education
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
jtoney | August 14, 2011Dear readers,
Some of you may be wondering what's going on at Dean's Corner. I begin a new position at my University tomorrow, August 15, serving as the Acting Vice President of Academic Affairs. {You can read the announcement here.}
I am planning to retool the focus of this blog to reflect my broadened responsibilities as an academic administrator at a University, overseeing all of our academic programs. I will continue to post science stories that might interest you, on an ad hoc basis, to the extent that I can, including articles at my blog at The…
milhayser | August 12, 2011
On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, Dr. Isis solicits hypotheses for the increase in the number of A's awarded to students at American universities. In 1960's, one out of six students got an A (and C used to be the most Common). Now an A is most common, and the number of C's (and D's) has fallen by half. Dr. Isis says, "It's interesting that the real change in grading appears to have occurred in the period between 1962 and 1974, probably coinciding with the increase in conscription for the Vietnam War." Mike the Mad Biologist offers, "I think it's pretty obvious what happened:…
drorzel | August 12, 2011I am an inveterate driver of "back ways" to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the "main" road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they're not well timed, so it's a rare day when I don't get stuck at one or more of them. My preferred route has a lot of stop signs, but very little traffic, so they're quick stops, and I spend more time in motion, which makes me feel like I'm getting there faster.
That's the psychological reason, but…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2011If our mainstream political discourse is to be believed, the U.S. 'doesn't make anything anymore.' We should all become 'knowledge workers', constantly reinvent our personal brand. Manufacturing--and the engineering it takes to support efficient manufacturing processes--are anachronisms. Hell, everything these days in made in China, right?
But like most popular economic bromides, this is utter bullshit that is completely contradicted by those damn facts. From the SF Fed:
The market share of foreign goods is highest in durables, which include cars and electronics. Two-thirds of U.S.…
drorzel | August 11, 2011I continue to be distracted from the paper-writing that I really ought to be doing by thinking about my classes this fall, and Joss Ives isn't helping. By being very helpful-- he posted a nice list of resources for active teaching. His blog has a bunch of other interesting stuff, too.
For the specific Matter and Interactions curriculum that we're using, it's probably also worth noting that they have a complete set of video lectures linked from their resources page. Unfortunately, these are complete with the "going over the syllabus" stuff in the early lectures, so the early going is a little…
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
drorzel | August 9, 2011An angle I had hoped to get to in last week's broader impacts post, but didn't have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0:
Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists into schools and hopefully inspire students with what they do. The goal, of course, is to get kids interested in pursuing careers in scientific fields, by showing them just how cool science is.
But I wonder - no matter how well meaning, how much do these…
drorzel | August 9, 2011It's that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to August, I inevitably start thinking about what I'm going to be doing in September, no matter how much I'd like to be thinking about other things instead. This year is worse than most, because I'm planning to really shake things up with regard to the way I teach the intro mechanics course.
I've been doing…
bioephemera | August 9, 2011
"Magnetic Field Outflows from Active Galactic Nuclei"
P.M. Sutter, P.M. Ricker, H.-Y. Yang, G. Foreman, D. Pugmire/ORNL
Wired has an article/webgallery of award-winning scientific visualizations which is worth a lunchtime visit. (Having trouble with Wired's interface? The videos collected there are the winners from SciDAC 2011's "Visualization Night" challenge, so you can also just watch them here.)
These visualizations are not your usual public-facing educational animation. Rather, they're just what you'd see at a scientific meeting - dry, functional, aimed at a specialist audience, and…
bioephemera | August 7, 2011Annalisa Crannell, a professor at Franklin & Marshall, has a great essay at Inside Higher Ed on the math of perspective. Crannell, who thinks her students are generally more scared of drawing than they are of math, uses the "fencepost puzzle" to get her students working through the proportions that create realism:
We mathematicians tend to stare at the paper, hoping an answer jumps off the page at us. Artists pull out their pencils and start doodling, often stumbling upon a solution almost by accident. The artists have learned to overcome their fear of drawing something that is "wrong,"…
jtoney | August 2, 2011This piece was co-authored with Sir Harold Kroto.
New legislation suggests a more appropriate name for the U.S.A.: The Unenlightened States of America.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced the "Defending Childhood" campaign, focused on violence prevention, offering an opportunity for us to reflect upon sectarian violence, religious indoctrination and ethics and education. In the 40 years since the April 20, 1971 Supreme Court decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the landscape of American education has changed beyond its original goal of racial…
sastyk | August 2, 2011Well, the astrophysicist and I finally managed to write something together. More than a year and a half ago when I moved to Scienceblogs I promised that Eric would be my sometime- collaborator. I promise I did not realize was a total lie. You see, the way we've managed over the years to raise four kids, run a farm and work several jobs is that we trade off responsibilities - when I'm working in front of the computer, he's with the kids or working the farm. When he's at work teaching, I'm home doing the same. Yes, we do have evenings together after the kids go to bed, but what we found is…
drorzel | August 1, 2011When I came up for my reappointment review three years into my professorial career, I was given a list of required materials to submit, which included a "statement of teaching philosophy." The same thing had been required for my job application, and at that time, I wrote about techniques and methods that had seemed particularly useful to me as a student (I had basically no teaching experience when I was hired), so for my reappointment, I wrote a statement looking back at what I wrote when I applied and talking about how I tried to incorporate those things into my teaching.
I passed the review…
jhalper | July 29, 2011One Thursday evening near the end of July, people sitting outside a local ice cream parlor watched a neurobiology Ph.D. student wave his hand in front of his face in imitation of a robot learning to sense itself as separate from its surroundings. Despite the trains arriving at the station in the background and the microphone feedback from a rival talk at an outdoor coffee shop across the plaza, the audience was engrossed in hearing how this simple robot, mostly built of Lego and a camera, is able to explore its environment in the same way a baby does.
All across the city of Rehovot,…
drorzel | July 29, 2011We're having a birthday party for SteelyKid tomorrow, so I have a ton of stuff to do today. I may have something more substantive later, but for the moment, here are a couple of videos to enjoy. First, from the Minute Physics set of videos at YouTube, an explanation of why you have quantum physics to thank for sunny days:
There's a bunch of good stuff in the Minute Physics channel, so if you're looking for a way to kill time in small chunks, have at it.
And if you prefer your physics to be classical, this demo from Harvard has been making the rounds:
Isn't physics awesome? Of course it is.
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2011A vote to resolve the debt ceiling political crisis failed last night because House Republicans--who hold a majority in the House of Representatives--opposed the bill. Here's a major reason why--Pell Grants, which are federal scholarships for low- and lower-middle income students:
House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare.
Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly…
jtoney | July 28, 2011
Why is the sun so hot?
Well, the sun is "like a big nuclear submarine - in the sky."
Henry Reich, who studied Physics at Grinnell College & Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and is now working on an MFA in Film Production at the University of Southern California, explores this question in, yes, one minute. He is developing a series of these innovative videos to explain concepts in physics to help us understand our world.
I invite your feedback and hope you enjoy this minute.
Note that Greg Laden posted this on July 26; my apologies for the redundancy.
jdupuis | July 28, 2011No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera.
However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians in Boston next week where I hope to be a least a little more enlightened and educated along that path.
Not surprisingly I've been watching the blogosphere these last few months for insightful posts and articles about academic leadership, in particular academic library leadership. I've found a few…
drorzel | July 27, 2011There's a lot of stuff in the news lately about asteroids, what with the Dawn mission orbiting Vesta, and the talk of a manned asteroid mission as a possible future step for NASA. Prompted by this, I'm going to dip into the territory usually occupied by Matt and Rhett, and ask a somewhat silly question:
What size asteroid would you be able to throw a baseball into orbit, a la Bugs Bunny?
(Sadly, probably for copyright reasons, I couldn't quickly find a YouTube video of the cartoon where Bugs throws a baseball all the way around the world. But you can probably picture it, even if you're too…