teaching
grrlscientist | May 11, 2007tags: human body farm, vultures, forensic science, Texas State University
Texas State University found that its plans to build a human "body farm" have been canceled due to fears of vultures flocking towards the smell of decomposing corpses. A human body farm is a facility where human corpses are placed out of doors and exposed to the elements so forensic scientists can better understand how the body decomposes over time. The nearby San Marcos Municipal Airport worried that the large circling birds could endanger aircraft while the neighbors were unhappy with plans to keep up to nine cadavers…
grrlscientist | April 27, 2007tags: disturbing essay, writing, teaching, mental health, freedom of speech
In the wake of the recent Virginia Tech tragedy, it was revealed that Cho, the gunman, had written several essays in his English class that were perceived by his professor as "disturbing." Even though I am aware of the gist of Cho's writings, I haven't read them in full, so I have no way of judging what exactly qualifies as "disturbing," although, as a professor, I'd sure like to know. Apparently, I am not the only person who is confused by what this means.
For example, this week, high-school senior Allen Lee wrote…
sporte | March 31, 2007Science labs are not for all people.
I've always enjoyed teaching lab courses, so some of you might find it strange that I agree with some of the comments from Steve Gimbel and fellow Sb'ers on the questionable benefits of laboratory courses in introductory physics. But you see, I wasn't very impressed with the undergraduate physics labs that I took either. And with a little reminiscing, it's pretty easy to pick out example labs where the kindest description is "time-waster."
This wasn't true of all my lab courses. My biochemistry and microbiology lab courses were phenomenal, and, it's…
grrlscientist | March 8, 2007Have you noticed how you tend to remember things better after you've figured them out for yourself rather than listening to someone else's explanation? Well, this phenomenon is typical for toddlers, too.
According to a study published today, toddlers have an easier time learning new words when they figure out the meanings themselves.
"There are two ways to learn as a child: you either learn because you figured it out yourself, or you learn because somebody told you, and lots of our school-based education is engaged in people telling us things," said Justin Halberda, assistant professor of…
purepedantry | March 2, 2007I don't know if you have ever seen this show on Animal Planet -- Meerkat Manor. It is disgustingly cute. It is about a family of meerkats that were followed over several years.
Anyway, I love that show, so lately I have had meerkats on the brain.
Some other researchers are also apparently interested in meerkats. Publishing in the journal Science, they have recently shown that meerkats teach their young how to hunt.
Thorton and McAuliffe examined hunting in meerkats. Meerkats eat basically anything they are bigger than -- as you will note if you watch the show above. This would…
purepedantry | February 16, 2007Lazy Middlebury students have lost a valuable resource:
Middlebury College history students are no longer allowed to use Wikipedia in preparing class papers.
The school's history department recently adopted a policy that says it's OK to consult the popular online encyclopedia, but that it can't be cited as an authoritative source by students.
The policy says, in part, "Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source."
History professor Neil Waters says Wikipedia is an ideal place to start research but an unacceptable way to end it.
Here is my thing. I…
sporte | February 13, 2007I received a mysterious file last week, via e-mail from one of my students. According the e-mail, the file contained the answers to an assignment.
I downloaded the file and double-clicked it. Nada.
I did notice that the file had an unusual extension. Most Word documents have ".doc" at the end. This one had ".docx"
I thought that must be a mistake, so I tried other options for opening it with Microsoft WORD, even editing the extension to change it to ".doc"
No. That didn't work.
Then, I tried TextEdit, all I saw were strange characters.
I did a few other things, but all I could see was…
grrlscientist | February 9, 2007
This interactive game is a great educational tool, teaching you how various legal and illegal drugs work in the brain.
Have you ever wondered how various drugs work in the brain to produce the symptoms they do? Well, this wonderful interactive website, Mouse Party, shows you the molecular details of how heroin, exstacy, alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamines, cocaine and LSD work.
Note:
The simplified mechanisms of drug action presented in the game are just a small part of the story. When drugs enter the body they elicit very complex effects in many different regions of the brain. Often…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2007Thanks to my sitemeter trackbacks, I discovered that the English 12 class at UNC is analyzing my blog as part of a class assignment. Needless to say, I think this is really fun! I am curious to know what your opinions are regarding what I am doing with my blog, so feel free to comment here or to email me with your comments.
I promise that I don't bite.
Well, not too hard!
sporte | January 12, 2007The bioinformatics classes that I teach use web services and web sites as much as possible, but I still find that it's helpful to have programs on our classroom computers. Here is a list of my favorite desktop programs for those of you who might want to add some bioinformatics activities to your biology courses.
Why not use the Web?
Before going on, I should probably explain, why we use desktop programs, we have so many things available on the web. We do use the web whenever we can. Web services are nice because you can shift the computation burden to someone else's computer. (I think this…
jlynch | January 12, 2007Ah, the start of another semester. That exciting time of the year when you meet new students, make new goals, and invariably curse at the copy machine as it refuses to churn out syllabi for you. Such is mid-January in academia.
Or rather it will be on Tuesday. That's when it all kicks off here at ASU.
This semester I'm teaching two courses. The first is my Origins, Evolution and Creation course that I have been teaching since 1998. Every year I get students from varying religious and educational backgrounds and we examine the evidence for creationist claims (after spending some time…
sporte | January 10, 2007I was frantically getting ready for class when I happened to glance out the window. What did I see? Big fluffy white flakes rapidly falling from above. You can't say we weren't warned. The newspapers have been predicting snow since Monday. It's just, well, unusual. And Seattle is never prepared to deal with it.
Even the kids aren't looking too happy about it, though. By this time of the school year, they've caught on that every snowday has a price. And, they will pay that price IN JUNE. Already the last day of school has been postponed until the 25th of June.
Who knows? The kids…
sporte | January 9, 2007There's nothing like the first day of class to make you appreciate the difference between the equipment you end up using at schools and the equipment that you get to use on the job.
For the month of January, I'm teaching a night class in bioinformatics at a local community college. We're introducing lots of web-based programs, and databases, and concentrating on the sorts of activities that biotechnology technicians are likely to use on the job. It's fun. It's practical. And I don't have to suffer through any lectures about the Semantic Web.
I'm also getting reminded (although not for…
grrlscientist | December 15, 2006
They say our solar system is not alone in space.
The Universe has endless mystery.
Some future astronaut
May find out that what he'd thought
Was a shooting star instead turned out to be...
Interplanet Janet, she's a galaxy girl,
A solar system Ms. from a future world,
She travels like a rocket with her comet team
And there's never been a planet Janet hasn't seen,
No, there's never been a planet Janet hasn't seen.
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tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
grrlscientist | December 3, 2006
Darwin's Evolution of Man.
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Richard Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist, is battling with powerful evangelical church leaders in Kenya. These fundamentalist wingnuts are pressuring Kenya's national museum to hide its world-famous collection of hominid fossils that detail the evolution of humans' early ancestors.
Leakey stated that the wingnuts' statements are "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard."
"The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind,"continued Leakey. "The…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2006
The Tree of Life
Click image for larger view.
This tree is constructed from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled from approximately 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life. The species were chosen based on their availability, but most of the major taxonomic groups were included, sampled very roughly in proportion to the number of known species in each group (although many groups remain over- or under-represented).
The number of species represented is approximately the square-root of the number of species thought to exist on Earth (i.e., three thousand out of an…
grrlscientist | November 27, 2006
This is a really interesting video that I found more than a month ago but never published it here because I could not view it on the hospital's crappy Dell computer. However, I can't resist the suspense any longer since I have shared it with other people, all of whom tell me to post it anyway! So you, amigos bonitos, will have to be my eyes and ears on this one, just until I get out of here (fingers crossed) and back to my own computer.
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tags: streaming video, Nobel Prize, RNAi
grrlscientist | November 25, 2006This is an amazing video that would work incredibly well in a biology classroom -- it shows the life cycle of an individual cell. It is accompanied by some fabulous music, too!
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tags: streaming video, cell biology
purepedantry | November 7, 2006Bad teaching is one of my pet peeves, but I go back and forth on PowerPoint. I think its egregious abuse most of its users shouldn't necessarily bring a cloud on the whole program -- sometimes it is used effectively. Still most people are not using it correctly, in a way that facilitates good teaching rather than is a crutch for bad teaching.
Chad Orzel from Uncertain Principles has an excellent guide to using PowerPoint for good rather than evil:
2) Limit Your Material. I tend to view one slide per minute as an absolute upper bound on any given talk, and I rarely reach that. The most…
sporte | November 6, 2006I wrote earlier about videos of lab protocols and the benefit these could bring to people who are trying to learn new techniques or perhaps troubleshoot their own. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who would benefit the most from movies of others doing lab procedures correctly are those who are already pretty observant.
Nevertheless, I have some ideas for improvements to these kinds of movies, ala acting and editing, that could benefit the truly-technically-impaired.
We need lab movies of people doing things wrong.
Last night we watched the episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus,…