Science Education
jlynch | August 1, 2006As I type this, votes are being counted in Kansas in primaries for the State Board of Education. You can keep track of the results here. For the record, Bacon, Morris, Willard and Patzer are ID supporters.
It seems as good a time as any to repost this from June of last year, in the spirit of hoping that the good people of Kansas reject an ignoramus like Connie Morris:
When an elected state school board member such as Connie Morris (KS) can write a newsletter [pdf] that reads as if it was written by an illiterate thirteen year old, then you know there is something wrong with the system in…
jlynch | July 31, 2006As Ed reports here, the mask has fallen away from ID. Joel Borofsky - Dembski's "research" assistant - has admitted that the push for "balance" in Kansas is nothing more than an attempt to inject ID into schools:
It really is ID in disguise. The entire purpose behind all of this is to shift it into schools...at least that is the hope/fear among some science teachers in the area. The problem is, if you are not going to be dogmatic in Darwinism that means you inevitably have to point out a fault or at least an alternative to Darwinism. So far, the only plausible theory is ID.
BOOM! Thank you…
clock | July 30, 2006Talking about the need to have popular scientists out there, I think the term "rock-star" was an unfortunate choice. Some people in joking, some people in all seriousness, started looking for people with PhD's who can play musical instruments.
That is, of course, irrelevant. We are not looking for scientists who are also rockstars, but for scientists who are as well known, as universally respected and as seriously taken as the rock stars were back in the 1960s. The idea is to have a scientist or two or three being so well known that anyone and everyone in the country and the world is at…
clock | July 29, 2006 While I am teaching the biology lab, I set this post to show up automatically at the same time. It describes what we do today, the same stuff we did back on March 26, 2006:
This week we had a busy lab, which means I did not have time for much inpired talking like I did last time. We did some exercises together as a group, while some other exercises were set as stations arund the room and each student did them alone, at their own time.
First, the students used the staining technique they learned last week to find out what kinds of organisms live on their fingers. They saw bacteria from…
sporte | July 28, 2006We've had a good time in the past few last weeks, identifying unknown sequences and learning our way around a GenBank nucleotide record. To some people, it seems that this is all there is to doing digital biology. They would, of course, be wrong.
We can do much, much more than identifying DNA sequences and obtaining crucial information, like who left their DNA behind on that little blue dress.
Today, we're going to a deeper question about who we are and who are our relatives.
Drumroll, okay, here it comes:
How similar are DNA sequences between humans and apes?
Your assignment is to find…
clock | July 27, 2006In an interview in Time magazine, Morgan Spurlock said, among else (and you should go and read the "else"):
We've started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry--people wusing p.r.-speak to push a corporate or political agenda. I think we need to turn scientists back into the rock stars they are.
Chris brought this quote to the bloggers' attention and Shelley was the first to respond:
I find this quote so refreshing (not just because it places us scientists up on a lofty pedestal), because it validates scientific authority figures as someone worth listening…
sporte | July 26, 2006Trade publications; such as catalogs, technical bulletins, and web sites; are a valuable source of information for students in biotechnology-related courses. Not only do catalogs and technical publications provide current information, but they also contain a wealth of useful facts and physical constants that biologists need on-the-job. Further, using catalogs in the classroom mimics the way that science is carried out in the real world. In the research lab, scientists and technicians often rely on catalogs, technical bulletins, and web sites, for quick and useful information.
I probably…
sporte | July 24, 2006A few years ago, the General Biology students at the Johns Hopkins University began to interrogate the unseen world. During this semester-long project, they study the ecosystems of the Homewood campus, and engage in novel research by exploring the microbial ecosystems in different sections of the campus. Biology lab students gather environmental samples from different campus ecosystems, isolate DNA, amplify 16s ribosomal DNA by PCR, and check their PCR results by gel electrophoresis.
DNA samples are next sent to the university's Genetic Resources Core Facility , where scientific staff, in…
tsmith | July 24, 2006Just wanted to point y'all to PZ's post on Gallagher's editorial (as he notes, he's much less generous than I am) and make a few clarifications:
1) Gallagher didn't coin the term "spiritual left;" that's lifted from Silver's book. I know many of the comments strongly disagreed with that term, and to be fair, it's not of his invention.
2) I understand that most of the examples Gallagher mentioned are present on all sides of the political spectrum. I agree that the right has more political clout and funding, and I disagree with Gallagher with his statement that the left is a bigger threat…
clock | July 22, 2006This is by far the most popular of the four installments in this series because it contains the nifty puzzle exercise. Click on the spider-web-clock icon to see the comments on the original post.
Just like last week, I have scheduled this post to appear at the time when I am actually teaching this very lab again. If there are any notable difference, I'll let you know in the afternoon.
When teaching the lecture portion of the course, I naturally have to prepare the lectures in advance, and each lecture has to cover a particular topic. This makes biology somewhat fragmentary and I try to use…
tsmith | July 21, 2006Via the Christian Science Monitor comes an article about the "Iron Science Teacher:"
Some of the best scientific experiments are the simplest. Think of Galileo dropping lead balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Archimedes working out the principle of specific gravity while lounging in his bathtub.
The noble tradition lives on with Linda Paparella, a sixth-grade science teacher from Harlem's Opportunity Charter School in New York City. Ms. Paparella works frantically over a collection of orange halves, wires, metal plates, and a stopwatch. Next to Paparella, three other young teachers -…
tsmith | July 20, 2006The name "Richard Gallagher" may be familiar to some readers. Gallagher is the editor of The Scientist, and last year, somewhat naively suggested that the evolution/creation "debate" was actually a good thing (you can find the text of his editorial at this site). Both PZ and Jason Rosenhouse took him to task for the editorial (and Gallagher replied, and PZ shot back). The next month, The Scientist then published a number of letters responding to the editorial, and Gallagher also wrote a reply (republished here by the Discovery Institute). Gallagher ended that piece with this quote:…
clock | July 17, 2006David Ng of Science Fair is asking an informal AskThe ScienceBlogger question:
Are there any children's books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn't have to be a picture book, doesn't even have to be a children's book - just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for the younger mind set.
MarkCC and Janet have responded with their choices. And you should definitely look up David's reviews of several science-related children's books here, here, here, here…
tsmith | July 15, 2006More interesting stories that I didn't get to this week...
Ewen is looking for volunteer producers for his radio show. If you're in his neck of the woods and would like to learn about science journalism, drop him a line.
Mike notes that MRSA is winning the war on drugs, due in part to dirty needles and a lack of needle exchange programs.
Orac discusses the latest Geiers drama (those would be the folks who've been most prominent in pushing the vaccination/autism link here in the U.S.) Turns out a court recently laid the smackdown on them, Kitzmiller-style.
More sequence information has been…
clock | July 15, 2006I am teaching the Intro Bio lab right now and thought it would be appropriate to schedule this post to appear at the same time. I wrote it last time I taught this, but today's lab will be pretty much the same. Being second summer session, the class will probably be really small, which will make the lab go even faster and easier.
Yesterday I had my first class of the semster of the BIO Lab at the community college. This is the first time with a new syllabus, containing some new excercises.
At the beginning, we took a look at some cartoons, as examples of Inductive and Abductive Arguments,…
sporte | July 14, 2006Last week, we embarked on an adventure with BLAST.
BLAST, short for Basic Alignment Search Tool, is a collection of programs, written by scientists at the NCBI (1) that are used to compare sequences of proteins or nucleic acids. BLAST is used in multiple ways, but last week my challenge to you, dear readers, was to a pick a sequence, any sequence, from a set of 16 unknown sequences and use BLAST to identify that sequence.
This week, we'll examine the results.
I did the experiment, too, with a completely different unknown sequence that's pasted below. This sequence is not part of the data…
clock | July 13, 2006. This is a post intwo parts - the second being a reaction to the responses that the first one engendered. They may be a little rambling, especially the first one, but I still think that there is quite a lot there to comment on.
Great Men and Science Education - Part 1
There is an interesting thread here about "faith" in science and the way science is taught. Why no science textbook is a "Bible" of a field. Here are some of my musings....
So much science teaching, not just in high school but also in college, is rote learning. Memorize Latin names for body parts, Krebs cycle, taxonomy of…
tsmith | July 13, 2006Received this press release in my email: Rudd Center Creates Blog for Discussion, Debate of Obesity Epidemic"
The Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale goes live today with a blog that encourages people to discuss topics ranging from how advertising determines what children eat to what pressures a bride-to-be is facing to squeeze into a size-four gown.
The center was founded last year in response to the obesity epidemic as well as to the prejudice faced by people who are obese. As a practitioner of "strategic science" designed to develop solutions to this major public health…
sporte | July 12, 2006Many regions in the United States, and the world for that matter, are seeking to entice biotech companies to relocate. As Lorraine Ruff and David Gabrilska describe in their Genetic Engineering News Article, "Metrics for Economic Development," the exhibitors at meetings like BIO work hard to:
".. entice founders and CEOs with a wide spectrum of inducements: institutional and technological excellence, free land, preferential tax rates, and low electricity and/or water rates. They punctuate the sale with regional culinary novelties: home of the famous crawfish (with plush toy), tasty sour mash…
sporte | July 10, 2006Although, I certainly didn't believe it. Truly in nature, it can be described as nonpareil.
With all the years that I've heard (or taught) that all DNA is antiparallel, it was hard to believe my own eyes when I saw this structure.
Yet here is, on the screen, parallel DNA.
The image that I posted a couple of days ago came from this same structure. In that image, I hid the rest of the bases, to make it easier to see why this structure is so strange.
Here are some images that show the landmarks a bit better. I hid the hydrogens and used different rendering styles to portray the backbone and the…