education
grrlscientist | March 27, 2010tags: Water Dikkop, Water Thick-knee, Burhinus vermiculatus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Water Dikkop, also known as the Water Thick-knee, Burhinus vermiculatus, photographed near the Kilombero River, Tanzania, Africa. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dan Logen, 9 January 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D300, 600 mm VR lens. ISO 320, 1/800 sec, f/7.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
rallain | March 26, 2010I am teaching physical science this semester. It appears that I will be teaching it again this summer. Ideally, I would like to switch to something like Physics and Everyday Thinking for large lecture courses. A course like this is being developed, but it isn't quite finished. Also, the current version includes chemistry and physics. I really need something different (we offer physical science 101 is physics and 102 is chemistry).
The current course is pretty traditional. Your basic physical science stuff. It has the following content.
Forces and Motion
Newton's Laws
Projectile motion…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2010tags: Upland Plover, Bartram's Sandpiper, Upland Sandpiper, Bartramia longicauda, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Upland Sandpiper, also known as the Upland Plover or as Bartram's Sandpiper, Bartramia longicauda, photographed in Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, Angelton, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 23 March 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…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2010tags: coins, mint, manufacturing, technology, factory, education, streaming video
This is an interesting video showing how the â¬2 coin is made. This coin consists of two different metals that are squeezed together into one coin. Interestingly, it uses recycled copper -- I wonder how many construction sites have lost their copper piping to thieves who then sold it to recyclers for manufacture into Euros? I also have embedded a second video that discusses the history of coin making as well as describing how less complex coins are made.
Another look at coinmaking (admittedly, not as fancy as…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2010tags: Sanderlings Schiermonnikoog, birds, birding, wildlife, humans, conservation, education, streaming video
This is a sweet little video about the Sanderlings that nested on the Niederlande beach of Schiermonnikoog. However, in just a few short years, they are rarely seen there. Why? This video provides some hypotheses.
There is a brief mention of a book (in Dutch) at the end. I've never seen it, don't own it and have absolutely no vested interest in it or anything involved with it.
grrlscientist | March 25, 2010tags: Paddyfield Pipit, Anthus rufulus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Paddyfield Pipit, Anthus rufulus, photographed on the Yamuna River, New Delhi, India. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Adrian White, November [larger view].
Nikon D40x with 70-300AF.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
HINT: I think you can narrow this bird down to one of two very similar species.
Review all mystery birds to date.
rallain | March 25, 2010Think Thank Thunk is a relatively new blog from Shawn Cornally, a high school math and science teacher. I have found his posts to be quite entertaining. In Shawn's latest post, he talks about grades. You know I like to talk about grades. Shawn puts teacher into two groups in regards to their ideas about grades:
"
Grades should reflect a student's progress with course material. Where an A+ indicates mastery.
Grades should be an amalgam of student's knowledge, behavior, and anything else the teacher wants to control.
"
I was in the middle of posting a comment to this post, but it was…
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
mikethemadbiologist | March 24, 2010One of the weird things (of many) about using the reconciliation process is that it can only be used once per session. So when the Democrats passed Romneycare, they also had to deal with getting student loan reform past conservative obstruction. From The Washington Post (italics mine):
The student aid initiative, which House Democrats attached to their final amendments to the health-care bill, would overhaul the student loan industry, eliminating a $60 billion program that supports private student loans with federal subsidies and replacing it with government lending to students. The House…
grrlscientist | March 24, 2010tags: Laysan Albatross, Phoebastria immutabilis, Diomedea immutabilis, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Laysan Albatross, Phoebastria (Diomedea) immutabilis, photographed on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, Midway Island, Hawai'i. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joe Fuhrman, March 2010 [larger view].
NOTE: Unless you are a beginning bird watcher, PLEASE wait 24 hours before identifying this bird. (Intermediate-expert birders are encouraged to use puns, anagrams, poetry references or citations, Monty Python quotes or anything else that tickles…
grrlscientist | March 24, 2010tags: condoms, manufacturing, technology, factory, education, streaming video
Well, now this is an interesting video: how condoms are made. The manufacturing process is actually quite interesting, and my favorite part was stress-testing the condoms. I wonder what the people who work in that factory say when asked at a dinner party what they do for a living?
bioephemera | March 23, 2010The Japanese have created some. . . disturbing. . . signage for the Tokyo subway. Not only are all the signs populated with pupil-less passerby-zombies staring with blank jealousy at the youthful protagonists, but the messages are a little mixed:
That's right - please go HOME to pass out in your own vomit minus a shoe. It's the civilized thing to do.
Kicking bookworms in the knee is also best done at home. Unless you don't have bookworms there to kick. In which case you can disregard this sign.
Go tell it on the mountain! (Why are you trying to take the subway to the mountain anyway…
bioephemera | March 23, 2010Alan Jacobs finds a quote that beautifully expresses why I don't want a Kindle, and why I wish the iPad were a stylus-friendly Mac tablet:
Of course, you can't take your pen to the screen. When it comes to annotating the written word, nothing yet created for the screen compares to the immediacy and simplicity of a pen on paper. The only effective way to respond to text on screen is to write about it. The keyboard stands in for the pen; but it demands more than a mere underline or asterisk in the margin. It demands that you write.
That, of course, was the reason for the pen all along: it's a…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2010tags: Red-footed Booby, Sula sula, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Red-footed Booby, Sula sula, photographed on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, Midway Island, Hawai'i. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joe Fuhrman, March 2010 [larger view].
NOTE: Unless you are a beginning bird watcher, PLEASE wait 24 hours before identifying this bird. (Intermediate-expert birders are encouraged to use puns, anagrams, poetry references or citations, Monty Python quotes or anything else that tickles your fancy to indicate you've identified this species during…
mikethemadbiologist | March 23, 2010...too bad MA Governor Deval Patrick, and for that matter, President Obama, don't. The recent educational regression reform plan in Massachusetts and the Obama Administration's educational proposals both seem to misunderstand what has made Massachusetts' educational system one of the best in the world (and that does far better than would be expected by demography):
1) Content-based standards that teachers can actually use.
2) Rigorous evaluation of whether those standards are being met.
3) A testing/evaluation regime that has been continuously refined and that is well understood, and that…
cagapakis | March 23, 2010I read R.C. Lewontin's Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA over the weekend and was struck in particular by one line in his wonderful diatribe against biological determinism and reductionism:
"Intellectuals in their self-flattering wish-fulfillment say that knowledge is power, but the truth is that knowledge further empowers only those who have or can acquire the power to use it."
This is something that was really hard to read at first, especially as someone who is overeducated and clearly spends a lot of time thinking about educating other people about science. But I realized that it…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2010tags: nature, stars, astronony, new discovery, amateur astronomer, citizen scientist, supernova, supernova 2008ha , stellar explosion, Caroline Moore, streaming video
There is no age restriction on the chance to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the universe. Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old from Warwick, NY, has made such a mark on astronomy with the discovery of Supernova 2008ha. Not only is she the youngest person to discover a supernova, but this particular supernova has been identified as a different type of stellar explosion.
To borrow one of her favorite words,…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2010tags: Science CAN Answer Moral Questions, philosophy, morality, ethics, behavior, brain, neurobiology, religion, culture, well-being, human rights, human values, Sam Harris, TEDTalks, streaming video
Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.
Adored by secularists, feared by the pious, Sam Harris' best-selling books argue that religion is ruinous and, worse, stupid -- and that questioning…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010
A short, wordless film inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, and created by Cristóbal Vila. Thanks to reader Esmeralda for passing this one along!
drorzel | March 22, 2010I gave a talk today for a group of local home-school students and parents, on the essential elements of quantum physics. The idea was to give them a sense of what sets quantum mechanics apart from other theories of physics, and why it's a weird and wonderful thing.
The title is, of course, a reference to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and the second slide was an embedded version of the Chapter 3 reading. I set the talk up to build toward the double-slit experiment with electrons, using the video of the experiment made by Hitachi. Here's the talk on SlideShare:
What Every Dog Should Know…