Science Education
clock | July 11, 2007OK, so I've been here for about a week now. It's been so far an exciting and overwhelming experience - there is so much to learn! And I am impatient with myself and want to get in the groove right now. I need to learn to slow down a little...
Anyway, I did manage to drop in here at the blog a couple of times and report on meetups with some local bloggers, but here is a little bit more about the week so far...
San Francisco is quite a unique city - I really cannot say it reminds me of any other place I've been to. Quite ecclectic and freewheeling. And hilly! My house is on top of the…
sporte | July 11, 2007What do people in biotechnology do on the job?
What can students do with a science degree once they've finished college? Some answers can be found at the "Life Sciences Central web site. Created by the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County, this is a wonderful resource for anyone who's considering biotechnology for a potential career.
My favorite part of the site is the series of short video interviews from people in the biotech industry, describing what they do on the job and how they got there.
tags: biotechnology careers, biotechnology, career+descriptions
Ten interviews…
sporte | July 10, 2007Okay, all of you biochemists and molecular biology types. I have a puzzle for you that I found by accident during a lecture. Yes, I was the one lecturing and the notes will be posted soon.
In the meantime, here's your puzzle: What's unusual about this pair of bases?
tags: DNA structure, DNA , molecular structure, biochemistry
(Those of you who attended our Chautauqua course - I know you probably know the answer - but don't answer, okay?)
tsmith | July 9, 2007Last year, Seed magazine and Scienceblogs noted the 25th anniversary of the recognition of AIDS. You'd think that in all that time, especially with the identification of HIV and all the public education campaigns in the 1980s, people would realize by now that HIV isn't spread by casual contact. You can't get it by sharing drinking glasses, by coughing and sneezing around others, by being in the same swimming pool. However, the message still hasn't gotten out in some areas, it would seem, as a two-year old HIV+ boy was restricted from using the pool and showers at an Alabama campground.…
clock | July 9, 2007I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week.
As I am at work and unable to moderate comments, the comment section is closed on this post, but will be open on the previous post (here) where I hope you will remain civil and stay on topic. You are also welcome to comment on this interview at several other places (e.g,. DailyKos, MyDD, TPMCafe, Science And Politics, Liberal Coalition, the Edwards campaign blog as well as, hopefully, your own blogs).
I…
clock | July 8, 2007What happens when you invite a bunch of high school students and a bunch of college students to do research over the summer in a bunch of biology labs AND you help them blog about the experience? You get amazing stories and great insights collected at Howard Hughes Precollege Program Summer 2007 and Student Research at Duke. Spend some time on both sites and look around. It is really amazing and eye-opening.
evolgen | July 5, 2007Last month's issue of Evolution (aka Evolution Int J Org Evolution, aka Evolution (Lawrence Kansas), aka some other confusing way of referring to the journal published by the Society for the Study of Evolution) contains two articles on teaching evolution. The first is on creating museum exhibitions to showcase evolutionary biology. The article focuses on Explore Evolution, a project in which multiple museums in the midwestern United States put up permanent exhibits about evolution. The exhibits encourage problem solving to understand how evolution works and have multiple examples from diverse…
clock | June 26, 2007As more and more people are slowly coming out of the woodwork and revealing they are going to Science Foo Camp, I am getting more and more excited about it! Yes, I have registered and reserved my hotel room already.
Sure, people like Neal Stephenson and Carl Djerassi are going to be there (as well as all those bloggers I linked to before - see the link above), but I am so excited to be able, for the first time, to meet in person Gabrielle Lyons, the power behind Project Exploration (the link to their site has been on my sidebar - scroll down - for about a year now). I wrote about it in more…
revere | June 25, 2007It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server?
A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…
clock | June 22, 2007Remember when we discussed the mammal vs. bird survival at Chernobyl the other day? Well, I learned today that someone is about to go and study the humans there as well. I am not exactly sure what kind of reserch it will be, but it will have something to do with the mutations in genomes of the surrounding population.
Sarah Wallace, a senior at Duke University, will be part of the team. And you will be able to follow her adventures and her science on her blog: Notes from Ukraine (MT will not render Cyrillics well so I translated the name of the country)
tsmith | June 21, 2007I mentioned I was back in Ohio last week. The occasion was the celebration of my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary, but while I was in the area, a number of us from Panda's Thumb also met up south of Cincinnati to take our own tour of Answers in Genesis' Creation Museum. (Wesley has a picture of the group here; I'll also try to scan in another "official" picture tomorrow).
My brain still hurts. My thoughts on everything below (with photos, of course):
This trip has been planned for awhile, and I've purposely tried to avoid most of the blog posts on the museum. I've checked out…
clock | June 20, 2007You may be aware of the ongoing discussion about the tense relationship between scientists and science journalists. Here is the quick rundown of posts so far:
Question for the academic types--interview requests
The Mad Biologist and Science Journalists
Science Journalists are NOT the Problem
Just don't quote me
Science and the Press
Scientists and Journalists, Part Deux
Scientists in the Media
Science/journalists update redux: Mooney chimes in
Science and journalism
Journalists and scientists - an antimatter explosion?
Madam Speaker, I Yield My Remaining Time to the Paleontologist from the…
sporte | June 20, 2007Quoth Dr. Stemwedel, from Adventures in Science and Ethics.
In the case of Universities and four-yr colleges, I completely agree. If you're looking for job training, go to a community college.
This post is in response to one of the comments from the other day. This commenter expressed frustration at having a completed a bioinformatics training program that left him/her with a certificate but without the right skills to find a job.
tags: bioinformatics, education
He/she suggested that "the government must select candidates for teaching from industry"
This post is my answer.
In the U.S.,…
clock | June 19, 2007What's in a name? It's just a word, a tag we use to talk about people so everyone knows wo we are talking about, isn't it? Or at least that is how it should be, don't you think?
But it is not, as anthropologists (and now psychologists as well) have been telling us for a long time. There is a reason why names run in families (with the addition of Jr., II, III, ...). There is a reason why there is a big market for Baby Names books. Names have subtle power over people.
Now, Sheril discusses a recent study from the University of Florida about the subtle effect of female names on their…
sporte | June 19, 2007Know your biology!
I get asked often about the type of bioinformatics training that students should get and whether it should be a special course or not.
And I answer that I think teaching bioinformatics in the absence of biology is like teaching Microsoft Word in the absence of writing.
There isn't much point.
tags: bioinformatics, education
So I was happy, to discover from BioInform, that I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
To quote Lincoln Stein:
I hope to see bioinformatics becoming a tool like molecular biology that everybody uses, and that the software we're developing now…
clock | June 17, 2007Here is an example of perfect science blogging. It starts seemingly innocuously, with a quiz: Monday's Molecule #30, where you are supposed to figure out what the compound is.
Then, after a couple of days, there is a post that you may not even realize at first is related to the first one: Bacteria Have Cell Walls
Another day or two, and A and B get connected: How Penicillin Works to Kill Bacteria
But how do we know this? Well, some people figured it out: Nobel Laureates: Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, Sir Howard Walter Florey - and now you know how we know.
Finally, putting…
clock | June 16, 2007What is it?:
Blip is a forum for artists, scientists and members of the public interested in new forms of art that explore generative and procedural processes, interaction, emergence and artificial life. We are based in Brighton, UK, and in the last 4 years we have organized presentations, exhibitions, gigs and three Big Blip festivals. To facilitate access, we primarily organize events in bars, clubs and other public venues in the centre of the city.
I have not been in Brighton since 1980 and I have not heard of Big Blip festivals until last night. Can someone tell me more? It sounds…
revere | June 16, 2007When Don Herbert died last weekend, many offered tributes to this television pioneer of science education (our contribution here). Herbert was TV's Mr. Wizard and many of us scientists-to-be loved to watch him. Maybe we should have been out playing stickball or strikeout or whatever (I became pretty proficient at strikeout later when I started dating). But instead we were inside watching grainy black and white science on TVs with tiny screens and rabbit ears (rabbit ears were part of an early form of wireless).
There were many heartfelt blog pieces from the many who remembered Mr. Wizard with…
revere | June 13, 2007Don Herbert died yesterday, just short of his 90th year. Don Herbert was host of television's Watch Mr. Wizard, a Saturday morning live TV show that had a run of 547 episodes from 1951 to 1965. He was an important figure in the youth of many of today's scientists.
The weekly 30-minute show featured Herbert as Mr. Wizard with a young assistant who watched while Herbert performed interesting science experiments. The experiments, many of which seemed impossible at first glance, were usually simple enough to be re-created by viewers. The show was very successful. (Wikipedia entry on Don Herbert…