Researchers, Artists, and Technologies Engage with Local Groups Using Computer Mapping
Citizen science is an increasingly popular activity among a broad cross section of the population. Because the number and variety of opportunities for participation continue to grow, it is appealing to those in a widening range of age and physical ability. Participants have joined diverse scientific monitoring projects, including migratory bird studies and personal weather station observations, as well as provided their unused computer time for interstellar space exploration. Citizen science has even stimulated growth in the ecotourism industry.
“Regardless of their background or level of skill, citizen science provides people with a powerful platform that allows them to get involved in science and their environment,” says Patrick Rickles, research associate for the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group at University College London (UCL). “However, as valuable as this is, these programs often see the citizen as a passive participant that simply collects information and then hands it over to the researcher. At that point, their involvement in the project is considered complete.”
Recognizing the potential for change provided by greater engagement with citizen scientists, Muki Haklay, UCL professor of geographical information science (GISC), and Jerome Lewis, a UCL lecturer of anthropology, formed ExCiteS. This is an interdisciplinary group composed of researchers, artists, and information and communication technology specialists that work with local groups to better engage them in the process of citizen science through participatory action. Continue reading →
Diets provide a great opportunity to exercise critical thinking. Pick any diet and pick it apart. Do this as a mental exercise or, if you teach, with your classes. Chances are that many of your students’ parents have dieted or are dieting. In this article, I am picking on the currently trendy Paleo diet.
The Paleo diet persists. I have a strange theory about diets. The first part is that people don’t like to diet. They like to eat whatever they choose. I suspect that this is especially true of libertarians. The second part is that many people see their food as a health problem and would like to change their eating patterns.
Many years ago, the Grapefruit Diet was very popular. This was great for people who loved grapefruit but not so much for those who found them too sour or too messy. Then, there was the problem that grapefruits are like the proverbial Chinese dinner that left you hungry shortly after finishing it. “Have another piece of grapefruit” just doesn’t work for most people.
Skeleton and restoration model of Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1). Exhibit in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, Japan.
Anyway, my theory is that diets are successful not if they work but rather when they cater to people’s desires. If you could get away with an ice cream diet, you’d have the world doing it because “everyone likes ice cream.” I haven’t yet seen a broccoli diet even though it would probably work better than grapefruit. Continue reading →
Dr. Peter A. Milne and his associates have found an unexpected and, to the cosmological community, startling result from their surveys of supernovae. This result illustrates both the consistent and varying nature of science at the same time.
Dr. Peter Milne
We know from a great many astronomical observations that the universe has been expanding for a little short of 14 billion years and continues to expand. Because of gravity, everyone expected that this expansion was slowing over time with theories and measurements suggesting that this expansion would eventually coast to a very dilute universe drifting apart at ever slower speeds.
In the 1990s, some astronomers separately discovered that the universe is expanding ever more rapidly instead of the expected opposite slowing of expansion using measurements of he brightness of very distant supernovae. They received the Nobel Prize in physics for this work in 2011.
Stars can explode. One common explosion is called a nova. A much more cataclysmic and extremely brighter explosion is a supernova. Supernovae shine with a brightness that can exceed that of all of the hundred billion or so stars in its galaxy. For this reason, we can see them in distant galaxies that are barely visible in our best telescopes. A supernova is a rare event occurring about three times a century in a galaxy the size of our Milky Way. With hundreds of billions of galaxies, however, it’s not too hard to find hundreds each year using modern astronomical equipment.
A special sort of supernova created when the two stars in a binary star system go through a specific series of interactions is known as a type 1a supernova. Because of the steps required to reach supernova status, the brightness of these type 1a supernovae has been considered to be a constant that can be used to estimate distances to very distant galaxies. Brightness declines with distance in a very precise manner.
There remains the possibility that acceleration of very distant bodies in our universe away from each other is a basic property of our space-time structure not detectable at smaller distances of only millions or even tens of millions of light-years, that “dark energy” is just an attempt to recast a phenomenon into understandable terms, just as the caloric theory of heat was long ago. -HK
The measurements of these supernovae were the reason to believe that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. We are seeing these very distant supernovae with light that started its journey over ten billion years ago when the universe was very young. Dr. Milne has discovered that type 1a supernovae are not all the same but fall into two categories of different brightness. Furthermore, the supernovae from the early universe are, on average, less bright than those in the more recent universe.
The lower brightness of the distant supernovae may well be due to less inherent brightness instead of greater distance. This finding destroys a fair piece of that Nobel Prize discovery. Dr. Milne still attests that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, just not so fast, but the vast number of recalculations being done to account for this new discovery will take some time. Continue reading →
You may have seen the headlines already. “What is dark matter made of? Galaxy cluster collisions offer clues,” shouts the Christian Science Monitor.1
Here you have a great moment to engage students in something exciting and to use critical thinking. Dark matter is a hypothesis to explain why stars in galaxies circle around their centers faster than the observable matter says that they should, as well as other more sophisticated reasons. It’s called “dark” because it does not emit light and because you cannot see it. You might also have called it “invisible” matter, but much matter seems invisible. Besides, “dark” implies spooky, and this stuff is definitely spooky because ordinary matter moves right through it as though it isn’t there, except for gravitational effects.
The new finding just reported tell us that dark matter behaves just the same way with itself. One patch of dark matter moves right through another as though it’s not there at all (again, except for gravitational effects). This result pushes back against the most popular idea about the identity of dark matter, that it’s WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles — because particles don’t just pass right through each other.
Dark matter is invisible. Based on the effect of gravitational lensing, a ring of dark matter has been detected in this image of a galaxy cluster (CL0024+17) and has been represented in blue. Image from NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University).
Two explanations come to mind. Some physicists doing the work still are seeking particles, but these other explanations could help get around that barrier. There are some truly exotic explanations going around as well, such as the existence of a “mirror universe.” It’s best to stick with the simplest ones, though. Occam’s Razor tells us so.
One explanation is that gravity just doesn’t work exactly as we expect it to, especially when dealing with very large masses spanning very large volumes of space. This is not a very popular explanation. The other is that dark matter is really energy. Because of the equivalence of energy and matter demonstrated by Einstein and captured in his famous equation, E=mc2, energy is affected by and causes gravity. Continue reading →
Amersfoort, 19th March 2015 – Mars One recently published a video in which Bas Lansdorp, CEO and Co-founder of Mars One, replies to recent criticism concerning the feasibility of Mars One’s human mission to Mars.
Question: What do you think of the recent news articles that doubt the feasibility of Mars One?
BL: At Mars One we really value good criticism because it helps us to improve our mission. We get a lot of criticism from our advisors, and that is also exactly what we want from them. The recent bad press about Mars One was largely caused by an article on medium.com, which contains a lot of things that are not true. For example, the suggestion was made that our candidates were selected on the basis of how much money they donate to Mars One. That is simply not true, and it is very easy to find that on our website. There are a lot of current Round Three candidates that did not make any donations to Mars One, and there are also lots of people that did not make it to the third round that contributed a lot to Mars One. The two things are not related at all, and to say that they are is simply a lie. The article also states that there were only 2,700 applications for Mars One, which is not true. We offered the reporter, the first journalist ever, access to our list of 200,000 applications, but she was not interested in that. It seems that she is more interested in writing a sensational article about Mars One than in the truth.
We will have to delay the first unmanned mission to 2020. Delaying our first unmanned mission by two years also means that all the other missions will move by the same period of time, with our first human landing now planned for 2027. -B.L.
Question: Concerns have been voiced about the thoroughness of the astronaut selection process. What is your response to that?
BL: We started our astronaut selection with over 200,000 applications that were submitted online. The application included a video and a lot of psychological questions for our candidates. We used that to narrow down the candidates to about 1000 that had to do a medical check, which was very similar to the check for NASA astronauts. All the remaining candidates then underwent an interview. The interview and all other parts of the selection process were led by Norbert Kraft, our Chief Medical Officer. He has worked on astronaut selection for 5 years at the Japanese Space Agency, and at NASA he researched crew composition for long duration space missions. Continue reading →
One of the craziest schemes to garner worldwide publicity and lots of contributions is having some new problems. Mars One has lost one of its final hundred to misgivings about the process by which he was chosen. Will more come out with similar stories? Is this the beginning of the end for Mars One?
The Mars One stray is Joseph Roche, an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in, wait for it, physics and astrophysics. With this education and background, he’s not just a scientist well equipped with Carl Sagan’s famous “baloney detection kit,” he’s also a specialist in getting around the universe.
Mars One is a reach too far. Until I see plenty of funding and until I see that water mission and then see the first supply mission land successfully, I will remain cautiously skeptical. -H.K.
I have written plenty about Mars One and its challenges. In the end, I stated that its biggest challenge is not radiation or water or air or food but money. It’s not just the money to send that first expedition to Mars but also the money to keep sending more until the colony is self-sufficient. The first expedition requires several preparatory flights to deliver lots of habitat modules, freeze-dried food, solar panels, machinery, rovers, and more. Each of those unmanned preparatory flights will cost very large sums of money, likely a billion or more dollars apiece. Continue reading →
Now that three of the moons of our solar system’s gas giant planets have been said to have subsurface oceans, it’s time to take stock and consider the meaning of these analyses.
Ganymede and Europa of Jupiter along with Enceladus of Saturn are likely to have oceans far below their frozen surfaces. Should we send unmanned missions to explore these unusual moons, and what should we be searching for? Many have exclaimed that we have extremophiles (organisms that survive in extreme environments) here on Earth, so we cannot discount the likelihood of life beneath miles of ice where the Sun never shines.
Enceladus’ north polar region. This image was catalogued by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
If we search near the geysers of Enceladus, might we find the frozen remnants of miniature fish coughed up from deep down inside this odd moon? Answering this question requires more than a moment’s thought. What is life? How does it begin and advance? Are the ingredients for life available in those cold, deep seas?
Here’s my definition. Life uses available energy and materials to reproduce itself and has the potential for errors in reproduction that will allow for evolution. From what we know, those vast, cold underground oceans have the necessary ingredients. Without an energy source, they would be frozen and not liquid. Heat coming from the inside of a moon must provide chemicals that can both be used as chemical energy sources and as materials for constructing living organisms. Continue reading →
Thursday, March 19, 2015 at 11 AM EDT (US)
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Dr. Colin Montpetit, Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Ottawa
Register for this complimentary webinar to learn how Dr. Colin Montpetit, Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Ottawa, increased class participation to 99%. Hear how he transformed his classroom into an “active learning zone” with the use of a student engagement solution.
Get the full story behind Dr. Montpetit’s stunning findings – how student participation rates grew in his classes, grades improved and failure rates decreased. Register today!
Who Should Attend: All are welcome. Those in Academic Technology or Teaching and Learning Centers are highly encouraged to attend.
Despite wholesale announcements by powerful academic leaders throughout the U.S. that MOOCs are dead, sightings continue to pour in from around the country and the rest of the world. For skeptics, the problem is physical evidence. People can offer them and take them, but no one seems to know what a MOOC looks like. Some point to Coursera and edX, but in the opinion of most MOOC experts, who are primarily from Canada and the UK, these are hoaxes.
So, in the interest of determining once and for all whether MOOCs are fo’ real, I’ll be opening Project White Book to publish promising sightings and photos of MOOCs. In this inaugural post, I’m sharing the photo, below, of what appears to be one person’s conception of a MOOC. I recently found it in the ETC spam queue. It was posted anonymously with the header “Da MOOC!” I’ll post photos as I receive them, so if you have one, email it to me (jamess@hawaii.edu) and I’ll publish the most interesting.
Is this a MOOC, a hoax, or just another weather-related phenomenon?
Butler reports that “almost 50,000 students have enrolled in a massive open online course on positive psychology taught by UNC professor Barbara Fredrickson.” Evidence that this Coursera-based course might be a real MOOC is very strong. It’s six weeks long, a departure from the usual quarter or semester time frame. It’s comfortably aimed at interest rather than college credit. According to Fredrickson, “Most people that are enrolled — 95 percent of them — say that they’re interested out of their own curiosity.” And the professor is on firm MOOC footing, looking for pedagogical guidance from the future rather than the past. She says, “I’ve written a couple of books for general audience and one of the things that’s clear about our changing audience is that people don’t necessarily want to read books, but they like ideas.”
Another promising sighting is from Cornell. Friedlander reports that “Cornell will offer four new [MOOCs] in 2016: shark biodiversity and conservation, the science and politics of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), an introduction to engineering simulations, and how deals get done – mergers and acquisitions principles.” They’re still in the planning stages, so I’ll keep an eye out for more details as they become available.
Are MOOCs fo’ real? In this series, I’ll be looking at the evidence through a lens that’s forged from constructivist and disruptive theory as well as a dash of whimsy. In this process, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please share them in the discussion below. If you’re logging in from an address that has been previously approved, your reply will be posted automatically. If not, your first reply will be published within 24-48 hours. Subsequent replies from your address will be published immediately.
Amersfoort, 16th February 2015 – From the initial 202,586 applicants, only 100 hopefuls have been selected to proceed to the next round of the Mars One Astronaut Selection Process. These candidates are one step closer to becoming the first humans on Mars.
“The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars,” said Bas Lansdorp, Co-founder & CEO of Mars One. “These aspiring martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be.”
The Mars 100 Round Three candidates were selected from a pool of 660 candidates after participating in personal online interviews with Norbert Kraft, M.D., Chief Medical Officer. During the interviews the candidates had a chance to show their understanding of the risks involved, team spirit and their motivation to be part of this life changing expedition.
Dr. Norbert Kraft said, “We were impressed with how many strong candidates participated in the interview round, which made it a very difficult selection.”
There are 50 men and 50 women who successfully passed the second round. The candidates come from all around the world, namely 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, 7 from Africa, and 7 from Oceania. The complete list of Mars One Round Three Candidates. Statistics on the candidates can be found here.
The following selection rounds will focus on composing teams that can endure all the hardships of a permanent settlement on Mars. The candidates will receive their first shot at training in the copy of the Mars Outpost on Earth and will demonstrate their suitability to perform well in a team. More information about the selection process can be found here: Mars One Selection Process. Continue reading →
With all of the hoopla over exoplanet discoveries in recent years, it’s a big surprise that this one did not receive more attention. Kepler-444 is a small star, about 25% smaller than ours, and is 11.2 billion years old. According to measurements made by the 600-million dollar Kepler space telescope, it has five rocky planets ranging in size from Mercury to Venus.
Artist’s conception of Kepler-444, an 11.2-billion-year-old star, and its five orbiting rocky planets. By Tiago Campante/Peter Devine.
The above information is sufficient to generate great excitement. When you realize that the universe is only about 13.6 billion years old, you know that this star and its planets formed in the early days of a very young, only about 2.5 billions years old, universe. Our own star is less than half as old at 4.6 billion years and has an expected lifespan of around 10 billion years. Continue reading →
The New England Patriots have muddled up the Super Bowl in a grand fashion. It might as well be an MIT prank but on a national scale. We haven’t see the like since Caltech (MIT’s famous rival in the prank world) jimmied the Rose Bowl’s card stunts half a century ago. (Personal note: I was a member of the Caltech group of twelve that did that. Also see this LA Times article.)
Denials are not going to change any fan’s mind. If you’re a Patriot fan, you probably don’t think it’s important. If you’re not, then you will believe any evil of the New England dynasty.
Before delving into the science, I should note that reporters have said that the ball deflation was discovered during halftime and rectified. As the final score was 45-7, and the second half score was 28-0, even if every Patriot point in the first, seemingly flawed half were rescinded, the score would still be 28-7 in favor of the Patriots. We are not discussing, therefore, who should play in the Super Bowl. We are instead discussing how balls would have become low in pressure.
As any high school physics teacher will tell you, PV=nRT, the ideal gas law. Okay, that’s gibberish to many, but it’s really very simple. So simple in fact that you can do the calculations yourself with calculator or even readily with paper and pencil. Let’s deconstruct this equation. Continue reading →
“Superhabitable” worlds may be common in our galaxy, making ideal homes for extraterrestrial life — Scientific American cover, January 20151.
Years ago, Carl Sagan famously wrote about a scientist’s “baloney detection kit” in The Demon-Haunted World (1995). You can learn all about this storied chapter by searching on the Internet for “baloney detection kit.” His point was that scientists obtain this mental tool kit as a side effect of their training and that we should similarly train everyone.
Scientific American magazine just published an article, “Better than Earth,” which shows us that scientists are not immune from broadcasting baloney themselves at times. The article is really quite good and interesting. Its statements are, as far as we can tell, accurate. Where is the baloney then?
At one point, the article states, “[T]he more closely we scientists study our own planet’s habitability, the less ideal our world appears to be.” The article also faults our own star’s “short” lifetime of about 10 billion years. “By some 1.75 billion years from how, the steadily brightening star will make our world hot enough for the oceans to evaporate, exterminating any simple life lingering on the surface.”
Looks as though we evolved just in time to enjoy our planet for a billion years or so before we are all steamed to death. Slower evolution may not have left enough time for us to exist here.
We circle a G-class star. According to the author, the next step down in star size, “K dwarfs[,] appear to reside in the sweet spot of stellar superhabitability.” K dwarf stars will shine for tens of billions of years, many times longer than our star. However, the author cautions that our planet is too small for conditions suitable for life to exist for that long period of time. Our core would have cooled too much to sustain our magnetic field and plate tectonics, both necessary to life. Continue reading →
You may have noticed recent news about Stephen Hawking predicting the demise of the human race due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)1. Others of genius rank, such as Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil2, have also made this prediction. With “The Theory of Everything” (biopic about Prof. Hawking) in theaters right now, this prediction is resonating across the English-speaking world.
Before digging your shelters or heading for the hills, you should ask, “What is artificial intelligence?” A bit of history may help put this entire subject into perspective. The term was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy, who called it “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”3 “When?” you ask. “That’s nearly 60 years ago! Before I was born!” (I actually was born well before then, but statistically you probably weren’t.)
Funny how AI has not taken over the world in the 60 years it’s had so far. Why the sudden worry? Computers are becoming more powerful and less expensive. Computer memory is dirt cheap, speaking historically. This trend of more computer power and more memory shows no signs of abating soon. Could it eventually reach the tipping point where machines are sentient and self-reproducing? Would they then remove the “scourge” of humans from the Earth’s surface? Might the end be less dramatic in that they would render people superfluous? Imagine a world in which all work, including creative work, is done by machines. Who needs Beethoven when you have the Ultra-Composer Mark IV?
This entire discussion circles around to defining machine intelligence and estimating exactly how smart machines might become. Right off the bat, understand that intelligence, as we commonly understand it, has not been seen in machines yet. No one truly knows if it ever will be. To comprehend why, you must have a feeling for the nature of computers and computing. Continue reading →
Amersfoort,1st December 2014 – Mars One is proud to present the ten Mars One University Competition finalists eligible to fly to Mars. One of these ten payloads will receive the once in a lifetime opportunity to fly on Mars One’s first unmanned Lander mission to Mars in 2018. For the first time ever the public will be able to decide which payload receives the extraordinary opportunity to fly to Mars.
The ten remaining projects from an initial 35 submissions were submitted by diverse universities worldwide. In order to get this far, the payload proposals needed to meet all requirements as described by Mars One supplier Lockheed Martin. Mars One community members, social media followers, and the general public will have the opportunity to vote on and select the winning payload. Voting opportunities for the public will be opened in the first weeks of December, 2014. Voting submission will be accepted until December 31st, 2014.
The winning university payload will be announced on January 5th, 2015. The winning payload needs to be feasible and meet the requirements and restrictions as outlined in the Proposal Information Package (PIP) and on-going discussions with Lockheed Martin, who will build the 2018 lander. Additionally, if in any case the winning team can not perform or adjust to additional requirements the runner-up will be chosen instead.
Arno Wielders, Co-founder & CTO of Mars One said, “These ten final projects are unique and creative and we are very happy with the payload proposals these teams have presented. It would be highly interesting to see each and every one of these projects being launched to Mars. Now it is up to the public to decide which project they would like to have on Mars.” Continue reading →
Only a few true nerds, such as myself, will be at all challenged with Big Hero 6. Let me explain.
Big Hero 6 is about four students at San Fransokyo Institute of Technology (SFIT), the younger brother of a fifth, and a robot. These are the “6” in Big Hero 6. The catch here is that these “super heroes” don’t have mystical powers. Their performance boosts come from technologies that they create.
The lead character is Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) who is a wild genius youth who enjoys bot fights instead of the serious business of school. His older brother, Tadashi, tries to dissuade him from wasting all of his talent on underground bot fighting and finally breaks through. He gets Hiro hooked on being a student at SFIT. There’s a catch. SFIT is a robotics-oriented school, and you must show your ability to get in. Hiro must demonstrate his capability to the faculty of the school by showing actual robotics.
How he does so and what happens next set the course for the film. There’s just enough scariness and just sufficient levity associated with it to please school-age children. I’ll be taking my grandsons (aged five and seven) to see this movie two days after it opens and will share their reactions with you then.
The robot member of the six is the most unlikely hero you’ll ever meet. Baymax is voiced perfectly by Scott Adsit. He is a healthcare robot, a nurse, who looks like, as the script puts it, a marshmallow. He is white and squishy — inflated actually. He has a large pot belly and walks like a penguin. This robot is the legacy of Tadashi, his ultimate creation.
Besides Hiro and Baymax, the six include Go Go Tomago (Jamie Chung) who is a speed freak, Wasabi (Damon Wayons Jr.) who has terminal OCD and looks like he spends too much time in the gym, Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez) who seems out of place in a robotics school because her expertise is in chemistry, and Fred (T. J. Miller) who just likes to hang out with the smart kids at SFIT. Continue reading →
Interstellar is a great story with excellent acting, especially from Matthew McConaughey and Mackenzie Foy. For me, the three hours felt more like a normal two. Like the characters in the movie, I was asking where the time went.
In the not-to-distant future, maybe 20-30 years, the Earth is in real trouble. All efforts are now focused on food. Climate change has destroyed much of our ability to grow crops. National budgets have even eliminated defense spending.
Cooper, a former NASA test pilot, is now a farmer struggling against ever-increasing problems of drought and blight. He stumbles across strange gravity messages that direct him to the remnants of NASA run by Professor Brand (Michael Caine).
The film revolves around the relationship between Cooper and Murph (Foy and, later, Jessica Chasten, and, even later, Ellen Burstyn). This is the emotional center of the movie and the important love story. Oh, there’s another standard love story as well but one that definitely is not strongly promoted in the story.
Needless to say, there are adventures and sacrifices made, and the intrepid astronauts save the world through a combination of love, luck, and lots of fancy mental gymnastics.
If you’ve seen a trailer, you’ve seen a mountain-size ocean wave approaching people standing in calf-high water. These waves are continual on this odd planet and also are completely unexplained and irrational. What force could have moved so much water — over and over again? This is just the beginning of making this movie exciting while ignoring reality. Continue reading →
The new movie, The Theory of Everything, is about the life of Stephen Hawking from his graduation from Oxford to his becoming famous and then separating from his devoted wife of over a quarter century. Please, everyone, go to this movie. Why? Because it’s a good story, well acted and directed, and because you will be supporting the concept of telling the stories of scientists in movies. We must have more of this.
Stephen has a special resonance with me for strictly non-scientific reasons. We were born in the same year. We both entered prestigious colleges at the same age, 17, and went on to prestigious graduate schools for our doctorates. We were both married in the same year, he to Jane and I to Jayne. Of course, there are innumerable differences to balance these few coincidences. I majored in chemistry, he in physics. I have enjoyed rather good health overall. He is outrageously famous, while I labor in obscurity. And so it goes.
Before getting to the science, I’ll praise Eddie Redmayne for his uncanny portrayal of Stephen Hawking. From the early stumbling to the later crablike fingers and the difficulty in forming words, he nails Hawking in a manner that I never would have believed. Especially moving are the scenes in which he has the twinkle and slight smile showing Hawking’s personal joy at special moments and his puckish sense of humor.
This is a wonderful love story in which personal connection overcomes insurmountable odds. Jane (Wilde) Hawking’s (played by Felicity Jones) indomitable spirit lifts Stephen Hawking to the threshold of his greatness. We see this spirit and unwillingness to give up displayed several times in the movie. The very fact that Jane has three children, the last when Stephen is unable to move from his wheelchair speaks volumes about her. Ms. Jones brings a real sense of what the actual Mrs. Hawking must have felt to many of the scenes in the movie. Continue reading →
The new Hollywood movie, FURY, focuses on tanks, their role, and tank crews in World War II. This 2-hour 14-minute film opens in theaters on Friday, 17 Oct. 2014. It stars Brad Pitt, a sure audience draw, playing the somewhat complex leader of the five-man crew of the FURY, a Sherman tank. If you go to this movie, watch Logan Lerman as Normal Ellison. He almost steals the show.
The movie starts in April 1945, near the end of the European part of World War II. VE (Victory in Europe) day is celebrated here as May 8, 1945. It’s spring, and everything is mud, mud, mud. American troops are in Germany by this time, and the famous Battle of the Bulge ended a few months earlier. German troops are now defending their homeland ferociously.
FURY, a Sherman tank.
The main character of this movie truly is FURY, at least for me, and really did steal the show when I watched. The tank used in the filming was real, supplied by the Tank Museum in Bovington, England, a late-war Sherman with a 76mm gun. That’s the big gun on the turret. The inside shots were done in a specially created set that could open up in several directions for the different shots. The entire set was mounted on a gimbal that could move it for the inside shots where the tank was in motion. If you think that the inside of that tank looks really crowded, you should know that it was made 10% larger than the real thing.
Before discussing tanks in more detail, I should warn potential movie goers that this is a very violent movie with lots of grisly scenes, very grisly, and plenty of profane language in nearly every scene. Interestingly, there is no explicit sex.
For those who don’t mind the above, this is truly a riveting and tense movie. There’s little let up in the tension that begins with the first scene. I found it difficult to turn away from the screen even when the most horrific scenes took place. The characters are interesting but, except for Pitt (playing Wardaddy) and Lerman, they’re not plumbed deeply. Even Wardaddy, who says, “It’s my home” about the tank, never has this aspect explained, except implicitly. We are left to wonder if this attachment came about over time or from a single incident. We also are given no clue as to how he became fluent in German.
One more “character” in the movie is the entire FURY tank crew of five. The examination of the development of this team and its personality helps to make up for not looking more deeply into the individual characters because it’s the team and the tank that count in the end.
My favorite quote, again from Wardaddy, “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent,” sums up the movie. Get ready for a Hollywood ride.
Back to the tanks — we’re still using those old machines today. The first were used in World War I a century ago and were rather primitive. They were little more than mobile armored weapons and personnel protectors to move troops across the no-man’s land between trenches while withstanding the machine gun fire and easily trampling the extensive barbed wire fences for the following ground troops. The WWII tanks were much more powerful and versatile and formed the mainstay of many land operations. In the movie, we see quite a few German officers at the front on horseback. This contrast of horse and tank may be intended to suggest that tanks will soon go the way of the horse.
David ‘Sting’ Rae, center, with the crew on set.
To have a better idea of what the past and present role of the tank is in warfare and what the future may bring, I interviewed David “Sting” Rae, a technical consultant for the movie. Mr. Rae sees a continuing role for tanks in the military. According to Mr. Rae, “The US Marines reinvented the role of the tank in Fallujah during the Iraq conflict where it proved almost decisive in breaking the will of the insurgents and allowing the infantry to take and hold ground.” Continue reading →
We live in a very large universe. By all accounts, it’s over 14 billion light-years to the edge from here. That’s nearly 10,000 billion billion miles. Our galaxy contains billions of stars. Our universe contains billions of galaxies. Somewhere out in those vast spaces, there must be, or have been, or will be another advanced civilization.
Unfortunately for those yearning to communicate with aliens and fortunately for those who fear alien contact, we are very unlikely — in the extreme — ever to communicate with an alien civilization. Our only real hope lies in violating Einstein’s laws of relativity, and so far they’re as solid as granite.
The vastness of space that makes the existence of aliens, at some time, likely also means that they will be too far away for any meaningful communication. If any are in our galactic neighborhood, they may have broadcast pictures of themselves just as we are doing every day with television, and we may intercept them if we can tease them out of the background noise of quasars, exploding stars, and so on.
Even an image of an intelligent, technologically advanced alien would add enormously to our knowledge of science. Speculation about what an alien would look like may seem like a waste of time, but it can help us if we ever do see one to recognize it.
The topic of what an alien, one with technology, with whom we could, in theory, someday communicate, will look like, act like, and so on has been in science fiction books and movies for many decades. Hollywood tends to reach for the extreme and depict aliens as very frightening. The movie, Alien, is a good example of that trend. Going back very far, there’s It Came from Outer Space.
The science suggests otherwise. Not that real aliens wouldn’t be, well, alien. The likelihood of them passing for one of us is rather remote. If you are teaching science, this concept can begin an excellent and engaging project investigating the possible parameters of alien beings capable of broadcasting images of the themselves. Before heading into the appearance of aliens, consider two separate issues that bear on this topic. Continue reading →
You may have noticed one of the many articles such as this one that cast doubt on the asteroid (or comet) strike that annihilated the dinosaurs. Oh, the asteroid did the job, they say, but it had some help.
Careful examination of North American fossil records strongly suggests that the dinosaur population was under stress from lower than usual herbivore diversity. What say?! There just weren’t as many plant-eating dinosaurs as usual, which means that dinner for the large meat-eaters was a bit harder to come by.
The Earth was undergoing extreme changes 66 million years ago when the great impact took place. Massive volcanic eruptions in what is now India were the result of a collision of the Indian and Asian continental plates. Climate was undergoing change. And dinosaur herbivore diversity was down.
The above was really no big deal. Dinosaurs had been around for well over 100 million years and had survived many environmental challenges. This was just another that would kill off lots of individuals and perhaps a few species. As a whole, the dinosaurs would come roaring back soon enough, however. Continue reading →
[Note: See chapter 1, Landing. Also see Harry’s Mars One: Exciting Adventure or Hoax?, especially the long-running, extended discussion at the end of the article. See his other Mars related articles in his list of publications. Chapter 2 is being published as submitted, without editing by ETCJ. -Editor]
The four hopeful settlers stare open-eyed at the vista that confronts them. Mars stares back, red-faced and malevolent. They discern nothing friendly or helpful in that stare. Some might see indifference, but they’d be wrong. If ever mankind faced evil, it is here in this impossibly alien and lifeless environment.
Even the dark, sharp-edged rocks strewn across the landscape with apparent reckless abandon seem infused with baleful intent, waiting patiently for countless eons for these soft Earthlings, waiting to cut them and trip them. The surface between the rocks is red, not the red of a poppy or even an Earth sunset, but an intense red that fills the land with emanations of harm. Despite the extreme thinness of the atmosphere, the strangely close horizon does not immediately and sharply turn to the black of space as on the Moon. The red dust of Mars hangs in the sparse air and softens the horizon just enough to give the appearance of red sand reaching up, an almost living thing.
As if sensing the planet’s personality, Chun speaks up, “We have to get that module back so we’re at full strength.”
“You bet!” responds Dawit excitedly, pumping his fist. He is undaunted by the landscape or the problem of the errant module.
“Sure,” says Aleka, “but first we have to put our habitat together.”
“Sorry,” says Chun as she moves into position.
“We all feel the same. All right, we’ve practiced this plenty of times,” says Aleka.
“Seems like thousands,” responds Dawit with a gesture none of the others can see because he’s inside.
“We don’t have all that long before our suits have to be recharged,” warns Balu.
“Right. Let’s rotate and connect,” says Aleka.
“Good thing that missing module connects at the end,” comments Chun.
“The rovers have done a nice job of clearing the site and putting the modules in place,” says Balu.
“I cannot wait to get a plan for the missing module,” comments Dawit over their intercom. Everything is an exciting adventure for Dawit.
While at a recent workshop at the Redlands, CA, headquarters of the Environmental Science Research Institute (ESRI), I heard the most concise definition of geography yet: “What where? Why there? Why care?”
My wife, Bonnie Bracey Sutton, had been accepted for a week-long workshop in ESRI’s T3G Institute. I traveled with her, thinking I was heading for a holiday in Southern California – maybe visit the beach and chill out in wine country.
No such luck. As soon as he saw me, Charlie Fitzpatrick said, “I’ll get you a badge.”
Charlie Fitzpatrick is the K-12 education manager at ESRI. Before joining ESRI in 1992, Charlie taught social studies in grades 7-12 for 15 years.
“T3G” is ESRI’s acronym for “teachers teaching teachers GIS.” So the goal of the workshop was to give a group of some 90 educators the knowledge and hands-on skills to be able to teach other colleagues how to use geographic information system information in their work. Continue reading →
The Garland Independent School District (GISD) is located in north-central Texas, adjacent to Dallas. The district encompasses approximately 100 square miles and serves the Dallas suburb cities of Garland, Rowlett, and Sachse. With an enrollment of about 58,000 students, it is the thirteenth-largest school district in the state of Texas.
The GISD has a “district of choice” policy. This policy allows parents to choose where their children will attend school, based on established criteria for ethnic balance. Annually, the district has a one-month selection period for both secondary and elementary schools. Once the selection period ends, the district’s Student Services department begins the process of assigning students to campuses based on building capacity, grade-level capacity, and seat availability. Other criteria, including campus demographic data, are considered before making the final decision on school placement.
To help with student travel and support the district of choice policy, the district’s GIS (geographic information system) department developed a Flex application for distance routing. With this application, officials can determine the location of a student’s home and local schools within the immediate vicinity.
Converting AutoCAD Files to Geospatial Data
Garland maintains 7 high schools, 12 middle schools, 47 elementary schools, and 2 pre-K schools, as well as a number of administrative offices and special use facilities. Managing these facilities for compliance with governing standards, current use, past maintenance data, and potential renovation or remodeling projects became increasingly difficult, and it was decided that an automated system was needed to prepare plans and data for quick and easy access.
For several years, the district used Autodesk’s AutoCAD for facilities management. The district’s AutoCAD facilitator, Kelli Daughtry, was responsible for converting all paper drawings into AutoCAD and maintaining facility floor plans during the district’s $385 million bond program. Approximately four years ago, the facilities department began implementing a GIS to be used in conjunction with AutoCAD. The district retains all facility floor plans in AutoCAD while using GIS to provide easy access to site plans, floor plans, room numbers, and data referenced to them. Continue reading →
[Note: This is part of Harry’s series on Mars, which began with “Mars One: Exciting Adventure or Hoax?” (4/8/13). As of 12/8/13, the discussion is still very active and has grown to 585 responses. Many of the comments are of article length, and the breadth and depth of information and participation make the discussion just as if not more valuable than the original article. The article has been tweeted 38 times and mentioned in 284 Facebook posts, and these figures are growing by the day -Editor.]
Mars is in the news again.1 And again. It seems that everyone is going crazy over Mars. The problems of getting to Mars are many and difficult, but that’s not stopping plenty of people from making plans and issuing press releases.
When I think back to my youth, I recall reading my first science fiction novel in a small local library after school in 1953. It was E. E. (Doc) Smith’s story of space travel, one of the Skylark series. At that time, no one had even put a tiny object into orbit.
A mere four years later, Sputnik I was launched, and the world entered the space age for real. Rockets to space were no longer science fiction. The next year, 1958, the United States put Explorer 1 in orbit. It weighed about 31 pounds. Dwight Eisenhower was president then. We were in the middle of the Cold War, and Nikita Kruschev was in charge of the Soviet Union. Both his picture and that of Sputnik I were on the cover of Time magazine the previous year. Indeed, if memory serves, he was the “Man of the Year.”
No one knew how much payload could be put into space. No one knew the effects of prolonged weightlessness on people. The Van Allen radiation belts were discovered and verified by Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 in 1958, raising the issue of radiation in space.
Despite the lack of experience in putting satellites in orbit and the great uncertainties in putting a human in space, the United States not only put men into space but even put them on the Moon just eleven years later. ELEVEN YEARS! Starting from a tiny satellite in orbit, a lunar landing module weighing over 1,000 times as much and holding two people landed on the Moon in that short time.
Those who say that we can’t put people on Mars in 10-15 years don’t remember the magic decade of the 1960s. You have to watch out when you use that word, “can’t.” The Mars Direct program was proposed in the 1970s and was to have people on Mars by 2000. That didn’t happen, and technology has advanced enormously since then. It’s more possible today, and it’s still a very tall undertaking. Continue reading →
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has taken over from simple, unadorned “science” as the term describing our science classes. Because most of these classes use technology and mathematics already, the major change is the addition of engineering. Many science classes already had some sort of engineering-oriented activities they call projects. The NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) has increased the emphasis on engineering.
STEM, as a moniker, has had such success that it has resulted in some copycat acronyms. Preeminent among these is STEAM, which adds art to the list. I have absolutely nothing against inserting art into science classes and even support the idea. However, the creeping growth of an acronym does bother me as does the omission of equally important areas of learning for students in science classes.
I also happen to think that that putting technology into the acronym is superfluous. I’d much prefer, for example, thinking as the T in STEM if you have that letter at all.
I have read many spirited discussions about STEAM replacing STEM, and they all seem to originate from teachers of traditional art classes where drawing, painting, and sculpting is taught. What about performance arts? What about music? I have not seen anyone agitating to add those to science classes. Why not?
There’s also the crucial role of history and social science in general to learning. There certainly is much history in science, both the history of science and the historical context. Our children can learn much from this analysis, possibly more than memorizing the names of U.S. Presidents or of the Kings of England along with dates. Why do we not see agitation for SHTEM or HEMST? Not a clever enough acronym? That’s hardly a sufficient excuse. Continue reading →
To the reader: I’ve decided to redo chapter one to incorporate story ideas that wouldn’t have been possible with the original chapter. Please bear with me, and I apologize for the false start. I hope you’ll enjoy this adventure as much as I’m enjoying sharing it with you. Best, Harry.
s the Google Mars shuttle continues its weeks-long deceleration toward its unbelievable destination, the crew of four busily checks the instruments on the attached Citigroup crew module where they have lived and worked for four months. They are so involved in monitoring not only their own module but also the Royal Dutch Shell supply module that they momentarily forget that they’re about to become the first humans ever to set foot on another planet. The shuttle holds the two attached modules like a parent carrying twins in both arms. It may look awkward to those used to air-based flight but creates no impediment to travel in the vacuum of space.
“Final pre-separation check,” snaps Aleka as the about-to-be Martians go through procedures necessary to ensure a clean separation from the shuttle. She glances out of the small thick window and sees the edge of the red planet against the black of space with its countless bright point lights of stars strewn haphazardly across its seemingly infinite reaches as though a child had thrown diamonds and diamond dust on a vast expanse of black velvet.
A few weeks earlier, the entire crew of four was excited to see the small red dot of Mars expand and grow into a shiny red penny in the black, deep expanse of space – nearly 14 billion light-years deep, far beyond human imagination. Now, it fills most of one side of their view. Earth has receded to a pale blue dot, left forever to the billions living there. A new world awaits. Humans will triumph over Mars someday. Aleka has promised herself that this will be that day.
“Check,” says co-pilot Chun. Her engineer’s mind racing with the excitement and the checks she’s performing to ensure a safe entry and landing.
Four years of training guarantee that the anxious crew all know their roles in this landing precisely. The captain, Aleka (Allie), is the only flight-trained pilot on the mission, but all of them have spent countless hours in the landing simulator and can take over if necessary. Redundancy has been the watchword of the Mars mission from the very beginning. For the landing at Amazon base, however, there could be only one crew module. Everything depends on its successful entry into the absurdly thin Mars air, about 1% of the density of that on Earth, followed by the powered descent to the surface. Continue reading →
Mars seems to be everywhere these days. Who will go? How will we go? When will we go?
These questions have yet to be answered. Dennis Tito, a millionaire with Mars instead of stars in his eyes is focusing on a project he terms “Inspiration Mars.” This is not a landing but just a flyby. It’s not a four-person flight but rather a two-person flight by a man and a woman, both past child-bearing age for the reasons of radiation during the 501-day trip.
There’s one very conspicuous hitch in this program, readily admitted by all involved: the date. In order to be efficient, space missions to Mars must take place roughly once every two years, when Earth and Mars are aligned in their orbits. In 2018, there will be a special alignment that occurs infrequently and provides what the Inspiration Mars people call a “exceptionally quick, free-return orbit” that’s available just twice in every fifteen years. The next such launch window is in 2031, according to the Inspiration Mars site. This project has a very tight schedule.
By orbiting Mars at about 100 miles above the surface, the mission will avoid encountering the thin Martian atmosphere and will also use the so-called slingshot effect that takes some momentum from the planet itself to accelerate the spacecraft back to Earth and shorten the return trip considerably. It also reduces the amount of fuel that the craft must carry considerably. Continue reading →
Last February, Conrad Farnsworth achieved nuclear fusion in his father’s shed in Wyoming*. This would be a big deal were it not for fourteen other high school students who had done this previously. You can find a YouTube video of his accomplishment and will note that the poverty-stricken need not apply. The equipment I see there would cost a few thousand dollars new and over a thousand even if you scrounged quite a bit. You even have to have a cylinder of deuterium, the stable heavier isotope of hydrogen. It has an atomic mass of two instead of hydrogen’s one due to an added neutron in its nucleus.
“First Neutrons,” uploaded to YouTube by Conrad Farnsworth on 2 Dec. 2011.
He achieved fusion by confining the deuterium in an extremely hot plasma, hundreds of millions of degrees hot. That’s hot!
Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas. A plasma is like a glowing hot gas. Its molecules have disintegrated into atoms, and those have lost electrons to become ionized. Ionized gases can conduct electricity just like your fluorescent lights (today’s energy-saving CFLs for example) do. The ionized gas in those lights causes the fluorescent material lining the inside of the glass to glow.
Gases like to expand when they’re heated up. This expansion cools them down. To achieve enormous temperatures and fusion, you must confine the gas to prevent expansion. The problem you’ll face is that no known substance can survive those high temperatures. You cannot make a bottle to hold your super-hot plasma out of any material in the universe. Continue reading →
After receiving many comments from my article, “Mars One: Exciting Adventure or Hoax?“, and exploring many issues of any such undertaking as well as the specifics of Mars One, I have decided that the conversation has become increasingly technical and therefore less interesting to our readers. In order to make our conversation more interesting and to bring more people into the conversation, I am presenting a series of episodes in a fictional future in which the first permanent settlers will arrive on Mars. While Mars One and our discussion have generated many of the ideas, this series does not claim to have a relation to any specific Mars settlement program. It just explores the issues involved in such a venture.
For the purposes of making the exposition and discussion more real, I will name the first four humans to arrive on Mars: Aleka (Hawaiian female: aka Allie) is the flight-trained captain, Balasubramian (Indian male: Balu for short and Bob among the crew) has the crucial survival role of botanist, Chun (Chinese female: aka Chunnie) functions as the engineer, and Dawit (Ethiopian male: everyone just calls him Dave) is the mission communicator. For the purposes of having a broad gene pool, the early settlers have genetic roots that include a worldwide geographical scope of origins.
I’d like to encourage you all to participate. Each chapter will end with a problem that must be solved. I am interested in seeing ideas different from the ones I imagine and may rewrite future chapters if better answers are submitted. If you are a science teacher at any level, please consider discussing these issues in your classes. We’re nearing the end of the school year now, and this sort of discussion may work nicely with the end-of-year mentality that you encounter. A fun, open discussion can make science come alive for students. Use NASA images to liven things up. -Harry E. Keller
s the Google Mars shuttle continues its weeks-long deceleration toward its incredible destination, the crew of four busily checks the instruments on the attached Citigroup crew module where they have lived and worked for four months. They are so involved in monitoring not only their own module but also the Royal Dutch Shell supply module that they momentarily forget they’re about to become the first humans ever to set foot on another planet. The shuttle holds the two attached modules like a parent carrying twins in both arms. The configuration of shuttle and two landing modules may look awkward but creates no impediment to travel in the vacuum of space.
Four years of training guarantee that the anxious crew all know their roles in this landing precisely. The captain, Aleka (Allie), is the only flight-trained pilot on the mission, but all of them have spent countless hours in the landing simulator and can take over if necessary. Redundancy has been the watchword of the Mars mission from the very beginning.
For the landing at Amazon base, however, there could be only one crew module. Everything depends on its successful entry into the absurdly thin Mars air, about 1% of the density of that on Earth and containing 95% carbon dioxide, followed by the powered descent to the surface. Ordinary chemical rockets slow the landers as they approach the surface where the gravity is 38% of that of Earth. While the low gravity means that less fuel is required for descent, it still is strong enough to kill everyone if the landing module crashes. Every element from the heat shield and parachute to the landing engines must function perfectly for a safe landing. Continue reading →
The discussion on “Mars One: Exciting Adventure or Hoax?” (4.8.13) has been wonderful, and I thank all of those who have participated. I’d like to take this entire issue to another level. Please stay tuned, watching ETC-J for a new beginning of the discussion about Mars.
“A crater near the Martian North Pole with a large lake of water ice. The lake is about 10 km across.” – Robert O’Connell, University of Virginia. NASA photo.
ETC-J is working on a serialized fictional account of the first Mars settlement so that those who are not so technically oriented can participate. We’ll have plenty of science and will address those issues we’ve talked about in the article and the discussion and many more in the context of the possible actuality of a Mars settlement. We’ll also have personalities and their reactions to crises. We’re making the assumption that it will happen within 20 years, maybe ten or so. We will use only technologies that we have or that could become available within this time frame. Exceptions will be made to this rule only if there absolutely is no other way, and we’ll still make every effort to make it scientifically sound. As a scientist, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
You’ll read about some real surprises in the episodes. We’ll be as creative as possible and will encourage all of you to write in with your ideas about how to solve the problems facing the settlers in the most recent episode. Some of your ideas will find their way into future episodes and will be acknowledged in the discussion.
If you know a science teacher, be sure to clue her/him into what’s going on. We’ll have special challenges for science classes to discuss. We invite science teachers to respond on behalf of their classes and to sign with their school name. I’m hoping that my own business, Smart Science Education Inc., will be able to fund some prizes, but I cannot make promises about that yet.
While prompted by the discussion of Mars One, any resemblance to the actual Mars One program is unintended. We will use the best ideas from anywhere, including Mars One, in our narrative, but this is NOT Mars One.
Watch for the first episode soon and be ready with your commentary on any science errors in each episode, solutions to the problems facing the settlers, and the science class challenges. I’m looking forward to a stimulating discussion. I hope you’ll join us on this adventure.
The Mars One project has received quite a bit of press lately. This project plans to establish a human colony on Mars in 2023 with four people. The project is the brainchild of Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch businessman. You must give him credit for creativeness. Much of the financing will come from a 24-hour television reality show that will follow every step of the project, including watching the new “Martians” as they adapt to the harsh Mars environment.
According to the Mars One website, this project will use existing technology. The habitat consists of modules that will arrive on Mars over a period of years and will be moved into place by a Mars rover. The first colonists will do the final assembly. Every two years, four more colonists will arrive until the total population consists of twenty immigrants. At that point, the colony intends to be self-sustaining, requiring no additional supplies from Earth. No kidding! At $10,000 per pound, Earth will not continue sending oxygen, water, food, Mars suits, and more to Mars regularly.
If you haven’t guessed yet, the trips by the colonists will be one-way only. There’s absolutely no provision for bringing them home. Even with an estimated $6 billion budget, the money just isn’t there. So, who will these colonists be? Interestingly, Lansdorp proposes to charge for the privilege of taking a one-way trip to hell. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Bas Lansdorp
The technology does exist to ferry materials, habitats, and a few people to Mars. The technology exists to produce enough solar power to eke out a sort of living there, in principle. The concept of establishing human habitation on another world must create a sense of excitement in anyone who has the time to pay attention. The educational opportunities would be enormous. The new colonists would be “going boldly where no one has gone before” – unless NASA gets there first with their round-trip Mars program.
[The following is a response to colleagues’ comments, in ETCJ’s staff listserv, re the need for change in the way science is traditionally taught. The discussion was spurred by the 2 Feb. 2013 report, “For Each and Every Child: A Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence,” by the Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission. -Editor]
You have to remember, I got thrown out of schools for doing all of the things that we talk about that are going to be the future. I worked with the White House. The principal called me in and said, “You can’t do this technology stuff in Arlington Schools if you want to stay.” That was not a choice to me. Teachers who did what they were told are still probably working. I was not what the schools wanted, an innovator using technology. You are preaching to the wrong person.
I can’t demonstrate my skills right now. I don’t have a place to do it. Tracy Learning Center in Tracy, CA, is where I worked to help establish advocacy. My benefactor died.
Nysmith School in Herndon, VA, and a few other schools and projects do what I love. NCLB took the steam out of STEM, the science out of the classroom, and the focus away from what was called SMET, now STEM. NCLB took me out of the classroom. I will always remember the discussion.
I was with people who are STEM evangelists in the Nysmith School, which I visited in the NIIAC times. We as a council visited the school back then. Both of the schools are not mainstream. Tracy School is a charter school, K-12, mostly minority kids, very minority. Because the school has a longer day, with another month in the school year, it has to be a charter school. We had a plan. Continue reading →
Dr. Yager is a Professor of Science Education at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Academy of Education. He has a long career in this area, and we should pay attention when he writes.
He has just written a short article for Science Education Review (11.3 [2012], pp. 54-55), “Does ‘Hands-On’ Indicate Real Reforms of Science Teaching?”* It begins with the following sentence. “Too often the reform of science for K-12 students is described as being ‘hands-on.’“ Everyone seems to be calling for reform these days. So, this is a valid discussion. Many of the reformers are “hands-on” advocates and even extremists who insist that no science education should be anything but “hands-on.” The short piece, just 1.5 pages, is well worth reading for anyone involved in science education.
Robert E Yager
Dr. Yager makes the point that involving muscles does not necessarily involve the mind. Indeed, as I also have seen, just the opposite is often the case. Science is about exploring. According to Dr. Yager, “One uniqueness of humans is their interest in exploring the natural world.” This uniqueness can drive the excitement and engagement of students with science. Losing it tends to do exactly the reverse.
Further on, he says, “Hands-on may be needed to develop tools to investigate student ideas.” Then, he counters with, “Often collecting evidence involves technology, not science!” He’s saying that you might use hands-on to collect evidence for your scientific investigation, or you might use technology. The hunt for dark matter is all technology. The Mars rovers are distant technology. Neither is truly hands-on. However, I take the view that science and science education are not the same thing. Just because scientists are trending away from hands-on, does that mean that students should too?
[Note to the reader: I am CEO of an online science lab provider and, while this article does not address online learning, it does have opinions related to the use of science labs. While I have made every effort to avoid bias based on my current position and believe that my opinion would be the same were I, for example, still a university professor, readers should be aware of my personal connection in this regard. -HK]
The long-awaited Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) second draft has been published for public review*. This is the final public review version. After diving into them, I found them lacking in some important respects.
I’ve taken the time to look at both versions (DCI and Topic arrangements). They’re both the same material arranged differently. I haven’t bothered with elementary school standards because I’m happy with doing any science at all in grades K-5.
I spent some time in the middle school area and was disappointed with the lack of academic rigor, the insufficient range of topics for three years of learning, and the paucity of quantitative investigations indicated. So, I went on to the high school topics hoping for something better.
As a chemist, the first thing I looked for was chemistry. There’s so no such topic. The NGSS document is arranged under three heading: PS, LS, and ESS. These stand for physical science, life science, and earth and space science. Earth and space science is certainly physical in nature but has its own separate section, while chemistry must lie hidden in physical science somewhere. The word chemistry does not appear.
Instead, most of what I’d term chemistry appears under two headings: Structure and Properties of Matter and Chemical Reactions. All right, a derivative word for chemistry does appear there but only in the topic-oriented version.
In order to see what’s afoot here, it’s necessary to list the topics under these headings. The good news and the bad news is that there are only ten topics (eleven if you count the bonus topic). It’s good because the list is short and easy to write here. The bad news is that this is all that there is for an entire year of high school chemistry. To give the NGSS their due, the introductory material does indicate that these are “core” ideas and that teachers are free to add on more material. You have to wonder how many teachers will bother to expand on the requirements that they’re given. Continue reading →
I don’t have any answers and I have not had time to read your draft. I have been consumed with family responsibilities and some of my emails have gotten lost while running two households. Sorry about that.
I was always punished for teaching thinking, until I was picked by President Clinton to be on the NIIAC. OK, and with the Lucas Foundation, which was also a boost. But my heart is sad. I see the same things going on in schools now, and worse practices. Not sure about Common Core and how it will be enacted.
The tests you hear about are the tip of the iceberg. There are internal, school-level, grade-level, county and practice tests.
I was a gifted and talented teacher. It was because I was determined to make school better, interesting and a compelling place to go. So I learned not to gate kids. I thought I knew math but found that I was very poorly prepared, that most people taught with their hand in the back of the book (for the answers), and that most schools allowed only one way to do math — the approach used in the book. A student, who was brilliant, took me to task when he understood number systems and then invented his own. It is really not that hard, but you have to get it. I took lots of courses that required thinking, creating, inventing — and understanding math. I understood cuisenaire rods and visual math. My 4th graders tested at the top in standardized math tests. All of them. Continue reading →
By Dan Branan, Ph.D.
NANSLO Lab Director
Colorado Community College System
John Adsit wrote a recent article (“No Satisfaction in Finding on Online vs. Traditional Science Classes,” 22 Oct. 2012) commenting on a study by the Colorado Department of Higher Education’s study showing, among other things, no significant difference in long-term college grades and GPA when comparing community college students who had taken their introductory science courses online with those who had taken them in the traditional community college classroom (Epper, 18 Oct. 2012). I had initially posted a response to John’s article, and was asked by the editor of ETCJ to expand it into an article, which I greatly appreciate. In short, it seems to me that John has largely missed the mark with regard to the Colorado study and its implications.
For many years, as an online educator in the community college system in Colorado, I have listened to traditional colleagues claim as a fact that students taking online science courses are not as well-prepared and, in fact, are at a disadvantage, compared to traditional students. The traditional model was held up as the standard, without proof, even though, as John points out in his post, there have been studies indicating that the traditional educational model does not work as well as it should in the first two years of college.
John’s initial response to the Colorado study is to merely sneer at the demonstrated equivalence of online vs. traditional science classes at the community college level by stating that “students in general learned very little in the first two years of college,” relying on the excellent analysis in Academically Adrift. While I cannot dispute the findings in that report, I do have an important question about its true meaning: Do we have proof that college education has ever been different? While it may indeed be a cause for alarm, could it be that the first two years of college are a time when students undergo a wide range of mental and personal transformations in readiness for the culminating two or three years before they earn their degree? Isn’t it true that the first two years of college are often filled with fairly bland courses in preparation for study in one’s chosen field of interest?
After all, the U.S. still possesses an undergraduate educational system that many students from around the world envy. According to a report last year from the Institute of International Education, the number of international students enrolled at U.S. colleges is 32 percent higher than it was a decade ago, and this is largely due to undergraduate enrollment of Chinese students. Continue reading →
John Adsit has written very well (“No Satisfaction in Finding on Online vs. Traditional Science Classes,” 10.22.12) about some of the issues raised by the Colorado Department of Higher Education study (Epper) and has expressed some excellent insights into this field. In some ways, I wouldn’t go quite as far, and, in others, I’ll dig more deeply.
While it’s mostly true that a university cannot meet these standards in large classes, it does not have to be so. It’s because most professors are dedicated to research and not to teaching that such situations abound. I was such a professor with 350 students in a freshman chemistry course with labs. I met with my 22 teaching assistants weekly and visited lab sessions constantly during the course. It left me little research time but helped to build a good quality course. (Today, I’d make a much better one, but I was new to teaching then.)
In community colleges, there’s no excuse for not meeting the goals of America’s Lab Report (ALR). It’s not a publish-or-perish environment, and the class size is smaller.
John has listed the ALR goals in his remarks, and I’ll comment on them specifically. I see no excuse for not meeting the second set of four goals that addresses integration of science labs with the overall course. These are overarching goals for any lab course and would be easy to meet for anyone who cares to make the effort.
The first set of goals focuses more closely on the labs themselves. These are nice goals, but are not all equal when it comes to designing great lab experiences. I’ll take them out of order to put them into the proper context.
3. Understanding the complexity and ambiguity of empirical work.
This is so important that ALR singles it out as the one goal that can be achieved in no other way than through a science lab. In this context, it’s important to note the part of the report that John left out, the definition of a science lab:
Laboratory experiences provide opportunities for students to interact directly with the material world (or with data drawn from the material world), using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science.
Note well that the data must always come from the “material world.” That statement completely rules out simulations that use equations and algorithms to create the data.
A recent study by the Colorado Department of Higher Education (Epper)* finds no significant difference in the performance of community college students who took science classes online and in traditional classrooms. This is consistent with many studies that show online learning to be as effective as classroom learning, but the importance of this study in the area of science is, sadly, less significant than it appears.
The study had two parts. One compared the grades of students within the system. This has little value as an indicator since grading was left to the instructors and thus provide no standard basis for comparison. The other part of the study is more valuable, showing no significant difference in the performance of the students after they transferred to four year colleges and universities. The students who completed their first two years of science education online did just well as those who completed it in regular classrooms. The significance in terms of science is the challenge to the common perception that students need to spend time in a true laboratory to get a proper science education. This online program used specially designed kits to replace the formal lab experience, and other programs used other online approaches.
Unfortunately, the 2010 study Academically Adrift shows there is little reason for celebration. That study found that students in general learned very little in the first two years of college. The conclusion of this study, then, implies that the online science program didn’t do any better (or worse) than a traditional program that we know isn’t working. One would hope that the online program is an improvement, and, in fact, it should be able to achieve improvement without breathing hard.
In 2005, the National Research Council published America’s Lab Report, a devastating look at science education in America. It was particularly concerned with the very poor way in which laboratory work was incorporated into the instructional process. Although that report focused on high school courses, the nature of the identified problems is almost certainly just as likely to be found in college classrooms, if not more so. This study not only shows why lab courses are ineffective, it also points the way to how they can be improved, whether in the physical classroom or in the online environment.
This was a meta-analysis that looked at a huge number of studies in science education. Some of the studies actually indicated that students would perform better if labs were eliminated entirely. The reason is simply a matter of instructional alignment. Achievement in science is usually measured by the ability of students to memorize and repeat facts related to science. They are rarely assessed on their ability to think and perform as scientists, by investigating, forming hypotheses, and following the scientific method to solve a problem or reach a valid conclusion. Thus, instructional time spent on anything other than learning and memorizing facts is time wasted. Continue reading →
By Jim Baumann
“Regardless of their background or level of skill, citizen science provides people with a powerful platform that allows them to get involved in science and their environment,” says Patrick Rickles, research associate for the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group at University College London (UCL). “However, as valuable as this is, these programs often see the citizen as a passive participant that simply collects information and then hands it over to the researcher. At that point, their involvement in the project is considered complete.”
