a PowerPoint talk (which I've posted about before).
So, you've made some measurements of a natural phenomenon. Congratulations, you've done Science! Now, you need to tell the world all about it, in a compact form that allows the…
jtoney | January 16, 2012
Photo by Nicolas Genin.
66ème Festival de Venise (Mostra)
In the touching film "Up in the Air," Ryan Bingham played by George Clooney has an ambition of earning ten million frequent flyer miles, for which he:
receives an instant upgrade: a personally engraved metal card that will allow him to directly access his own private operator, someone who will greet him by name.
No such thing exists for publishing - whether you're a writer, a reviewer or an editor - until now.
Mike Fowler of the Nature Network describes a new "publishing revolution" in his recent blog post. The current system…
jtoney | January 13, 2012
Photo source.
Gender gaps are a persistent challenge in cultures across the globe, whether it is a gap of income or educational achievement. Is it a dream that the gap can be erased?
Researchers at Harvard, MIT and Northwestern University have just published an extraordinary study in Science reporting that this is achievable, using a case study in India.
How did they do they study?
From June 2006 to November 2007 we surveyed a random sample of 495 villages throughout the 165 village councils in Birbhum district in West Bengal as part of a large-scale study of the effects of political…
drorzel | January 13, 2012I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time and timekeeping. How well do you think students learn the big ideas about how science works from these classes, as apposed to a more traditional general physics class? How much transfer do you see in students' understanding of the content of this course to understanding of science in general?
The…
drorzel | January 10, 2012My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general "research methods" class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there's a lot more specialization by subfield), but I'm going to try to give as general an overview of how to approach scientific research as possible in a course with no prerequisites. The following is sort of a rough sketch of a lecture for next week, on how to approach the scientific literature, so comments and suggestions are welcome. This is…