At the tail end of Tuesday’s post about wind and temperature, I asked a “vaguely related fun bonus question:” If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn’t the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s? This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by.… Continue reading Waves: Moving Without Going Anywhere
Tag: education
Algebra and Circuit Breakers
A couple of “kids these days are bad at math” stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory “Who cares… Continue reading Algebra and Circuit Breakers
Virginia Heffernan Is Our Target Audience
There’s a great post at NeuroDojo on the Heffernan business this weekend, and what the take-away ought to be: Yeah, let’s criticize that she didn’t get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping – she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation… Continue reading Virginia Heffernan Is Our Target Audience
Should Doctors Have to Take Physics and Chemistry?
The New York Times today has a story with the provocative title Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences, about a program at Mount Sinai that allows students to go to med school without taking the three things most dreaded by pre-meds: physics, organic chemistry, and the MCAT: [I]t came as a total shock to… Continue reading Should Doctors Have to Take Physics and Chemistry?
Dinosaurs Are Too Easy
Earlier this week, there was some interesting discussion of science communication in the UK branch of the science blogosphere. I found it via Alun Salt’s “Moving beyond the ‘One-dinosaur-fits-all’ model of science communication” which is too good a phrase not to quote, and he spun off two posts from Alice Bell, at the Guardian blog… Continue reading Dinosaurs Are Too Easy
Communication Skills for Scientists
As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won’t solve the problem, but it’ll give me something to point to the next time… Continue reading Communication Skills for Scientists
The Problem of Broader Impacts
Over at the Cocktail Party, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has a post about the image of scientists that spins off this Nature article on the NSF’s “broader impact” requirement (which I think is freely readable, but it’s hard to tell with Nature). Leslie-Pelecky’s post is well worth reading, and provides a good deal more detail on the… Continue reading The Problem of Broader Impacts
The Elusive Digital Native
Inside Higher Ed featured one of those every-so-often articles about the awesomeness of the demographic subgroup of the moment, this time Athur Levine’s panegyric about “digital natives”, who “grew up in a world of computers, Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, and social networking,” and how they’re too cool and tech-savvy for current universities: They differ… Continue reading The Elusive Digital Native
Cathedral-Building in Science
Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don’t bother with the comments to Tommaso’s post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don’t expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their… Continue reading Cathedral-Building in Science
Required Reading in Science
Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it… Continue reading Required Reading in Science