education
drorzel | January 25, 2011Over in locked LiveJournal land, I read a post talking about computer science education, and how it's biased against people who aren't already tech geeks coming into college:
Taking an intro CS course if you don't already know how to program is like taking intro Spanish without ever having taken it in high school - 90% of the people in that class are ahead of you, possibly way ahead of you, on day one, and you're working from the back.
That is a brutal situation to be in, honestly, and it does nobody any favours. The people who don't already know how to program are dealt a crushing blow to…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2011At this point in Obama's term, I'm simply hoping that the things I care about, like Social Security and education, aren't mentioned by Obama in his State of the Union address. I've given up on thinking he'll actually institute good policy (lost hope, if you will), and am just attempting a holding action. This is the administration that told Democrats they had to choose between school funding and feeding hungry children, and also has imposed Education Secretary Arne Duncan's failed ideas on the entire country, so I'm not optimistic.
Matthew Yglesias draws our attention to a Center for…
jdupuis | January 24, 2011A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the programming of the recent ScienceOnline 2011 conference and yesterday I posted some thoughts about the more social and fun aspects of the event.
In this post I like to look forward to next year's conference and start thinking about some of the sessions I might like to organize. My very early thoughts are coalescing around undergraduate education around. I have a couple of ideas which I think might be interesting to pursue.
First of all, I'm interested in collaborations around teaching undergrads about the scholarly information landscape. On…
jtoney | January 22, 2011
Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York. The ASO plays at Avery Fisher Hall. Photographer: Richard Termine/21C Media Group via Bloomberg
President Leon Botstein of Bard College is using an innovative approach in higher education with his new project, Citizen Science. President Botstein is a musician, having served as conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra {I have a number of his recordings in my collection.}
About two dozen scientists have been recruited to teach non-science majors at Bard College - sign me up!…
esiegel | January 21, 2011"You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him to think." -Elbert Hubbard
If you listened to some of the headlines accompanying a recent news story, you might conclude that College is a waste of time, money, and resources for practically everyone involved. The three links above have, as their headlines:
$80,000 For Beer Pong? Report Shows College Students Learn Little During First Two Years (Besides Party Skills),
Report: First two years of college show small gains, and
One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?
Over the past 15 years, I've lived and worked at…
drorzel | January 21, 2011There's been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing in academic circles this week over the release of a book claiming college students are "Academically Adrift" (see also the follow-up story here). The headline findings, as summarized by Inside Higher Ed are:
* 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.
* 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college.
* Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements.…
jtoney | January 21, 2011My recent posting on deepwater oil drilling raised questions about alternative energy sources. The news of more and more permits allowing deepwater oil drilling is discouraging given available alternative fuels, but understandable.
Here's why.
A recent Science publication by Richard Kerr provides an historical perspective of energy production and consumption since the 18th century. It is no surprise that fossil fuels are so popular, because:
A coal mine or oil field, for instance, yields five to 50 times more power per square meter than a solar facility, 10 to 100 times more than a wind…
kbonham | January 20, 2011The heavy hitters in the science publishing business are taking notice.
This critical onslaught was striking -- but not exceptional. Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation.
Like everything else in the modern world, old orthodoxies are going to have to change. I would love to accelerate this process, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
This article in Nature discusses a GWAS (genome-wide association study) that supposedly linked a…
jtoney | January 20, 2011
A message sent this afternoon over Twitter by President Obama announces a new report, "Promises Kept," produced by "Organizing for America" (a project of the Democratic National Committee.) This brief document gives food for thought as we look towards the 2012 Presidential elections.
@BarackObama Barack Obama
Let's be the generation that makes future generations proud of what we did here.
Some selected highlights:
Do you think that these are promises kept? This is not a simple question but one that warrants careful thought. I do not have an answer.
REBUILDING OUR ECONOMY
RECOVERY ACT…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2011By way of Thers at Whiskey Fire, we read that the evangelical movement has recognized that sometimes homeschooling doesn't quite get the job done:
Suppose you have home-schooled your advanced blastocyst in the best evangelical wingnut way, to the age of 18. And suppose you recognize that no matter how much you would like to pray otherwise, your advanced blastocyst, age 18, is an absolute lettuce.
Dumb as a box of Bibles. A cretin by Sarah Palin standards. A doorstop. A rock.
Problems! Where do you park these burdensome home-unschooled-uli? In the godless local community college? Do you…
jtoney | January 20, 2011
This is one of my favorite examples of Vi Hart's creative, instructive doodling to teach mathematics.
In this case, the doodles are "binary trees." If you are not familiar with the concept, I am confident that you will be after this brief video!
jtoney | January 19, 2011
Photo source.
This article was co-authored with Ms. Julie Dalley, Program Coordinator for the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair State University.
Why pursue a college degree? It is a fair question. People pursue a college degree for many different reasons. It may be the realization of a personal goal, have cultural significance, or may simply be a stepping-stone to professional success. No matter what the motivation, all students have an expectation of learning and many pay a high price to achieve their learning goals. But is learning taking place? And if so, how?…
jdupuis | January 19, 2011Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference.
Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…
bioephemera | January 19, 2011
I found this children's encyclopedia in a pile of books on the curb a few weeks ago. Some of its depictions of science are charming; some are odd, and all are really, really dated. More snapshots below the fold. . .
drorzel | January 19, 2011We did a lab yesterday that asked students to measure the speed of a ball leaving a spring-loaded launcher in a few different ways. this is a great way to talk about the difference between systematic and random errors and how those are dealt with. As a way of starting that discussion, I asked the students to calculate the speeds last night, and then enter their values in an Excel sheet when they came to class this morning. Since generating a sensible plot in Excel 2007 is such a gigantic pain in the ass, I used an older data set to set up a template, and made a graph of the quantities we were…
drorzel | January 18, 2011The latest snowstorm is wreaking some havoc on my plans for the day, which means I'm going to lift another question and answer from the Physics Stack Exchange, with some modification. This one is a question about thermal radiation:
What are the quantum mechanisms behind the emission and absorption of thermal radiation at and below room temperature? If the relevant quantum state transitions are molecular (stretching, flexing and spin changes) how come the thermal spectrum is continuous? What about substances (such as noble gases) which don't form molecules, how do they emit or absorb thermal…
jtoney | January 17, 2011
Math is boring. We hear that every day. But there are exceptions. Consider Sir Isaac Newton. He matriculated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 1661, became a Fellow in 1667, and created the "Newtonian" branch of physics. But many may not be aware that he was a master doodler while sitting in math class.
A number of years ago, I visited the University of Cambridge library, and happened across an extraordinary display. It contained class notes of Sir Isaac Newton, taken while he was an undergraduate student. The notes were taken in meticulous handwriting, with…
bioephemera | January 17, 2011Observatory is hosting another great event tonight:
From Heumann Heilmittel, "Eine Reise durch den menschlichen Körper" (1941)
Body Voyaging: an illustrated lecture with Kristen Ann Ehrenberger
Date: TONIGHT, Monday, January 17th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
We human beings have a seemingly insatiable desire to experience the bodies underneath our skins. While many scholars have treated the subject of looking into or through bodies via medical imaging, one perhaps understudied trope is that of "body voyaging." A few writers and artists have imagined what it…
drorzel | January 17, 2011Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world.
A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…
jdupuis | January 16, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, is from August 9, 2007.
=======
Every organization relies on software these days. Big custom systems,…