education
grrlscientist | November 9, 2009tags: House Wren, Troglodytes aedon, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] House Wren, Troglodytes aedon, photographed at Smith Point, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 3 November 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/640s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
bioephemera | November 8, 2009Louis Menand has a must-read article on what's wrong with graduate education in the Harvard Magazine:
Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is…
grrlscientist | November 5, 2009tags: Chipping Sparrow, Spizella passerina, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Chipping Sparrow, Spizella passerina, photographed at Elmer Bailey Road, West Harris County, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 9 March 2007 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/800s f/8.0 at 500.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | November 4, 2009tags: Plain Chachalaca, Ortalis vetula, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Plain Chachalaca, Ortalis vetula, photographed at the Frontera Audubon Sanctuary, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 1 April 2008 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/350s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
emjohnson | November 3, 2009By now everyone has heard of the high school English honors teacher, Dan DeLong, who was suspended for offering students the Seed magazine article "The Gay Animal Kingdom" by Jonah Lehrer as an optional extra credit assignment.
According to the Alton, IL based Telegraph newspaper, DeLong has now been reinstated at Southwestern High School after several hundred students and parents attended a six-hour long disciplinary hearing:
At Monday night's meeting, more than 200 people lined the stairs, sidewalk and office space at the district's small unit office at 884 Piasa Road in the Macoupin…
ejohnson | November 3, 2009
Last week, Dan Delong, an English teacher at Southwestern High School in Piasa, Illinois was suspended for allowing students to read an article on homosexuality in the animal kingdom. The article in question, "The Gay Animal Kingdom," was written by ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex, and published by Seed magazine in 2006. Mr. Delong faced a school board hearing on Monday and stood to lose his job over the incident. Jonah, along with many other ScienceBloggers, rallied support for Mr. Delong, as well as science education and literacy everywhere. Mike Dunford of the…
grrlscientist | November 3, 2009tags: Red Knot, Calidris canutus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Red Knot, Calidris canutus, photographed at Quintana, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 30 September 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/750s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
mikethemadbiologist | November 3, 2009It's not a failure of monetary policy, but fiscal policy.
Over at The Quantum Pontiff, ScienceBlogling Dave Bacon asks if college tuition is a bubble:
But what I find interesting, and what I've never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2009tags: Short-tailed Magpie, Cissa thalassina, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Short-tailed Magpie, Cissa thalassina, endemic to the South Pacific Maritime
Southeast Asian islands of Borneo and Java. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Watercolour and gouache sketch on paper.
Image: Thomas Lewin, early 1800s [larger view].
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | November 1, 2009tags: Crested Hawk, Aviceda subcristata, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Crested Hawk, Aviceda subcristata, photographed at Atherton, Queensland, Australia. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Steve Duncan, 26 August 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200 w/ Nikkor 300mm f/4 1/2500 & 1/1250 sec, f/4 iso 200.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2009"If the president's [budget] proposal is enacted similar to what he recommended, it will have a chilling effect on abstinence education across the country...We're in a race against time to keep these people in business"
So says Leslie Unruh, rightwing nutjob extraordinaire (and a driving force behind this). I'm not sure why anyone in the Coalition of the Sane should care, in light of these results of abstinence-only misinformation (italics mine):
In the beginning, the public-health community was open to the programs. The United States did, after all, have the highest teen pregnancy rate in…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2009tags: Budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulatus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery birds] Budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulatus, photographed in Boulia Shire, far west Queensland, Australia [I will identify these birds for you in 48 hours]
Image: Ann Britton [larger view].
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
News story:
This year's floods along river systems such as the Diamantina and Georgina sparked prolific breeding by the budgies which have been feasting on an abundance of grass seeds.
"I have been here since 1983 and never seen anything like it…
rallain | October 30, 2009In the past couple of weeks, we have had two different publishers 'pitch' their online homework system. First, they are fine people and interesting products, but I just don't think this is going to work.
Online Books
I think the publisher's plan is to have a textbook, and offer extra stuff to go with it (including an ebook). However, for all the ones I have seen, there are problems with the ebooks.
You can't keep them forever. It depends on the terms of the service, and maybe this is long enough. The terms seem to vary from 1 year to 5 years. If you are in certain fields (physic or…
grrlscientist | October 30, 2009tags: Bare-throated Tiger-heron, Tigrisoma mexicanum, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Bare-throated Tiger-heron, Tigrisoma mexicanum, photographed in Mexico. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dennis Paulson [larger view].
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | October 29, 2009tags: Cooper's Hawk, Chicken Hawk, Blue Darter, Accipiter cooperii, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Sharp-shinned Hawk, Accipiter striatus, Cooper's Hawk, also known as a Chicken Hawk or Blue Darter (?!), Accipiter cooperii, photographed at Smith Point, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 30 September 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/1250s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
I added more images of the same bird, taken…
drorzel | October 29, 2009Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:
What is good writing?
Ask an English teacher, and they'll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They'll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they're really honest, they'll admit it has a scholarly tone -- prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could've been written by Willie…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2009tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty
This is a poll. I will show you two pictures, and ask you to tell me which picture is more symmetric. Your votes are tabulated after you've clicked on that picture:
Now that you've participated in my little poll, I want to share some information about my own fund-raising efforts for DonorsChoose:
Those pictures tell us that collectively, we've:
provided resources to 550 students
supported 66 hours of instruction and homework
Oh boy! Sixty-six hours of classroom instruction AND HOMEWORK?? That's almost demonic…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2009tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty
Here's the latest news from DonorsChoose: collectively, all of the blog writers and the 4,038 citizen philanthropists who participated in the Social Media Challenge have raised more than $565,000 to help more than 99,000 students in public schools throughout the US!!! I think this is amazing! JUST the ScienceBloggers team has raised an astonishing $54,358 from 244 citizen philanthropists (my blog has raised $5,646.31 so far -- last year, the ScienceBlogs team raised $38,000 and my blog raised $2,884.55)
But there's still…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2009tags: Rough-billed Pelican, American White Pelican, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery birds] American White Pelican, sometimes known as the Rough-billed Pelican due to the structure that develops on the upper mandible of breeding adults, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos, photographed at Smith Point, Texas. Numerous Broad-winged hawks, Buteo platypterus (background) with two red-tailed hawks, Buteo jamaicensis (right of center, lower left) [I will identify these birds for you in 48 hours -- If you can convince me there's other species in this image, feel free to…
gregladen | October 27, 2009I just received a mass emailing from Julia's high school, in the name of the principal. Routine business. At the end of the missive was this quote:
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
What does this quote mean to you? If you don't know its context, you may be in for a surprise.
You see this quote all the time on K-12 educational material as a header, footer, slogan, logo, inspirational message, and so on. It obviously means something good about teachers. Maybe something good about education. The quote is by Henry Adams and comes from his book "…