Education
razib | October 7, 2006Update: OK, a pro is in the house. Chris of Mixing Memory starts:
I don't really know where to start on this. Lakoff's reply is one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces of writing I've seen from a cognitive scientist, and if anyone other than Lakoff had written it, I'd probably just ignore it. But Lakoff is not only famous, he's influential, and more than a few liberal bloggers take him seriously. So I feel compelled to say something. I guess the best way to go about this is to detail their disagreements, and show where Lakoff sinks to all new lows in defense of his position.
Read the…
sporte | October 6, 2006Many science experiments are carefully thought out. Often, the procedures we follow have been thoroughly tested. We measure everything we can at every point that we can, so that we can determine if a procedure, like isolating DNA, is working properly and if the procedure doesn't work, we can determine what went wrong. When the procedure is done, we analyze our data to determine if our experiments really gave us an answer. Then, we present our data to others, in venues like lab meetings and conferences, subjecting our work to review to the toughest critics we can find.
Every act of…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there's no reason to be complacent. There's a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the next generation, aren't going to be propelling us as well. Take this report by science educators, for instance:
"We are the best in the world at what we do at the top end, and we are mediocre — or worse — at the bottom end," said Jon Miller, of Michigan State University, who studies the role of…
stcynic | October 5, 2006Denyse O'Leary has a post defending Frank Beckwith's credentials from an anonymous attacker on her blog. The anonymous critic wrote:
Beckwith is not a law professor. He does not have the requisite education to be a law professor. He has no juris doctorate. Therefore, he can only teach at the undergraduate level. And even then, he can only teach the "philosophy of law." Not law itself.
Now, I fully agree with O'Leary that this is a silly and pointless attack on Beckwith. She is absolutely right to point out that he has a Masters in Juridical Studies from Washington University-St Louis, which…
cortex | October 5, 2006The much awaited Harvard University proposal to revise its aged core curriculum has been released. So far, two details have gotten most of the attention:
1) The committee did not follow Larry Summer's suggestion to increase core requirements for science. Students would still have to take one course each in life science and physical science.
2) The committee has added a mandatory course on religion, dubbed "Reason and Faith". From the WSJ:
The proposed religion course would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. The report, which…
j7uy5 | October 3, 2006"College Town 'Poverty' Exposed:" Exposé or Rant?
The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a story a couple of weeks ago, which
dealt with the issue of Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) going
to college towns. The article ran in Sunday's Ann Arbor News,
which is where I saw it. The article itself is available on
the
Internet,
href="http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/koff091806.html">here.
The gist of the story is this: the CDGB program is a federal program
that provides block grants to communities based upon their poverty
rates. College towns tend to have a high proportion of
college…
pharyngula | October 2, 2006Since John Wilkins has already commented on Paul Hanle's article on the declining competitiveness of Americans in science, I'll focus my opinion on a narrower point. I think Hanle is precisely correct when he points out that ID and creationism are shackles that handicap science education in our country.
By teaching intelligent design or other variants of creationism in science classes at public schools — or by undercutting the credibility of evolution — we are greatly diminishing our chances for future scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations, and are endangering our health,…
tsmith | September 29, 2006Via Dean and Science, Just Science comes this story about a new group trying to get ID into class in the UK:
Parents are being encouraged to challenge their children's science teachers over what they are explaining as the origins of life.
An organisation called Truth in Science has also sent resource packs to all UK secondary school science departments.
It promotes the idea of intelligent design - that there was an intelligence behind the creation of the universe.
On their website, Truth in Science notes that they've already sent " a mailing to all Secondary School and College Heads of…
stcynic | September 27, 2006The Oakland Press published an editorial on its website on Saturday about Dick DeVos' statements advocating the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes. Their editorial stance is essentially to dismiss it as a non-issue brought up by a "frenzied media" or by "anonymous political groups." Speaking as a founding board member of the only organization that has spoken out publicly on the issue, I can only assume that they are referring to Michigan Citizens for Science. Unfortunately, the editorial in the Press fails to address the crux of the issue.
They make two primary…
terrasig | September 26, 2006Dr Bruce Alberts, recently departed president of the US National Academy of Sciences and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF, just spoke this morning at a symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Duke University School of Medicine. The overall program is incredible, with four Nobel laureates in three days, plus a number of Lasker Award winners including one of this year's (Linda Grieder).
I'm compelled to put up this quick post on Dr Alberts' talk because of his ambitious plan for improving scientific literacy of the US and the scientific prospects for grad students and…
purepedantry | September 26, 2006So I am sititng in a movie theater the other day, and some teenagers sitting behind me are talking. Of course, they are talking. They are ALWAYS talking behind me. And what particularly irks me is that it is a Tuesday night during the school year, and I only come to movies at 10 pm on Tuesday nights during the school year for the slim chance of avoiding talking teenagers.
Why, I ask you? Surely, there is some explanation for this behavior?
One theory is that teenagers are actually from a separate barbarian race. However, I suspect that there is also an underlying neurological reason…
cortex | September 25, 2006Go to Yale for free.
Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures, the New Haven, Connecticut-based school said.
The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They…
purepedantry | September 19, 2006I have talked repeatedly here about how I don't think that genetics provide an adequate explanation of the gender disparity in science. I haven't mentioned that this gender disparity does not overly disturb me, primarily because I think that some time in the next 10 years this is going to get fixed in profound way. Here is some demographic evidence why women will soon surpass men in science and more generally in academia:
Girls have long gotten better grades than boys in all levels of school. But while at one time few women used those academic skills to get degrees, new research suggests…
pharyngula | September 19, 2006Of course! They're lurking everywhere, scheming to get onto school boards and wreak havoc. I recently heard from a few people at the University of Hawaii who were shocked to see some of the responses of school board candidates there to the question, "Should public schools teach intelligent design?"—they gave answers like this:
Henry W. Hoeft, Jr. says Intelligent Design creationism "Should be taught side-by-side with Darwin's Theory of Evolution and students can decide which view to accept".
Brian Kessler says "Voters should decide by referendum".
There's a simple answer to this problem:…
mikethemadbiologist | September 16, 2006After reading this Washington Post article about the Iraq War reconstruction effort, I've stumbled across the epitaph of the Bush Administration:
Bush Administration appoints political cronies and ideological wackjobs to important positions. Said appointees pandimensionally clusterfuck everything sideways. People suffer and die due to avoidable ineptitude.
Let's document the idiocies.
Jim O'Beirne was the gatekeeper for hiring in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Because most of these jobs were classified as temporary, provisional jobs, they were exempt from the federal…
pharyngula | September 16, 2006An old pal of mine, the splendiferously morphogenetical Don Kane, has brought to my attention a curious juxtaposition. It's two articles from the old, old days, both published in Nature in 1981, both relevant to my current interests, but each reflecting different outcomes. One is on zebrafish, the other on creationism.
1981 was a breakthrough year for zebrafish; I think it's safe to say that if one paper put them on the map, it was Streisinger et al.'s "Production of clones of homozygous diploid zebra fish (Brachydanio rerio)"1. George Streisinger was the father of zebrafish as a model system…
ddobbs | September 15, 2006
W.A. Mozart -- just another hard-working genius
___________________________________________
A few hours ago I received this email:
your article in "new scientist" sept 16-22 06
is pure B S . you should dedicate it to the
extreme liberal intelligensia.
The writer, one Kenneth Rubin (nice meeting you, Mr. Rubin) refers to a New Scientist feature I wrote about genius, talent, and expertise (subscription required -- though you can get a 4-week one for $4.95), which was just published today. Mr. Rubin didn't elaborate, so I can't say what his particular complaint is. (As a critique, Mr. Rubin'…
apalazzo | September 14, 2006One 18 year old girl is dead. Eight others are in serious condition. It could have been worse, but I think that the Montreal Police learned from the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre that you should try to confront and disable anyone who walks into a public area and intends to commit mass murder.
This had to take place at Dawson, of all places. I have some of my best memories there. For those of you not familiar with education in Quebec, after high school, all students are required to go to CEGEP (or college) for two years before entering university. As we have one year less of both high…
razib | September 13, 2006Ed Brayton and Jason Rosenhouse have long posts up about the recent dispute between PZ Myers and Ken Miller, the Roman Catholc cell biologist who has been one of the most prominent popular expositors of evolutionary biology in these United States. You can read my 10 questions for Ken Miller to get some sense of him through my own idiosyncratic lens.
Since Jason and Ed are bringing up issues relevant to the broad church of the anti-Creationist movement, I take interest. Though I am a civilian, that is, I leave the fighting to others so I may do other things, there a few general points…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006
What happens when rational coherence is not assumed, in the development of creationist views?
No child is able to make their epistemic set maximally coherent, and so it is likely that they will acquire a number of mutually inconsistent epistemic values and principles. If your parent tells you to try and see if things work out on the one hand, and that you need not do anything but believe the pastor or Bible on the other, this does not register for most young children as a conflict.
Young learners are natively active explorers and experimenters to some degree, but this doesn't immediately…