standards
gregladen | May 28, 2014Republican lawmakers and their kin are opposing the acceptance of National Science Standards. Why? Because those standards are based on science. What they prefer is that the standards we use to guide curriculum in America's public schools be the hobgoblin of the Koch Brothers and the rest of the petroleum industry. Way to ruin the country, man. Civilization too. Nice move.
As Chris Hays points out (see below) the anti-science industry in America is leaving Creationism behind and shifting towards the denigration of Climate Science, much to our detriment.
The following interview from All…
esiegel | September 25, 2012"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -Albert Einstein
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." -William Arthur Ward
On one side of the room, the interviewer's palms begins to sweat. Although the young man has done his research, his guest is unpredictable. His guest has an agenda, his guest has a polarizing position on a very divisive issue, and his guest may lie or make up facts right there on the spot. The moderator will step aside once the debate commences,…
esiegel | June 20, 2012“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” -Frank Zappa
Inside of every student I've ever taught lives a passionate, curious mind that can either flourish or stagnate, both inside and outside the classroom. The teachers that get it -- that get you -- are the ones that help bring you there, but that is not all teachers, not by any means. I think everyone, by this point in their life, has had experience with at least one teacher that stands out…
milhayser | May 24, 2012
On Denialism Blog, Mark Hoofnagle argues that unless homeschooling is better regulated, it should be banned altogether. He writes "universal primary and secondary education is part of why our country has been so successful." While Rick Santorum can teach his kids that global warming is a hoax and the earth was created in a day, other parents can withhold sexual education, or, in one example, forbid their daughters from getting a GED. Hoofnagle concludes, "for parents to say it's a matter of religious freedom to deny their children education, or a future outside their home, can not be…
cagapakis | October 20, 2010We can babble philosophically about whether or not what we call "red" looks the same from another person's eyes, we can compare the adjectives we use to specify colors--is it maraschino red or cayenne?--but when we're talking to our computers, categorizing flowers, designing objects for mass production, branding a company, or establishing a flag's official colors we have to be able to be specific about which exact shade of red we want.
These days we have standard color systems that define colors as specified mixes of red, green, and blue pixels on screen, specific mixtures of pigments in…
cagapakis | April 12, 2010I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less "democratized" than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier's work criticizing the "open" and "free" culture movements online as both unfair and leading to cultural stagnation. While I don't agree with all of Lanier's arguments about the prospects of an open digital culture, he makes a lot of really important points that resonate with my feelings about the future of science based on the open online model, in…
jwilbanks | August 5, 2009I was in a roundtable yesterday talking about Health IT with a bunch of very smart people in the bay area. It was sort of a briefing of ourselves and others about the real issues underpinning what it would take to generate real disruptive innovation in health technology and health costs. The vast majority of the conversation centered on payment reform, which is outside my ambit.
But we did spend some time talking about health data standards, and the problem of getting standards that are so geared to the existing market-dominant companies that they actually froze out new market entrants. My…