Science Education
clock | May 19, 2010If you can, join us at noon, Tuesday, May 25, here in Research Triangle Park for our final 2009-2010 American Scientist pizza lunch talk. (Don't worry, we'll launch a new season next fall.)
Our speaker will be Phaedra Boinodiris, a Serious Games Program Manager at IBM, where she helps craft IBM's serious games strategy in technical training, marketing and leadership development. She'll discuss: "Using Games to develop strategies and skills to thrive in a real-time world." Boinodiris is the founder of the INNOV8 program, a series of games focused on business process management. An entrepreneur…
gregladen | May 17, 2010Fearless Leader of NCSE, Eugenie Scott, gave the University of Missouri Commencement Speech on Saturday. I'm sure they gave her an honorary degree for the speech, and I believe this makes Genie a PhD eight times over, earning her the name "Octodoc." (And to think, I knew her when she had only one or two. Unidoc. Or Bidoc maybe.)
"Show me" you say? OK, no problem:
Graduates, parents, distinguished faculty and guests ... but especially graduates.
Because a graduation should be all about you.
The traditional ritual of a commencement speech is to give graduates advice: how to live your lives…
kcollins | May 13, 2010
By Aimee Stern, Festival Communications Director
"Fighting a forest fire with 1000 eye droppers." That's how David Washington, acting CEO of Change the Equation, a non-profit, described the current effort to improve STEM (science, technology, education and mathematics) education in the United States.
There are hundreds of programs around the country addressing the nation's need for improving STEM education, but there is no centralized repository of information about them. The problem? Others can't learn from their success or failures.
This discussion was part of a larger meeting at the…
kcollins | May 12, 2010TODAY IS THE DAY! Have you voted yet?? Help us decide the jingle for the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
Find the 7 jingles here listen to them all and then vote! Today is the last day to vote!
So what are you waiting for? Go listen AND VOTE!
clock | May 10, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Alex from Miss Baker's Biology class at Staten Island Academy to answer a few questions. You can read about Alex's experience at ScienceOnline2010 here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about…
clock | May 7, 2010Last week, at the SigmaXi pizza lunch (well, really dinner), organized by SCONC, we were served a delicious dish - a lively presentation by Dennis Meredith about Explaining Research, the topic of his excellent new book - in my humble opinion the best recent book on this topic.
His presentation was almost identical to what he presented on our panel at the AAAS meeting in February in San Diego, and you can check out the slideshow (with the audio of his presentation going on with the slides) here.
Dennis and I are friends, and he attended 3-4 of the four ScienceOnline conferences to date and you…
clock | May 6, 2010Our May Science Café (description below) will be held on Tuesday 5/18 at Tir Na Nog on S. Blount Street. This year there has been an incredible amount of geologic activity around the world. During this cafe we will be talking about volcanoes and earthquakes and how these and other forces have shaped North Carolina. Our café speaker for the evening will be Dr. Kevin Stewart from the Geology Department at UNC. It should be an interesting evening for all of us to learn more about the earth, how it changes, and how those changes can affect our present world. Dr. Stewart will have some of…
clock | May 3, 2010Last week I went to Sigma Xi to hear Dennis Meredith speak about Explaining Research. I posted my summary of his talk over on Science In The Triangle blog so click on over.....
eklemetti | May 3, 2010
Mt. Saint Helens erupting in 2004.
I had a chance to watch a new NOVA special that airs May 5 (PBS) on the 1980-1986 and 2004-2008 eruption cycles at Mt. Saint Helens, along with the recovery of the blast zone from the 1980 eruption. It is a fitting episode as we approach the 30th anniversary of the eruption that took out the north side of the volcano and devastated a vast swath of Cascade wilderness in Washington on May 18, 1980. Many of you have already sent me your Mt. Saint Helens memories (keep them coming!) for my tribute to the eruption, but if you want to get started on remembering…
clock | May 1, 2010In ten days, new Periodic Tables:
May 11, 2010 at 7:00 P.M.
The Importance of Being Dad: Paternal Care in Primates
Although human males often get criticized for being "deadbeat dads", the truth is that compared to most mammals, human males are simply outstanding fathers. Join us as Dr. Susan Alberts discusses why we don't generally expect male mammals to provide paternal care (answer: because we think they usually can't recognize their own offspring), and the unusual and surprising case of paternal care in a primate species where we least expect to find it.
In the baboons of the Amboseli…
jstemwedel | April 28, 2010Yesterday in my "Ethics in Science" class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn't available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
For one thing, it can give you a glimpse of the lives of people who are working out how how to become grown-up scientists, or how to combine a scientific career with a life outside of that career. The wide array of scientists at different career stages working out…
gregladen | April 21, 2010C.E. Cupp is Ann Coulter before the bottle-blond crap is poured on her head, but maybe slightly less vile.1 She just came out with a new book: Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity, which explains everything you had wrong if you were a progressive liberal in the education business. The book even comes with forward by Mike Huckabee.
Well, Steve Levingston of Political Bookworm on the Washington Post web site has reviewed the book, and seeing as how he does not have a lot of background in the Creationism vs Reality struggle, he interviewed Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE…
clock | April 19, 2010Ask A Biologist, a wonderful site where experts answer all your questions about biology:
This is a site aimed mostly at school kids and is devoted to providing the best scientific information available to anyone who is interested in any aspect of biology (the study of life) including palaeontology (the study of the history of life). But don't be put off; we accept questions from anyone who asks - whatever their age! We want to take you beyond the classroom - if you want to know more on any subject that interests you, then ask us and we will help you to find the answer.
Everything you see here…
clock | April 16, 2010USA Science & Engineering Festival Calls for Entries to New Kavli Science Video ContestCalls for Entries to New Kavli Science Video Contest:
WASHINGTON -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Science is cool and The Kavli Foundation is challenging K-12 students across the nation to explain why.
The first ever Kavli Science Video Contest will be held this year during the USA Science & Engineering Festival October 10-24, 2010 in Washington, DC. This two-week celebration of science based in the nation's capital, includes events ranging from student brown bag lunches with Nobel Laureates to a two-day…
terrasig | April 14, 2010Down on the left sidebar you'll see a little gizmo for SiteMeter, a service that measures one's blog traffic and gives all sorts of tidbits about how readers got to the blog and a very general idea of where they are coming from. Most bloggers pay attention to the numbers of visitors but I have always been more interested in how readers get here and what posts they are reading.
One value of SiteMeter is to keep tabs on search terms that bring people here to learn of breaking stories. So, when I saw a bunch of hits starting yesterday with search terms like "hydrogen sulfide," I feared the…
gregladen | April 14, 2010"Mr. Tangarone, a 17-year veteran of the Weston school system, claims that a program he wanted to teach about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln was rejected by the school administration because it involved teaching evolution -- the scientific theory that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor."
Mark Tangarone, who teaches third, fourth, and fifth grade students in the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program at Weston Intermediate School, said he is retiring at the end of the current school year because of a clash with the school administration over the teaching of evolution…
clock | April 14, 2010From the USA Science & Engineering Festival:
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--It's the 30th Anniversary of the Rubik's Cube, and the USA Science & Engineering Festival is planning a You CAN Do the Rubik's Cube tournament in Washington, D.C., October of 2010. Teams from Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia are eligible to compete. Here's a video from the first You CAN Do the Rubik's Cube tournament held this spring in San Diego.
Rubik's Cube creator Professor Erno Rubik will receive a Lifetime Science and Math Education Achievement Award from the…
clock | April 9, 2010Next American Scientist Pizza Lunch:
It's not often that we get to dive a little deeper into a topic encountered at a recent pizza lunch talk. But we will this month. In March, Geoff Ginsburg from Duke briefed us well on the current science regarding genomic (or personalized) medicine and its promising applications. At noon on Tuesday, April 20, Jim Evans from UNC-Chapel Hill will discuss the complexity of implementing this new medicine with a talk entitled: Personalized Medicine: Too Much Information / Too Little Information. Like Dr. Ginsburg, Dr. Evans is a doctor-scientist. He is also…
gregladen | April 9, 2010Credo (as in Working Assets) gives a percentage of its charges to various organizations. Now, there is a way for you to vote for which organization will get an infusion of cash. One of the choices is the NCSE.
According to Robert Luhn of the NCSE:
... NCSE is on the 2010 ballot. If your readers support the teaching of evolution in the public schools...well [they can go to the] CREDO ballot and [the] to the "Economic and Social Justice" section, where the listing for "National Center for Science Education" resides.
On the Credo site, it says:
If you are a current long distance, mobile or…