That title isn’t a euphemism– SteelyKid decided to use this week’s Toddler Blogging to try to teach an old Appa a new trick. First you go up up up on your head: Then you flip down: Ta-daa!!
Month: May 2011
Alternatives to Lab Reports?
An academic email list that I’m on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This “feels ” wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the… Continue reading Alternatives to Lab Reports?
The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science
NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be “twisted” by the Earth’s rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically… Continue reading The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science
Links for 2011-05-05
The Civil War Isn’t Tragic – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic “Yesterday, Robert Zimmerman was kind enough to link this podcast on the Civil War, and the reasons soldiers, Union and Confederate, offered up for fighting. It’s a good segment which I heartily recommend, especially for those of us in the Effete Liberal Book… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-05
Science Marches On
It’s been a hectic day here, so I haven’t had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I’ve written up here in the past: 1) In the “self-evident title” category, there’s Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year’s… Continue reading Science Marches On
Links for 2011-05-04
Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools – Technology and Learning – Inside Higher Ed “Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance. Here are 4 reasons why you should hold more of… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-04
Survey-Related Inadequacies
I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person. For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods… Continue reading Survey-Related Inadequacies
Education Reform Is Slow
Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in… Continue reading Education Reform Is Slow
Links for 2011-05-03
A SETI Infographic « Microcosmologist “And to put things into perspective, I’ve whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:” (tags: science space astronomy politics funding blogs pictures) Physics Buzz: Hinting at dark matter We haven’t seen dark… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-03
The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)
Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist: [O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him. As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat,… Continue reading The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)