education
rallain | May 17, 2010And lo and behold. Another semester has ended. I was going to post about somethings from my physical science course (for non-science) majors. Then I noticed that both Ethan at Starts With a Bang! and Farady's Cage posted about their semester reflections. I vote that the academic blogging community make this a tradition.
This semester, I had 3 courses. Here is a brief overview of what I learned.
Physics for Scientists and Engineers II
This is the electricity and magnetism part of the intro physics course. As I said before, I used Matter and Interactions (Chabay and Sherwood). I am not…
grrlscientist | May 17, 2010tags: Orchard Oriole, Icterus spurius, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Orchard Oriole, Icterus spurius, photographed Wisconsin. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Bardiac, 15 May 2010 [larger view].
Canon Eos, 70x300 zoom + 2x.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
This bird is remarkable among all its family members for one of its special features, can you tell me what that feature is?
The Orchard Oriole, Icterus spurius, is the smallest North American species of icterid blackbird. Due to their small size and…
drorzel | May 17, 2010SteelyKid's every-so-often bath was last night, and as always, she was fascinated by scooping up water in a hexagonal cup thing that's part of one of her bath toys, and watching it drain out. Which is completely understandable-- not just because she's a baby, but because there's a bunch of physics at work, here.
I realize this is trampling on Rhett's territory, but I made a little video showing the physics part (in the sink, not the tub, because I don't want to have the pay the therapy bills that would come from posting video of SteelyKid in the tub):
The explanation is laid out in the video…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2010tags: Augur Buzzard, African Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo rufofuscus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Augur Buzzard, also known as the African Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo rufofuscus, photographed at the Ndutu Safari Lodge, at the south end of the Serengeti ecosystem, just outside Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, Africa. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dan Logen, 15 January 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D300, ISO 400, 1/250, f/6.3, +2 Exp comp.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
cagapakis | May 15, 2010I've been co-teaching a short class on synthetic biology this spring through the MIT High School Studies Program (HSSP). The program is awesome, I took classes through a similar MIT program as a nerdy middle schooler and have had a great time teaching the past few weeks (if you're in the Boston area I highly recommend checking it out as a student or as a volunteer teacher!). My students were terrific--smart, open to new and crazy ideas, thoughtful about bioethics issues, and enthusiastic about thinking about what biology can do and designing new biological species.
Today was our last day of…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2010tags: Red-billed Buffalo-Weaver, Bubalornis niger, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Red-billed Buffalo-Weaver, Bubalornis niger, photographed at the Ndutu Safari Lodge, at the south end of the Serengeti ecosystem, just outside Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, Africa. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dan Logen, 15 January 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D300, ISO 640, 1/640 sec, f/6.3, Exp Compenstation at -.3.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
esiegel | May 14, 2010I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. -Thomas Jefferson
It's the end of the semester at my college as well as at many schools across the world, and I've spent the last week or so grading final exams. And while I was doing it, I noticed something astonishing. But let me start at the beginning.
Introductory physics -- without calculus -- is one of the most notoriously challenging and rigorous classes that students pursuing a career in health, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, veterinarians, and physical therapists, face in their college career…
grrlscientist | May 14, 2010tags: education, PhD defense, cultural observation, travelFinland, Helsinki
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 July 2009 [larger view].
By the time you read this, I will be 5000-6000 meters (30,000 feet) above the ground, somewhere between Frankfurt and Riga. After a one-and-a-half hour layover, I will board another plane that is flying to gorgeous Helsinki, Finland!
Even though I am still sick (and still barely have a voice), I am excited beyond words! I have my laptop and two beautiful cameras with me (one with three different lenses) and I am ready to snap hundreds of photographs of my favorite…
grrlscientist | May 14, 2010tags: Yellow Warbler, Dendroica petechia, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Yellow Warbler, Dendroica petechia, photographed at Sabine Woods and Sabine Pass area, Port Arthur, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 28 April 2008 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/160s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | May 14, 2010tags: Deutsch für Doofe, German for Boneheads, German language, education, SpeedyConKiwi, streaming video
This video is all about how to pronounce the German alphabet -- something I cannot do correctly at this time. Not that knowing how to say this is going to help me when talking to the bankers about depositing my paycheck into my account or anything.
If I don't know how to say the alphabet by the time this video pops up, you have my permission to tie me up and force me to drink German beer until I learn how to say it.
bioephemera | May 13, 2010I spent some time today chatting with Sam Bayard of the Citizen Media Law Project. It occurred to me that some of you who are newer to blogging might not know they have an invaluable database of articles on legal issues related to online publishing - a good resource to bookmark! (See, for example, "legal protections for anonymous speech".)
bioephemera | May 13, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette, a wonderful TED talk by Dan Meyer, high school math teacher, which is about so much more than math or education. It's about how we think about problems in the real world, how we handle ambiguity, and the problem with impatient problem-solving: "what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but paving a smooth, straight path from one to another, and congratulating our students for how they step over the cracks along the way".
In his words, Meyer "sells a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it." So he's…
jdupuis | May 13, 2010By some strange coincidence given yesterday's post, this post on Raising your internal profile as an academic liaison librarian by Emma Woods came across my Twitter feed this morning.
As part of a task and ï¬nish group on internal marketing of academic liaison librarians at the University of Westminster, I posted a message to a couple of JISCmail lists to see what other librarians do in this respect. As ever, I was delighted by the number of responses I received and the amount of interest there is on this topic.
In the current ï¬nancial climate where every penny counts, raising our internal…
grrlscientist | May 13, 2010tags: Baltimore Oriole, Icterus galbula, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Baltimore Oriole, Icterus galbula, photographed at Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary, Brazoria County, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 27 April 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/250s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
drorzel | May 13, 2010Spinning off a blog at Inside Higher Ed, the Dean Dad has a post on deciding what classes are essential:
My personal sense of it is that the distinction between core and periphery is largely a function of purpose. If your goal in life is to be an exhibited artist, then you might well decide that art is essential and history a frill. If your goal is to be an engineer, I could understand valuing a math class over a psych class. Since different students have different purposes, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that one student's frill is another student's priority.
But the questions go deeper…
jdupuis | May 12, 2010Or is that the inherent insularity of academic culture in general?
Joshua Kim has some great observations (in context of a review of This Book is Overdue) (Amazon) about the great chasm of misunderstanding between the culture of the academic library and the broader academic culture.
As academia shifts and changes, as budgets squeeze, as millenials millenialize, it's a constant struggle to make the case for the library's role in academic life. It's hard to know both who our best champion's are and who our most determined opponents are. Sitting in the library talking to ourselves is probably…
mikethemadbiologist | May 12, 2010While I think many supporters of the charter school and privatization movements are well-intentioned, albeit terribly misguided, they have attracted, as all bad ideas do, the bottom feeders--in this case, banks that lend charter schools money for building facilities (italics mine):
There's a lot of money to be made in charter schools, and I'm not talking just about the for-profit management companies that run a lot of these charter schools. It turns out that at the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, Congress passed a new kind of tax credit called a New Markets tax credit. What…
grrlscientist | May 12, 2010tags: Summer Tanager, Piranga rubra, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Summer Tanager, Piranga rubra, photographed at Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary, Brazoria County, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 21 April 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/400s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
For those of you who know exactly what this bird is, I have several questions for you: first, How is this species distinguished from a…
cagapakis | May 11, 2010Unlike many of my colleagues, I'm not really interested in the whole "science vs. religion" thing, but I do want to point out the very thoughtful analysis of genetic engineering and synthetic biology by the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion, and Technology Project. On GM food, they write:
The official scientific and economic reports support the view of the 1999 Assembly, that GM is not a simple 'yes or no' issue and must be taken case-by-case, weighing up many different factors. Theologically, SRT has found no convincing reason to say it is a wrong act to transfer genes into a crop from…
grrlscientist | May 11, 2010tags: Swainson's Thrush, Olive-backed Thrush, Catharus ustulatus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Swainson's Thrush, also known as the Olive-backed Thrush, Catharus ustulatus, photographed at Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary, Brazoria County, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 27 April 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/400s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.