education
gregladen | October 18, 2009Yesterday, I posted a comment on my facebook account that resulted in more response and discussion than any comment I had previously made. The issues at hand pertain to privacy, how public high schools are run, how colleges are marketed. This also may pertain to the ongoing discussion of civility.
Below I describe two scenarios which are anonomized versions of real events that happened a few days apart in two different schools. Please tell me what you think of them.
Scenario I
Ninth grade. An elective class. A faculty member from a local vocational college comes to class to give a…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: Black Crake, Amaurornis flavirostris, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Black Crake, Amaurornis flavirostris, photographed at Amboseli National Park, Kenya, Africa. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dan Logen, 6 August 2006 [larger view].
Nikon D2X, ISO 200, 200-400 VR lens at 400 mm. 1/180 sec, f/4.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | October 17, 2009tags: Bhutan Laughing-thrush, Garrulax imbricatum, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Bhutan Laughing-thrush, Garrulax imbricatum, photographed in Bhutan.
Image: Larry Gardella, spring 2009 [larger view].
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | October 16, 2009tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty
National Wildlife Refuges Week (11-17 October 2009) is almost over already, but we've made good progress because four projects in my "Biology is Life" Challenge have been fully funded! The teachers for each project have posted thank you letters that you can read here: The Viking Shark Project, the Cow Eye Dissection project, the Please Pass Me the Scalpel, Nurse project, and the A Room Without A View project.
There are more proposals in the "Biology is Life" Challenge that need your help, so be sure to check them out by…
grrlscientist | October 16, 2009tags: Orange Bishop, Grenadier Weaver, Orange Weaver, Euplectes franciscana, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Orange Bishop, also known as the Orange Weaver or sometimes as the Grenadier Weaver, Euplectes franciscana, photographed at Arthur Storey Park, Houston, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 26 September 2007 [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.
This species is monochromatic during the…
rallain | October 15, 2009The basic idea of the student response system is that each student gets some electronical (or not - see below) device that lets them answer multiple-choice questions. (Science Geek Girl has a good summary of clickers also) A computer then displays the distribution of responses for the class. Simple, no? They are becoming super popular, and I really like them. I used to just use them for large enrollment lecture classes (like 100 students). However, this semester I started to use them in my intro physics course for science majors with just about 30 students. I didn't realize the impact…
gregladen | October 15, 2009Roughly half of the people in the United States reject one or more fundamental tenets of science (most commonly evolution), while a larger percent, perhaps more than 80 percent depending on how we measure, would fail a basic science test. A strong majority of those American citizens who would claim to have strong feelings about one or more science policy issues such as climate change, stem cell research, or nuclear power either know very little about the relevant science or are so badly informed regarding the science that their knowledge is not merely insufficient, but is actually opposite…
bioephemera | October 15, 2009For all my microbiology/cell biology peeps, this could be a neat opportunity. ASCB has obtained a two-year stimulus grant from NIH to assemble an image library of the cell. According to Caroline Kane, project PI and professor emerita at UC-Berkeley (and a wonderful person/mentor),
"By visualizing the structure and dynamic behavior of a broad range of cells, scientists and clinicians will be better able to understand the nature of specific cells and cellular processes normal and abnormal. This will likely lead to new discoveries about diseases and drug targets in the future," Kane added. "I'm…
drorzel | October 15, 2009I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time.
I've long considered using "A Brief History of Timekeeping" as the theme for a general education course-- there's a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn't go into too much detail:
A Brief History of Timekeeping
View more presentations from Chad…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2009tags: Red-bellied Woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Red-bellied Woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus, photographed in the photographer's back yard in Houston,Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 2 June 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.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | October 14, 2009tags: animals, hummingbirds, insects, biology, streaming video
This is a lesson in observation. This is a North American animal. I know what this is (and I knew as soon as I saw the still image on the video) but I am asking you: what is this; hummingbird or insect? And for a bonus, can you tell me the species?
This is a Common Clearwing, also known as the Hummingbird Clearwing Moth, Hemaris thysbe.
bioephemera | October 14, 2009Just saw this posting:
The Stetten Fellowship seeks to encourage postdoctoral historical research and publication about biomedical sciences and technology and medicine that has been funded by NIH since 1945. Fellowships carry a stipend in the range of $45,000 per year and include health insurance and a work space, computer, and phone in the Office of NIH History. (Fellowships may be renewable to a maximum of 24 months, subject to satisfactory progress.) Stetten Fellows have access to the resources of the Office of NIH History, the collections of the Stetten Museum, the National Library of…
grrlscientist | October 14, 2009tags: American Pipit, Anthus rubescens, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] American Pipit, Anthus rubescens, photographed at Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, southwestern Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 30 January 2007 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/1000s 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 | October 13, 2009As you'll have noticed by now, I'm not doing a BioE DonorsChoose challenge this year. It was a really tough decision, but I currently have neither the time nor the spare cash to do a DonorsChoose promotion proper justice. Fortunately, I have a baker's dozen Sciblings who are going all out this year to beat the crews at Discover and Nature!
Currently, PalMD is somehow ahead of Chad, but I'm sure that's only because there hasn't been any monkey-dancing yet. Plus, I hear Isis is threatening to deploy a secret weapon, so stay tuned. There's fun, schwag, and warm fuzzies to be had by all, so if…
grrlscientist | October 13, 2009tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty
National Wildlife Refuges Week (11-17 October 2009) has is half over already, but we've made good progress because four projects in my "Biology is Life" Challenge have been fully funded! The teachers for each project have posted thank you letters that you can read here: The Viking Shark Project, the Cow Eye Dissection project, the Please Pass Me the Scalpel, Nurse project, and the A Room Without A View project.
There are more proposals in the "Biology is Life" Challenge that need your help, so be sure to check them out…
esiegel | October 13, 2009
Barney: Next they're gonna show my movie.
Bart: You made a movie ?
Barney: I made a movie? I wonder why there was a picture of me on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
Earlier this year, a documentary film challenge was issued internationally. The goal was to make a movie about one of this year's two themes: hope or fear.
A group of Oregon filmmakers, The Cingulate System, called me up at work and asked if they could interview me for their film about Dark Matter. The challenge was to make a documentary, from scratch, in under a week. The film premiered April 8th right here in Portland…
drorzel | October 13, 2009The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field-- something like a laser, which behaves very much as if it were a smoothly oscillating electromagnetic field with a well-defined frequency and phase.
Mathematically, one of the important features of a coherent state is that it is unchanged by the photon annihilation operator (in formal terms, it's an "…
grrlscientist | October 13, 2009tags: Olive Sparrow, Arremonops rufivirgatus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Olive Sparrow, Arremonops rufivirgatus, photographed at Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, Alamo, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 4 April 2008 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/60s 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 | October 12, 2009tags: soap bubble science, physics, science, surface tension, Keith Johnson, streaming video
This is a really interesting video about soap bubbles -- how they work and what we can do with them. The slow motion footage of a bursting bubble is especially interesting to watch.
drorzel | October 12, 2009Somebody should look to see if there's a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.
We had pretty decent weather-- cool but seasonal, sunny in the morning, clouding over in the afternoon-- for today's Open House. Last year, we had dreary rain at least one of the Open House days. I'd like to think that something as random and trivial as the weather wouldn't really influence a high school student's college decision, but then, I've heard stupider things...