Wes Elsberry at Austringer does a bit of design on the side. Here’s his latest:
Tip of the old scrub brush to P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula.
Bumper sticker science
October 13, 2007
Leave a Comment » | 
Creationism, Intelligent Design, Politics | Tagged: Bumper sticker, intelligent design flunked | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Malaria control: Requires health care system improvements
October 13, 2007WHO’s former malaria expert, John Litsios, notes that controlling malaria requires integrated programs, especially including overhaul of local health care delivery systems.
Copyrighted article from Resources for the future. “Chapter 17: Malaria Control and the Future of International Public Health,” in The Contextual Determinants of Malaria (Washington DC: Resources for the Future), Elizabeth Casman and Hadi Dowlatabadi, editors
Leave a Comment » | DDT, Malaria, Public education, Public health | Tagged: John Litsios, malaria control, Public health, WHO | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
They do as you do, not as you say
October 13, 2007If you were wondering whether it’s still true that kids watch what you do rather than listen to what you say — yes, it’s still true. It’s more important to walk the walk than talk the talk — Gallup Management Journal features an article emphasizing the phenomenon, “The Sixth Element of Great Managing”:
One of the most powerful discoveries about how humans understand the world around them came about by accident. In the early 1990s, a group of researchers led by Dr. Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy, placed small electrodes in the brains of monkeys near the regions of the brain responsible for planning and carrying out movements. If the monkey picked up something, an electronic monitor that was connected to the wires in the animal’s brain would sound — “brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip” — to register the firing of those neurons.
Then something happened — something so unusual that the researchers thought it had to be a mistake. If the monkey saw one of the scientists doing something — eating an ice cream cone, picking up a peanut or raisin, grabbing a banana — the monitor registered the firing of brain cells as if the monkey had done it, when all the animal did was watch.
“It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” Rizzolatti told The New York Times. The structure behind the phenomenon was discovered to be what they called “mirror neurons,” cells scattered throughout key regions of the brain that mimic everything the monkey sees another do.
Subsequent research found a far more complicated set of mirror neurons in people. This “human see; human do” circuitry is believed to be why a yawn can be contagious, why even a newborn will stick out her tongue if she sees someone else do it, and why American boys sometimes mimic the idiosyncrasies of their favorite baseball players at bat. “It explains much about how we learn to smile, talk, walk, dance, or play tennis,” said a 2006 cover article in Scientific American Mind magazine.
If you want your students to be good at map reading, they need to see you reading maps. If you want your students to read, they need to see you read. The “mirror neurons” phenomenon should affect the strategies we use in the classroom.
- Scientific American Mind, “Therapeutic Reflection,” June 2007 (subscription required)
- Scientific American, November 2006
- Schools for Children Notebook
File this under the “nothing new under the sun” category, or “oh, yeah, now I remember!”
1 Comment | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Ethics, Learning, Learning styles, Teaching | Tagged: brain mirroring, Education, Learning, mirror neurons | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Utah voucher wars: When very desperate, bribe
October 13, 2007Salt Lake Tribune political reporter Paul Rolly shows just how desperate are the voucher supporters in Utah, with polls showing the voucher referendum on the November ballot will crush the pro-voucher legislation: They offered bribes.
Yes, bribes are illegal. You know that, I know that. Tell it to the voucher advocates:
With polls showing overwhelming numbers of voters poised to repeal the voucher law that was passed by the Legislature last winter, voucher advocates got so desperate Thursday they sent an e-mail from the FreeCapitalist Project offering money for pro-voucher votes in next month’s referendum election.
But then someone must have let them know it usually is considered illegal to buy votes, so they sent a second e-mail several hours later retracting everything they said in the first e-mail.
The original e-mail said Parents for Choice in Education is conducting a “Friends and Family” campaign in which “advocates” are encouraged to sign up friends and relatives who commit to voting in favor of the voucher law in next month’s referendum election.
If the advocate provides his or her field manager with 25 names committed to voting for vouchers and they actually vote, the advocate gets $10 per person, or $250 for the 25 names, the e-mail said. Plus, the advocate will get $10 for each voter they get beyond the 25.
The contacts for the program were listed as Brandon Dupuis and Jim Speth, PCE field managers for northern and southern Utah, respectively.
So, as the old saying goes (a bit amended): If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with a bribe.
But then came the Oops!
“Retraction,” the second e-mail boomed.
“We apologize for the previous e-mail . . . . It was simply incorrect and misrepresents the Free Capitalist Projects’ grass-roots efforts. Neither Parents for Choice in Education nor the Free Capitalist Project will ever provide incentives that appear to pay people to vote. The earlier e-mail was sent by determined and sincere individuals who are working diligently, but the Free Capitalist Project and Parents for Choice in Education did not approve, authorize or see the e-mail in advance.”
I’ll wager it wasn’t the illegality that stopped them. Somebody probably sat down with a calculator and suggested how much it might cost them, at $10.00/vote, if people took them up on the offer. And for the $10.00, there’s no guarantee that any of the votes would be switches — no guarantee that it would sway any votes their way.
3 Comments | Education, Education spending, Elections, Rampant stupidity, School vouchers | Tagged: education vouchers, referendum, Utah vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Peace Nobel: Al Gore and IPCC
October 12, 20072007’s Nobel Prize for Peace sailed out to Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Observations:
First, this is a big win for science. The IPCC has been victim of political knee-capping as virulent as any we’ve seen in the last 25 years. Science wins out with the Nobel.
Second, if, in October 2000, we had been able to see a headline, “Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize,” what would we have thought that meant about the results of the 2000 election? It’s an indictment of the inaction of the Bush regime that in 6 years Al Gore has done enough to win a Nobel for his efforts, while the Bush administration has not.
Third, while Gore is U.S. citizen, he’s a graduate of St. Alban’s School in Washington, D.C., a good private school. I’m 0-4 on public school grads winning Nobels this year. So much for my predictions. Of course, P. Z. Myers argues Nobels are at best a lagging indicator (how’s that for zipping in an economic term, social studies teachers?). But he’s talking about science, not education in general. P. Z. says the real disaster for U.S. awards is ahead, when our failure to support science in research and graduate study starts to “pay off.”
Al Gore is a good guy, in my experience. He’s knowledgeable about a lot of things, he has foresight (we’d not have this internet but for Gore’s work to save it in its infancy), and he’s a mensch. Ah, for the things that could have been.
Sources:
- Press release from the Norwegian Nobel Committee (full text below the fold)
- British court rules “Inconvenient Truth” a political film, with errors (ABC News story notable for its quoting of crank science advocates — are there no editors at ABC any more? Remember when I said science won out? The science deniers aren’t going quietly.)
- Chicago Tribune story
- Melbourne (Australia) Herald-Sun story
- Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times, October 14, 2007, “Who will succeed Al Gore?”
- Eli Rabett’s view
- Creators Syndicate columnist contrasts Bush and Gore
4 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, Education success, Science | Tagged: Al Gore, Climate change, Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Nobels, a lagging indicator
October 12, 2007P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula notes buzz about the science Nobels all going to Europeans (even the two U.S. residents are European). Nobels are a lagging indicator of things, at best, P. Z. says. The real damage done to U.S. research shows up other places.
Thanks for the reassurances, P. Z.
(He’s right, you know. He’s using Nobels as an indicator of the robustness of U.S. science; I use them as an indicator of the robustness of U.S. education. Much of the same stuff applies. More on science, later.)
3 Comments | Education, Science, War on Science | Tagged: Education, Nobel Prizes, War on Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Too much communication: e-mail
October 12, 2007What’s one big difference between education and business? Communication, especially electronic communication. Businesses have too much of it, many if not most educational organizations are a decade behind that curve, not yet having enough.
Free content at the Wall Street Journal includes this column by Sue Shellenbarger in Work and Family, “A day without e-mail is like . . .” She tells the story of U.S. Cellular’s chief operating officer banning e-mail on Fridays to improve work. He was striving for more face-to-face communication among employees, and he got it.
My first experience with e-mail was at the U.S. Department of Education — good heavens! — two decades ago. We were experimenting with electronic communication with the old, slow systems that linked dumb terminals through telephone connections (1200 BAUD, anyone?). Our formerly technophobic boss, Checker Finn, was at home recuperating from some physical ailment, and we made the delightful mistake of showing him he could send and receive messages by computer. Within a few weeks it took at least an hour a day to keep up with the messages. But our operations were split, with administration across town at the main ED building, and most of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) closer to the Capitol, at New Jersey Avenue, NE. Basic communications that had taken three days by inside mail, courier, and the limousine between the two buildings, were shortened to exchanges over 15 or 20 minutes. Computer messaging was a huge boost to productivity on most things. E-mail, such as it was, had to be printed out to be read. Saving it was a manual filing process.
3 Comments | Best practices, Business, Classroom management, Classroom technology, Education, Education success, Organizational communication, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: E-mail, Education reform, Organizational communication | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Italian WWI vet dies
October 11, 2007
From the on-line Wall Street Journal’s “Evening Wrap”:
Italian World War I Veteran Dies — The world lost one of its few remaining veterans of World War I last Friday when Justin Tuveri died in the French resort town of St. Tropez . Born Giustino Tuveri on the island of Sardinia in 1898, Mr. Tuveri was a member of the Sassari Brigade, a Sardinian infantry unit known as the “Dimonios” — alternately translated as “demons” or “red devils” — which suffered 15,000 casualties in fighting against Austro-Hungarian and German forces in mountainous northeastern Italy. According to the French daily Le Monde, Mr. Tuveri’s was shot twice in the back during a battle with German forces four months after he joined the service. And he told reporters that doctors removed the bullets from his body without anesthesia. After he recuperated from his wounds, he emigrated to France where he had an active life, including driving until the age of 98. The French Defense ministry says there are only two French veterans of the Great War alive. There are three left in the U.S., according to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman Jim Benson. The youngest, at 106 years old, is Frank Buckles of Charles Town, W. Va., who lied his way into the army because he was underage. He served as the grand marshal of the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington, D.C. this past May.
–The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Leave a Comment » | Heroes, History, World War I | Tagged: veterans, World War I | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Carnival of the Liberals #49
October 11, 2007The Neural Gourmet sends greetings:
Tangled Up In Blue Guy brings us the fortnight’s best grumpy liberal blogging for this 49th edition of Carnival of the Liberals. Join us October 24th for our
anger management seminarCarnival of the Liberals #50 at That Is So Queer.
Go see what people who actually claim to be liberal think and blog about. It’s one of those places where people actually discuss Myanmar/Burma as if it mattered, and as if they have hope for the future.
Who’d have thought such things concerned liberals? (Hey, if you didn’t think liberals worry about such things, you really need to take a look at COTL49.)
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Political, Politics, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Literature Nobel: Doris Lessing
October 11, 2007Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced this morning, “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”
Lessing was born in what was then part of Persia, and now lives in England.
So, I suppose there’s little chance she was educated in U.S. public schools . . .
The Nobel Peace Prize should be announced tomorrow, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics is scheduled for Monday.
1 Comment | Books, History, Literature | Tagged: Doris Lessing, Literature, Nobel Prize | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Spinning dancer
October 10, 2007
Cool .gif, and a bit of a rant:
Cool .gif: I found this .gif at That Wealth Advisor Guy, a blog of a midwestern investments advisor. He claims that if you see the dancer rotating clockwise, you are right-brained; if you see her rotating counter-clockwise, you are left-brained. I can see it both ways (look under her feet for a few seconds, see if she doesn’t reverse for you, too).
If this is a valid test — and I have no way to gauge that it is valid — it provides one more way to discern one more fact about people you work with, or know — or about your students with some relevance to their learning styles (I don’t know what the connections would be).
The rant: That Wealth Advisor Guy posts no links, no sources, and no citations to back up any of his claims. It may well be just a cool .gif. How could we know if he doesn’t give us the details?
His blog doesn’t allow comments.
Would I invest with a guy who doesn’t provide all the information I want, or all the information that should be legally required, and who seems unduly influenced by woo stuff he finds on the internet?
Off to see if I can find citations . . .
Below the fold: Right-brain, left-brain characteristics, as related by That Wealth Advisor Guy. Are they accurate, or backed by any research? Who can tell?
Update: Mo at Neurophilosophy debunks the left-brain / right-brain stuff. It’s just an optical illusion, which illustrates that we often see things differently from other people, but probably provides no deep insights into anything you should take seriously. Go read what he says!
19 Comments | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Learning styles, Woo | Tagged: left-brain/right-brain, Spinning dancer illusion, Woo | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Chemistry Nobel: Reactions on solid surfaces
October 10, 2007The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded this morning, went to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Institute, in English), Berlin, Germany, “for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces.”
One more win for Europeans this year — another guy not the product of U.S. public schools. So much for my predictions, so far.
These awards for 2007 seem to be very practically oriented. The press release puts the Chemistry award in focus quickly:
Modern surface chemistry – fuel cells, artificial fertilizers and clean exhaust
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2007 is awarded for groundbreaking studies in surface chemistry. This science is important for the chemical industry and can help us to understand such varied processes as why iron rusts, how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in our cars work. Chemical reactions on catalytic surfaces play a vital role in many industrial operations, such as the production of artificial fertilizers. Surface chemistry can even explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere. The semiconductor industry is yet another area that depends on knowledge of surface chemistry.
Even the technical, scientific explanation seems easy to follow:
The Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2007 is awarded to Gerhard Ertl for his thorough studies of fundamental molecular processes at the gas-solid interface. When a small molecule hits a solid surface from a gas phase there are a number of possible outcomes. The molecule may simply either bounce back or be adsorbed. It is the latter case that carries the most interesting possibilities. The interaction with the atoms of the surface can be so strong that the molecule dissociates into constituent groups or atoms. The molecule can also react directly with surface groups and change the chemical properties of the surface. A third possibility is that the adsorbed molecule encounters another previously adsorbed one and there is a binary chemical reaction on the surface.
There are very important practical situations where these scenarios are the key chemical events. Heterogeneous catalysis has been a central process in the chemical industry for a century. The agriculture of the world has been supplied with fertilizers rich in nitrogen since 1913 due to the Haber-Bosch process, where the nitrogen of the air is converted to ammonia using an iron-based catalyst. Today every car produced has a catalyst system that converts carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons to carbon dioxide in the exhaust gases. Also the content of nitrous gases is reduced through the action of the catalyst. Thin semiconductor layers are produced by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in large quantities in the microelectronics industry. Currently large resources are devoted to the development of efficient fuel cells that would enable the use of hydrogen as a standard vehicle fuel. Corrosion, which is caused by chemical reactions at surfaces, is a major problem both in everyday life and in more sophisticated industrial contexts such as in nuclear power plants and airplanes. Damage by corrosion may be reduced by adjusting the composition of the surface so that it is protected by an oxide layer formed in air. It is clear that chemical processes at surfaces play a central role in wide span of economically highly significant applications of chemical knowledge to the solution of practical problems.
Has globalization already hit so hard, and has U.S. education fallen so far, that the U.S. dominance of Nobels is already at an end? One year does not make a trend. We can hope.
More:
- Derek Lowe thinks this award is real chemistry: “Down with witchcraft,” he headlines it
- Who got passed over? ChemBank
Leave a Comment » | Education success, Globalization, Science | Tagged: , chemistry, Nobel Prizes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Portal to Texas History – Universty of North Texas
October 10, 2007Texas history teachers — looking for good images? This seems to be a source.
Leave a Comment » | History images, History museums, Teaching, Technology in the classroom, Texas history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Effective presentations: Door knocking, phoning
October 9, 2007It doesn’t matter what your politics are — Rob Reiner’s got a great little film here on effective presentations (the one at the campaign site is better quality than the one on YouTube). He’s pushing for Hillary Clinton for President. What he says applies to anything — selling Girl Scout cookies, selling Boy Scout popcorn, raising money to fight breast cancer, recruiting people to your organization, talking about the hero’s quest in Beowulf for your English 3 class, making a case for more computers for your classroom, whatever.
“She’d rather do laundry than talk to you.” That’s an acid test. If your audience would rather do laundry, you need to listen to Rob Reiner.
[Gee, I hope the Clinton campaign leaves that video up for a long time . . .]
1 Comment | Campaigns, Politics, Presentations, Presidents, Student projects | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
2007 Nobel Prizes in Physics – Giant magnetoresistance
October 9, 2007The Nobel Committees are working overtime to frustrate my predictions this year.
Two Europeans won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Albert Fert, Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, won for the discovery of “giant magnetoresistance.”
It’s called one of the first real applications of nanotechnology. Here’s an explanation from IBM’s website, of how the discovery affects new hard drive technologies. This is the basic technology for the working of your hard drive.
Go see the press release from the Nobel Foundation. Video of the announcement ceremony should be available here, later today.
Score so far this year: Five awards, one person schooled in the U.S, by Quaker schools, not public schools. My predictions that the awards go to U.S. citizens schooled in the public schools are not doing well, so far this year. Is the trend over already?
1 Comment | Education success, Heroes, Physics, Science, Technology | Tagged: nanotechnology, Nobel Prizes, Physics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 