Links for 2011-08-17

"Maybe he really believed that. Maybe the single example of “stifling regulations” that he chose for his stump speech was some wild rumor that, despite being a state governor, he never bothered to check into or to have an aide check into. Maybe he is as naive and gullible and prone to misplaced knee-jerk indignation as the Facebook fools denouncing stories from The Onion thinking they’re true.

But for that to be true, Rick Perry would have to be really lazy and really gullible.

It seems far likelier that Rick Perry was just assuming that his audience was that lazy, that gullible, that naive and that prone to misplaced, knee-jerk indignation."

"The first major science project in China that has been built through a genuine international collaboration has begun operation. Once fully complete next year, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment – a partnership between 19 Chinese and 16 US universities – will begin searching for the final undetermined neutrino "mixing angle", known as θ13.
Neutrinos are difficult to detect because they interact weakly with matter. They come in three "flavours" – electron, muon and tau – that change or "oscillate" from one to another as they travel in space. The oscillation strength between different types of neutrino is characterized by three "mixing angles" – known as θ12, θ23 and θ13 – with Daya Bay designed to determine θ13 by measuring the disappearance of electron antineutrinos."

"I’m prepared to grant that there are good teachers and bad teachers (though the problem of bad teachers seems massively exaggerated in the policy debate). I’m prepared to grant that good teachers can be distinguished from worse teachers, and that there really are teachers who "need improvement." Let’s assume we have ways to identify those teachers.
Should a teacher who is judged to persistently "need improvement" for many years be fired? Unless those laws come with funding to provide in-service training to those lagging teachers, and mentoring and review from master teachers, and paid prep time to rework lesson plans and practice and develop new skills, I don’t see how we can expect those teachers to improve to any significant degree. Assuming that we’ve got the tools to accurately identify teachers who need some help, that identification has to be matched with some sort of actual help, if we’re going to attach penalties."

"WGBH seeks an experienced content producer to create content for NOVA Education’s innovative new project, NOVA Labs. NOVA Labs will be a virtual research platform for teens to engage in science by working with authentic data and taking part in "citizen science" projects. Individual Labs in a range of STEM research areas will encourage scientific thinking and be supported by NOVA’s rich media library, explanatory text, interactives, games, a social media platform, and more."