Science Education
gregladen | March 8, 2008Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design is a must read for those interested in the Evolution - Creationism controversy. In particular, this volume is an essential part of the personal library of every science educator, for reasons that I will describe below. If you know a Life Science Teacher, this is a perfect birthday present. If you have a child in the public K-12 education system in the US, or the analog somewhere else, donate a copy of this book to the appropriate life science teacher!
In this important book published by Oxford University Press in 2004, Forrest…
gregladen | March 7, 2008.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module" (more on the "evolution module" another time ... or come to the Bell on Friday to hear me rant about that in person).
Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I…
clock | March 6, 2008Regular readers must be familiar by now with the ZooSchool in Asheboro, NC. Today's news from the school - their students have put up the first issue of their online newspaper, the ZSX-Press. Go check it out!
In related news, and also at the Asheboro Zoo and related to education, The NC Zoo and NC Zoo Society will be hosting the No Child Left Inside Conference Thursday (today), March 6th, which will be held in the MPR [multi-purpose room] of the Stedman Education Building. I wish I could go. Perhaps someone there will write about it and post something online.
clock | March 6, 2008News from SCONC:
The NC Museum of Natural Sciences presents Reptile & Amphibian Day on Saturday, March 15 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Dozens of displays, activities and presentations highlight reptiles and amphibians from North Carolina and around the world. Here's your chance to get up-close and personal with hundreds of live animals, from giant pythons to bearded dragons. Meet reptile expert Dr. Brady Barr, the first person to capture and study all 23 crocodilian species in the wild.
gregladen | March 5, 2008Voters told urologist Barney Maddox to piss off, leaving incumbent and former school teacher Pat Hardy in her position on the school board representing District 11. The people of that Texas District were too smart to be fooled by an excessively expensive campaign by Maddox who spent over $120,000 to Hardy's $10,000.
Incumbent Mary Helen Berlanga, also challenged by a hard right winger in her own party (Lupe Gonzales) appears also to be holding her own in District 2.
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gregladen | March 4, 2008It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the "evolution" unit that they teach during life science class. As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that time…
clock | March 4, 2008That is what Anne-Marie asked after a week with seven mid-term exams. In a few weeks, she'll have another bunch of exams all at the same time. And then a finals week in May.
This is, obviously, not the most efficient system. So, have you, as a student or a teacher, encountered a better system?
gregladen | March 3, 2008On one hand, we have the Huckabee factor ... Huckabee's draw on hard right voters in tomorrows primary may lead anti-evolutionists to victory. On the other hand, we have the Obama factor ... Obama's draw on moderate republicans may lead to a cleansing of pernicious liberal elements from the Republican party.
Hilary Hylton has an interesting and informative piece in, of all places, Time, about tomorrow's events in Texas. You need to know this.
Texas has a state-wide school board. This means that when it comes to textbook adoption, Texas is the largest single customer, and thus,…
gregladen | February 29, 2008That is the title of the First Place science fair project from a baptist science fair.
The description of the project:
Cassidy Turnbull (grade five) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.
Very cute. Too bad little Cassidy's brain is now hobbled forever. (Well, maybe not. She's only in fifth grade. She could get over it....)
This is from here.. You will find…
gregladen | February 29, 2008are here:
HIV infection at Wissen schafft Kommunikatioin
Other cellular stuff (an oldie but a goodie) at WeiterGen!
gregladen | February 27, 2008Bennett Gordon has a post on the Har Mar Science Fair:
...Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs decorated the words: "If you love me, you will obey what I command." (John 14:15) in pink lace fabric. This quote got to the crux of the science fair, in my opinion: parental commandment. These parents pulled their children out of school, away from their peers, and said, "Now prove that Darwin was…
sporte | February 26, 2008Do different kinds of biomes (forest vs. creek) support different kinds of bacteria?
Or do we find the same amounts of each genus wherever we look?
Those are the questions that we'll answer in this last video. We're going to use pivot tables and count all the genera that live in each biome. Then, we'll make pie graphs so that we can have a visual picture of which bacteria live in each environment.
The parts of this series are:
I. Downloading the data from iFinch and preparing it for analysis. (this is the video below) (We split the data from one column into three).
II. Cleaning up the data…
sporte | February 26, 2008This is third video in our series on analyzing the DNA sequences that came from bacteria on the JHU campus.
In this video, we use a pivot table to count all the different types of bacteria that students found in 2004 and we make a pie graph to visualize the different numbers of each genus.
The parts of this series are:
I. Downloading the data from iFinch and preparing it for analysis. (this is the video below) (We split the data from one column into three).
II. Cleaning up the data
III. Counting all the bacteria
IV. Counting the bacteria by biome
Part III. Pivot tables from Sandra Porter on…
sporte | February 26, 2008What do you do after you've used DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria, viruses, or other organisms in the environment?
What's the next step?
This four part video series covers those next steps. In this part, we learn that a surprisingly large portion of bioinformatics, or any type of informatics is concerned with fixing data entry errors and spelling mistakes.
The parts of this series are:
I. Downloading the data from iFinch and preparing it for analysis. (this is the video below) (We split the data from one column into three).
II. Cleaning up the data
III. Counting all the bacteria…
sporte | February 26, 2008For the past few years, I've been collaborating with a friend, Dr. Rebecca Pearlman, who teaches introductory biology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her students isolate bacteria from different environments on campus, use PCR to amplify the 16S ribosomal RNA genes, send the samples to the JHU core lab for sequencing, and use blastn to identify what they found.
Every year, I collect the data from her students' experiments. Then, in the bioinformatics classes I teach, we work with the chromatograms and other data to see what we can find.
This is the first part of a four part video series…
tsmith | February 26, 2008This is the third of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By Whitney Baker
While working out at the gym last night, I was perusing the latest SHAPE magazine to help pass the time. In it, I read a small article about researchers finding an association between Adenovirus-36 and human obesity. Since I am in the infectious disease field, I was already aware of this proposed link- an infectious cause (or contributor) for obesity. But for the millions of health-conscious readers hearing of this for the first time, what would they make of it? Would they have visions of…
sporte | February 25, 2008Bora had an enjoyable post yesterday on obsolete lab skills. I can empathize because I have a pretty good collection of obsolete lab skills myself. These days I'm rarely (okay, never) called upon to do rocket immunoelectrophoresis, take blood from a rat's tail, culture tumor cells in the anterior eye chamber of a frog, locate obscure parasites in solutions of liquid nitrogen, or inoculate Kalanchoe leaves with pathogenic bacteria.
(Wow! It sounds like I worked for the three witches in MacBeth! Fire burn and cauldron bubble!)
I don't entirely think that my lab skills are "obsolete." I…
tsmith | February 24, 2008...my grad students.
My spring semester course is on infectious causes of chronic disease, looking at the role various infections play in cancer, autoimmune disease, mental illness, and other chronic conditions. Since I've often discussed the importance of having scientists communicate with the public, I decided to assign each of them to write 2 blog posts for the course, discussing anything of relevance to the course. Their first round of assignments was due last week, and I'll be posting them beginning on Monday. Constructive comments on their posts are appreciated, but keep in mind…
gregladen | February 24, 2008We are busy watching Florida, and the ICR's new "degree" in "life science education" in Texas, and whatever crap is happening in our own back yards, and we may be missing a dramatic development at the K-12 level in Texas: Social conservatives are poised to take over the Texas State Board of Education.
There is a primary in on March 4th, in which Barney Maddox, a conservative creationist, may take over the run against incumbent Pat Hardy for the District 11 (Fort-Worth) seat on the school board. This would shift the balance of power in the Lone Star (read Libertarian Fundamentalist Yahoo)…
tsmith | February 23, 2008I received a very nice email from a high school student looking for a mentor for a research project on progeria:
Currently, I'm in a science research program at school where we choose a topic of interest and study it for a period of three years, as well as design an experiment and carry it out based on this topic. Eventually, students are able to present their work for competition purposes or just to share their knowledge in symposia or other forums, such as the Intel Science Competition, or the Siemens Competition.
I am studying Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome for my project and…