Science Education
tsmith | April 21, 2011If there's anyone living in the Columbus, OH, area who's interested in getting involved (or more involved) in science outreach and the Science Cafe movement, now's your chance. The Columbus Science Pub, which I started off back in September 2010 and which now boasts over 450 fans on Facebook, is looking for new leadership to take over when Dan (the current organizer) leaves Cowtown at the end of the summer.
Anyone interested should send a note to columbussciencepub@gmail.com.
For more information on the Columbus Science Pub, go to Columbus Science Pub's Facebook site or for information…
tsmith | April 19, 2011As Maryn McKenna and others have reported, a paper was released on Friday showing a high percentage of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus contaminating raw, retail-available meat products. There has been a lot of media coverage of this finding--so what does the study say, and what are its implications? More after the jump.
First, a bit about S. aureus itself, and why this study was carried out. Historically, Staph has been a relatively common cause of food poisoning. The bacterium produces toxins that can collect to a high level when prepared foods are left at room temperature, such as…
gregladen | February 24, 2011The Science component of "The Nation's Report Card" was released today and clearly indicates that we have moved one step closer as a nation in two of our most important goals: Building a large and complacent poorly educated low-pay labor class, and increasing the size of our science-illiterate populace in order to allow the advance of medieval morality and Iron Age Christian values.
The "Nation's Report Card" is meant to report academic achievement of K-12 students, and is conducted by the US Department of Education as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The current…
sporte | February 14, 2011This morning I attended a "bloggers-only" conference call with Dr. Eric Green and the folks from the NIH Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to hear about NHGRI's new strategic plan. The new plan represents a shift away from viewing the genome through a lens marked "for research use only" and towards the goal of making the genome useful as a clinical tool. As a consequence, we will see a greater emphasis on funding activities that support clinical work. For example, it's not always clear how variations in the genome are related to disease. NHGRI might fund projects that help sort and…
gregladen | February 9, 2011I just posted the following comment on this article in MinnPost:
Thanks for covering this. As Randy says, this has been known for decades, but for some reason every time it hits the news (because of a new study that shows the same thing again) everyone seems to have just heard it for the first time.
I promise you: Creationist students (there are many) and/ore creationist parents of students (and no, parents and students are not always on the same page as each other) DO make themselves known the the teachers who are teaching evolution, sometimes quite aggressively. I have yet to hear of a…
gregladen | January 20, 2011A new study compares "acceptance of evolution" by highly educated adult academics with college students in various categories, with all those sampled being in New England, which has the highest overall acceptance of evolution in the US (a mere 59 percent). The results are interesting.
The study is rather complicated. The original paper provides a great deal of detail about the characteristics of the population. Several different questions were ask. At the end of the day, however, the following results are the most important:
The percentage of respondents who feel that evolution alone…
sporte | January 6, 2011About mid-morning, my 16yr old daughter called me from school and asked me to help her get an interview transcript that was on her computer.
Four years ago, when my older daughter was in high school, I would have printed that document and driven to the school to deliver it.
Not today.
Today, I found the document on YD's computer, opened a browser, logged in to Google Docs, uploaded her file to my Google Docs account, and set the sharing settings so that YD could log in from school and get the document, which she did.
No one had to drive to the high school. No child had to stand outside in…
gregladen | January 3, 2011The other day, a science teacher remarked that a student who had previously declared herself to be a creationist, and who's parents had previously expressed concern over the teaching of evolution, was suddenly all talky-talky and engaging the teacher in more or less polite and friendly discussion about the topic, coming to visit the teacher outside of class and everything.
I thought at the time, "That's unusual. But it does happen."
What I wasn't thinking is that a recent court decision supports the idea of a teacher who teaches evolution to christians, who does not cave when the…
gregladen | December 21, 2010The annual Gallup Poll on how dumb Americans are has come out, and they got less dumb.
A new Gallup poll on public opinion about evolution hints at a slightly higher rate of acceptance of evolution in the United States over the years. Asked in December 2010 "[w]hich of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings," 38% of the respondents accepted "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process," 16% accepted "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less…
gregladen | November 20, 2010So much bad publicity spins out of Louisiana about so many things that we don't often get a chance to shine a spotlight on the competent, dedicated people who are the real reason that this state works at all. And since Thanksgiving is almost here, it is a good time to tell the world that Louisiana has intelligent, accomplished, dedicated citizens, teachers, scientists -- and students! -- who are trying to stop the damage that the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF) and their allies are doing to Louisiana science education. Several of Louisiana's finest testified on November 12, 2010, in favor of…
tsmith | November 18, 2010The second edition of the Rock Stars of Science is now out online, and in the November 23rd ("Men of the Year") edition of GQ magazine. As Chris Mooney notes, this is a campaign funded by the Geoffery Beene Foundation, working to raise recognition of scientists' work (and scientists, period, since roughly half of the American population can't name a single living scientist). Part of the campaign is to make science noticeable and "cool;" I'll quote from the press release:
ROCK S.O.S⢠aims to bridge a serious recognition gap for science, observes journalist Chris Mooney, co-author of the…
gregladen | November 12, 2010Louisiana is one of those states where really stupid stuff tends to happen, especially when it comes to evolution in the school curriculum. Recently, a state panel was in a position to chose either creationist textbooks with which to abuse the children for whom they are responsible, or good biology textbooks to educate the children for whom they are responsible. Under considerable pressure to not become the next national laughing stock, the advisory council voted 8-4 to use the correct books.
That's good news, but it ain't not over yet. This was only a preliminary vote, and the final…
sporte | November 1, 2010Funding raising drives come and go but the need to educate the coming generations in science and math never goes away.
With your help, teachers can help their students.
DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects individuals, like you, to classrooms in need. The average public school teacher spends $500 - $700 on classroom supplies out of his/her own pocket, and students still go without critical supplies they need to learn. At DonorsChoose, teachers post requests for classroom equipment and supplies, like microscopes, DNA kits, even field trips to the zoo, and you can help fund…
gregladen | October 18, 2010... for the truly ungodly time of 9:00 AM Central Time to listen to Air America's "The Voice of Minnesota" Atheist Talk Radio Show on KTNF AM 950.
Ira Flatow (photo)
aDNA (that's "art-DNA") artist and sciJournalist Lynn Fellman and I will have a conversation with Ira Flatow of Talk of the Nation's Science Friday about science communication, media, and the role of media.
The idea for having this conversation originated with the recent news of changes in the support available for Ira Flatow's show. To get the latest information about this (and to learn how we all overreacted to the scary…
gregladen | October 6, 2010It is hard to imagine a world without science Friday.
But it is easy to image a world in which our collective respect for the National Science Foundation, who is pulling their funding for the program, is seriously compromised. Also, it is easy to imagine a world in which we do NOT renew our memberships to NPR because they are ALSO pulling funding.
UPDATE: Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday, has added a comment below which you should read.
As you know, I tend to be bit radical in these areas. I may very well shift my personal donation to Sci Fri despite Ira's suggestion, or perhaps split…
sporte | October 5, 2010We often hear talk these days about failure in leadership and gutless congress people. I understand wanting to keep out of the fray. Last year, I wrote about a reasonable proposal to help young people and unwittingly tapped into a strain of people out there with an amazing amount of hatred towards kids.
That experience really made me appreciate the courage displayed by Senators Richard Durbin, Patrick Leahy, and Richard Lugar in not giving up on the Dream Act and working once again to try to see it get through congress.
I never knew anything about these kids until a friend in Oklahoma…
tsmith | October 4, 2010This is great. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has launched a site on The History of Vaccines. I've been poking around, and there's an incredible amount of stuff to check out. They have a nice FAQ, Top 20 questions about vaccination, as well as some great activities (herd immunity! learn about Koch's postulates! understand the relative risk of vaccination versus other events!) and a metric fuckton of articles and images. Looks to be a fantastic resource for students, and for anyone interested in understanding vaccination.
gregladen | October 3, 2010I always assumed that "The Mouse that Roared" was a not too subtle reference to Sputnik I, which was launched on this date in 1957. The satellite was the first human made machine to orbit the planet, and it was launched by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. In some ways, Sputnik's tiny "beep beep beep" sound heard radiometrically (but mostly metaphorically) in the west, from a Soviet-launched device flying over whatever countries the Soviets decided to launch it over ... was the most frightening sound ever heard in the Situation Room (or the 1957 equivalent thereof) at the…
sporte | October 3, 2010Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) shared this wonderful Lady Gaga lab spoof on Twitter the other day. It rocks.
And, it makes me wonder if my pals who've been thinking about getting students interested in careers by having scientists talk on camera might be going at this the wrong way. Sure, videos of scientists talking are totally fascinating (yawn..) and...
Oh right, where was I?
Well, here's the thing. If you want to get kids interested in something, you have to use something that interests them. Your strategy isn't going to work unless the kids find it intriguing enough to go watch…
tsmith | September 30, 2010The Dog Zombie has an interesting post discussing women in vet med--and why there are so many. She notes that her school is only 12% male, versus more of an even distribution in med schools, and the recent discussion of gender imbalance in science blogging. This is interesting to me, as my personal vet is male, as are almost all of the vets we collaborate with for our research. Of course, the gender distribution of veterinarians in academia may well be more gender-balanced (or even male-skewed) than those currently in vet school or recently graduated.
DZ posits some possible reasons for this…