Vonny

What is wrong with our Political System? In a word, Money.

2012-01-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

Here we go. After what I consider to be a disastrous decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 (Citizen's United vs FEC), where essentially corporations are now individuals and there can effectively be unlimited contributions from the wealthiest people, Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire, has given $5 million to a super-PAC that backs Newt Gingrich. He is reportedly willing to spend $20 million for Gingrich. How is this democracy, where the few have the power to manipulate elections? How does this work in the spirit of 'every man created equal,' which is then forgotten when it comes to elections, where we are clearly NOT equals since money is the kingmaker? I fear this is just the start of what will be an insane campaign season when it comes to money - super-rich individuals and big business and and unions and lobbyists as the go-betweens vying to have the biggest influence on the election. What's more, they will almost all contribute at least something to both sides, so they will be able to have access and influence regardless of who wins.

What I would love to see is public financing for elections. Give candidates some lump amount of money to spend on their campaigns. Let the public see how they are able to work with a fixed amount of money (like they will need to do in office), how they set up a campaign budget, and may the one who is able to best convince the electorate that their ideas are best win. No PACs, no unions, no corporations, no dominance by a few individuals. As one comment I saw states very well: "It is not an election - it is an auction." Office sold to the highest bidder!

No Evidence for a Dec. 21, 2012, End of the World Event! Now I can sleep at night.

2011-12-31T12:53:00.000-08:00

I am glad NASA scientists have spoken up about the predicted end of the world on December 21, 2012. Check out responses to some of the main threats non-scientists keep yapping about at http://news.yahoo.com/apocalypse-not-now-2012-doomsday-predictions-debunked-nasa-055304813.html. Looks like we will only need to suffer through the election year nonsense instead of an apocalypse.

At least I can wish everyone a Happy and Healthy 2012!!!!!

A 'Smoking Gun' Regarding Climate Change - Yep, We are Responsible for Increased CO2 Levels

2011-12-16T23:27:00.000-08:00

I have not been able to watch the Republican presidential debates with any regularity, as time and a lack of cable channels do not permit. However, even if I were to watch these, I would find it difficult to keep the TV on when they begin any discussion of climate change. I would not be able to stomach it when Rep. Bachmann or Gov. Perry say the science is not there - that this is a hoax - that humans have nothing to do with increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This is either simple, blind ignorance of the actual science that exists, or a blatant disregard of scientific facts in order to cater to certain interest groups and get their money and support.

If there is one thing in the science of climate change that is not in doubt, it is that human beings are largely responsible for the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide (a leading greenhouse gas) since the second half of the 19th century to the present. Now, THE question that is correct to ask is how do we know this? How do we know that humans burning carbon-based materials like coal, oil, and natural gas has led to increased carbon dioxide levels, and that the increased levels are not due to natural causes?

A series of tests provide the answers to this question. There are multiple, independent tests that all lead to the same conclusion. And what's more, these tests rely on basic, fundamental science principles that are not disputed...yes, there are basic, science facts that the conspiracy believers simply have to ignore if they continue their rhetoric.

A brief summary is provided below, but a better, more detailed explanation is found here.

One way of thinking about human contributions to the rise of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which have increased from about 280 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm in just the past 150 years is human activity, i.e. the industrial revolution. One can calculate the amount of carbon burned over that time span, and one finds that humans have put enough carbon in the atmosphere that could place CO2 at some 500 ppm. So why do we measure only 380 ppm? This is because the earth is a complex system, and there are natural carbon sinks such as forests and the oceans, which absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere. These sinks have been able to absorb some of the excess CO2 humans have put into the atmosphere, but in the end we are putting greenhouse gases into the air at a rate faster than natural sinks can absorb it. We are not in chemical equilibrium, and as we now have more humans on the earth than ever, and burning even more carbon materials at faster rates than any other time in human history, it is a natural prediction that this increase in greenhouse gases will rise and put us in a larger non-equilibrium state with carbon sinks.

There is another way to test whether or not humans and the burning of carbon materials are responsible for the increase in CO2 during the last 150 years. It is the measurement of the relative abundance of carbon-13 to carbon-12. The most abundant carbon is carbon-12...this is the form of carbon we are made of, as well as plants. Carbon-13 is an isotope of carbon, with one extra neutron in the nucleus.

There is a natural concentration of the different isotopes of carbon in the atmosphere that is accurately measured. Scientists use the ratio of C-13/C-12 to quantify this concentration of carbon types. Carbon-14, which is radioactive and used in dating many different types of objects, is much more rare than carbon-12 or -13. So Nature has a basic value for the C-13/C-12 ratio in the atmosphere, that has been effectively constant for hundreds of thousands of years with minor variations due to events such as major volcanic activity. By the way, how do scientists measure this over long time periods? Water, ice, and plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Ice core samples from the poles can be dug out and measured and dated. CO2 levels have increased to levels never seen in at least the last 400,000 years, for instance. And this rise has occurred in the last 150 years.

But here is one last aspect of the isotope ratio. The ratio has one value for the atmosphere. But when you burn stuff, there is a significantly different ratio in the CO2 produced from that combustion process! So the study to do, and has been done multiple ways and by independent groups, is to measure the present ratio of Carbon-13/Carbon-12 and compare it to past values. The expectation is that as carbon-based materials are burned, there will be a rise in CO2 (this is simple chemistry that one cannot get around...sorry, no true clean coal exists...if you burn it, CO2 will be produced). but at the same time, the C-13/C-12 ratio should decrease. This is because plants favor absorbing the lighter C-12 from the atmosphere more than C-13. And coal, gas and oil are made from plants that die. Plants, and therefore coal, gas and oil, have a lower C-13/C-12 ratio than the atmosphere.

What is the result of such studies? C-13/C-12 is flat for thousands of years in the atmosphere...natural atmospheric concentrations. But in the last 150 years, CO2 has increased, and C-13/C-12 has decreased, just as predicted. So multiple tests confirm that the burning of carbon-based materials by humans (because there have not been any constantly burning forest fires during this same period, or any other natural process) in the past 150 years has occurred, and this corresponds, over the same time period, to the unprecedented increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Yes, humans are responsible for at least a significant portion of the increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. CO2 traps heat, and can cause warming of the atmosphere. These are basic facts of chemistry and physics. It is not a hoax. The more difficult problem to solve is the longer-term consequences on the global climate. This is done via computer simulations. The global climate system is an unbelievably complex system, and as climate models improve of time we may have a better grasp of what will eventually happen.

If CO2 levels continue to increase at increasing rates, which will be the case if developing nations like China and India continue to rapidly increase automobile use and coal-burning plant production, and the US does not do anything to decrease its CO2 deployment into the atmosphere, obviously we will continue to see further changes in the natural climatic cycle.

How do we get the general population in tune with the science? When will policymakers accept science facts instead of ignoring them for political gain? And when does it become too late, where even if we cut off all carbon combustion, there will be no turning back the clock on climate change and potential disastrous consequences of high greenhouse levels? That part is debatable; but human responsibility for increased CO2 levels is no longer debatable.

Little Sue and the Rock

2011-11-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

I am looking for feedback. I have a children's story that tries to get the concept of atoms and ultimately quarks across to children. I see kids in the age range of 4-8 or so as the target group.

If you have kids and want to read it, or if you have any comments of your own as to what you think about it, please let me know! If you have any experience with children's books, also let me know as I have a number of questions for you. I can see some interesting illustrations that could be produced for the story. Thanks.

Here goes:

Little Sue and the Rock
By Mark Vondracek, Ph.D.

It was after school, and Little Sue was walking down the street,
when she noticed a pretty little rock down by her feet.
She picked it up, looked at it, and wondered what was inside,
when all of a sudden she was going on an amazing ride.

Little Sue began to shrink,
and she did not know what to think.
Was she really getting smaller,
or was the rock just getting taller?

Whatever the case, she quickly began to see,
sparkling crystals appear, like when the sun shines on the sea.
And while these crystals were simply amazing,
little Sue knew this was only the surface of the rock she was grazing.

Ever smaller did little Sue grow,
before she was in a world she did not know.
Those beautiful crystals disappeared,
into a number of balls forming patterns, that much was clear.

The balls were bound together, which to little Sue was very cool,
when she realized she was seeing objects her teacher called molecules.
But she also wondered what was with those once little balls,
which seemed to be getting bigger as her size continued to get small.

Even though little Sue’s height was still decreasing,
she could not help but think this new world was pretty pleasing.
She kept approaching those balls, and it was becoming a little cloudy,
and the balls seemed to be shaking, and even seemed a little rowdy.

“Those balls must be atoms!” exclaimed little Sue to herself,
she knew this because she had read that science book on her shelf.
As she shrunk into one of the clouds it seemed a little fuzzy,
and as she struggled to see, smaller specks flew by and sounded a little buzzy.

Little Sue was checking out the electrons flying by,
moving very fast, so fast she could not even say “Hi.”
And before long little Sue shrunk into a place,
where the electrons were now gone and all she saw was empty space.

It seemed like forever that little Sue kept on shrinking,
seeing nothing around caused her to start thinking.
“Is there nothing else around here that will stop my fall?”
when suddenly in the distance she could see another little ball.

Atoms have a second part, little Sue seemed to remember,
with electrons whizzing and circling the outside, and a nucleus in the center.
Little Sue kept shrinking and suddenly was able to see,
a bunch of smaller balls in the nucleus, glued together so perfectly .

“Wow, these little balls are protons and neutrons! This is really cool!”
as little Sue was remembering that science lesson from school.
She was now seeing the smallest pieces of that rock she had been holding,
at least this is what she thought before she got a little scolding.

Little Sue heard voices complaining as she shrank a little more,
falling inside one of those protons that were at the atom’s core.
Even smaller balls were inside and finally had a chance to make their mark,
by introducing themselves to little Sue, saying, “Hello, we are the quarks!”

For little Sue this was unexpected and really quite the surprise,
as she began to look around and rub her wide-open eyes.
“Quarks,” she said, “were not mentioned in my science book.”
and she closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them for a second look.

The quarks explained to little Sue they aren’t very well known,
but they do exist and are real, with identities all their own.
“Our names are Up and Down,” they said to little Sue,
“but the protons and neutrons are more popular, so what can we do?”

Just then little Sue realized she was no longer shrinking,
for now she had reached the smallest piece of the rock, and she was left thinking –
I have seen the smallest piece of the rock….or have I not?
could there be something smaller than the quarks, as small as a dot?

For now, little Sue will need to wonder about that question,
but as she grows back up in size I leave her this suggestion.
For little Sue, as well as all her little school friends,
if you don’t know the answer to your questions do not leave that as the end.

Keep asking your questions, and don’t leave any of them to silence;
look around, try to find an answer – and before you know it, you will be doing science.
It doesn’t matter what it is, from the smallest atom to outer space,
because you will find questions that still need answers all over the place.

Gaming in Education

2011-11-25T20:23:00.001-08:00

OK, something many of my students may have been waiting for. Here is a TED talk about how gaming makes kids smarter, and argues that gaming should be a major part of school. While I agree that there are certain skills that are captured in playing computer and video games, such as being able to process large amounts of information, analyze it and make quick decisions based on that information, and in many games this could be a collaborative activity, let's remind ourselves that this is a different skill set than, say, being able to have patience and focus on a complex problem that requires long periods of time to collect information, keep records and notes, stay organized with ideas as they come up in this thought process, perhaps, in the case of science, develop a physical experiment to test ideas, or build a device or object or model to further investigate aspects of this complex problem, find other information about it from numerous sources, and develop logical conclusions from all this work. Gaming does not really jive with such a skill set.

My point is this: this video, while making a good point, is not a silver bullet. I will always argue that there is no single solution to the optimal education of any individual. There are so many good ways to learn, and it is a useful exercise to experience multiple ways of learning a topic or subject. In real life, one is faced with countless possible problems at a moment's notice, and depending on the type of problem and the environment you are exposed to that problem, some solutions will fall back to what you learn in a 'classical' or traditional manner, while others will make use of a skill set developed best through video gaming systems. Others will require the use of physical tools such as hammers and nails and saws, which one will never learn through gaming. Do NOT fall into the trap that you need to do all of one thing over none of some other things...learn about both methods and have a broad set of intellectual approaches to take on any problem! Remember, if you can talk about an idea or concept in multiple ways with multiple examples, chances are you have mastered the information.

Remember 9/11/01

2011-09-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago to the day, I was greeting students for first period. It was a different feel, however, to any other day, as colleagues were walking quickly through the halls with very distressed faces. I asked if something had happened in school, and the quick response was that New York City was supposedly under attack. Rumors were spreading rapidly. I and a handful of students ran into our computer room and pulled up CNN, only to see both towers of the World Trade Center ablaze. Reports had other planes attacking Washington, DC. Within about 15 minutes from when we started watching, we saw the towers collapse.

Anyone who was alive and old enough to remember that day can tell a story like this, for they, too, know exactly where they were and what they were doing. I can only hope those who lost loved ones have found time as a healer of some of the pain, and hope the souls of those who were lost have found peace.

My dear friend, Zenpundit, has a wonderful post. In it, he lets us know his great hope and lesson from all this, which is something we have talked about numerous times together - that our generation stops the trend we have been in, which is reactive to events. We need to try to develop a longer-term strategy, and build to reach the goals of whatever that strategy is. I am not sure how this will ever happen in today's combative, completely partisan political environment. With 2-year election cycles, long-term thinking, proposals, and action are nearly non-existent. This is why, literally for decades, people have brought up the issues with Medicare and Social Security, and that it needs to be fixed to remain solvent for future generations, and yet NO ONE in either party has had the political spine and will to do what we already know must be done. Again, it is a known problem with some known solutions, been there for decades, and no action at all.

Will we be able to do better? Who will come out of the crowd to help lead a new era of strategic thinking in the near-, mid- and long-term perspectives, rather than simply near-term for political gain? When will the tipping point take place that will create the level of public outrage for this era to begin? Time will tell, and let's hope it does not take another 9/11 scale incident to bring us back to this same discussion.

The East Coast Earthquake Discussed by NU Professor

2011-08-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to share a segment from Chicago Tonight, a daily show on Chicago's local PBS station, WTTW. A professor I know from Northwestern University, Suzan van der Lee, was the guest who spoke about the recent magnitude 5.8 earthquake on the east coast. She does a very nice job of explaining some of the details about the geology of the east coast and how this event produced the strongest recorded tremor (at least on NU's seismometer) in Chicago over the past few years.

Mathematics - Both Discovered and Invented

2011-08-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

There are two Scientific American links of interest to me.

One of the Scientific American articles is about the beauty of mathematical structures. There are some wonderful pictures in this slide show. The second article is in the August edition of Scientific American, which looks at 'Why does math work?' This goes to the age-old question: Is mathematics a natural entity that is there for us to discover, or is it invented by humans to satisfy our ability to quantify bits of our world? The author, Mario Livio, argues that it is both, and I tend to go along with this view.

There is a type of mathematics, pure math, that is analogous to pure science. This is where mathematicians investigate math for the sake of doing math, with no applications necessarily in mind. It is playing with curved surfaces, like Riemann investigated. Or when Galois was checking out the properties of various groups to solve polynomial problems. At their respective times, there were no real-world problems to which these mathematics were related. Perhaps one could say these topics were 'discovered.' Later on, years after the math was understood, scientists found new phenomena in Nature where the non-euclidean geometry (general relativity) and group theory (such as in particle physics) were important and necessary to describe.

Another type of math is applied math, where math is 'invented' to solve specific problems in the world. Newton developed calculus in order to solve gravitational problems, such as proving that a planet's mass can be reduced down to a single point, or the laws of motion, that required formal connections between displacement, velocity and acceleration. The rules of geometry were formulated in order to help quantify items being traded, or in designating property lines and areas. This is analogous to applied science, which places a focus on investigating real problems and finding solutions or producing a new tool or product that will be useful to humans.

An interesting thought experiment presented in the Livio article goes like this: If the intelligence of the world resided in a jellyfish that lives deep in the ocean, where it is generally isolated, would the concept of numbers exist? If there is nothing to count, and nothing discrete about the environment in which one lives, do numbers make any sense at all? So does this mean numbers are a natural concept of Nature, or that numbers are an invented entity because humans have a need to count things? Perhaps the jellyfish thought experiment leads to a conclusion that numbers are an invented concept. This is an interesting 'battle' to think about.

Here Comes the Higgs?!?!?

2011-07-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

A recently published article, summarizing new data presented at a high energy physics conference in Europe, show an excess of particles in the mass spectrum that may end up being the Higgs boson, as some like Nobel winner Leon Lederman have called the 'God particle.' This is a particle that has been predicted for some 45 years, from a theory known as the Standard Model. This is the theory that covers the known forces and particles in Nature, minus gravity. It has been wildly successful when compared with experimental data, and one of the key pieces is the Higgs boson and Higgs field. This particle and field are responsible for nothing less than the matter we are all made from. It is the theoretical mechanism that allows energy to transform into matter, which is summed up by Einstein's E = mc^2.

Physicists on the experiments producing these data do caution the world NOT to jump to any conclusions. In science, rumors are left just as that, rumors. There are strict statistical results that are needed before one can claim discovery. There are double and triple checks of analysis algorithms, calibrations of the detectors, fine-tuning theoretical programs called Monte Carlos to re-check the backgrounds for these types of particle decays, and many other checks before anyone would even think of calling a few excess events a discovery, especially something as vital as the Higgs. We will see over the next few months what the final conclusions are, but this provides a sense of excitement for the world of physics.

Mathematical Minds

2011-07-21T22:22:00.001-07:00

From one of my favorite blogs, which has a focus on looking at brain functioning to understand all sorts of issues in education, learning, and life, there is a wonderful post about mathematical minds.

Gifted math minds really do 'light up' differently than average math minds when looking at math-related problems. And because of the way the brain is organized and behaves for different mental tasks, gifted math students can be difficult to identify from commonly used assessments and classroom behaviors. For instance, many truly advanced math students are not strong verbally, which can make them difficult to pick out of a crowd, and many like to 'do their own thing' when it comes to math and not at all be interested in the rote math memorization so often done in school. And likely the single most common trait is the love of solving problems of any type. This shows up not just in the 'numbers people,' but also tinkerers. Can you relate to any of these traits?

Macrocosmic Object in a Quantum State

2011-06-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

My last post was about making some sense out of what wave-particle duality is all about. Coincidentally, when I checked out TED videos just a little while ago, I saw the one below. Physicist Aaron O'Connell is the first to show a macrocosmic object go into a quantum state...it goes into a superposition state where it is vibrating and not vibrating at the same time! Completely weird, but, hey, that's quantum mechanics. We will see more of this sort of experiment in the next few years, to be sure, and who knows where this will lead as far as applications in life. Will it be more advanced quantum computing devices? Or something we have not even considered? Perhaps! Check out the discussion.

An Attempt to Make Some Sense of Quantum Mechanics

2011-06-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

Gaining any level of understanding of quantum mechanics is one of the great intellectual challenges in science. In a quantum world of indeterminism and probability, uncertainty and fuzziness, phenomena completely unseen in our everyday lives are the norm for atoms and particles.

At the center of the strangeness is particle-wave duality, the notion that particles can at times act like ‘solid’ balls, but in different circumstances can behave like a wave. Likewise, something we normally think of as a wave, such as light, can certainly act like a wave under certain conditions, but in quantum mechanics light can also behave like particles we refer to as photons. In fact, a favorite question I pose to students is, ‘When light is traveling from a light bulb to your eye, is it a particle or wave?’ Ultimately, someone will offer the answer, ‘It is both!’ That is an acceptable answer; but what does this mean? How can an ‘object’ be two things simultaneously, which is what the answer ‘both’ implies.

No one is comfortable with this answer, and yet it fits in with the foundational principles of quantum mechanics. The reason is, in the mathematics of quantum mechanics, objects are described with a wave function. This is a mathematical function that encompasses possible states the object can take. So a photon that is moving through space can be thought of as a combination of two states, something like Photon = [particle state] + [wave state]. More specifically, this function can be used to determine the probability of finding the photon in a particle or wave state.

But I think most of us still come back to the same questions: How do we interpret this mathematical nonsense? What does this mean for the object? This is where an analogy comes in handy, that will perhaps put this probabilistic concept into a more understandable context.

If I am talking about this in a class, I ask students to look around at each other and identify the personality snapshot of each of their classmates. This means to identify who is happy, sad, confused, angry, sarcastic, sleepy, bored, or anything else. So while there are numerous possible ‘personality states’ any person can have, while observing a person we can select one personality state at that time because we are interacting with them. However, what do we do when the bell rings and everyone goes on their way? If I ask someone to identify which personality state a specific person is in when they are no longer available for observation or interaction, what is the answer? The best we can do is to effectively guess…but to do this mathematically, we would acknowledge that at any given moment when a person is not being observed in any way, we cannot be certain about the personality state and can only try to identify the probability of that person being in each state. Perhaps there is a 20% chance she is happy, and 25% chance of being sad, and so on for each possible personality state.

This is the way we think about particles and waves when those entities are not being observed. When we do observe the entity, the act of observing selects out the personality from the mix of possible personalities. Another way of saying it is the experiment we do selects out a single observable state that we then identify. For a person, maybe it is the ‘happy’ state that becomes crystallized out of the ‘personality state’ function that includes all the possible personality states. For an electron, if we put it through a diffraction grating the wave personality is selected, whereas if we shoot it at an atom and it is deflected, the particle personality was selected instead.

Thinking this way is not necessarily normal, obvious or instinctive, but it is something we can try to understand the way the quantum world works. Of course, in real quantum mechanical problems, the mathematics becomes very hard very fast, but trying to find more concrete ways of thinking about the consequences of probabilistic concepts can only help the student to whom this is all new.

Robotic Cars - The Future is Here

2011-04-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

A short TED talk about Google's self-driving car. This is the sort of thing commonly found in science fiction and futurism presentations, but the technology exists now. It is the sort of device that reminds us about robotics and 'intelligent machines.' It is the sort of device that reminds us that there is very 'cool' technology that will continue to wow us, but at the same time it will make us think more and more about the consequences, intended and unintended, of the development of smart machines.

Interesting Take on China's advance - Why and how are they different from West/

2011-01-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting talk about China, and how a recent projection, as a post-western economic recession world status, has the Chinese economy matching and surpassing the U.S. economy by 2020 - just one decade away.

Martin Jacques goes over some key differences between China and the West, and how they have been able to grow so rapidly, often befuddling western analysts who think in western ways. We should not be thinking of China as a nation-state, but rather a civilization-state, as Jacques argues. Very fascinating and important topic.

Looking for Feedback - If you have kids, especially...Can this story help learn some science?

2011-01-01T23:57:00.000-08:00

Where the world is headed - An Economic Phase Transition from Hyperconsumtion to Collaborative Consumption

2011-01-01T23:37:00.000-08:00

I found this TED talk very interesting. One can certainly see a change in how people interact with each other due to the Internet and global wireless communications, and I think Rachel Botsman presents a strong argument for a phase transition from a hyperconsumption economy (I believe this term comes from Thomas Friedman) to a collaborative consumption model.

Multi-disciplinarity and The Birth Of America

2011-01-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

Back in July I read an interesting book entitled The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris. I posted on how the birth of modern science developed within the same mindset and intellectual framework as the first modern democracy, the United States. In fact, this book argues the U.S. would not have formed had it not been for the birth of modern science. Building off that theme, a second book, Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and The Birth of America, examines the life and work of Joseph Priestley, and his deep friendships with Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and his influence on those two Founding Fathers as well as John Adams.

Priestley began as one of the leading and first modern chemists, whose main contemporary scientific rival was Antoine Lavoisier. Priestley had numerous discoveries, including providing key evidence for the existence of oxygen and its role in combustion and life itself, but what was new for me was his deep friendship with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin and Priestley met and corresponded with each other about science for many years prior to the American Revolution, and influenced each other greatly as far as the development of experiments, analysis and interpretation of data. Their letters show how they were onto the conceptual understanding of the cycling of oxygen and carbon dioxide for all of life, and how ecosystems work in terms of the flow and transformation of different energy types from one to another. These concepts were decades ahead of their time.

However, as Franklin became embedded in politics and the Revolution, the time he had to commit to science was limited at best. It was Priestley who kept him updated on scientific progress, and Franklin's influence on Priestley began to turn Priestley's attention more towards politics. In addition to the politics, Priestley also began writing about religion. His attention and publication of his views on Christianity, most notably History of Corruptions of Christianity, where he argues against the more mystical aspects within the Bible (dismissing the Trinity, miracles, and contradictory concepts in doctrine), actually led to riots among Christians and a mob that burned his house, lab, and called for his death. Priestley ended up in exile, and moved to America. It did not take long before he met and befriended Thomas Jefferson. Even before becoming friends with Jefferson, he knew and befriended John Adams when Adams was Vice President.

Priestley was a deep thinking man who believed in complete openness and sharing of information and data with as many people as possible. He wrote everything down, in exhaustive detail, especially with his experimental procedures and data. Had he the technology, he likely would have developed the Internet. Why was he this way? Priestley and Franklin agreed in their correspondence that by publishing everything in the sciences allowed them to "excite the attentions of the ingenius." Great ideas develop by people brainstorming and sharing thoughts. If one person is on a path but cannot quite see the answer, someone else might, and that is good for progress. This mindset is at the heart and soul of all modern science disciplines, as well as academia in general. This is what 'connectivity' and the Internet is all about, or at least the Internet provides the appropriate platform for sharing and exciting the attentions of the ingenius. Check out my post from another of Johnson's books about how ideas form.

Providing information to the masses is a necessity for democracy. Priestley's preaching and practice of sharing information was a key influence on the development of the vision of Franklin, Jefferson and Adams as they were helping invent America. Priestley also resisted just having a single focus. The practice of the day was for science, religion, philosophy, politics, and other fields of study from overlapping. Priestley helped break this mold, as he was a firm believer in multidisciplinary approaches to topics. He and Franklin in particular discussed this concept, as if they were forming the modern field of complex systems. Having and using a multi-disciplinary mindset allowed some of our Founding Fathers to be great visionaries that were needed to make the American experiment to work. In fact, after Priestley died and Jefferson and Adams began their decade-long, legendary exchange of letters up until they died (on July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence), whose name appeared more frequently than Franklin's, Washington's or Madison's? It was Priestley.

The key players who gave birth to America were geniuses. They were scientists at heart, and this mindset and experience were key to the development of the American concept. But they were also willing to share ideas, try new things, and collaborate to solve major, complex, and multi-disciplinary problems. And the big three of Franklin, Adams and Jefferson had a common thread of Joseph Priestley to help guide them over decades worth of time. He showed how science, religion and politics were inter-related and all had to be 'on the table' simultaneously when developing new ideas. It is a fascinating story, involving fascinating individuals. These are the same themes and issues we talk about today, whether it involves current problems the nation and world face, as well as with reforming our education system as we try to prepare kids for the 21st century. These men from the 18th and early 19th centuries have much to teach us still, and I think they deserve their say!

Example of what young children are capable of doing

2010-12-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

Hat tip to a former student for sharing an article about a class of 8-10 year old children in Britain, who did a scientific study of bees and ended up being published in a Royal Society journal. This is great!

This fits in nicely with my last three posts. This is a prime example of 21st Century learning. This is what our kids here in the U.S. should be doing, rather than largely ignoring science and the social sciences to put all the focus on reading and math, in order to do well on high-stakes testing for NCLB. This is multi- and interdisciplinary work, where kids learn that science, math, writing, reading, and communication are all related, and that the content being presented in school matters in the real world. This is giving them experience and practice and exposure to problem solving, critically thinking about data and observations, trial and error with experiments, trouble shooting, tinkering, collaborating, finding information with modern tools, and how one's work is presented to the world. It gives them a chance to discover things on their own, and allows them to be creative and innovative as they try to learn about and figure out a complex problem. This shows what young children are capable of doing, if only given the opportunity! We tend to UNDERestimate what kids can do.

If only we could do this on a large scale in the U.S., and actually prepare kids for their futures while making learning fun and engaging!

Is Uncle Sam Limping? Probably, because Politicians are in charge of education and keep shooting him in the foot

2010-12-23T22:34:00.000-08:00

Another state bites the dust. Massachusetts took the step, where its teachers agreed to tie their salaries and promotions to test scores. I do hope there are some other criteria in this, but it is the latest instance of our test-crazed society that has existed since the introduction of No Child Left Behind some ten years ago. While testing has always been, and will always continue to be, a part of education and the assessment of what students are learning, it has bothered many educators for many years that testing is the primary, and for some who have a voice in the education debate, the only, means of assessing and 'fixing' American schools. This is what we will continue to get so long as politicians, almost all of whom have never taught in the classroom and do not have expertise in education, control the education system.

I've harped on this countless times over the years, and will continue to do so, especially since Sec. of Education Arne Duncan will be working with congressional leaders as they discuss the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). One can only hope that both sides agree that changes to NCLB must be made in how a school or district is assessed, with multiple measures considered instead of the present high-stakes test each state is required to produce.

We continue to regress in education by becoming like much of the rest of the world that has used high-stakes testing to determine what students will be allowed to do. But do our politicians pay any attention to the global trends that many countries have participated in over the past decade? Do our political leaders know that many countries, including numerous Asian countries that have been ahead of us on global standardized tests (such as Singapore, China, Japan, and so on), have been slowly breaking away from a content-focused test meritocracy system to one that encourages more student freedom and skills development? I know this to be true since I participated in a discussion at Northwestern University five or six years ago with a delegation from Singapore. I spoke to them about how I approach teaching physics, and how to include hands-on, experiential learning for students, and how to connect content to student lives and develop problem-solving skills for students. It was a truly interesting meeting, and testing never came up. This delegation made it clear that they wanted their education system to look more like that of the U.S., and could not understand why the U.S. wanted to look more like Singapore's and other Asian and European traditional school systems.

Content is important; at least certain content in each discipline. One needs foundational concepts and principles in order to build up off that foundation. But just look around at what current students are going to face when they get to college and beyond. Listen to what Bill Gates and others are telling educators, as well as just about every professor I know is looking at - they want students to have some basic knowledge foundation, but also skills sets, creative problem solving capacity, being able to work both alone and collaboratively across disciplines, and strong communications skills across multiple media platforms. This package of skills forms what many are now calling '21st century skills.'

I dream of the day when my junior students in high school will not be judged on if they remember an obscure vocabulary word from a physical science class they took four years earlier (and never touched that topic again). Rather, let them be judged more on what they come up with when posed an open-ended problem on how to best modify a bridge design that needs to span a specific geological feature, or how to take experimental data and develop an empirical formula that relates several quantities together, or something, anything, that makes one think critically, problem solve, and communicate the thoughts to the reader. When will we have student portfolios count in an assessment, where we can see a variety of skills and knowledge in action, and see growth over the course of a year?

If you build an assessment that requires 21st century skills, teachers will set up their classes to develop those skills and focus on appropriate content. They will then break away from a 19th century classroom of memorize, sit still and quietly for 6 or 7 hours in rows of desks, listen to mostly lectures, and do sets of worksheets. Why are we teaching and assessing the way we were taught and assessed decades ago? If we do not change the way we do school, we are simply setting our kids and the country up for disaster when they go out and try to compete against kids from other places in the world who will be properly trained and prepared for the new workplace. And what scares me most is that we know this to be true, and are simply ignoring the eventual outcome by continuing down this same pathetic path that provides only disincentives to be creative, innovative, collaborative, technologically inclined and competent, and figuring out more complex problems that are multi-disciplinary in nature.

Where do New Ideas come from?

2010-12-22T17:03:00.000-08:00

Two terms we hear quite frequently in education are innovation and creativity. CEOs and other private sector leaders largely agree that these two 'skills' are essential for the present generation of children who are moving through the education system, as manufacturing jobs are largely gone and the economy is fast becoming one built around services and the flow of information, i.e. technical jobs that will be the thrust of job growth over the next couple decades.

But what exactly are innovation and creativity? The dictionary definition of innovation is 'the introduction of new things or methods,' while creativity is 'the ability to create meaningful new ideas, forms or methods' that are original and imaginative. So the key notion is the development of new ideas in whatever field one is working. A question naturally develops, which is where do new ideas come from? How do we begin preparing children now to be creative and innovative in the future? In the past, many would have first thought about the arts as being the training ground for creativity. Now, we realize that the development of the abilities and mindsets and skills necessary to be creative in every field of study is necessary.

Steven Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, provides the argument that there are seven common themes that have led to the vast majority of great ideas throughout history. He gives numerous examples of such ideas, ranging from Darwin's development of the theory of evolution to the of the GPS system, from Google to the creation of the first mechanical computing devices centuries ago, and so on. It is an interesting read.

Here is a summary of the seven themes that lead to good ideas. Keep in mind there is certainly some degree of overlap and relationships between the themes, but overall they can be thought of as distinct concepts.

1. The Adjacent Possible: Even if you have an interest in some topic or problem, if there is not a good environment conducive to presenting the necessary pieces to solve the problem, good ideas will almost certainly not develop. You may be brilliant with some of the information (i.e. pieces of a puzzle) in your mind that is necessary to solve a problem, but if your surroundings are not able to provide the remaining pieces of information or experiences, you will endlessly search for them to no avail. If you are isolated from others who know something about your problem or issue, or if there is no means of gathering further information (which is becoming less of a problem with the advent of the Internet), or if your environment does not provide the physical infrastructure or supplies to finish building a new physical device, you will be unable to develop the Idea or solution to your problem.

2. Liquid Networks: Great ideas can develop when information is allowed to flow through a larger network. One possible network is a social network, or often and more specifically, a professional network. The focus of this is the ability to collaborate to solve problems. It turns out that there are almost no great ideas throughout history that have been developed in isolation or by an individual who did not need any help in the development of that great idea. One may think Newton or Einstein did their work in isolation, but this is not entirely true. Those two individuals come about as close as you can get to not needing a network to develop the laws of motion or relativity, but they relied on some level of feedback, reading others' work, and ultimately talking and discussing issues with close colleagues and friends.
An interesting study was done that looked at how research groups reach the coveted 'Eureka!' moment, where a new discovery is made. It turns out that these rare moments of discovery or problem solving almost never happen in the lab! Instead, the 'Aha!' are yelled out at the conference table, where members of the group are throwing ideas around and sharing results of their latest work over the past week. The person who figures it out needs to have input they have not thought about from the larger group or network, before the grand idea is formed.

3. Slow Hunch: This is the notion of wanting to solve a complex problem or answer a difficult, involved question, but needing long periods of time to find 'the idea' that allows you to solve it. This could be over a period of years. Darwin, for example, had all sorts of data and observations he mulled over for nearly twenty years; same for Johannes Kepler, and countless others. It takes percolation of ideas in one's mind before the right mix is found. Especially in the past, individuals would keep 'commonplace books' where they would write down all thoughts and experiments and notes from literature. They would review it frequently see where their thoughts have been and where they are presently. Now many people do similar things electronically, but the idea is the same. For inventors and experimentalists, the slow hunch is an analogue of tinkering. Whatever you call it, people have hunches they follow, some of which work and others that do not, but over time the right connections of ideas are made in the brain and 'the idea' forms. While it may seem like more of an 'Eureka!' moment, it was likely a slow hunch that evolved into the great idea.

4. Serendipity: This is the accidental connection. This theme stems from the many examples of artists and scientists and businesspeople who get the great idea in dreams. Thoughts and information are processed subconsciously, and the idea seems to come from 'out of the blue.' But it is something that has been thought about consciously and then develops during the stormy brain activity during REM sleep. Every so often the right synapses fire that connect the appropriate thoughts in the mind. In fact, brain studies in 2007 by Robert Thatcher show how busier, noisier brains do better on IQ tests, since the increased neural activity allow for more interactions of more synapses between neurons. If one gets lucky, the right combination of thoughts are processed during the chaos and the idea is hatched.
This notion of the accidental discovery can be accelerated and encouraged during brainstorming sessions, where ideas are being thrown around, some chaos is present, and someone puts out just the right example or bit of information that clicks, and the idea is born. There is an argument that the Internet and web surfing can encourage serendipity because it is so easy to go off on tangents during research that a new piece of data from a site you never would have guessed would be useful actually turns out to be the key to forming a solution or great idea. Taking walks and showers are other ways to encourage this, and the prime Eureka moment of Archimedes took place in the tub!

5. Error: I think of this as learning from trial and error us a powerful way to modify initial, likely incorrect, ideas or solutions, to form the correct idea or solution. As an experimentalist, I have experience with this. On paper, you think you have the perfect design to test something. You put it together, and it is a complete flop! You need to play with it, learn from any mistakes, and modify. Perhaps you need to scrap the design altogether. But that is OK, since you learned from the errors. Theorists of all disciplines must learn from errors in their predictions when in conflict with experimental data, and this is a way to develop new ideas to replace those which are flawed in the initial theoretical model.
Errors are helpful because they help eliminate some number of incorrect ideas, and allows us to explore other ideas outside of the set of those that are incorrect.

6. Exaptation: This is borrowing a mature technology or idea from, typically, a different field and putting it to use to solve a seemingly unrelated problem. Some have called Gutenberg's printing press the most significant invention of the past millennium. But he borrowed a technology from the wine producing industry of the day, which was a screw system for pressing the grapes. It turned out this inspired him to develop the model for the press, using the same screw system. In economics, mathematical modeling and functional solutions in physics inspired new economic modeling and mathematical solutions to statistical problems, to the point of there being a new subfield of econophysics. We are using natural designs in plants and animals to develop new ideas for manmade products, ranging from structures for robotics to membrane systems to aerodynamic designs.
A big part of this, in my mind, includes analogies. The use of analogies is powerful in teaching and learning, cognition, and in just about any field of study one can imagine. It is making something more familiar by using ideas or concepts from entirely different fields or contexts. I certainly agree that this theme is completely relevant to the formation of new ideas, as well as for learning about new topics.

7. Platforms: The last theme for forming good ideas is to have a foundational set of principles, concepts, ideas, thoughts, or rules and build off that foundation, or platform. Physics is one of the great examples. Classically, there is Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations. For centuries, those provided a platform to build from, and science and technology prospered. Ideas continuously develop as 'what ifs' of known problems and solutions. This led all the way to taking people to the moon. For the GPS system, it all began with Sputnik, when two engineers used the Doopler effect to pinpoint the orbital trajectory of the satellite. This one development got the military to ask them if it is possible to invert the system, and if one could use the technique for a satellite to pinpioint the location of a signal on the ground. Turned out it is, and our ballistic missile system was born. Years of playing with this technology platform developed into a 30-satellite GPS system (as well as weather satellite and radar systems).

Looking over this list, it seems fairly complete. Some are more obvious than others, but the production of good ideas is something one cannot predict. However, identifying circumstances and environments that increase the likelihood of good idea production is useful. Many of these ideas are already employed in industry, such as Google's 20% rule (all engineers must take 20% of their time and devote it to their own interests and research, where the slow hunch is encouraged), as well as in university research, where the development of multi- and inter-disciplinary research collaborations and research institutes are being formed (perhaps most famous is the Santa Fe Institute, which has a focus on complex systems analysis) and utilize several of the above themes. We can certainly implement some of these ideas into the classroom, to provide exposure and training to students about the skill sets they need when they move into college and beyond.

What is also clear is that regardless of the pattern(s) of innovation being used, these work best in open environments where ideas and information can freely flow in unregulated channels. This certainly means having an open Internet will be vital to the continuation of progress and the production of ideas that will, hopefully, benefit humankind.

Running for Woodland District 50 School Board in April Election

2010-12-20T18:41:00.000-08:00

Well, I will be a candidate for one of the three seats for the Woodland School Board. The election is April 5, 2011. Check out my new blog dedicated to this at http://vondracekforwoodland.blogspot.com/. There will be more to come on this after the new year!

Examples of 21st Century Education

2010-12-19T22:32:00.000-08:00

One hears about 21st Century Education and Schools a lot as catch-phrases by politicians, parents and teachers. But how often is someone who uses this phrase able to give a good definition of what it means, or what they think it means? And, even more rare, how often is someone who uses this phrase able to give real examples of what they mean?

There is, in all fields I suspect, a phenomenon of 'great volumes of talk but of little action.' The notion of a 21st Century Education has been this sort of phenomenon in education the past few years. There is SO much talk about it, but little action. Many I have discussed this with point to getting X number of computers into a school or into a classroom, and then there is 21st century education happening since kids can then access the Internet. Well, I suppose this is part of it, but in my mind that is the beginners' definition of this phrase. But there is SO much more we must do. What about problem solving? Sure, but that has been around for a couple centuries already in schools. For 21st Century problem solving, let's add the word 'creative' to it. Then there is innovation. Then there is critical thinking, which has also been a popular education term for at least decades now.

These are common terms that are overused and poorly defined by most people who use them. What continues to be missing, though, from too many faculty meetings and conferences and workshops are real examples of what these mean, and much more importantly, what they look like, in real classrooms. To put it bluntly, I think all teachers should be asking administrators and education professors and themselves, "Give me something I can actually use!!" Well, here is a TED video that does just that. A real classroom teacher, who really gets it when it comes to what a 21st Century classroom looks like, and who gives real examples from her classes of what we can do with high school students. She is social studies and history teacher Diana Laufenberg, and it is a great example of what I think all teachers should see and think about.

If we continue to teach and run schools the way we were taught and learned prior to the late 1990s, we will continue to lose kids to the many distractions that exist in the modern world that are more exciting than the old teaching and learning paradigms, and we will continue to do a disservice to kids because we are not preparing them for their world.

Check it out.

Quick Thoughts on recent politics...

2010-12-01T21:09:00.000-08:00

So, the GOP is now planning on blocking all legislation until the Bush tax cuts are extended for all brackets. President Obama and most Democrats want to extend the cuts, except for those in the top bracket who earn $250,000 or more. Two reasons the GOP give for wanting to extend the tax breaks is to help stimulate the economy and equity/fairness. The Dems argument is that by going back to the rates under the Clinton administration will save some $700 billion off deficits in the next decade.

Now, at the same time, the GOP has blocked extending unemployment benefits to some 2 million American workers, mostly middle and lower class workers, because those benefits are not paid for...and we can't have that, since living within our means is the overriding reason voters just gave Republicans control of the House. A second important item being held up is the START Treaty with Russia, which the President, military leaders, and four former Republican Secretarys of State endorse and state is in our national security interests.

I try to have an open mind on just about everything, and I find glaring holes and contradictions in the Republican. The first problem I find is that the Bush tax cuts have never been paid for. The cuts were given in a time when Clinton and a Republican Congress were able to leave a large budget surplus, and there has never been a worry about this large loss of revenue in the federal budget. Many economists note that this has played a large role in the budget deficits during the Bush administration and, now, the Obama administration. I do not agree that we should continue to give the wealthiest Americans, who have seen incomes explode during the past ten years and even during this recession while middle class workers have seen stagnant and even slight declines in income (when adjusted for inflation) during the same period. By placing a small tax increase to an old rate (and where we had one of the healthiest economies in our history) would not only pay for short-term assistance to millions of unemployed workers, but also contribute to trimming tens of billions of dollars from yearly deficits for years to come. After all, aren't we all supposed to sacrifice (I've heard some GOP leaders mention this, too)? By the way, if tax cuts are SO essential to revive the economy, why are we in a recession? Where are all the jobs? Shouldn't the wealthiest Americans be reinvesting all those tax savings back into the economy? They should have been doing this continuously for the past decade.

Obviously, the trickle down theory doesn't always work as advertised. And now we are being held hostage because of it, where literally nothing will get done until we continue on with an unpaid gift for the wealthy while millions of families get their Christmas present of a loss of unemployment checks that, for many, is the only money keeping them afloat while they continue to look for work. By the way, it is predicted that we'll have a new record high for bonuses for our top income earners - some $140 billion in bonuses, much of that going to those who helped cause the near collapse of the global economy. At least the GOP will continue to take good care of that extra income for those who do not need it, while sticking it to those who desperately need it. Merry Christmas.

One Idea of How to Teach Math in the Modern Classroom - On Computers

2010-11-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

Conrad Wolfram has a presentation about what he feels is a weak, antiquated way of teaching math in school. Instead of all hand-written work on paper, use computers to get students thinking about everyday problems. He argues that problems are dumbed-down in school, and that real-world calculations are not done that would better engage students, as well as lead to better math skills that are necessary in today's world. Because math is done on computers in research and the workplace, this would allow students to build the knowledge, tools and skills that are relevant in today's world, rather than the knowledge, tools and skills that were necessary 50 years ago in an age of agricultural and manufacturing jobs.

Personally I think he has a good point. However, I am convinced that doing just about anything one-way is not a good idea. Variety is necessary. There is something to be said for doing things by hand to learn process and the nuts and bolts of a computation. But I do think technology can be and should be used more frequently than is presently done, as this is a student's future. Also, not everyone will likely learn more if done on a computer. Some students do in fact enjoy pencil and paper problems, and can learn a great deal with this technique. I also think that many learn, or at least gain greater insights, interest and relevance of math through applications in something like physics. I know I finally got a grip on what calculus was all about after using it in physics, and many students have told me the same thing.

I am interested in your take on this as students...what do you think?

Good Advice to Look for Simplicity in Complex Problems

2010-11-17T18:55:00.000-08:00

Scientist Eric Berlow gives some good advice on how to approach complexity and complex problems. With complex systems and networks, there can be a good deal of secondary and tertiary connections that might be considered 'noise' in the system, and rather than focus on a terribly complicated network map, he checks out the key components first, such as hubs in the network or looking for the first few degrees of connectivity of key components, to simplify the map. It is a short segment of a TED talk, but I found it as something that some of my students might relate to as they get into more complex problem solving; basically making things manageable. Check it out.

Elections in Lake County - Choose Bond and Seals

2010-10-25T14:35:00.000-07:00

As the midterm election comes up on us next week, we must make important choices at both the state and national level for Congress. It is a period where being an incumbent, and this is something that appears to be crossing party lines, is toxic, regardless of the record of certain individuals. We are seeing as emotional a period as I have witnessed in my 41 years of life, to be sure.

If you live in Illinois State Senate District 31, I would urge you to vote for Michael Bond. He has done what he promised when he ran four years ago to become the first Democrat from the district to win the seat. He is a finance expert who has good ideas to help fight the state budget crisis...I just wish he was in the leadership and had some control of the agenda, for he is the type who does not care who comes up with a good idea - a good idea is a good idea, and the time for political games is OVER. He is serious about doing what is right for the state and for the district.

For Congress, the Illinois 10th district will hopefully, and finally, go to Dan Seals. I met Dan and have talked with numerous people who know him, and I am convinced he is an honorable man, who like Michael, wants to do what is right for the state and the nation. Both men have kids the same age as mine, and they have their hearts and minds in the right place. They will do what they think is right, and have it in them to oppose the leadership if need be. Their kids' futures depend on what they will end up voting for or against, and they understand that responsibility.

Vote Michael Bond and Dan Seals!!

A Fantastic Video About Educational Paradigm Shift

2010-10-16T05:58:00.000-07:00

Sir Ken Robinson gave a lecture about the reasons we need an educational paradigm shift for the age of globalization, which breaks from the current system built for the industrial age. It is a wonderful animated video! Do check it out.

Keep in mind there are no solutions offered as to how to implement the new paradigm into classroom learning and teaching, but I think this is precisely the type of presentation needed for policymakers, the vast majority of whom never have taught and continue to call for 'reform' that is simply a variation on a theme of the status quo industrial model. Even Race to the Top is stuck in standardization mode, so it will also likely fail to produce any changes in achievement, just as No Child Left Behind has failed to see any real improvements in academic achievement of children. When will the politicians see the light that many educators have already seen for some time????

Thanks to Zenpundit for linking to this and making me aware of it!

"The Simple" Tend to be Not So Simple

2010-10-09T13:29:00.000-07:00

What could be more basic or common in life than stepping up to a drinking fountain and taking a sip of water. A stream of water becomes a fluid projectile, and it lands on the metal surface of the fountain, splashing a bit, but nothing too extreme. At least, nothing too extreme at a first, quick glance.

I do an activity from time to time with students, as well as science teacher colleagues at some past workshops, where we reproduce the water fountain experience in an even simpler way. Simply take a large beaker full of water and pour it gently on a hard surface. When one does this and then begins to observe what happens a little more closely, they quickly realize there is more to this event. First, a smooth circular region appears around where the stream of water lands on the surface, and then at a certain radius, the water level dramatically lifts up. This is the well-known hydraulic jump. Most people have never paid attention to water from a faucet landing in their sinks at home, so this tends to be a surprise. But then, I will ask the students or colleagues to do something else. Make a list of any variables you can think of where the size and pattern you see could be changed. That is, what could the hydraulic jump depend on, and what are the variables you could select to investigate in controlled experiments to better understand this feature of fluid flow? Here is one list that developed from this simple demonstration of a hydraulic jump:

• The amount of water in the stream, or ‘jet,’ being poured out of the cup – this is the flow rate of the water;
• The height the water is poured from the cup – this determines the energy and speed at which the water hits the surface;
• The diameter of the stream coming down to the surface;
• The temperature of the water;
• The temperature of the surface;
• The material the surface is made from;
• Whether the surface is horizontal or sloped relative to the ground;
• The type of liquid being poured – one student said syrup being poured would look very different compared to water, so this would refer to viscosity;
• The strength of gravity – some students predicted the jump would look different if this experiment were performed on the Moon;
• Whether the surface is still or rotating;
• Whether the stream of water was laminar flow versus turbulent flow before hitting the surface;
• Whether the stream hit perpendicular to the surface or at another angle relative to the surface;
• The topology of the surface – differences would likely appear if there was a curve to the surface, instead of being flat;
• If there were any barriers or obstacles on the surface close to where the stream hit the surface;
• If there was more than one stream of water coming down – what would the consequences be if there were multiple, interacting hydraulic jumps?
• The size of the surface;
• If there were any horizontal vibrations of the surface;
• If there were any vertical vibrations of the surface.

Again, this long list catches even colleagues by complete surprise. After all, this is a very "simple" physical event - water pouring onto a surface. A simple pattern appears. But when one begins to really think about the phenomenon, clearly it is more complicated than one could initially imagine.

This is a wonderful way to get students to a new level of observation and thought. It is a wonderful way to get someone out of a textbook way of thinking and step into the complexities of reality. And I am a firm believer that getting students to be able to identify and accept more complexity than what is allowed for in standard textbooks at younger ages (such as in high school, if not middle school) is something we should look to be doing in education. I personally was not exposed to this way of thinking until my second year in college, and I regretted it because I realized I had been missing out on almost being forced to think more creatively about problems and analysis.

While it is vital to simplify problems by making assumptions and approximations, if for any other reason to be able to gain initial insights into the physical system and actually solve the resulting mathematics that appear in the theoretical models,
what we overlook by NOT considering the complexity include second- and third-order effects that can collect together to cause subtle differences in the system when compared to theoretical models. These higher-order effects are also regions to explore for new discoveries and insights into deeper, better models of how the world work. And beyond that, it allows students to have to think about how they could design experiments to test the effects of variables never considered in the textbook, and this usually requires the students to be innovative and creative in trying to solve such design challenges. If the students then actually try the experiments they develop on paper, they then have to troubleshoot their experiment, which inevitably does not work the first time they set it up.

Complexity is all around us, even in what we would categorize as the most "simple" systems. In an age where creativity and advanced problem solving is in decline even though such skills are some of the most important to have in this day and age, educators should not be shy about pointing out how to break-down the 'simple' to find the complex, and then allow the student to attack the complex and unknown with abandon, developing new ideas and getting their hands dirty trying out their ideas. There is A LOT to be learned by all involved in such a dynamic process!

The Single Story - Leading to Bias and Sterotypes

2010-10-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

There is so much to the old saying, "Variety is the spice of life." Exposing oneself to variety of any kind allows him or her to see the world in multiple ways. Possibilities to compare and contrast, to learn, to experience, and to react exist when one expands their knowledge of the world. But so many individuals do not take the time to go out of their way to expose themselves to variety in any aspect of life. When this happens, and individuals only experience one way of doing something or one way of thinking about something, that is, only see one story, then any variety that may exist escapes their view and cannot influence their thoughts and feelings in any way. Without such variety, it is easy to fall into the very human traps of bias and stereotypes.

Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Adichie does a beautiful job of capturing the essence of the single story, and the dangers in thought it presents. A lack of exposure to new ideas, new cultures, trips to locations never before traveled, new stories, and variety in any way, restricts thought and the notion of other possibilities. Too often bias and prejudice are the results due to a mindset that prevents one from making a realization that 'one size does NOT fit all.' Adichie offers personal stories to make such a case, and I find her story compelling and thought-provoking, as well as convincing. I recommend watching her presentation, and keeping an open mind that variety exists in all areas of life.

Creative Brains Tend to Work More Slowly - Good to Know for Educators

2010-09-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

A post by the Drs. Eide points out research that shows the most creative brains work slower than other, less creative brains. There seems to be convergence of data and studies that show students who are creative, gifted, or who have ADHD or dyslexia, all have thinner prefrontal cortex patterns. The areas of the brain where, say, creativity depend, have numerous side-roads and neural branches that differ from pure intellectual pathways, that are described more as superhighways. The extended branching off of that 'superhighway' allows for a variety of different neural connections that can produce new thoughts and ideas. To me it seems like the situation where you are sitting in a meeting, very focused and engaged in the flow of information being presented (i.e. the superhighway of the brain is engaged with information flowing and being processed rapidly), but then for a few seconds or minutes you suddenly find yourself daydreaming or having new thoughts not related to the exact information of the presentation (i.e. taking an exit off the superhighway to some off-the-beaten path side-road). You find yourself 'snapping back' to attention to re-focus on the meeting. I suspect this is related to the model being proposed in this new research, where the daydream or new, distinct but unconnected idea comes from the off-road pathways in the brain.

The analogy then makes sense in terms of understanding why creative thought requires more time. It is quicker to travel on superhighways than going on side-roads.

Now put all this in the context of how schools are run. Our education system, more often than not, is focused on getting through content. Often there are fixed standards that need to be covered, or a fixed number of chapters in a textbook that have to be completed during the school year, and this is typically done regardless of the ability of the students to comprehend all that information. It is a race where not covering lots of material determines the losers of the race. But as a teacher, I am well aware of the effect of this - sure, lots of material is covered. But a good portion of that material is not learned. Many have questioned the logic of this approach in education: depth or breadth, which is more important? It is an endless debate.

With studies of creativity showing present students being significantly less creative than past generations of students, this may be a key step into understanding why. In our sprint to teach content, we are preventing young brains from having the time to take off-road excursions. Here is a case where we need to sit down, take a deep breath, and put all the various studies and research on the table to sort it out and determine how it all connects. What is the big picture brain research is trying to tell us when it comes to the education system? I don't think this has happened yet, but it absolutely must happen. I suspect there is a great deal classroom teachers can do differently to enhance and unleash creativity while still getting to content, but perhaps not as much content as we presently teach. In a world where creativity is one of the absolute essentials, educators need to get this right so students are prepared for their futures.

Are Students Prepared for Community College, Let Alone 4-Year College?

2010-09-25T06:04:00.000-07:00

Through my School Board Association, I read an article pertaining to the necessity of vertical alignment between high schools and community colleges. With even state schools such as my alma mater University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign costing some $25,000 per year for in-state students, community colleges will continue to play a vital role in education and the training of our future work force. For many, going for two years to a community college is the only feasible way of affording college. Many students go for two years, while working full-time, to save for two years at a four-year institution, allowing the student to get a bachelors degree.

What is disturbing about the article is that 58% of students in community colleges are enrolled in at least one remedial course. When a majority of high school graduates, who are supposed to be prepared for basic college courses, are in fact behind standards and need to repeat high school material, there is a glaring issue that needs to be resolved sooner than later. The same issue exists at the K-8 to high school transition here in Illinois. For years it been known that the Illinois elementary and middle school test, ISAT, has standards that are not properly aligned with the high school standards as defined by the Prairie State Exam (PSAE). Half of the PSAE is the ACT exam, meaning every junior in Illinois is taking a primary college entrance exam. Many eighth graders who meet ISAT standards are being fooled that they are ready for high school, since high school standards are set higher. It is insanity at its finest. Now it appears as if the same is true for high school to community college transitions.

How difficult is it for the powers that be to sit down and align curriculum so that students have a clearly defined path through the entire education system? Everyone is off in their own little worlds, doing their own thing, and the students are the ones who are affected. By the way, the same study, which was done by Prof. Debra Bragg of the U. of Illinois, also found that 30% of students who attend non-selective four-year schools are also enrolled in at least one remedial course. These are discouraging numbers. And anecdotally, the many professors I know from top, selective schools (such as Northwestern, UIUC, UIC, U. of Chicago, etc) state almost unanimously that there are noticeably large numbers of students who lack basic skills in areas like science, to the point where they have had to modify their curriculum. The downturn in science skills is not a total surprise, however, since science has not been part of K-12 AYP tallies in No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Many districts have cut back on science, as well as social studies, because of NCLB.

The lack of preparation for community college is yet another issue that needs to be not only addressed, but fixed. It is not a well-publicized issue, but an important issue for the future.

Evolution in Action - Superbugs

2010-08-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

I just read a report that describes the discovery of a new gene that, in bacteria, allows them to be resistant to just about all antibiotics and other medications we have in our biological arsenal. The gene, New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1,has been found in South Asia, and scientists are worried about the vast potential for bacteria with the gene to spread globally. International travel allows for this potential.

This is yet another good example of evolution in action. Bacteria, with their incredible exponential reproductive rates, multiply rapidly and, in some small percentage of cell divisions, have genetic mutations. Depending on which portion of the DNA mutates (i.e. which gene mutates), the mutated daughter bacteria can have new traits expressed in their phenotypes. Every so often, a mutated bacterium has a resistance to one of our drugs that will kill the previous type bacteria. As the older type are killed off by our drugs, the new mutant strains remain alive, and they then reproduce exponentially. Such change and variation is one of the prime actions in evolution. The rapid process that single-celled critters have for reproduction and genetic variation is why they were here long before humans existed, and why they will almost certainly be around long after humans are gone.

The new bacteria are presently most prevalent in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and dozens of cases have been reported in Britain in patients who were recently treated in those Asian countries. We will see what becomes of this new threat in the weeks and months coming up.

Creativity on the Decline?

2010-07-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

A common theme I come back to when I think and write about education and our school system is creativity. A growing consensus amongst educators, CEOs, scientists, and others is that the key skill/characteristic/trait one needs for the 21st century is creativity. But there is evidence that today's students are actually in decline when it comes to the ability to develop creative solutions to problems. This is outlined in a recent Newsweek article (many thanks to Linnea for pointing this out to me).

I can especially relate to the anecdote the author tells about an American visitor who is in China:

"Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

I understood this when I met with Singapore educators back in 2004 at Northwestern University. They were studying how the American system worked, and how, that's right, creativity was taught or included within a student's studies. With No Child Left Behind, I fear that we have prevented a generation of students from learning how to be creative in all disciplines. Neuroscience suggests creativity can be taught, and that it can be practiced. We have moved to a point where teachers are working with students about how to take a test, rather than how to do true problem solving and taking risks as to how they solve complex problems. Let's hope we realize this and do not repeat the mistake with the final version of Race to the Top.

The Drs. Eide have picked up on this same study. Their post is at
http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/getting-all-as-but-flunking-life-iq.html.

Is There a Shortage of Scientists, or Science-Related Jobs?

2010-07-12T04:47:00.000-07:00

For some time, there has been a deep worry in the U.S. that we are quickly losing our lead in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or STEM) fields of study to up-and-coming foreign rivals, particularly Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, India and, the one that gets the most attention now, China. China, for example, has been producing hundreds or thousands, if not millions, of scientists and engineers over the past decade, as their economic growth has been on a steep ascension for many years. The U.S. has been producing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers. Certainly, simply looking at the 'production' numbers, we have a need to worry about the future prospects of the U.S. maintaining its clear lead in STEM areas since World War II.

Furthermore, the 2005 report from the National Academies, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, was a tipping point for policy makers to lead a new charge into pushing for the production of more STEM graduates and a larger workforce to keep up with developing nations. But while the production numbers of the U.S. cannot compare to those in a country like China, is this the right number to be concerned about? Do we have a shortage of STEM talent, graduates, and workers, or are there other data to help mold a more accurate picture of where we are at the top levels of STEM fields to remain competitive and in a lead position for our economic growth and national security?

An analysis of such questions is done in the Miller-McCune story, The Real Science Gap. It argues that, if one looks at the whole picture, we do not have a shortage in numbers of PhD level STEM graduates, but rather we have no system in place to ensure that these graduates have appropriate research jobs when they graduate. For example, many are now saying there is, in reality, not nearly enough tenure-track faculty positions in American universities to accommodate the graduate students and postdocs in the pipeline. Such positions are the goal of most students who enter PhD programs, and such positions largely drive the pure research that takes place in the country to make scientific advancements. For the relatively small number of tenure-track positions that open up during the course of a year, many hundreds of candidates apply for those jobs. What used to be 1-2 year postdoc positions now extend into 3-6 year postdoc positions. I am familiar with several cases of this as I came up through a PhD program some fifteen years ago, and met a number of postdocs who were having trouble finding faculty positions. It is clear that many industry jobs for STEM graduates have been lost to out-sourcing and to the economic issues of the recession. A question becomes, will STEM jobs lost to the recession still be there as a recovery takes place? That remains to be seen as companies reorganize and develop updated strategies for their future research and development efforts.

There was a second report published by the National Academies in 2005 that I was not aware of, entitled Bridges to Independence: Fostering the Independence of New Researchers in Biological Research. This study reported that the average age of scientists who won their first NIH grant, went from the high twenties several decades ago to 42. This is a telling signal that many scientists are not becoming faculty with their own labs until they are significantly older than what used to be the case. And there is an argument to be made that an age such as 42 is already beyond the most productive and creative intellectual ages of one's twenties and thirties.

Here is a telling set of statistics from The Real Science Gap article:

"In fact, three times as many Americans earn degrees in science and engineering each year as can find work in those fields, Science & Engineering Indicators 2008, a publication of the National Science Board, reports. The number of science and engineering Ph.D.s awarded annually in the U.S. rose by nearly 60 percent in the last two decades, from about 19,000 to 30,000, the report says. The number of people under 35 in the U.S. holding doctorates in biomedical sciences, Indicators note, rose by 59.4 percent — from about 12,000 to about 19,000 — between 1993 and 2001, but the number of under-35s holding the tenure-track positions rose by just 6.7 percent, remaining under 2,000."

What seems to be lacking, in my opinion, in this discussion and debate is any sense of targeting fields individually. Some fields have a surplus of PhD students, with limited job opportunities within the field. My specialty field, high-energy physics, is likely one of those. Many Americans in this field have to go overseas to the CERN facilities in order to do their research, and one finds that the limited number of faculty positions that open up have those hundreds of applicants. In fact, Miller-McCune article states only nine faculty positions were hired nationally in particle physics last year! There are many hundreds of graduate students in the pipeline. However, if one thinks about fields that are likely to see growth, and will need highly trained STEM workers, think about a field like nuclear science and engineering. If the U.S. begins to build numerous new-age nuclear power plants, there will be a dramatic increase in the number of nuclear engineers needed to design, build, and maintain those facilities. This will also be a multiple decades area of growth. The need to study nuclear waste disposal, as well as be involved in nuclear no-proliferation work around the globe, will continue to fuel the need for more workers in these areas. Environmental engineering and positions related to the energy industry will need growth, as those appear to be the job-creation mechanisms in the global economy.

To generically say "we need more scientists and engineers" appears to be a misleading message to send to students who are interested in STEM fields. Perhaps it is time for the U.S. to develop a system that accurately reflects specific needs and projected areas of growth in order to guide the education system and its students, so they can pursue degrees that will actually result if jobs related to those degrees. As a high school teacher, I know we do not receive such specific information or guidance that will help us advise and guide interested students into fields of growth. Part of the reason for this is a lack of communication in general between the K-12 and university levels of education, as well as a disconnect between the STEM industrial complex and K-12 education - we need to know something about the jobs prospects in order to help students pursue degrees where there is a more likely payoff at the end of four years or at the end of ten or more years if a student pursues a doctorate degree. It also would help for high school teachers to be aware of the numerous jobs that branch off a primary STEM degree. Again, I have experience with this as I went into high school teaching rather than pursuing a university position after earning my doctorate. Thinking about and planning for a student's STEM future needs to find its way into his or her high school education.

As for the American K-12 education system, I do want to once more re-state my position that our top students can compete with any other nation on the planet in STEM areas. And one aspect of this issue that is often overlooked and ignored, precisely because of an obsession over test scores, is that American students are among the most innovative and creative thinkers in the world. Because our students have nearly unlimited access to information, because they study the arts and history, because there are opportunities to begin doing research while in high school and participating in numerous competitions in STEM fields, they have been encouraged to learn from mistakes and take chances to 'think outside the box,' or as I like to tell students, to 'think outside a textbook,' when looking for solutions to tough problems. I will gladly take a hit in test scores where students have to regurgitate information, if those same students are creative problem solvers and thinkers, and are capable of communicating and collaborating with each other in the most diverse society the world has ever seen.

There is a reason we are the lone superpower. There is a reason American scientists and engineers have produced the most patents, publications, and won the most Nobel Prizes. Our K-12 system really does play a role in that, and I hope the effects of No Child Left Behind and the upcoming Race to the Top does not hurt the creative side of education and problem solving too badly because of the need to assess students and districts strictly by snapshot testing that drives the system. Producing students who have the creative and technological skills and foundational knowledge base to feed into the top university system in the world, with a more focused sense of what degrees to pursue that will lead to related jobs, can help keep the U.S. in the elite group of STEM nations for decades to come. Students also need to be aware that there are more, diverse opportunities outside of becoming a professor, both in academia and in the private sector. I am confident we will continue to produce the best-trained students in STEM, and continue to have the top intellectual infrastructure on the planet for many years to come. We just need to use some of that creative brain power to build a system to ensure jobs are available to encourage interested students in pursuing technical fields.

Choice in Education - No Silver Bullet

2010-07-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

Some anticipated studies have been released concerning the two main 'school choice' options many are advocating as the fixes to our education system. Those options are charter schools, which are receiving a lot of attention from the Obama administration and the development of Race to the Top, as well as in a recent talk given by Bill Gates, and voucher programs, long a favorite of the political right. Charter schools are public schools where children in the hosting district may apply via lottery, and these schools generally have themes around which they build their curriculum - it could be the arts, science, the environment, or others. Voucher programs will take monies from the public school district, give that money directly to parents, and then parents have the choice to use the money to send their children to any school, including private schools (regardless if they are secular or religious private schools).

The studies conclude that there are no statistically significant differences between those students who went to charter schools or were recipients of vouchers than their peers who were in the public school system. The charter study looked at a variety of charter schools across 15 states, and when students who won the charter lottery are compared to those students who did not win the lottery and had to attend the public school district, no significant differences in math and reading are found. The voucher system that was studied was the Washington, DC, program, which is the first federal program ever tried. While graduation rates were better than the public school rate, achievement was, on average, no better than what students achieved in the public schools.

This does not surprise me, as it does some others I know. Anyone who is involved in education understands that there is no silver bullet. We are dealing with students, who are human beings, and each individual student comes with his or her own 'baggage' from outside the school. Until we learn how to get effective and efficient with more individualized instruction and learning, it will be very difficult to achieve significant increases in student achievement across the board for the vast majority of students. There is no single model of education that will work for all students, just like there is no single physical health regimen that will work for all people. We go and see our doctors for our physical health and progress and treatments on an individual basis, simply because every body is different. We will not fix our children's mental and intellectual health until we 'see them' on an individual basis in schools, simply because every brain is different. Yes, there are great individual charter schools and great individual private schools who are involved in voucher programs, but there are also poor charters and private schools, too. Keep in mind that there are great public schools, too...I would put my students up against students from any other school (and in fact do in a variety of competitions), and they normally shine at the local, state and national levels. But there are also poor public schools.

But bottom line is, we are not there yet in education, and charters and vouchers programs are not, in and of themselves, the final solutions to our education problems.

H.B. Phillips - Forseeing the Future of Technological Progress

2010-07-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

I came across a truly interesting quote from a mathematician, H.B. Phillips, who, in an article published in October of 1948 in American Scientist, said:

Advances will be most frequent when the number of independent thought centers is greatest, and the number of thought centers will be greatest when there is maximum individual liberty. Thus, it appears that maximum liberty is the condition most favorable to progress.

Phillips understood, as does every scientist and academician, that science and academia revolve around communication of ideas. When trying to solve the toughest problems in the most difficult realms of human thought and experience, even the Newtons and Einsteins of the world need to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' who lived or worked prior to themselves. Knowledge, ideas, problem solving, and innovation are mass produced industries - individuals can spark new, original ideas, to be sure, but to do anything with those ideas requires support from others. Even brilliant individuals need to learn about their area of work and interest, and learn what has already been done. This requires access to knowledge and previous thoughts and ideas about the subject (although the other avenue to discovery is the 'accidental' discovery).

In Phillips's day he would have had access to journals, book, conferences, personal correspondence using traditional 'snail' mail, and some telephone, telegraph and radio communication. The phone and radio networks, however, would have been more limited, of course, prior to global hook-ups and networks. Large information packets would have taken days or weeks to be passed along between individuals, as whole books and articles would have had to been physically delivered. He did not possess the Internet, fax machines, teleconferencing, virtual anything, or global satellite communication. But he understood the concept that is at the heart and soul of academic, technological and theoretical progress. Difficult problems involving complexity need multiple brains working on them to make progress in figuring out the complexity. His term 'thought centers' is, in my mind, a broad statement that presently could refer to any one of a collection of entities: individuals on the Internet, think tanks, research groups, R&D departments of industry, academic departments in universities, blog groups, and generally any type of grouping of people who are collaborating to figure something out.

The Internet provides unprecedented access to information. And anyone can plug into that information. Strangers communicate and bounce ideas around every day and instantly with each other. Information and progress have, as a result and as Phillips foresaw, exploded exponentially as the number of 'thought centers' increased. And what is perhaps most important, the free exchange of information and ideas that the Internet provides has been key to this progress. Innovation, creativity, and problem solving now have tools available to anyone with access to the world wide web to see rapid and original progress, as interconnectivity runs to all regions of the planet.

As crazy as the rate of progress has been over the past decade (as personal computing has blossomed), there is room for even more progress. The second condition Phillips talks about is 'liberty.' This would seem to indicate that there is a need, in present times, for individual freedom and access to information, as well as the continued free exchange of that information, outside any type of censorship or restrictions to information. We see such restrictions to access and to personal freedom in many countries around the world, with the obvious major example of China. What will happen when China alone gets to the point where some 1.6 billion more people have unfettered access to the Internet, journals, and other forms of information access, trying to solve the plethora of problems the world is facing? Time will tell, but I do appreciate when deep-thinking individuals identify trends and 'see' where the future is headed.

Examining the Beginnings of Modern Science

2010-07-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

I am reading a very interesting book, "The Science of Liberty" by Timothy Ferris. Mr. Ferris argues that science was the thrust to liberal democracy, and while about a third of the way through, he presents a strong case for his thesis.

Beyond his main theme, I am also enjoying the history behind the founding of modern science thought and its process. This history includes the two most famous giants, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. But some others, who most forget about, include Nicolas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, William Gilbert, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, John Locke (a contemporary and good friend of Newton),and Robert Boyle. There are certainly a number of other important early scientists, but I find this group the most intriguing.

For centuries the Aristotelian approach to thinking about the physical world dominated. Logic and perceived common sense were the 'tools' through which one should reach conclusions about why things work the way they do. The classic example is dropping a heavy object along with a light object. Of course, without knowing anything about basic physics, most would think the heavy object should hit the ground first. Makes sense, in a logical frame of thinking, since gravity is obviously pulling harder on a heavy object. And that is the end of the discussion. For whatever reason, which is so foreign to modern thinking, no one simply picked up two different sized rocks and dropped them...no one did the experiment. At least there is no documented instance of this happening prior to Galileo's famous experiments. Tradition (especially religious), respect for past genius, a mindset that what was in books was the final word on a subject, and a culture that did not yet appreciate the notion of some process resembling experimentation, kept limiting advances in human thought, at least when it came to the physical world. Part of the reason for this was the fact that there was no formal public education for the masses. Smaller groups of the 'elite' and privileged, both aristocratic/governmental and religious, dictated life, kept the masses in a static intellectual state, and worked to maintain the status quo.

Liberal democracies did not exist in those times, up until the scientific revolution had begun through the work and sacrifice of the names listed above. Science is based on facts, physical evidence, open minded thinking, and the ability to test ideas and observe results of those tests. Science is a collaborative process. It relies on the exchange of ideas and findings, and allows curiosity to cross geographical and geopolitical borders. Science does not care what one's socioeconomic status is, but rather whether one has done careful, thoughtful and thorough work that leads to evidence that supports one's conclusions. It is a mindset, a process, and a culture all in one. There is no single leader, for everyone's work is put through the ringer of independent tests and possible rebuke by the rest of the scientific community. If a better idea or theory arises based on new experiments, then old theories are abandoned. Even the great Newtonian mechanics in Newton's Principia, which was the greatest singular piece of work in science history (for it formally established the power of the scientific process and showed the world what science was capable of), met its match with Einstein's relativity theories.

Wherever the word science is used in the above paragraph, substitute in 'liberal democracy.' Does it fit into such a description of characteristics? Largely, yes. Democracies depend on ideas being exchanged. Ideally, it depends on large educated groups of citizens and followers. It is a mindset, a culture and a process. There is no singular leader, but when someone else comes along with a better idea and can convince the masses that he or she is correct (and preferably with evidence that it is a better idea), then that person becomes the new leader. The founders of the early democracies, for example in the United States people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams either were scientists or endorsed the scientific process. The early Founding Fathers were all highly educated and committed to the principles first introduced and practiced with good results in the scientific revolution that began in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Liberal democracies did not exist prior to the science revolution, which still persists today. These are Ferris's arguments in his book.

One quote that sticks with me is from William Gilbert in 1600:
"In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from pure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators...Men are deplorably ignorant with respect to natural things, and modern philosophers, as though dreaming in the darkness, must be aroused and taught the uses of things, the dealing with things; they must be made to quit the sort of learning that comes only from books, and that rests only on vain arguments from probability and upon conjectures."

This approach and way of thinking is precisely what jump-started the science movement and revolution that followed. Galileo and then Newton took this approach and ran with it, along with others who are not as well known, and world history changed forever. In keeping with this relationship between science and liberal democracy, we still hear about the "Great American Experiment" which is our own democracy. Science, and therefore democracy, is not static, but instead dynamic and evolving. If something works, it lasts, but when evidence shows it is not working, the machinery is in place to make change. Only time will tell where we will end up.

A Wonderful Interview with Zenpundit

2010-06-12T18:17:00.001-07:00

I wanted to put up a link to an interview of my very good friend, fellow teacher, and historian extraordinaire, ZenPundit (aka Mark Safranski), who was a featured guest interview on Steven Pressfield's site. Check it out!

Physics Screencasts - How to Videos for AP Physics

2010-06-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

National Core Standards Released

2010-06-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

Over the past year, a national committee has been working on K-12 Core Standards for language arts and mathematics. I still need to look through the details, but here is a clip from the introductory material.

Core Standards http://www.corestandards.org/

(From Key Considerations, page 4 of document)

"Grade levels for K–8; grade bands for 9–10 and 11–12
The Standards use individual grade levels in kindergarten through grade 8 to provide useful specificity; the Standards use two-year bands in grades 9–12 to allow schools, districts, and states flexibility in high school course design.

A focus on results rather than means
By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers,curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be
reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards.

An integrated model of literacy
Although the Standards are divided into Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language strands for conceptual clarity, the processes of communication are closely connected, as reflected throughout this document. For example, Writing standard 9 requires that students be able to write about what they read. Likewise, Speaking and Listening standard 4 sets the expectation that students will share findings from their research.

Research and media skills blended into the Standards as a whole

To be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas, to conduct original research in order to answer questions or solve problems, and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new. The need to conduct research and to produce and consume media is embedded into every aspect of today’s curriculum. In like fashion, research and media skills and understandings are embedded throughout the Standards rather than treated in a separate section.

Shared responsibility for students’ literacy development

The Standards insist that instruction in reading, writing, speaking, listening,and language be a shared responsibility within the school. The K–5 standards include expectations for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language applicable to a range of subjects, including but not limited to ELA. The grades 6–12 standards are divided into two sections, one for ELA and the other for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. This division reflects the unique, time-honored place of ELA teachers in developing students’ literacy skills while at the same time recognizing that teachers in other areas must have a role in this development as well.

Part of the motivation behind the interdisciplinary approach to literacy promulgated by the Standards is extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas. Most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure and challenging in content; postsecondary education programs typically provide students with both a higher volume of such reading than is generally required in K–12 schools and comparatively little scaffolding.

The Standards are not alone in calling for a special emphasis on informational text. The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades."

On the surface, I like what is stated here, as I agree and have argued for this sort of educational philosophy for years. I do hope in practice this approach still prevails. We will need to see what happens during the implementation phase with state Boards of Education. I am sure there will be much more to come on this one.

A New Age - 'Creating' Life

2010-05-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

Just published on the journal Science's online platform, a group from the Craig J Venter Institute has created a bacterium using an entirely synthetic genome. This is effectively the first time humans have created life from inanimate substances.

Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before this was done, and the future is now. However, while I am entirely for new scientific discovery and inquiry, this really is an eye-opening research result, where humans are 'playing God.' We need to have a very serious discussion on the ethics behind such research, and consider as best we can the unintended consequences of such research. While this was a case of creating a known bacterium, what happens when someone creates a new organism that literally is a brand new, never before seen life form? How can we know what will happen if something that never has existed in Nature comes out of a test tube? While we have that potential on a daily basis with mutations of existing single-celled organisms, this adds a new layer to the possibilities of life that could arise. Ever since humans have learned to genetically engineer organisms, there has been the potential of manufacturing new organisms that could become the ultimate biological weapon, or create scenarios that were once unimaginable. These are issues that most people are unaware of and don't consider, but this must change so political leaders from the global community can address the issue, sooner than later. With new global energy being put into nuclear proliferation, this is the next step in addressing matters that have profound effects on nothing more than global security and the future of human existence on the Earth.

Happy Anniversary - 50 Years of the LASER

2010-05-17T18:22:00.000-07:00

Ah, the laser...this stands for Light Amplification of Stimulated Emission of Radiation. They are spread throughout our society, and most of us do not even realize it. Laser pointers. Security systems. CD players. DVD players. Construction. Grocery store scanners. Surgery. Industry. Making holograms. Telecommunications.

The laser was invented some 50 years ago, and the applications only become more numerous by the day. Check out Scientific American's tribute to this amazing device, first predicted in the 1920s by none other than Albert Einstein.

Some Thoughts on Where We Are...

2010-04-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

Life right now is, in a word, interesting, is it not? The world keeps going 'round, the sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening, and here in the Midwest we have actually had quite a nice spring thus far. I noticed a truly beautiful sunset this evening, after helping coach my son's first baseball practice of the year. What a way to get some perspective, to remember what is important in life, to see the boys out there getting dirty and having a truly enjoyable time playing a great game, with my daughter and countless other children playing in the background in a park.

I think we adults around the country need to enjoy such moments more frequently, take a deep breath more frequently, and remember what it is like to be caring, thoughtful, responsible, passionate as well as compassionate, and even a bit civil towards our fellow men and women in this country, as we consider, debate, and contemplate where we are as a country. Never in my life, which began in 1968 at the height of civil unrest with Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and shortly thereafter Watergate, have I seen so much of the polar opposite of what I just mentioned amongst adults. I've been relatively quiet on this blog about current events and politics, mostly because of a complete absence of time to dedicate to writing, but also because I am near speechless about the extent of incivility, irrationality, utter partisanship, and downright, for lack of a better word, hatred so many Americans have been showing towards each other in our body politic. As I say so many times to students as well as other adults who know me, we are in a greatly extended period where emotion seems to outweigh logic and honest debate of issues, regardless of one's political slant, ideology, and opinion.

We are in a time when the extremes of both the right and the left have forced themselves to center stage and have the microphone, throwing around accusations, blame, and doomsday rhetoric about our country. We see so many arguing the talking points that feed on emotion to try and drive the masses into a frenzy, never mind facts and evidence that inconveniently get in the way.

We see a time when decades of neglect and inaction on many fronts have finally managed to converge on us all at once, which has developed an environment where emotion is able to trump logic and common sense because of the scope and magnitude of the issues we now face simultaneously. There is an interconnected set of problems that need to be solved, some time very soon, if we are to avoid near catastrophe as a nation. And I do not want to be seen as being nothing but a partisan when I say this, because I truly say this in all sincerity and with as much an open mind as I can - President Obama is the only major player and person in a position of power I see who seems to understand the scope of interconnectedness of the many major issues we face. Think about it - who else has given speeches that go beyond one or two points? Who else makes a case for any sort of political solution to a problem without mentioning how it is related to multiple other problems and issues? I try to think of others who do this consistently, on either side of the aisle, but cannot think of anyone else (Bill Clinton comes to mind, but he is on the sidelines).

The economic collapse of the past couple years. Health care. Social security. Jobs. Energy policy. Climate change. Foreign policy, national security and two wars. The state of education. Immigration. Budget deficits and national debt. Tax policy. The role of government. National infrastructure. The American Dream and our standard of living.

This is all heavy stuff, each one being a major problem that requires serious discussion, debate, compromise, and both short- and long-term solutions. For any administration, taking on any single one of these over the course of a year or two and getting any sort of major deal on it would be a huge accomplishment. Well, having ignored just about every single one of these issues for multiple decades, there is a logjam on the presidential and congressional plates. We have someone who is willing to take on the political risk to actually confront them. Not because he necessarily wants to...but because he necessarily HAS to. And tough problems that require enormous amounts of work and effort and thought make the average person twist in the wind and want to run and hide. Tough problems we do not necessarily like to think about, precisely because they are tough, make many of us mentally adn intellectually shut down. Do you remember being a student in a math or science class, or some other subject you may have struggled in a bit, and you get to a topic or problem that simply does not make any sense when you first see it? What is your instinct? As a teacher, I see this most days of the week with a number of individual students...the tendency of many, perhaps most, is to step away and resist having to work on it. Serious thought...I am talking about the wrack your brain over a number of days or weeks thought about a single tough problem...is utterly exhausting. It can be entirely frustrating. It can lead one to want to quit altogether. It can lead to anger and emotional outbursts because it is easy to feel utterly stupid and inadequate when a solution continues to hide in the dark, and you are without a flashlight.

This is where we are with the problems we face, and the ugly side of problem solving is upon us. Emotional outbursts and anger have arisen from the collective 'wracking the brains over extended periods of time.' The issues are terribly complex. There are no easy solutions, period. Sorry to say, but "Drill, baby, drill!" really will not solve our energy crisis...simplicity, while desirable, is nothing more than wishful thinking and allows us to create catchy, folksy, bumper sticker quotes that dangerously puts the uninformed and short-sighted thinker into an emotional frenzy. Simply saying "Deport all illegal immigrants!" is not a real solution to our immigration woes. Nor is it practical...good luck hunting down 13 million people living in the background and shadows covering millions of square miles. Think about how hard it has been over a nearly ten-year period to hunt down just one person in a vastly smaller area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. As much as I, too, am not thrilled with all I pay in taxes, simply cutting taxes is not the solution to our jobs and fiscal problems. It is just a tad more complicated than that.

Thinking in terms of the ten-word phrase found during political campaign season is dangerous, because it completely masks the complexity of the serious issues facing the nation. An example is energy policy. What you do with energy affects infrastructure, which affects the budget, which affects tax policy. It affects industry and the type of manufacturing that will take place in the country over the next few decades. This affects jobs. The nature of those jobs affects the type of education we must provide to our children, who make up the next generation of the workforce. What we do with energy affects global pollution, our standard of living and climate. The nature of pollution from energy production and distribution affects health care (for example, as I point out to students when they asked about Obama wanting to begin building new nuclear power plants, no one in the US has ever died from us using nuclear power over the past five decades...but tens of thousands become sick and die from the pollution of coal, oil and gas power plants each year...not sure why this is never pointed out in the media). What we do with energy affects foreign policy and national defense.

This is why I say "Drill, baby, drill" is nothing more than a catch-phrase for the masses you want to emotionally charge up and fool into thinking that this is a serious policy statement. Nothing more ever follows those three words in terms of anything that resembles a solution to a tremendously serious, complex issue that is interconnected and intimately related to numerous other serious, complex issues. This is why I say Pres. Obama, whether you agree or disagree with his politics and proposals for issues, is the only one I see out there even attempting to seriously recognize the complexity and severity of the nature of the interconnected problems.

By the way, so you know I am not a complete partisan who thinks Obama can do no wrong, I am disappointed that the President recently authorized new offshore oil drilling. The right keeps saying that with modern techniques and technology, this is a safe endeavor. Tell that to the people on the Gulf Coast, as we have a new disaster in the making from the offshore platform that exploded and is now causing a natural catastrophe of much of the Gulf ecosystem. As bad as this is going to be in terms of environmental damage to all sorts of species, I kept arguing during the campaign when McCain proposed all sorts of new drilling that, when you consider the long-term, this is going to also be our drinking water. There is an impending shortage of clean, potable water in many parts of the US (as well as many parts of the world), and we will have to begin using ocean water some day (sooner than we might think)for our own survival. But no one likes thinking about this issue, so it has been put on a back burner, just like we have done with health care, social security, energy, infrastructure, immigration, and so on. We are paying a heavy price right now for that lack of action and foresight, and we will keep being shortsighted with issues like off-shore drilling and the interconnectedness to other issues like drinking water. History does repeat itself; this is a cliche for a reason.

I am frustrated by the majority of our elected officials who are in campaign mode and who are, perhaps, incapable of thinking about more than one thing at a time. I am worried that short-sighted, emotional outbursts are drowning out facts, evidence, expert opinion and proposals to serious, complex issues, that quite frankly the average person may not be able to comprehend, nor wants to make an effort to understand. I worry about those who resort to name calling and who attack another person's character and integrity if they do not agree with one's own opinion or political slant. It does not make you a 'traitor' or unpatriotic if you do not agree with me. In my mind, if your intent is to help solve a problem and make our nation better, that makes you a patriot, plain and simple, whether I agree with you or disagree with you! Being able to peacefully disagree with each other is largely what makes America unique and great! Why do we want anything less than this? This is why a blanket philosophy of "You are either with us or against us" is so terribly dangerous and UN-American. This is where many Americans are on both the left and the right. My kids' future is up for grabs right now, and I desperately yearn for a day, very soon, where facts and evidence are valued, and where serious and rational thought, debate and compromise will show its face and put this emotionally, partisan-driven nonsense in its grave.

Rest Before Mental Work a Plus

2010-04-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

The Drs. Eide had a brief post about the positive effects of taking a nap prior to doing mental gymnastics that relate to memory and learning. A UC-Berkley study showed a significant gain in learning for those who nap/rested prior to doing the mental activity compared to those who did not nap.

I like the example they use where, at Google, employees have access to what are effectively napping modules (nap pods) that block light and sound. By resting for, say, 30 minutes or so, worker productivity, innovation and creativity should be enhanced by being able to take that quick rest period, particularly if it is just prior to a working group meeting or research period. The brain literally has a chance to reset and blood flow to the hippocampus increases, which is good preparation for the parts of the brain where learning and memory physically take place.

This has implications for education. If there is a more intense period of learning planned towards the end of a class period, where students have already been working for some period of time, a brief few minutes to rest may in fact enhance the learning immediately prior to the more intense learning period. Many teachers, myself included, know that using something like a 20-5 strategy works with students (meaning 20 minutes of activity followed by 5 minutes of practice/rest) seems to be effective for many students. This type of research helps explain why such strategies work, and suggests we should do more of work-rest periods in the classroom help our students maximize what they get from a lesson or activity. A detailed article about what is happening with the brain can be found here.

Interesting History at CPAC

2010-02-19T20:06:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here watching Michelle Bachmann speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference annual conference, and I'm hearing a really interesting account of history. I'm learning some new things tonight:

- FDR took over a "manageable recession" and spent the U.S. into the Great Depression (last I checked, FDR was sworn in in January of 1933, which, if my math is correct, was some 3.5 years into the global economic collapse);

- Obama is solely responsible for the 'bail-out nation.' (I, too, forgot that there was another bailout prior to Obama taking office. The start of the bank bailout really wasn't during the Bush administration, back in the fall of 2008...Obama was elected and was able to go back in time and do that one...I have forgotten about that);

- the Dems want nothing but 'a state of decline for America.' I guess this must be the case because they don't agree with everything the conservatives believe in. I seem to remember vaguely that a battle-cry from the far right goes something like 'you're either with us or against us' which then translates into 'if you don't agree with me you are not a patriot.' This was then followed on Obama's inauguration day with the cry of 'I hope he fails,' led by Rush himself.

- oh, and as John Pence said during his speech, the solution to all our economic woes is for government to get out of the way, deregulate the market so there are no restrictions on them, and cut taxes across the board, especially for the rich. Well, that was what happened during the last 8 years under Bush...oh, I forgot that was the flawless plan that worked perfectly. The current Great Recession was not started with any issues of a greatly deregulated marketplace. It was all Obama's fault, which he was able to make happen during that same trip back in time he made to start the bailouts. Yes, Mr. Ponce, you are so right...you have the answer for getting us out of this Obama recession.

- There are many Republican state and local officials (such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty of MN) who, in front of one set of cameras, rail against the Obama stimulus bill and how it has done nothing but waste money and create zero jobs, but then in front of another set of cameras back in their states brag about balancing state budgets (such as Pawlenty) and go to ribbon cutting ceremonies for new bridges, highways, buildings, and other infrastructure projects that did produce jobs, that were funded through the stimulus bill. So, which is it? Oh, I forgot they get it both ways, as long as they sneak in that this is another attempt by Obama to help America decline.

- They discount the Congressional Budget Office's (non-partisan office responsible for providing Congress with budgetary projections and analysis) confirmation of White House numbers that some 2 million jobs have been saved or created since the stimulus bill was introduced that otherwise would have disappeared, flatly saying it is not accurate or true, but then turn around and use the CBO numbers for deficits and long-term budget projections...so is the CBO only competent when the data support your causes and agendas, and completely incompetent when they contradict what you want to say?

- One of the catch phrases every speaker is using is the 'bail-out nation' that Obama has created, and they tie it into the stimulus bill. Again, interesting history I apparently had incorrect in my own mind. I was under the impression these were two completely different bills (TARP vs ARRA). The bank and auto industry bail-outs were done initially in order to save the once thought 'too big to fail' corporations that screwed up the national and global economies. I seem to remember that it was the Bush administration that started the TARP process...and yes, some were throwing around the D word, depression, had this not happened. By the way, I did not hear any speakers yet mention that most of the TARP money given to the banks has been paid back, with a goal of getting it all back in the next few months. Even GM has plans of beginning to pay back money from the auto rescue (by June), that prevented hundreds of thousands of other jobs being lost. The stimulus bill (ARRA) is centered on some $250 billion in tax cuts and credits (the CPAC speakers failed to mention that one for some reason), infrastructure projects (which most reasonable people know we are desperately in need of all around the country; I certainly appreciate the road work that was just completed where I live that would not have happened without the stimulus money), education (as school budgets are imploding around the country, and especially here in Illinois, because of state budget catastrophes and the housing collapse that began under the Bush administration, although I have heard some Republicans even put this one on Obama), transportation (such as the frantic race to submit high-speed rail proposals in red and blue states), and energy (funding for alternative energy projects and businesses, which is already beginning). The new thrust by Obama into construction of new nuclear power plants is going to come from some of the stimulus money. I thought he would get some credit for this last one, but I am waiting for the far right to criticize him some how for going with something the right has wanted for years.

I guess this is a useful history lesson for me because I had it all wrong, apparently. On a serious note, I lose respect very quickly for anyone who twists, or worse, simply makes up, their own self-declared facts and evidence to promote their cause, whatever it is. And because these are 'distinguished' people who are on TV with big microphones, many people who are not familiar with true facts and reality will believe them.

It is all in the name of winning an election, this one being the midterms coming up in November. Heaven forbid they all just shut the f*$& up and work for the many millions of American people who are having a difficult time right now. I am becoming a fan of Evan Bayh, who said the other day that the American people need to vote the incumbents out of both parties who do nothing but contribute to the nasty political gotcha games...screw politics, and do what's right for a change. Reasonable people can sit down and come up with reasonable solutions and compromises to solve many of our problems. There really is a political middle majority within America, and CPAC is NOT that middle. More than one has said since I have been watching that they don't want Republicans elected, but rather Conservatives. This is not the average American being represented, and average Americans will hopefully be able to distinguish true history from CPAC fantasy.

Hope Springs Eternal - Beginning to Develop STEM Standards

2010-02-09T10:06:00.001-08:00

I've been writing and talking about needed STEM changes in our science and technology classes for years, and this includes the last deluge of recent posts below. By chance, just today in Education Week is an article describing the just formed national task force charged with developing the initial framework for new STEM standards that will fit into the Obama administration's education policy.

Presently, 48 states are working on new sets of learning standards for the primary areas of reading and mathematics, and this new task force, which is coming out of the National Research Council (NRC), has just stated that the primary philosophical goal is to break away from learning a thousand individual and often disperse facts and concepts, and include a much stronger focus on thinking, reasoning and analytical skills. This is music to my ears!

As wonderful as this news is, we must keep in mind that this new group's purpose is to soley develop the 'conceptual framework' for new standards. Then the results and recommendations from this task force must go to the states and the Department of Education for review and for the details. My hope is that none of these groups go too far in either direction. We need some core concepts and subject knowledge (i.e. content), to be sure. But it is widely believed, and certainly by yours truly, that we have reached a point of near saturation of content knowledge in today's classroom. What we cannot do is go entirely to open-ended and project based classes that then totally ignores subject content. We need balance, where content knowledge is gained, but then also used and applied in a variety of creative and innovative ways, which is where deeper thinking, analystical and reasoning skills are developed and deeper science understanding and literacy are reached.

I have told students, colleagues and many others many times that, personally, I could care less how we do on international tests, which tend to focus almost entirely on content knowledge and recall. I'll gladly take a hit on national testing results in favor of developing a deep thinking, creative generation of students who can solve everyday, complex problems in new, innovative ways. While some different countries place first in international testing, I always like to ask, "OK, but how many Nobels have you won? How many important patents or publications do your scientists produce? How many new industries have you created?" For most countries the answers are none. Innovation, problem solving, analysis, recognizing and making progress in complexity/chaos/networks, communication within multidisciplinary collaborations, and so on are the future in a global economy adn society. This is a first step that is on the right track of reforming our education system so the next generation is properly prepared for such a world.

Summary of STEM Posts

2010-01-31T13:31:00.000-08:00

We have issues with STEM education in America. My last three posts go into great detail about different aspects of the problem, and suggestions of how to fix the STEM education system. Unfortunately some may not want to read through the long posts, so here is a much shorter summary.

The main problems, as agreed upon at a recent conference of experts from all education levels, industry and STEM professionals include:
• We do not have appropriate teacher training and certification systems in place to ensure STEM teachers in Preschool – High School can in fact provide what is needed for students. Reform and progress in STEM areas cannot ever happen if we do not have teachers in place who can properly work with students;
• Federal education policy places a focus on content only, and not skills needed to reach levels of ‘critical thinking’ and complex problem solving. This runs contrary to what is needed in STEM education and for college to be successful in STEM;
• We continue to treat education in America as five disjointed, and at times disconnected, levels. We must move into a mindset of one continuum of education, Preschool – college, and then use this to our advantage and vertically align the system to reach the end goals we want.

We have limited success stories out there of schools that are producing high-powered STEM students, to be sure. But these stories are, unfortunately, few and far between. Assuming that federal mandates and education policy continue to emphasize content only for the foreseeable future, educators and STEM experts need to be clever about how to try and get more success stories to blossom, despite the systemic obstacles that are placed in our way.

A start is to make use of technology and network with each other. From our conference, there is a new Ning setup for such communication. This is at http://stemdist219.ning.com/. For those of us who have had some successes, we need to share our methods and experience and encourage our colleagues in other districts to try it. Blog about your ideas, tell us what works and what does not. For example, I have put a large amount of information and documents on my school research web site. There are links to past student papers (which shows the high level high school students can work at when unleashed!), links to university departments with suggestions of how to make contacts and how to develop research ideas, and a research booklet with all sorts of suggestions that have worked for me as I tried to establish a research program. I will put some references to published articles I have written at the end of this post, so you can get more details about some things that have worked for me over the years.

If you are unable to get research started, then perhaps getting students involved in STEM competitions is a possibility. We get at least our top kids involved in JETS TEAMS contests, WYSE Academic Challenge, the STEM Olympiads, Physics Bowl, science essay contests, bridge building competitions, independent studies into any area of science or math that they are interested in (such as quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, robotics, Lagrangian mechanics, and so on), writing computer simulations with C++, Java, Matlab or other software, peer tutoring and mentoring (to get them thinking more deeply about STEM subjects), and whatever else you can think of. Students being able to actively do things they want to do is invaluable for building a love of STEM subjects and get them deeper into the process and skill-building that is necessary at the college and professional levels. By getting them into projects of any kind outside of classwork, a new level of independence is reached, and often more involved problem solving and synthesis of new, challenging material are required. This is the value of academic extracurriculars. Just provide outside opportunities for kids, and let them lose. Often you will be amazed at what they end up doing! These are the things we no longer have time to do in classes, because we need to focus on content for ‘the test.’ I don’t see this changing any time soon, even with the Obama administration. However, if we are willing to work on projects and contests outside of class time, we can begin to hook more students into STEM areas, and properly prepare them for advanced work in college and beyond. We have no choice if the system does not change. It is more work. It is more difficult than it needs to be. But our children’s future and the country’s future depend on such efforts.

While we are at it, please share any thoughts or activities that have been successful for you. Join the Ning and join the discussion with a larger network. We should organize and contact political leaders who are in charge of education policy, as well as State Boards of Education and University deans for schools of education to adopt new training and certification programs to develop well-trained STEM teachers of the future. There is much to get done, as quickly as possible.

Let’s get to work!

Some references related to how to build and maintain high school STEM/research programs:

1. M. Ngoi, M. Vondracek, “Working with Gifted Science Students in a Public High
School Environment.” Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, vol. XV, no. 4,
141-147 (Summer 2004).

2. R. Horton & M. Vondracek, “Creating and Maintaining a High School Physics
Research Program.” The Physics Teacher, vol. 42, 334-338 (September 2004).

3. M. Vondracek. “Diminishing the Gap Between High School and University
Research Programs – Computational Research.” The Physics Teacher, 44 (Oct.
2007).

How to Fix STEM Education

2010-01-31T12:43:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I asked the question, “Where are we with STEM education?”

The brief answer is we are systemically set up in precisely the wrong way to bring about any large-scale reform to STEM education. The main reasons, in my opinion, include: we are presently a test-crazed society, which has prevented schools from having the time to create programs that work on the skills needed to get children to the often mentioned realm of ‘higher-level” or “critical” thinking skills, terms that you hear a lot in education and from politicians; our teacher training and certification programs do not produce STEM educators that have true research experience, and though everyone wants more hands-on and inquiry learning as well as more student research, we do not have the personnel in the classrooms who know what this involves; and we have a mindset issue by thinking of our education system as a series of separate, distinct levels – pre-school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and college – rather than simply thinking of it as a continuum that needs to have flowing communications and be vertically aligned from one year to the next.

What needs to be done to change this mixed up system? I could just say “A LOT” and run for the hills, but let me offer some suggestions.

I could take the easy way out and simply say we need more money to fix all the problems. While STEM education does cost large sums of money for equipment, supplies, facilities, and properly trained teachers, there is much more to it, unfortunately. I mentioned above that it is a systemic problem, and mean this in every sense of the word ‘systemic,’ from top to bottom.

A major issue is that we are not doing a very good job of getting quality science and technology education to our youngest students in pre-school. This is where we want to hook them into the process of STEM disciplines. While content expertise cannot be expected with 3-4 year olds, that is not the point of good STEM exposure at this age. THEY ARE NATURAL SCIENTISTS AT THIS AGE and we should be encouraging them to observe, question, think, analyze, and present their thinking in as many ways as possible, so that they learn this is the expectation for learning and that it is fun to do. Every single presenter, for example, at a STEM conference I recently attended emphasized the need to excite students about STEM subjects throughout their schooling, and that having skills was as important as any content knowledge they possess by the time they get to college. Any teacher knows bad habits are harder to break as a student ages, so let’s give them good habits and great encouragement and energy when they first start formal ‘schooling.’ Check out an earlier post about pre-school STEM education, and an attempt to get a real curriculum for that age level.

Building process and skills in pre-school leads children into elementary school (K-5). But here we begin running into systemic problems. It is well-known that K-5 teachers generally have the strongest background in language arts and mathematics, and that a good majority acknowledge their weakest subject area is science. Let’s fix this, once and for all by modifying the certification training for elementary teachers. We know that the good jobs of the future are going to be largely STEM jobs, so why do we continue with the same old teacher training programs? It does not make sense. Require more science, and more importantly require some minimal time in science labs working on slightly longer-term projects so elementary teachers learn what the actual scientific process is and what skills are needed to do science. Again, at the youngest ages developing skills and understanding how to do science is as important, if not more important, than content, and this will not happen if teachers do not know what the process is or what is needed to do science.

A second problem has arisen in the past decade. No Child Left Behind (NCLB). While the idea of being accountable for every child learning is undeniably the right idea, how NCLB has been administered has done great damage to STEM education. Because school standing, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), relies on a standardized test and performance in math and English/reading, that is where schools are literally forced to focus. Content is everything, and skills have fallen effectively out of sight. Students need to be able to regurgitate facts and follow a prescribed writing format in order to do well on the test. Schools have no choice but to spend numerous hours, days, and weeks on test prep rather than on hands-on and portfolio assessments, where students can have a chance to be creative and perhaps select from a variety of activities. Creativity from students and teachers has suffered, as has innovation in the classroom, because that will not help with scoring well on the test. In addition, AYP status and yearly increases suggest the belief that all kids should be at the same place, across the board, at the same time. Any reasonably intelligent adult knows for a fact that this is a ludicrous belief, and therefore reject the premise behind the assessment of NCLB. Politicians who are in control of education policy, however, find this to be politically reasonable. In the end, most elementary schools have cut back on science and social studies time in order to focus on the tests for math and language arts.

Similar problems exist at the next educational level, middle school. Teachers in STEM subject areas generally have coursework in that subject area in college, however the same problem of not having any real time and experience in the lab holds true. This problem continues for the vast majority of high school teachers, too. Because the training of teachers places emphasis on content almost exclusively, that is what is presented in class in middle school and high school. While content is important, as there are numerous facts, theories, principles, calculations, and simple experiments to understand if one wants to advance to higher levels of learning in the field, we need to keep in mind what every college professor and instructor at the conference said: more important than content coming into a college STEM program is enthusiasm and skills!

If a student can think, analyze data, understand and interpret graphs, know how to do basic measurements, how to report findings, how to find information about specific questions that arise in research, how to take large volumes of information and data and figure out what is important and what is not, and find patterns in data and observations that can lead to logical, evidence-backed conclusions, they will teach you the content. But not knowing how to test content and what to do with content, that is much more difficult to teach to older students. Bad habits have been formed, misconceptions have been developed, and there is not the time in a semester class to make up for 13 years of either mis-training or no training at all in how to do STEM. It is ironic that many of the professors who were making these statements are at universities that trained the K-12 teachers in the first place…and they did not train them with the skills necessary to get students to where they need to be in order to be successful in STEM college programs. STEM departments do not communicate very well with schools of education within the same university structure.

We are shooting ourselves in the foot, and it is a systemic problem!!

However, here is another level of complexity to the system. State Boards of Education.

A State Board of Education is generally a politically appointed body. It may vary tremendously from state to state what the expertise of Board members include, but I would guess not many on state boards have extensive STEM expertise, and I would also guess not many members have a great deal of experience in K-12 classroom education. Many are administrators, some are from business areas, and some are politically well connected with the governor’s office. Whatever the case, the important piece is that the state Boards set certification criteria for teachers in the state. For real reform to occur in STEM areas, state boards of education need to change the current standards. Teachers in training MUST be required to have some amount of STEM research in the lab. Science teachers must know what scientists actually do, and how the process works. Teachers must know what goes into setting research questions, how to develop and plan experiments, how to properly analyze data and present it, and how to interpret data and observations to draw reasonable conclusions. Learning about the scientific method is very different from a textbook than from actual experience in a laboratory.

I guarantee that present calls for more research and higher-level research for high school students will NEVER happen within the current system simply because more high school science teachers do not know how to do research themselves. It is that simple.

Communication between levels in the education system
Let’s assume we get more research trained STEM teachers into classrooms. There is then the issue of lacking facilities and equipment to do any sort of high-level, original research with students. This is a real problem at the vast majority of middle school and high schools around the country. There is a growing list of options becoming available to pre-college teachers and students, due in large part to the Internet.

Many people may be surprised at how easy it can be, especially in the physical sciences (life science research tends to require more expensive and sophisticated equipment than chemistry or physics), to use more basic equipment to do clever science research in a high school, or even in a student’s home. But to learn how to do this for the first time, and to even get an understanding that this is possible, requires help. It is my own experience that the vast majority of professors are very willing and able to give suggestions for research topics and ways of studying the topic. Sometimes they will make their own equipment available for certain measurements, or even take in a student into their lab. Other times they will email a relevant article, or put us in touch with a colleague who can be of more assistance.

Many professors are willing to be e-mentors for high school and even some middle school students. This, I suspect, is in its infancy, and more and more college level research groups will make members available to give ideas and some amount of guidance to young students while they do their work in some other part of town or even in other parts of the country. This can be done effectively and efficiently with email, video conference calls, distance learning platforms, webcasts and podcasts, online videos for demos or illustrations or even online lectures about the topic, remote access to lab equipment (such as with the iLab Network), computer simulations, some Google applications, wikis and Nings, and other clever uses of Web 2.0 applications and technologies.

The point is it is very possible for one-on-one contact with university experts and advisers, but this is presently being done on a small scale, with individual high school teachers. A system could be developed to make it easier for more Preschool-12 teachers to contact experts for advice and help.

Systemically, we need to take an approach for STEM education to identify, at the professional and college levels, what skills are absolutely essential by the time a student enters college and the workplace in a technical industry. These need to be fed to a State Board of Education, so they then can put in place policy and certification criteria for teachers in that state. The State Board needs to work with the teaching training colleges and get them to develop the necessary courses to meet those certification criteria. Then those newly and properly trained teachers will filter into the preschool-12 education system. This is not an easy process, but a necessary one. This will be difficult to do if we do not change the mindset that we have a single education system, rather than five different levels and parts of the education system. Better vertical alignment is needed if we are to do this right.

All of what I just suggested becomes a moot point if the federal education policy does not change. With a continued emphasis on content being proposed in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top law, the status quo will remain. If STEM training is to be the dominant area in the 21st century schools, time must be provided for students to have research experiences in STEM classrooms. They will not be able to develop skills needed in college otherwise. We need to lobby political leaders in control of education to get off the testing bandwagon and onto the STEM bandwagon, where students will truly learn more advanced analysis skills and how to think, ask questions, and find good information among the endless online resources.

I fear the politicians will not change education policy or assessments any time soon, and we will continue to have isolated bright spots in the education landscape, but nothing on a scale that the country needs to maintain its dwindling lead in STEM. China produces millions of engineers a year, and send large numbers of their top college students to American schools for the skills training that has kept American scientists ahead of the rest of the world for the past 60 years. Our dominance is not quite where it used to be, and with us producing scientists and engineers in far fewer numbers (some 2-3 orders of magnitude less than the Chinese, not to mention India, too) we can expect further declines in our STEM lead. Those of us in education, and specifically in STEM education who know what is needed and what needs to change, need to mobilize and address our concerns to the powerbrokers at the state and federal level. This is a call to action!

Where are we with STEM Education?

2010-01-31T06:45:00.001-08:00

The 21st century is being labeled with a number of names, ranging from the Age of the Internet; The Information Age; The Age of Globalization; and a new one I just heard, the Age of Conceptualization. And still others call it the Age of STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. I’ll stay away from the Age of Terror that I’ve heard some mention in a more political/warfare sense. In many ways, it does not matter if one chooses any of these because at a basic level they are referring to the same thing.

I was recently at an all-day conference on STEM in the Chicagoland area, where leaders in education (middle school through college was strongly represented), industry, science and engineering (speakers included an astrophysicist, a particle physicist, a robotics specialist, a nanotechnologist, and lead engineer who designed and built the Dubai Tower), and politics (the keynote speaker was Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Illinois 9th) met at Niles North High School to begin a networking group focused on how we should be approaching STEM in schools, with an additional focus on how to improve student research and active involvement in STEM areas while in K-12 schools. It was a wonderful turnout (some 140 leaders from dozens of high schools), and I had the pleasure of being asked to be the table leader for student independent research. Many thanks to the gang from Niles North for putting this together and hosting. I also must compliment Niles North for being a leader in developing a broader STEM program that includes a wonderful facility for research and for getting large numbers of students doing true research.

Where are we with regards to STEM in K-12 education? Like so much in public education, the answer to this question depends almost entirely on where you happen to live. The leaders in STEM tend to be from wealthier suburban districts or magnet-type schools such as the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), whose charter mandates students to do research and pursue scientific/technical activity. The major reason such schools lead the way is that it requires money for students to do research on a larger scale, as well as to recruit and hire instructors with strong research backgrounds to begin setting up programs for students. In Illinois it is especially difficult to break this cycle because of the way schools are funded, which depends severely on local property tax revenue.

News headlines have for some time had a focus on how poorly the U.S. compares on international tests of science and math to the rest of the world. The average American student does not hold up well on such tests. Our top students continue to do extremely well, but there is a growing gap for the overall average. A couple reasons were identified at the conference and there has been a growing consensus over the last couple years as to why this is the case. These include:
• A lack of training and research experience of teachers at all levels of K-12 education. Even in high schools, a shockingly large percentage of science teachers have never actually done research, meaning they have never actually done science. There is a Grand Canyon sized gap between coursework from textbooks and actually doing long-term research in the lab;
• A lack of expertise and time devoted to science and technology in early grades (typically K-5). This has continued to worsen in the age of No Child Left Behind, as time is taken away from science and social studies to focus on reading and math, the two subjects that are tested and go into a school’s AYP status;
• A lack of funding in K-12 education, in terms of having facilities and equipment/supplies to do higher level research. In Illinois and other states that have enormous deficits, this will continue to be the case;
• A disconnect between K-12 and college levels of STEM, largely because of a lack of communication. And I’ll include industry as well. High schools can be at a loss in terms of understanding what, exactly, are the required skills colleges and the workplace are looking for. This has been exasperated by the fact the high schools have been under intense focus for specific science content in order to pass state tests for No Child Left Behind mandates. Colleges and employers are not necessarily only interested in what specific content students have had, but rather they have become more interested in what skills students have developed in order to be successful in college STEM programs and in the workplace.

What can we do about all this? What should we be doing about all this? The answers are NOT being addressed by the federal mandates, and that includes the soon to be new education policy called “The Race to the Top,” which will be the Obama administration’s education policy that replaces the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind. By being on a school board, I have had early exposure to Race to the Top because we had to decide whether or not to send in a Memo of Understanding that was required to be registered with the state board of education in order to be eligible for money coming out of competitive grants. There is a competitive grant program set up between states to meet a large number of criteria in the Race to the Top legislation that will be given to Congress in the not so distant future.

There is a similar flaw in the national and state education policies that have then been dumped on local school districts. It has to do with the mindset of those writing the laws, almost all of whom have never taught in classrooms before. This is what we get by having non-experts writing education policy. What I mean by mindset is that too many still think of education as five separate entities. There is preschool; there is elementary school; there is middle school; there is high school; and there is college. Finally, there is the workplace. There are separate districts in many locales, where preschool is its own entity, then there may be a K-8 elementary district that then feeds into a separate high school district. The districts are often within different boundaries, meaning a K-8 district could feed into multiple high schools, as is the case where I live. There are state tests that are given to K-8, which are written separately from the state tests that are given to high schools. This has been a disaster in Illinois, for example. The elementary test, called ISAT, tests a set of standards that are not aligned with high school standards. In other words, for the past ~8 years of testing for No Child Left Behind, kids passing the ISAT have been promoted to high school thinking they are well prepared, but then they find out they are behind because the standards for the high school test, called the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE), are set at a higher level. So a good number of freshman in high school find out their levels of reading and math and already behind where they need to be to meet the standards set up for their junior year of high school, which is when the PSAE is given according to federal law. How messed up is this??? And the tests both come from the same state board of education.

The MINDSET of thinking about 5 levels of education is entirely flawed! We need to think about this as a continuum, not as a disjointed system of education and learning. I am convinced, as are all the other participants at the conference after I brought up the concept of mindset to the group, of an overarching Preschool – College education system. The entire system must have some level of communication and organization that allows for some level of vertical alignment of curriculum and skills-building. This mindset would put us in a model of a pipeline with a continuous laminar flow for students, rather than the turbulence that results from transitions between districts and standards that vary from one level to the next due to nothing more than the rear not knowing what the front is doing. Without this model and way of thinking about education, I fear no reform is possible. Period.

If we buy into this mindset of a continuous, flowing education, then what? How do we begin to fix specific problems with STEM education? For starters, we need to think about where students need to end up by the time they get to the workplace in their early twenties. What skills are going to be needed twenty years from now, for a young child today to be able to compete in tomorrow’s world, where we do not presently even know what jobs are going to exist? This gets tricky because it requires long-term projections and planning, but it is a very good guess that the bulk of good future jobs will require STEM backgrounds. But here’s the thing so many cannot get their heads around – we have to be thinking in terms of SKILLS as much, if not more so, than CONTENT.

Content is important, don’t get me wrong. Going through school, one needs to learn how to write and spell correctly and understand the basic rules of math, and know about the Constitution and how the country works, and know some fundamental principles that science is built upon. Such facts and content is vital in order to continuously build knew knowledge. But whether it is No Child Left Behind or the new proposals in Race to the Top, the end results are focused entirely on content. Schools have been rated in NCLB solely on those tests at the end of the year. Race to the Top will in principle do a little better because the claim is it will focus on academic growth of students, rather than the ridiculous notion that all students should be at the same place at the same time as NCLB assumes. However, the end game is going to be on end of year testing. Race to the Top will take it even one step further, with teacher and principal evaluations being based on test results (that is good for me since I teach AP, and my kids will pass state exams 100% of the time; what about the special ed teacher, though, whose juniors come in reading at a 3rd grade level, and not a single one will pass the test? Am I a better teacher than she is? Probably not, but federal law treats me as far superior since my kids passed the test…a crazy way of doing education!).

End result of both federal education laws: Content is going to continue to rule the day.

Now here is the kicker. To a person, when asked at the conference what does a college professor want from an incoming freshman, every professor in attendance I spoke with and who participated in table discussions as well as the eight featured speakers to the whole group, not a single one mentioned content! They did not care about how much content, beyond the basics that is, a student had in their STEM area. They can teach the content, they all said. But what IS needed, and what IS presently lacking from a majority of incoming college freshman, are skills. For STEM areas, students need to be able to do 2 things according to every professor: be able to read technical literature for understanding, and have the ability to think about and find information to reach logical conclusions, i.e. problem solving (this includes being able to identify how to know what you don’t know, and then be able to go figure out the answer). Skills matter as much and more than specific content for college. The underlying reason for this, by the way, is that many believe we are in a paradigm shift of ages – we are moving from the “Information Age” into the “Age of Conceptualization.” We have collected more information in the past twenty years than human civilization collected in the past 10,000 years combined, and now we have moved into an age of having to figure out what to do with the information. This is why higher-level thinking and problem solving and creative skills come in, for STEM fields have progressed from single disciplinary to multi-disciplinary. We have moved beyond knowing what is in the textbook, and into an age where textbooks in some fields are changing every few months with new discovery…students must be trained to think on the fly and how to synthesize large volumes of information and find the connections between topics from different fields.

Because we treat our education systems as separate blocks of education, we have systemically developed a lack of communication between the blocks. We are focused on the wrong things in the test the content dominated K-12 blocks compared to what the kids should be doing to properly compare for college and the workplace.

We need to take the end result, higher-level thinking and problem solving and creative skills, and work backwards. What do we need to do year-to-year in pre-college education in order to reach the end goals? What are some best practices that allow us to develop not only good content knowledge in students, but also provide an environment and system where skills are developed, too?

Future posts will focus on these last questions.

Some Posts on STEM: Early Childhood, Part I

2010-01-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

I will be putting up some posts up regarding STEM education in our schools, at all levels. STEM is something educators see a lot, but for those who are not familiar, it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. While many say this is the way to the future, I must say the future is here and has been here for the past decade. The rest of the world realized this and have been investing heavily in STEM areas of education at all levels, and especially at the college level. Why have China and India been rising so quickly economically, and why have countries such as the aforementioned been 'stealing' America's technical jobs? Because of their rapid rise in STEM education and the number of technically trained workers (e.g. China is training millions of engineers and scientists each year, the U.S. is in the tens of thousands per year). This, and because wages are a fraction of what American workers make, are the primary reasons many believe China is the next superpower in this century.

The first item to put out there is a necessary change that is needed as far as what our pre-school children are capable of with regards to science. An article from Education Week deals with this, and a new curriculum designed for those 3-4 year olds. Keep in mind, if you have kids or young siblings, think about how they learn. They are scientists! They actively investigate everything. They experiment. They go through trial and error, learn from mistakes, and actually try to predict what will happen as they 'play' with new toys. They are natural curious about everything, and over time make connections between different items and experiences. They learn language through intense observation and build off of what others do. Through group play, they teach and learn from each other. Is this not what we want from our high school graduates?! Is this not how successful research programs behave and operate?

As is stated by a researcher in this article,

" “Most teachers will have a science area in their classroom, ... and if you look on plans, you would see something listed as science but, in reality, there would be some shells, some magnets, and maybe a pumpkin, or a book about animals in winter,” said Nancy Clark-Chiarelli, a principal research scientist at the Education Development Center, a research group based in Newton, Mass. “But those items are not conceptually related, and they don’t promote children’s independent exploration of them.” "

The curriculum featured in this article is called Young Scientist, and is funded through the National Science Foundation. It is a start that is, I suppose, better late than never. There is more to come about STEM topics and issues.

Quite Amusing...

2010-01-11T13:11:00.000-08:00

In case NBC is looking to replace Jay Leno altogether, perhaps they'll consider Gov. Sarah Palin. She made a classic one-liner in a response to reports that she is being hired to a multi-year deal with Fox News, as a commentator I would think. Her press release included the statement:

"I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news."

Waa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Good line, Mrs. Palin.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!

2009-12-31T06:54:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone is able to enjoy the new year, and remain happy and healthy so you can pursue all your goals and dreams!!

Importance of Imagery for Memory & Learning

2009-12-29T19:31:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Drs. Eide for a post on imagery studies and how they play a role in memory and learning. If you reflect on instances when there is some physical activity or complex calculation or cognitive exercise you need to do, can you remember a time when you tried to 'see' yourself doing it ahead of time? It may seem to be an instinctive process or action, but I certainly have imagined doing a tough calculation prior to a math test, or have caught myself imagining myself playing a tough trumpet lick on a bus as we drove to a music contest. Professional musicians and athletes often refer to this mental practice since they are on the road so often, without the ability to physically practice like they are used to doing. Read a good article on this topic here.

Mental imagery is something that can help build memory for particular actions or cognitive activities, largely because neuroimaging experiments show as much as 90% of the neurons that are used in the actual, physical activity are firing in mental imagery exercises. To the brain, imagery is not so different from the real thing. Imagery can help us with the following:

- not only visualizing what the activity is, but also gaining spatial, auditory and kinesthetic information and practice and memory for that activity;
- helps with activities with high levels of organization, multi-steps, and decision making;
- positive imagery has a positive effect on real performance results: for example, golfers do 30% better on putting when positively imagining sinking putts, and 20% worse when imagining missing putts;

For readers, 60% of 5th graders report naturally using some imagery during 'think aloud' breaks in reading stories. It appears to be a natural reaction, even for children, to try and 'see' the scenes that words are trying to convey in order to develop memories of a story that we, ourselves, are not part of in reality. Humans are more visual creatures, as I like to tell my own students, and it is important to remind and also teach students how to visualize physical events and experiences. In fact, in problem solving in physics, I try and teach as an essential part of every single problem to draw a picture and mentally 'see' what is happening in the problem. We use a technique that requires making pictures and labeling all forces on the picture, and then use the picture to actually set up the math (for F = ma problems). So science and imagery are naturally connected, just as reading, writing and imagery are connected. Memory improves when visualization and imagery are used for stories or for how physical events play out in reality. The experimental finding that a good majority of the brain used for the physical activity is used in imagery, too, begins to explain why this process works.

Imagery is used extensively in elementary grades, and the combination of mental imagery with drawing pictures and other hands-on, physical activities makes for a powerful way of building memory and learning. We tend to actually decrease the use of imagery techniques as students progress into higher grades. Perhaps imagery is used most extensively in science classes by the time students get to high school, but it seems as if the use of imagery and hands on activities decreases significantly in literature and history/social studies classes, at least via anecdotal evidence and through conversations with students. Perhaps this is something educators need to consider more in practice.

Hypocrisy in Government? Perhaps a bit....

2009-12-25T18:55:00.000-08:00

At least there is some media coverage bubbling up about the hypocrisy of Republicans who are fighting the Obama/Democrat attempt at health care reform. A good number of the Republican Senators who are leading this fight, who argue that they worry about a huge increase in the federal deficit with a 'government takeover' of health care, were the same ones who sponsored and supported and voted in the Medicare prescription drug program that passed a few years ago under Pres. Bush, when Republicans also had control of the Congress. That plan was truly a giveaway to the drug industry, as it was entirely deficit funded. It has added over a half trillion dollars to the deficit since its inception, and also provided the infamous 'doughnut hole' in funding for drugs for seniors.

Check out the article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091225/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_deficit. But now, the resistance to health care reform is based on a lack of evidence as far as how it is funded. There are savings built in and, yes, some tax increases on the wealthy, that help pay for the reforms. In fact, not only does the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score it as cost neutral, but actually will reduce the deficit by some $130 billion over the next decade. Projections may or may not be accurate depending a whole series of assumptions that are made, but this is generally the official budgetary analysis that is provided to the Congress for bills that are being considered.

While I am singling out the GOP on this one, as I and most people I know are so completely frustrated by the circus that is called the Congress, let me make it clear that both sides show this type of hypocrisy in the name of partisanship battles. It just depends who happens to have majority power during a particular political cycle. It is part of the game called politics, and it is at least beneficial to be aware of the game. We will see what happens.

Health Care Reform on the Way?

2009-12-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

Despite unanimous disapproval from the GOP, the Senate has passed its version of Health Care reform. Now, the House and Senate begin the task of taking those two bills to conference committee to try and strike a final deal on a final bill, to be ultimately signed into law by the President.

It is a long, messy process to say the least, with obvious bitter feelings on many sides of the issues facing our health care system. And although whatever happens in conference committee, you can be sure there will still be universal votes against it from Republicans. There were numerous attempts to try and get portions of the bill to hook in some small number of those on the right, ranging from abortion language to dropping the public option to better language and policy favoring small business, but it really doesn't matter in the end because it had become and is clear nothing would gain any support on the right. I like to think this is not true, but there is something to the first set of comments from Rush Limbaugh immediately after Pres. Obama was sworn into office, where many on the right simply want to see the Obama agenda fail at all costs, period.

I try to listen to the arguments and complaints by the Republican leadership, who are out there every day stating why health care reform will destroy the economy and our childrens' futures, but evidence does not support their claims. Just the fact that some 30 million presently uninsured Americans will be able to obtain some level of health insurance, so one severe injury or illness does not bankrupt them, is a good thing. Can we agree on that? We haven't heard the right bring out CBO numbers lately because the 10-year projection is that it does pay for itself and trims $130 billion from the national debt. There are benefits and incentives for small businesses, which will drive the eventual job creation in the country, which is why some allies of small business have endorsed the plan. We'll keep hearing complaints about how seniors are going to start dying off early from non-existent 'death panels' that some on the right still throw out there for fear-raising purposes, or that Medicare is being raped - this despite the fact that the AARP endorses the plans. If there was any significant detrimental effect on seniors, this endorsement never happens...the language cannot be all that bad, apparently. And most importantly, if there were serious threats to the quality and extent of health care in the country, the AMA never endorses the plans - but they have, so this suggests it can't be all that bad. In fact, many doctors I know still think the best thing that could happen to control costs is some sort of public option, or at least what many other nations do, which is make insurance companies be not-for-profit organizations.

It is only a good thing that insurance companies will no longer be able to have entire divisions devoted to searching for needles in the haystack for their customers pasts so they can have an excuse to deny coverage when the customer needs it the most. It is only a good thing when insurance companies can no longer drop coverage without warning when a necessary procedure is too expensive. And it is only a good thing when it becomes illegal for someone with a 'pre-existing condition' to finally be able to get coverage that will not bankrupt them. If these were the only changes in the end, it would be worth the effort.

Change is not easy. Hell, small change at the local level is never easy, let alone big change at the national level. There is no such thing as a perfect bill in any policy area at any level. There are too many interests and too many emotions that arise to make much more that 50% of the country happy in anything nowadays. So I hope the Democrats push on and pass this, since it is now pointless to hope for any support from Republicans. There are some good things in the bill that will help millions of Americans. If the projections are at all accurate, not only is this going to be cost neutral, but actually lead to some savings. Does more need to be done in the near future to further reduce health care costs and the rates at which those costs are going up? Absolutely. Could the process have been handled better on both sides of the aisle? Absolutely. Are there still going to be critics and those on the far right demanding the Democrats be burned at the stake? Absolutely. But this could be an enormous first step in a multi-step process. Nearly a century after Pres. Teddy Roosevelt called for health care reform, we might get some necessary, very much overdue changes within the next month or two, depending how long the bills are debated in committee. It is time to get it done.

Scientific American Top 10 Science Stories for 2009

2009-12-22T19:39:00.000-08:00

Check out the Scientific American Top 10 scientific stories of 2009. Always a good time debating top 10 lists. Perhaps the lead next year will be the discovery of the Higgs boson, either at Fermilab or CERN.

A Map of the Whole of Science

2009-11-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

My good friend Zenpundit sent me the link to the map of science below. It is a wonderful tool showing topical and paradigm links between the major disciplines of science. You can click on the map and zoom and move around the map to read the topics that make up the links. It is truly worth viewing up close to see all the various areas of science and research. Have fun!

Wasting Food - Something to Ponder After We Over-eat on Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T23:55:00.000-08:00

I personally enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, for it is a good chance to be with family and reflect on how much they mean to me. There is also a side benefit, one where we are able to dine in the extreme with an overabundance of delicious homemade turkey dinner. As with any large meal, particularly with numerous children participating in the festivities, I cannot help but notice there is a good amount of food being thrown out, as stomachs fill more quickly than the original estimate one's eyes make just prior to eating. But until I read a story summarizing a new estimate of how much food Americans throw out, I had no idea of the true waste I have witnessed.

Americans throw out approximately 40% of the food produced in the U.S. This is a staggering number, but it is the result of a study done by researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. This translates into 1400 calories of food per day per person, or some 150 trillion calories per year of wasted food and nutrition. This is happening in a time where, with the economic crisis that has unfolded since 2007, an additional 2 million Americans have been added to the rolls of those who do not have enough to eat every day, going from 4.7 million to 6.7 million people just in two years. This is an estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Worldwide, about one billion people go without adequate amounts of food.

There is an oversupply of food in the U.S., and it has led to some noteworthy health problems such as widespread obesity, increased amounts of heart disease and diabetes, and I would hypothesize our poor diets with food excess play some role in the shorter life spans Americans see when compared to other wealthy nations, where diet selection and choice is healthier than what many Americans choose.

As a citizen in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen, I am thankful for the opportunity to walk into countless stores and be able to select as much food for myself and my family as we can stand. Our grocery stores are considered in many countries around the world to be centers of unimaginable volume of food that will not ever be realized in those countries. Perhaps it is time to recognize this overabundance and figure out how to better distribute food in order to use the waste we now produce to actually be put to use and feed some of those billion hungry world citizens, many of whom are children. Many experts argue there is enough food being produced worldwide to feed the global population, but the way it is distributed and managed and taken for granted in certain regions of the world leads to vast waste. We can and must do better, in order to allow as many individuals to have the opportunity to enjoy the life given to them, rather than going hungry and having no hope of pursuing their dreams. Let's try to become more thoughtful of how much food we waste, and begin to trim the volume of food we take each meal. Let's purchase what we will actually consume, and let's encourage restaurants to actually serve smaller portions than the mountain of food a typical meal includes, and which so few costumers can actually finish without being bloated.

Farthest Object Ever Observed

2009-11-02T22:08:00.000-08:00

At some 13 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS from Earth, this gamma ray burst is now the most distant object ever observed. At roughly 600 million years after the Big Bang, we are seeing the remnant of one of the first generation stars that formed after the universe was created. Gamma ray bursts are among the most energetic events known to scientists. Truly remarkable!

My Class Blog

2009-10-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

At the start of the school year, I started a separate blog specifically for my physics classes. It will be a work in progress, of course, with one aspect being a variety of 'how to' videos for numerous physics problems and topics. The latest, for example, is 'how to do multi-body systems with tension,' which can be confusing to students who are first exposed to such problems. The videos are actually screencasts with voice, made with ScreenToaster, which I recommend to all teachers. This online tool, along with a tablet computer, is truly a powerful combination for producing useful presentations that can be embedded online. I have already used such screencasts for students who miss a couple days due to illness or college visits, where examples done in class and then put online have allowed them to catch up immediately. I plan on making an online library with all sorts of examples, notes, and demonstrations so students can review at their leisure, whether it is just to remind themselves of what went on during class, or reviewing for a quizzam, or catching up when absent. It is also a good tool for parents to check out if they are interested in what happens in their child's class.

Tens of Thousands Die Young Who Do Not Have Health Insurance

2009-09-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

A new study has come out in the American Journal of Public Health, and health records and data suggest some every year nearly 45,000 uninsured Americans between the ages of 19 and 64 die early due to complications with their health, which would likely have been prevented had they had private insurance. This group of people do not have private insurance, and even when public health clinic are available, this does not contribute as much to sustained health as seeing one's own doctor. In general, there is a 40% higher risk of death for uninsured compared to insured Americans.

There is a summary article of how the study was done in Scientific American. If this is not motivation for our political leaders to get something done this year to reform how we run our health care system, I don't know what will.

Accessing a Radioactivity iLab

2009-08-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

Capture your screen in seconds

New Record High Ocean Temperature

2009-08-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

Because I live near Chicago, and we are having one of the most comfortable, meaning coolest, summers on record, I do hear a number of people mentioning that 'global warming' is indeed not real. However, we need to remember that a key concept is carried by the word 'global' and that local weather can be entirely misrepresentative of warming. This is why 'global climate change' is a more accurate phrase, with climate replacing warming, that captures the essence of what the vast majority of scientists who study climate are worried about. Some areas of the world are expected to continue warming, however there are some areas that are actually expected to cool.

But key components of the global climate system are the oceans. Ocean currents help transfer energy, in the form of heat, around the world and help drive climate. The news continues to be a source of concern to scientists, as a new record high temperature was recorded this past year for the world's ocean temperatures. The largest increases have happened in the Arctic Ocean, which is why ice sheets continue to melt at high rates. The moral of the story is to not let local weather fool us into thinking we are suddenly in the clear.

Asteroid Hunters

2009-08-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

When the dinosaurs went extinct some 65 million years ago, it is widely believed that a large impact between the earth and an asteroid was responsible. There is evidence for such an impact near the Yucatan Peninsula. In 1994, for the first time in human history we were able to watch the Shoemaker-Lavy comet impact Jupiter. The Jupiter impacts, where some of the impact areas were larger than the earth itself, and studies of moon crater rates, showed us that large impacts do still happen, even though the inner solar system is not as crowded as it was millions of years ago with asteroids in earth-crossing orbits around the sun. Most scientists who study these events agree that the earth will ultimately experience another large impact with an asteroid.

While this is popularly the stuff of science fiction, with Hollywood movies such as Armegeddon, it is a serious topic when considered by scientists. Yes, there could, and likely will, be an impact one day in the not so distant future, between earth and a larger asteroid. And if that happens, there would be catastrophic, global consequences.

In 2005, Congress assigned NASA the mission of identifying 90% of the estimated 20,000 larger earth-crossing asteroids by the year 2020. In this case, 'large' would be asteroids with a diamter of 460 feet or more. This sized rock is large enough to survive passage through the atmosphere and devastate a large region on the ground. Of course, as this size increases, so does the impact energy and devastation area. The goal is to plot orbits and try to identify any that are on a possible collision course with the earth in the near future (within several decades worth of time until impact). To date, some 6000 have been identified and catelogued.

However, NASA reports conclude that the funding Congress was supposed to be providing to carry out this mission has never been given to NASA. In order to find such close objects to earth, a different network of telescopes is needed to accurately track such objects. It is to NASA's credit that they have been able to find 6000 at this point without the telescopes and funds.

With limited funding, it is doubtful NASA will be able to accomplish this mission, and little is being done anywhere else in the world regarding this issue. With enough warning time, there are possible interventions humans could make to save the earth from an impact event, and this is the purpose for beginning the NASA asteroid hunting mission in the first place. This is a mission worth completing.

Thoughts on Afghanistan

2009-08-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

My good friend Zenpundit has posted the single best analysis of what we should be doing in Afghanistan that I have seen. A realistic set of goals for a truly tough situation. As this has been transitioning into 'Obama's war,' I hope the new administration will develop a strategy similar to Zen's.

When Emotion and False Statements Drive Policy Debates

2009-08-10T18:14:00.000-07:00

Publicity hound Rush Limbaugh comparing Pres. Obama to Adolf Hitler, and Sarah Palin stating the health care proposals coming out of Congressional committees promote suicide, take away health care from those who need it most, and says Obama's "evil plan" has "death panels" that will control what happens to those who are close to dying, have made the headlines this past week. That was by design. The more outrageous the statement, the more press coverage. And the more you can get the masses all riled up since just about no one ever does their own research for little things called facts. Democrats trying to hold town hall meetings across the country are being forced to cancel them due to unruly crowds and, in one case, death threats against the Congressman. The millions being spent to crush any type of reform whatsoever is making some progress, it seems, even though the main claims are inherently false, particularly the wild claims by Palin.

I am putting a Comcast news article below verbatim, since it does a fact check that completely contradicts what the far right campaign of fear mongors have been spreading daily.

"WASHINGTON — Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin says the health care overhaul bill would set up a "death panel." Federal bureaucrats would play God, ruling on whether ailing seniors are worth enough to society to deserve life-sustaining medical care. Palin and other critics are wrong.

Nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision. The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes. Here are some questions and answers on the controversy:

Q: Does the health care legislation bill promote "mercy killing," or euthanasia?

A: No.

Q: Then what's all the fuss about?

A: A provision in the House bill written by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., would allow Medicare to pay doctors for voluntary counseling sessions that address end-of-life issues. The conversations between doctor and patient would include living wills, making a close relative or a trusted friend your health care proxy, learning about hospice as an option for the terminally ill, and information about pain medications for people suffering chronic discomfort.

The sessions would be covered every five years, more frequently if someone is gravely ill.

Q: Is anything required?

Monsignor Charles Fahey, 76, a Catholic priest who is chairman of the board of the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit service and advocacy group, says no.

"We have to make decisions that are deliberative about our health care at every moment," Fahey said. "What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini — then let me go."

Q: Does the bill advocate assisted suicide?

A: No. It would block funds for counseling that presents suicide or assisted suicide as an option.

Q: Who supports the provision?

A: The American Medical Association, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and Consumers Union are among the groups supporting the provision. AARP, the seniors' lobby, is taking out print advertisements this week that label as false the claim that the legislation will empower the government to take over life-and-death decisions from individuals.

Q: Should the federal government be getting involved with living wills and end-of-life questions — decisions that are highly personal and really difficult?

A: It already is.

The government requires hospitals to ask adult patients if they have a living will, or "advance directive." If the patient doesn't have one, and wants one, the hospital has to provide assistance. The mandate on hospitals was instituted during a Republican administration, in 1992, under President George H.W. Bush.

Q: How does a living will work, and how is it different from a health care proxy?

A: A living will — also called an advance directive — spells out a patient's wishes if he or she becomes incapacitated. Often people say they don't want to be kept alive on breathing machines if their condition is terminal and irreversible.

A health care proxy empowers another person to make medical decisions should the patient become incapacitated.

There's also a power-of-attorney, which authorizes another person to make financial decisions for someone who is incapacitated.

Such legal documents have become standard estate-planning tools in the last twenty years.

Q: Would the health overhaul legislation change the way people now deal with making end-of-life decisions?

A: It very well could.

Supporters of the provision say the main consequence would be to formally bring doctors into a discussion that now takes place mainly among family members and lawyers.

"When you execute a legal document with your lawyer, it ends up in your files and in the lawyer's files," said John Rother, a senior policy and strategy adviser for AARP. "Unless the doctor is part of this discussion, it's unlikely that your wishes will be respected. The doctor will be the one involved in any decisions."

The American Medical Association says involving doctors is simple common sense.

"There has been a lot of misinformation about the advance care planning provisions in the bill," AMA President Dr. James Rohack said in a statement. "It's plain, old-fashioned medical care."

Q: So why are some people upset?

Some social conservatives say stronger language is needed to protect seniors from being pressured into signing away their rights to medical treatment in a moment of depression or despair.

The National Right to Life Committee opposes the provision as written.

"I'm not aware of 'death panels' in the bill," said David O'Steen, executive director of the group. "I'm not aware of anything that says you will be hauled before a government bureaucrat. But we are concerned ... it doesn't take a lot to push a vulnerable person — perhaps unwittingly — to give up their right to life-sustaining treatment."

The White House says it is countering false claims with a "reality check" page on its Web site, http://www.whitehouse.gov."

Would it not be wonderful to debate issues and ideas on merit, facts, and evidence? To take testimony and advice of experts in the field and make informed decisions? Whether it comes from the right or the left, shame on those who knowingly and blatantly state lies and exaggerations, who spend more effort and creativity on what names they will call their opponents than on new, original ideas if they think the other side is so wrong.

Do we really want to keep the status quo? How has that been working? How is it working for the 50 million uninsured, who may be finaincially ruined if someone in th efamily is seriously ill? That is a national embrrassment. Are we happy spending twice as much on average as the rest of the Western, industrialized world on health care, while having lower life expecancies, higher infant mortality rates, more obesity, and higher cancer rates? Keep in mind all of the other countries in this category insure every single citizen while having results we ae striving for as far as actual health goes.

Let's try to have an honest debate...how would that be for change?

Wikipedia for Schools, With a New Twist

2009-08-05T21:43:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the use of Wikipedia as a primary research resource for school reports, many teachers do not allow it for fear of inaccurate information. At least in the sciences and other technical topics, I have yet to find any articles that are not accurate, and I do not mind if students use it. But like anything when it comes to research, one wants to ideally confirm information with multiple sources.

To help alleviate the fear factor many teachers have, there is a largely unknown version of Wikipedia that is specifically for schools. It has about 5500 articles on major topics in the main subject areas, and what is different is that each article has been reviewed for content accuracy by educators and is appropriate for children. What's more, the founders are purposely limiting the size of the site and offer a downloadable option, so you can copy it for free to a DVD or flash drive. The file size is about 3.5 GB. This version also provides school districts across the country an interesting option for one group of students.

I would imagine most districts have some number of students (primarily from low income homes) who have a computer at home, but their parents are unable to afford high-speed Internet access. Or perhaps a rural school district lies in a region of the country that still does not have infrastructure for high-speed Internet access. Districts have the option of purchasing DVDs and making and dispersing copies of the site to those families for use at home. This is the equivalent of providing a 20-volume encyclopedia (something like 34,000 images and 20 million words), for free, to eligible families. I could also imagine having students making the copies and/or dispersing them to families as a community service project.

This is another technological tool that will help level the playing field for students across the country who have not been able to have the same exposure to information due to location and socioeconomic status, and I look forward to still other innovative ways to continue to break down information divides that may still exist. If interested in this site, downloading instructions are available here.

iLabs - Working to Improve STEM Education and Level the Playing Field

2009-07-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

Just over one year ago, Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) collaborated and won a $1 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the iLab Network. This is a network of university groups from around the world that will develop and implement remote experiments that are accessible over the Internet. Students from anywhere around the world with Internet access will be able to make use of real equipment to get actual data from the experiments. Teachers and students can request accounts at http://ilabcentral.org.

High school science programs tend to have traditional equipment, with some relatively small number of electronic sensors, from companies such as Pasco or Vernier, but the sensors are for fairly basic measurements and applications, such as temperature probes, voltmeters, pH meters, and so on. It is difficult to do sophisticated experiments that require hardware that is much too expensive for a high school to afford. Besides a lack of equipment, time is also a major factor for high school science labs because it is difficult to do involved measurements in a 45-minute period. But colleges tend to have such equipment.

Many college courses have made use of remote labs for the past decade. This was in part to save class time for moving through material and allowing students time to collect data remotely on their own time, and often from their dorm rooms since it was online. Lab reports could then be completed over some given time period and turned in either with hard copies or through email. Only recently has the effort to put more sophisticated and interesting experiments online for high school access been made, and the iLab Network is ready to be at the forefront of this effort.

The first experiment to have a full curriculum and access for high school students is the effect distance has on radiation intensity. Many high schools do not have radiation sensors such as Geiger counters, let alone strong radioactive samples. An experimental setup at the University of Queensland, Australia, has been used by my classes and those of several of my colleagues in a pilot test, and students have been able to collect real data (as opposed to computer simulated data, which likely would have been used had it not been for the iLab) in just a few minutes, analyze it, and do fits of the data (typically with MS Excel) to determine the mathematical relationships between counts of radiation and distance between the strontium-90 source and the Geiger counter. Students are able to design the experiment around their selection of several parameters of the hardware, such as the distances to be used, the number of trials, and the exposure time of the Geiger counter to the radiation for each trial. Once an experiment is submitted and runs, it takes only minutes to finish and have an Excel file with the data available. Students can submit their experiments any time, and even if they are not online the files will be saved in the student's account for future access.

Other iLabs being developed include neutron spectroscopy (using a neutron beam from a nuclear reactor at MIT), a shake table to simulate earthquakes, various advanced circuits analyses, polymer crystallization, and a heat exchanger experiment. All of these are not possible in high schools, although they deal with highly interesting and engaging topics. And the vast majority of high schools do not have major research universities in their neighbohoods to conveniently and physically access the equipment necessary for these experiments. But remotely, everyone will have a chance, whether they go to school in a wealthy suburb, the inner city or in a rural community. I am personally excited by the prospect of evening the playing field for science classes in all communities. Having taught at an inner city school for several years, I can appreciate the opportunity iLabs will be presenting to science programs and their teachers and students.

One other aspect of these remote labs I want to point out is that remote experimentation has been vitally important for a number of scientific disciplines for years. High energy physics and nucelar physics have had researchers from around the world be able to access hardware and the collected data, and biologists, geologists and meterologists have used remote sensors and experiments in the field for years. This is a common experimental and analytical process for professional scientists and engineers, and the technology is filtering down to high schools, providing students with new opportunities to investigate topics that were once limited to books, lectures, and an occasional computer simulation that provides only theoretical, ideal data. iLab data is real, physical data, just as scientists would collect and need to analyze, complete with statistical uncertainties and the 'noise' of reality.

I look forward to continuing to work with the iLab principals for the benefit of students around the world, and I am curious as to what will be the next batch of remote iLab experiments. Check out other articles in the online Converge magazine, an NU press release, and Evanston Now.

Young Children and Reasoning

2009-07-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

The Drs. Eide have a recent post relating research results about young children, as young as 2 years old, and their ability to reason. For those of us who come through teacher training/certification programs, this cannot be! We are told that Jean Piaget found reasoning comes in developmentally at ages near 12-13 or so. But it appears Piaget was wrong on this one. I certainly recommend anyone in education to check out the article as well as second post by Dr. Peter Gray at Psychology Today about how young children are capable of reasoning in playful environments, where creativity is being encouraged and the experience of play allows children to reach conclusions that they typically would not if just being asked directly and more seriously as we may do in school. It appears children do not yet have abstract thinking or reasoning until they are closer to teenage years, but rather depend on experience to reason things out.

The research centers on how children answer syllogisms, introduced long ago by Aristotle, and more specifically, counterfactual syllogisms. The example provided is:

All cats bark (major premise)
Muffins is a cat (minor premise)
Does Muffins bark?

If a child is asked this in a straightforward, more direct or serious tone of voice as a teacher or other adult would likely do, they will not abstractly or logically see that Muffins will bark. Instead, young children will say no, that Muffins meows or purrs (as my own young children said just now when I asked this as a straight question as part of a normal conversation). This is their experience with our cat, so the notion they should answer that a cat barks does not make sense and they do not take it to mean anything in their answer. But when I presented the same syllogism (and others with a similar structure, such as: Penguins are black and white...some old TV shows are black and white...therefore some penguins are old TV shows) when we started playing a game we called 'Imagine That,' where snails move fast and cheetahs can't catch zebras any more since zebras could both fly and turn invisible (that was my 6 year old daughter's premise), my kids did indeed begin answering with the logically correct answers. It was interesting to do the experiment and see it happen first-hand.

The authors of the two posts wonder if we are underestimating children in school settings (which I would say, from my own experience, we certainly do fairly consistently! It is amazing what children can do when not restricted and put in a good frame of mind, and simply allowed to explore opportunities.), and how research that stems from this finding may lead to improvements in methodology in the classroom, from Pre-K through elementary and middle school. In fact, I found it interesting that, in the Gray article, developmental and cognitive psychologists now reject a distinction between concrete and abstract reasoning, since abstract concepts become interpretted and processed based on concrete experience. The argument is centered on the notion that imagination combined with your own daily experience can lead to the ability to think and reason abstractly.

What does this mean for educators and parents? I leave with a quote from the Dr. Gray article:

"My overriding point here is that play automatically induces hypothetical reasoning. It leads us to think about pretend worlds, where anything is possible, and to reason about those possibilities, rather than to limit our thoughts just to things that are true in the immediate here and now. In this way play promotes the kind of thought that is crucial not just to all of theoretical science but to all planning about the future, in which we must imagine possible events and think about how we might deal with those events.

Please do not draw the wrong conclusion from this little discussion. I am not arguing that it is a good idea, educationally, to induce playful states deliberately in children in order to improve their reasoning, as the researchers did in their experiment. Children play naturally, and it is through natural play that children practice reasoning. Children who are manipulated into play by teachers who think that this will improve their reasoning will soon learn to resist the manipulations. Play, in the long run, is only play if it is self-chosen and self-directed. Children practice reasoning in their own ways, through their own self-chosen play; we can't do it for them and shouldn't try. All we need to do, as I have argued in previous installments (e.g. Sept. 30, 2008, posting), is to provide places where children can play and explore safely and naturally, with others in age-mixed groups. They will take care of the rest."

Let children develop naturally, for their reasoning skills and abilities will develop...but we some times need to get out of their way and allow them to have some fun along the way in order for this to happen. :-)

Control of Weather - Do we want to go there?

2009-07-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

The History Channel just had a program dealing with human control of weather, and with a special emphasis on the weaponizing of weather. I only caught the last few minutes and therefore missed the details of the show, but for decades there have been serious scientists, military leaders, and politicians all the way up to the White House (including discussions in the Johnson, Nixon and Bush II administrations), who have contemplated ways to use the weather as a weapon. This progressed up to the point where militar leaders predict by 2025 the U.S. Air Force will have control of weather, and one can contemplate wars that consist of hitting a country with a 'natural disaster' that cripples the enemy country without needing a single shot from more conventional weapons being fired. This would also allow the country that made the attack to have plausible deniability, since they could claim that the weather event was an act of God, and one of those natural weather anomalies that cannot be predicted nor controlled.

There is an article in the Spring, 2007 Wilson Quarterly which summarizes the history of this concept of controlling weather. The formal name is climate engineering. My worry is our lack of knowledge of complex systems, and the numerous unintended consequences that could be realized. The fact that we are unable to predict weather more than a couple days in advance is evidence of our ignorance of global complex systems. Weather is not a local phenomenon, but is instead linked to what the atmosphere and oceans and cosmic environments are doing. We would be playing with proverbial fire, IMO. There is much to learn.

An Interesting Set of Observations About Education, Courtesy Dr. Tae Kim

2009-07-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, Dr. Tae Kim, who has been at Northwestern University most recently, has an interesting set of ideas about the state of education in the United States. Check out a recorded version of his last lecture, Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning, at:

http://vimeo.com/5513063

It is about 30 minutes in length, but worth the listen when you have time.

Scientific and Engineering Marvel - Landing Men on the Moon

2009-07-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

On July 20, 1969, the United States landed men on the moon. The Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon, and made history. Scientific American has a series of articles about the trip, and the 40th anniversary of the mission.

There is a good summary of the history of getting to the moon at Wikipedia.

Memorization in Schools

2009-07-19T05:52:00.001-07:00

As part of the discussion taking place about the need for 'Big Picture' thinking and learning in our educational system, part of the argument against what is presently happening in classrooms has been too much memorization in order to do well on the next test. But good points are brought up that there is a need for memorization. Perhaps the best example is how medical doctors need to memorize human anatomy, which is obviously relevant and vital to a doctor's work.

I wanted to make the distinction, though, between the two types of memorization that educators need to worry about: short-term versus long-term. We should be looking for the latter type in education, rather than the former.

Here is my full comment on my friend Zenpundit's post about big picture thinking:

"The notion of memorization has come up in a few comments. I agree that a certain type of memorization is necessary in education, and that is memorization for the sake of learning and eventual application (i.e. long-term memory). The example of medical doctors needing to memorize human anatomy is a prime example. But this is very different than what takes place in, say, most history classes, which is memorization for the sake of passing the next test. This is why most cannot come up with dates and events, because the focus of the individual was solely for the short-term when they ‘learned about’ those dates and events in school, in order to pass the test.

Students freely admit this, and I and most of my teacher friends know this to be true because we did the same thing when we were in middle school and high school. There was no importance/relevance given to us to make us want to try and raise the level of our learning to long-term memory, and many teachers will explicitly state ‘you need to know this for the test.’ If that is all that is required, and if that is all the motivation students are given, then of course we should expect nothing more than short-term memorization.

I tell my students on a very regular basis that they need to challenge me as a teacher…ideally on a daily basis. They (students) need to ask me, and often they do, "What is the point of me wanting to learn this stuff today?" If I cannot give them any reason that will some how connect to their life in any way, then I need to ask myself if this should really be in the curriculum. They may not agree with my argument or reasoning as to how it affects them, but they at least will acknowledge my effort to make a connection. Why should students need to learn something if it truly does not matter for them in any way? A lack of relevancy inevitably leads to short-term memorization for the vast majority of students."

In a high-stakes testing environment, we are teaching to the test. And we've got to change how we approach this by offering students the reason for learning what we are teaching them, by giving them reasons beyond "doing well on the test" for them wanting to learn the material and skills. We are absolutely shooting ourselves in the foot with the approach we have been forced into in our classrooms, and many students are being ripped off in terms of the quality of their education.

WE MUST AVOID BECOMING A TEST MERITOCRACY AT ALL COSTS. It leads to a largely short-term memorization approach from students, devoid of creativity and innovation and application of long-term learning and strategic thinking.

Good Discussion Going on About 'Big Picture' Education

2009-07-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

I recently posted about a topic started by the Drs. Eide, regarding the lack of 'Big Picture' thinking, teaching, and learning in our educational system. These two posts were then picked up by my good friend Zenpundit, after we had a good discussion over lunch a few days ago. Himself a stellar educator and deep-thinking analyst, Zen took the baton and presented his support of the notion that we are regressing in education, largely driven by the implementation of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing, and this has all led to a wonderful discussion thread you can follow from Zen's post.

Zen and others have brought up the near desperate need for high-level thinkers who have been trained and educated, at least in part within a 'big picture' framework, because this is precisely what is required for long-range, strategic thinking, planning and implementation. Society has largely been focused on short-range, today-to-tomorrow thinking and planning, and this is not at all what is required in this day and age. Many tend to forget, or worse have not been exposed to, history; perhaps this is because much of what we are taught in history classes boils down to memorizing dates and facts, rather than true analysis of cause and effect of particular policy or action that led to specific consequences, which in turn led to other consequences...you may be guessing, correctly, I am implying a lack of big picture thinking in history, too.

This type of longer term strategic thinking is and has been for some time largely absent from our policitical leaders. This is driven from the need to post today's and yesterday's results and accomplishments, rather than where such and such policy will lead us in ten, twenty or fifty years from now, because of the desire to extend one's career by winning the next election. And why do politicians do this? It is like any other market - politicians sell the electorate what the electorate wants to hear, and that is short-term results, because that is how the electorate has been trained to think in school.

I like what was posted at Red Herrings regarding this discussion:

"I think the problem in many ways goes even deeper. How much has a focus on the minimum required effort, intellectual instant gratification and a lack of any kind of emphasis or training in long-term thinking affected the very culture of the United States and contributed to a range of problems from obesity and political apathy to over-spending and the credit crisis.

How we teach becomes how we learn, and how we learn becomes how we think. We teach to the test. We learn the minimum required to reach the minimum standard. We think no farther than the next chapter, the next test, the next evaluation, the next paycheck, the next credit card payment. We have stopped thinking about year five much less year twenty five of a thirty year mortgage, and the same thinking horizon applies to health and political decision making. It isn’t about intelligence. There are many very smart people out there who are very good, very fast, thinkers, and if we have gained any kind of skill in dealing with “complex, dynamic, fast moving situations” it is only because we are in a constant state of flux, constantly in crisis mode, and constantly trying to squeeze advantage at best and survival at minimum, out of the bad situations we constantly find ourselves in. That takes skill and inventiveness, but not everyone is that quick, innovative or lucky. However, long-term, strategic thinking in advance of a crisis could have prevented those situations from ever adversely impacting us or even turned them into opportunities to further our goals."

I highly recommend reading through the various comments and links to posts about this topic.

A 2-Year Science Course for Grades 9-10. What do you think?

2009-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

My previous post addresses why I think we have a need to include some amount of the 'Big Picture' to classes. We need to show students why what they are studying matters, how it applies to their world, and why we need to focus on real learning for students. I have thought about what a big picture science course might look like, and below is a basic draft of one possibility. It would be integrated and team-taught over grades 9 and 10 in high school, and it addresses in a logical (at least in my mind) order the connection between many different disciplines in science. I am curious to learn what you think about it.

First Year
I. Ingredients for a Universe
A. Size Scales – Powers of Ten; From Big to Small, Science Studies it All!
B. Observation and Scientific Process
C. Big Bang – What is it, and what evidence supports it?
D. Energy – Basics and Examples
E. Matter – Basics and Examples (include E = mc2)
F. Forces – Basics (Newton’s laws) and Examples
G. What is Physics?

II. Atoms
A. What are they?
B. Electric Force
C. Nuclear Forces
D. Molecules (and introduction to bonding, valence electron concepts)
E. State of Matter - Gas
F. Gravity
G. Phase transition – Gas to Plasma (new state of matter)
H. Stars – Heavy Atom Factories (nuclear reactions)
I. Evolution of Universe – Simplicity to Complexity (quarks/electrons to atoms to gas clouds to stars to supernovae to heavy elements to planets to solar systems to galaxies to superclusters)
J. What is Astronomy?

III. Periodic Table
A. Patterns in Nature
B. Organization of elements based on patterns of chemical properties
C. Why does it look like it does? What those electrons are doing…
D. Significance of the Table…more on bonding, intro to reactions (both chemical and nuclear)
E. What is Chemistry?

IV. The Solar System
A. Formation of Planets
B. States of Matter – Liquid & Solid
C. Behavior of Planets – Kepler’s laws of Planetary Motion
D. The Structure of Earth
i. Land (include core, plate tectonics)
ii. Water
iii. Atmosphere
E. Chemical Reactions
F. What is Geoscience?

V. Life
A. What is Life?
i. Characteristics of Life
ii. Chemistry of Life
B. First Life on Earth
C. The Cell
D. Genetics
E. Evolution of Life – Simplicity to Complexity (build off the previous series: simple molecules to polyatomic molecules to organic systems to molecular networks to simple structures to cells to tissues to organs to organisms…)
F. What is Biology?

Summer Supplements
I. The Math – algebra practice; basic trig of right triangles
II. Summer readings and/or project

Second Year
I. Motion in Everyday Life
A. Basics of Vectors
B. Applying Newton’s laws of Motion – Equilibrium vs Nonequilibrium
C. Applying Conservation of Energy
D. What is Engineering?

II. Thermodynamics
A. Energy in Chemistry
B. Entropy
C. Types of Chemical Reactions & why reactions happen in the first place
D. What is Physical Chemistry?

III. Electricity and Magnetism
A. Electrostatics
i. Field and Force
ii. Potential and Electrical Energy
B. Electric Current and Origin of Magnetism
C. Power Generation – Faraday’s law
D. Bioelectromagnetism
E. What is Biophysics?

IV. Communication
A. Intermolecular
B. Cellular (not the phones…at least not yet)
i. Cell-Environment
ii. Intercellular
C. Nervous system
D. Waves
i. Properties & Phenomena
ii. Sound
a. The ear
b. Sonar for animals
iii. Electromagnetic Radiation
a. Visual communication, the eye
b. Radar, satellites
c. Astronomical communication
E. What is Biochemistry?

V. Science for the Citizen (for political, economic, environmental issues): Applications of What We Have Studied That Affects Your Life on a Daily Basis (Relevancy of the science; prior knowledge, personal experience, self-discovery, project-based, choice of what to study, possible careers in science and technology, etc)
A. Global Climate Change
B. Genetic Engineering (including stem cell research)
C. Energy Sources
D. Nuclear Power and Weapons Proliferation
E. Computer Security
F. Food and Water Supplies
G. Medicine – Fighting Disease, Bioterrorism
H. Intelligent Design and Creationism vs. Big Bang and Evolution
I. The Next Generation of Space Exploration
i. Back to the Moon, to Mars?
ii. Protecting the Earth
J. Ethics in Science and in Public Policy related to Science
K. When Does Life Begin? The Abortion issue
L. Where will the jobs be for your generation? Why you should care about everything you have studied in this course…

A Need for some 'Big Picture' Exposure in Education

2009-07-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

I am glad to see posts such as the recent one by the Drs. Eide, entitled "The Paradigm Shift for Big Picture Thinking." They argue for, and I agree entirely, that:

"Instead of training for compliance, careful rule-following, and exact memorization or a paragon of crystallized intelligence, we need to make more room for 'big picture' thinkers - while still recognizing the need for basic skills and knowledge."

When I talk with students (juniors and seniors in high school) about how different subjects and classes are taught, invariably it comes down to great amounts of memorization. Most students, when you engage them in real conversations about the education they receive, will open up freely and get right to the point...because of the continued emphasis on grades and GPAs by colleges, students feel the need to focus first on memorization and get the grade on the test, and then move on to the next topic without much concern with what was just studied. When this is the case in school, has true learning just occurred? Likely not, if students are unable to recall and actually apply concepts that were covered in the past. I personally would love to change my job title from 'teacher' to 'learning facilitator,' or something similar. Teaching happens everyday in every classroom. But if student learning does not take place, what is the point? Teaching and learning are not the same thing, and I for one want the latter over the former!

To make matters worse, as students rely so heavily on memorization and short-term success on tests (and this is driven home even more in the 'high stakes testing' environment we find ourselves in in the era of No Child Left Behind, as resently implemented), those students, many of whom are gifted, as the Eides point out, who prefer complexity in their learning, are not benefitting from the way many (most) classrooms are run. By complexity, I mean those students who want to 'see the big picture.' Those students who want to know why something works, and how it is related to the material that was studied last semester as well as to the material that was covered in another class. For example, I love when students in my physics classes come to me asking about how to interpret and apply a particular integral result which was just studied in calculus class, or how Einstein's theories changed political and military history, as studied in a history course. Those moments happen every so often, as a result of student curiosity and their wanting to truly learn about the material rather than memorize something for the test, and good teachers recognize such moments when they happen...that is what I want school and the education process to be like for every student. I guarantee we (i.e. society) will be the beneficiaries if we can figure out how to do this systemically.

How can change, or the paradigm shift the Eides are referring to, like this occur? I still firmly believe it won't ever happen until we get state boards of education together with teaching colleges and work together to change how teachers are trained. They need to be taught in this manner in the colleges so they have practical, real-world models to think about and employ when in the classroom, rather than the enormous amount of theoretical psychology that has been in traditional certification programs (and which I personally have never used in an actual classroom). Master teachers of this strategy need to be the ones to work staff development sessions rather than outside consultants who are preaching the traditional single-topic methodologies I think we should be using, but together with other methodologies (example: I've been to how to use phonics sessions, and how to use whole language sessions - I have yet to go to a session that gets teachers thinking about and trained in how to use the best of phonics and the best of whole language to get the most bang for the buck). Teachers need to learn how to do more coordinated team-teaching so kids are exposed to the interplay between math-science-reading-writing-history-art-technology.

Too many students are missing out on seeing the 'big picture' of what they study, and therefore have a difficult time in answering the question every student asks at some point, and that is - What is the point? of what I was just shown in class. This is then the lead to the next question - What is the point of school itself? We owe it to them to be able to answer this question, as more and more educators are unable to provide a good answer.

Some Thermafrost thawing, and some resulting Methane gas can be trouble

2009-06-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post. Scientific American has an article outlining some research into the methane gas being released from thawing thermafrost up in Alaska. If all of the thermafrost were to thaw out, tens of billions of tons of methane gas might be released. This is truly significant since methane outdoes carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas by a factor of 25.

Prof. Yong Zhao Has it Right About Education: Mistake Obsessing About Test Scores

2009-06-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

Michigan State professor of education Yong Zhao has been speaking at a number of conferences about education, education reforms, achievement gaps, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), technology in education, and so on, and I could not agree more with one of the main points he consistently stresses: "The point of education is NOT to produce high test scores." He makes what is, in my opinion, a key observation about our national obsession of comparing American students scores in math and science with those students in other countries. When such comparisons are made, typically the U.S. is in the bottom half of the countries that take the test. He asks the question, "Does such an achievement gap, while real, really matter, except for national pride?" He, like I have for a number of years, argues this 'gap' is not so important. What's more important is summed up nicely in an article he wrote for Phi Delta Kappa's journal Edge:

"Instead,we are becoming obsessed with test scores
in a limited number of subjects, which in essence is
the adoption of a single criterion for judging the success
of students, teachers, and schools. Once we
adopt this single criterion, and we are well on our
way, we will kill the most important and soughtafter
commodity in the 21st century — creativity."

I firmly believe there are some key reasons as to why the U.S. is the only superpower in the world, and included in this set of reasons is our often publicly pummeled and criticized public education system. We have been, until recently (i.e. up until the NCLB era), using a system where children do not have to take tracking tests at young ages (such as around the 5th grade) that will determine their academic and professional lives, and where students can take electives in all subject areas, where the student determines what he or she is good at and enjoys, and then has the ability to go to college or a trade school or into the work force and pursue their self-selected area of concentration. Creativity is encouraged, children are taught to take risks on occasion, and there are normally support systems in place to allow individuals to learn from mistakes and still have chances to move on. There has been a lack of 'high stakes tests' that determine a person's future, with only SAT and/or ACT exams approaching this level of testing. For those who go to college, there are hundreds of majors, all of which are available to pursue if one wants to, and there are more opportunities to get practical experience in one's chosen field as well as to get involved as undergraduates in research, internships, study abroad, and so on. Variety, exposure to multiple points of view, discovery of interrelationships between disciplines, and opportunities and rewards for creative solutions to problems are all part of the educational process. But limiting subjects of study and putting in single-assessment structures dampen, if not eliminate, all that is good and different within our education system. The U.S. has dominated in innovation, technology, science and economic development for the last six or seven decades because of what and how our children learn in school.

I have argued this, too, in the past, ranging from the reality of 'late bloomers,' the need to avoid becoming an exam meritocracy, and even how other countries are rethinking their test-focused education systems to add features of the U.S. education system. I anxiously await how the Obama administration will modify NCLB, particularly with how education is assessed. Will we stay with limited, snapshot tests that further restrict other curricula and limits creativity, or will the focus be on student growth (which can be measured) and ability to continue to not only emphasize math and reading, but also the arts, social studies, science, business and languages, so children can see a variety of disciplines that all affect our society and allow for interactions that encourage collaboration and innovation? I suspect there will be a change towards the latter, which I feel is absolutely the right thing to do for individual students learning as well as for the continued advancement of our country.

Year of Science Site - Very Cool

2009-06-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

Although we are half-way through 2009, I highly recommend checking out the 2009 Year of Science, which features a new theme each month. The present theme is Oceans and Water. Other months will feature physics, chemistry, geoscience, technology, astronomy, climate, sustainability, and much more. Very cool site for adults and kids, with a Fun Zone for the youngsters to look at, scientist features and cutting-edge research highlights.

Beginning to get serious about tapping into oceanic energy

2009-06-06T14:00:00.000-07:00

There seems to be an acceleration in plans to tap into the enormous energy naturally supplied by oceans, both tidal power and power from the deep oceanic currents. Check out a Scientific American article that begins to outline the plans to fast-track R&D in the American Northwest. The concept is completely analogous to wind farms, where 'windmills' are submerged into ocean current and 'blown' into spinning turbines just as terrestrial windmills and generators work. A challenge that becomes more of an issue in water is the effect on sea creatures of all types that benefit from ocean currents for food sources.

A second challenge that is relevant to both land-based and ocean-based mills and generators is the complete lack of infrastructure to transmit energy from the source to cities. This is precisely why the Obama administration dedicated down payments in the stimulus package for the initial development of some of this infrastructure, as well as money for modifications to the power grid in order to handle new energy plants and sources. As I tell my students who are now graduating high school and are interested in engineering and the physical sciences, it is a good time to be entering college and, in a few years, the job market, as we necessarily need to begin transforming the country's infrastructure and the way we produce energy. It is an unbelievably large task from both the research and applications sides of the business, but one in which we must accept and succeed as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Add more challenges to Obama's list...Somalia and Yemen

2009-05-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

President Obama has come into office facing as many big challenges as any President in my lifetime, to be sure. And the list continues to grow, with the recent addition of a flu pandemic and a legacy-building opportunity to select a Supreme Court Justice. Obviously, beyond the economic meltdown he is trying to contend with, there are major foreign policy challenges in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, and the ever-present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All of these are important in the fight against terrorism as well as nuclear proliferation and stability in unstable portions of the world. But as luck would have it, two more nations are, in my opinion, about to make the list of major problems: Somalia and Yemen.

These nations have certainly been on the radar screen, with the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the Somali pirates. However, growing evidence and international concern are showing that these largely lawless nations are home to ever-increasing numbers of Al Qaeda fighters, with Yemen being the most recent making headlines. I am fairly convinced the blinders our previous administration had on Iraq is the primary reason this has been occuring, as a lack of attention and resources in other parts of the world has taken its toll. There were multiple years of time for al Qaeda and other militant groups to establish themselves and begin gaining more recruits in impovershed areas of the world. We must hope for large-scale success in Pres. Obama's attempts to re-establish our alliances with the rest of the world and win support in assisting us in breaking down new militant networks and financing, for we certainly cannot do this alone.

Venice to Build Algae Power Plant

2009-04-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

The city of Venice, Italy, is taking a step in the truly green direction. There is a plan to build an algae power plant that will produce up to half of the city's energy. This is impressive, and also shows how efforts in other parts of the world are much more forward looking and advanced than what we Americans have been doing.

Producing energy from algae is not new. It began with research by none other than the US Department of Energy in the 1950s, but obviously there were political obstacles that never led to actual production. However, with some effort and extended research, there are some advantages to such power production, which includes taking carbon dioxide from the energy release process and feeding it back into the growth of new algae for future energy use. Researchers believe this can ultimately be close to a carbon neutral process, which is why there is a growing amount of interest in this energy production scheme. We are clearly close, since actual plants will indeed be built overseas.

Gregorash for Woodland School Board

2009-04-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

Dr. Lawrence Gregorash is running for a second term on the Woodland District 50 School Board. As a true leader and a major influence for the continued improvement of the K-8 district, including being a leading voice that pushed through the strategic plan being followed by the district, we need Dr. Gregorash back on the board to continue on a positive path. Vote on April 7!

Local Elections on April 7

2009-04-03T18:29:00.000-07:00

Local elections for mayors, village officials, school board members, and so on, take place next Tuesday. This round of elections tends to have poor turnout, even though "all politics is local." I wonder what tiny percentage of voters even know who their local trustees are, let alone school board members. But these offices are vital to how any small community runs, ranging from local tax rates to city ordinances to quality of life issues like parks and libraries, which in turn affects our property values and quality of schools for our children. It is important to have your voice heard when so many immediate issues are in play. Educate yourself with local news outlets about the issues and who is running, and get out to vote.

Disspelling a Myth - Public Schools do Better in Math than Private

2009-03-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

A study coming out of my alma mater, University of Illinois, concludes that public school students perform better in math on standardized tests than students from private schools. Check out a Science News article outlining the results.

This is a comprehensive study that used data from 270,000 4th and 8th grade students from 10,000 schools, so the results are significant with little in the way of statistical uncertainties. The researchers looked at five factors to see which correlated more positively to achievement. Those factors are parental involvement, school size, class size, teacher certification and instructional practices.

School size and parental involvement did not correlate significantly with achievement. However, small class sizes do correlate positively with achievement, and small class sizes are more prevalent in private schools. Certainly, the general public perception of private vs public schools is that everything private tends to be better, with the possible exceptions of the elite, wealthy public schools (such as a New Trier or Stevenson in the Chicago area) or magnet schools in urban areas, such as Walter Payton Prep in Chicago. But typically the strerotype is private is better in general.

So if small class size is more typical of private schools, how can public schools end up doing better than private in mathematics? It lies in the quality of the teachers and in the trend to adopt research-based, modern curriculum. Many private schools apparently still adopt traditional "back to basics" methods of learning mathematics, built around rote memorization and 'drill and kill' problems. Newer curricula are built around understanding concepts, problem solving and applications of math. Private schools also do not require or are mandated to have certified teachers, and tend to offer smaller salaries that are not competitive for top teachers. The research suggests these are the two driving forces that lead to better achievement, at least in mathematics.

Like anything else, though, there are outstanding private and public schools, and there are other schools that are in dire straits. This is an interesting study that not only concludes something that goes against common perceptions, but I think it more importantly gives insights into factors that make for better learning experiences for students. The evidence that curriculum and teacher certification and expertise are significant drivers for learning supports efforts among school districts for robust and focused staff development programs and collaborative efforts between universities and school systems for continual development and improvement of data-driven/research-based curricula. One other piece of this puzzle is, in my opinion, using cognitive science research in larger capacities with the development of curriculum as well as in-class practices, where we provide more ideal environments for students that are literally targeted at students' brains, and how our brains make the inner connections that lead to learning. This includes understanding differences between male and female brains and how they are 'wired,' where genders learn differently. There is still much to do, and hopefully both public (where 90% of our children go) and private schools use such research to better educate our children.

Geothermal energy production costs on par with that of Coal

2009-03-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

A new study suggests that the energy production costs coming from geothermal sources is now on par, and perhaps even cheaper, than the costs associated with energy coming from coal burning plants. This is important in this day and age of multiple billions of dollars from the stimulus package being destined for alternative energy sources. A summary can be found at Scientific American online.

Power production through turbines and generators is based on running pressurized steam through the turbine, which in turns spins loops of wire inside a magnetic field, thus inducing alternating voltage and currents. This is then brought into your town or city through the power grid. I don't think there is any doubt from any groups associated with the energy sector of the economy that the power grid needs serious work, and that there is a need for the U.S. to expand its energy portfolio. But how to go about reforming the energy sector is under intense debate from competing industries and other stakeholders. I am glad to not hear the "drill, baby, drill"groups on TV every evening, because that is not the answer long term. A well-balanced portfolio is necessary, and the dominant source of power will likely be based on local abundances of fuel or energy source. The south and southwest will likely have, in the next couple decades, a much higher percentage of its power coming from solar technologies relative to the north, and the north will likely have higher percentages of its portfolio using nuclear or wind. Certain areas of the country will make use of local geothermal or hydroelectric resources, and some may still rely more on fossil fuels.

One idea I would like to see researched is tidal power and the use of ocean currents to power generators. At some point, when drinking water becomes one of the major issues for certain portions of the U.S. and other countries, that same tidal or oceanic power is used by desalination plants along coastlines. This would certainly be cheaper than extending the power grid out into the oceans. It is an upsetting time for many as they consider the large increases in energy on a global scale, as China and India continue their march to becoming industrial and economic giants, but at the same time there is such an amazing opportunity to expand energy sources and see what some creative thinking will develop in the next 10-20 years. I do think Pres. Obama got it right to include some financial resources for new energy development in the stimulus bill, because in time the energy sector should be a major creator of good, technical jobs in the U.S. This all ties into national security and economic development, as well as manufacturing revival of some factories that will be needed to build the massive amounts of new infrastructure that the U.S. and most of the rest of the world will require as energy production expansion continues at rapidly increasing rates that match population increases globally. It is also a necessary step in protecting the environment and addressing global climate change. A good portion of the U.S. and global economies will, in fact, be 'energy economies' as we hear the president say so often.

I Agree with Newt Gingrich...did I just say that?! Mexico - a major security issue waiting to happen

2009-01-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich was on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous, and during a discussion about unforeseen problems the new Obama administration may encounter during its first year, Gingrich brought up the issue of Mexico and the near civil war that is presently underway between the government and the powerful drug cartels. Gingrich argued something that I have wondered about, largely due to the seemingly complete lack of American press coverage given to this issue - when will the U.S. get serious about a major problem right on our border?

With record numbers of homicides in Mexico, and some in southern border towns of the U.S., drug money from our completely failed 'War on Drugs' program of the past two decades is financing the terrible violence in Mexico. For a short summary of the problem, check out this article. When will we learn, or simply admit, that simply locking drug offenders in violent prisons is not the answer to our drug problems in the U.S.? When will treatment and educ ation programs take the lead, which tend to show much better results than the 'lock 'em up, I am tough on crime' mentality that we have had, making not even a dent in the drug flow or usage in the U.S.?

I have no idea what will work in Mexico, but I do agree with Gingrich (and this does not happen very often) that this issue may come up during Obama's first year as something the U.S. will need to get seriously involved in if violence continues to spill over the border and if it becomes an increasing issue with gang activity in the U.S. I fear it will become such an issue, which is something we cannot afford at the moment with the economy, unemployment, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Afghanistan, crumbling infrastructure, health care, entitlements and war on terror issues Obama is inheriting (and let's no forget another continuing problem we have not heard much from, a nuclear North Korea).

U.S. needs science and math teachers

2008-12-29T05:17:00.000-08:00

Yet another study has come out that confirms what many others have concluded over the past couple years, and that is U.S. middle schools and high schools need many more teachers over the next decade. Specifically, it is estimated that schools are going to need some 200,000 plus science and math teachers to fill in positions. Keep in mind that it is already a bad situation in middle schools, where surveys have shown more than 40% of science teachers are not certified in science, but have been quickly converted from other areas of study they were originally trained in. This does not bode well for the U.S., nor for children, who need to be prepared for a globally competitive economy which, of course, is becoming more and more dependent on science and math. The need for massive teacher recruitment, training, and retention is upon us.

President-elect Barack Obama has identified this issue as one of his priorities for education when he officially takes office. Because of economic conditions, it is unclear what is fiscally possible because he would like to offer up to 40,000 scholarships for science and math teachers who would, in return, commit three years of teaching in high-needs schools. There would be a focus on teacher support and mentoring, seeing how something like 40% of new teachers leave the profession within three years (which is why I always scratch my head when I hear so many people complain how easy teaching is and how easy teachers have it, but that's just me). This is an ambitious plan that may or may not happen because there will likely be no money available for so many scholarships, so alternatives need to be figured out, stat.

One option is the concept of virtual science departments, which is something I am very interested in and have begun to think about, along with a number of education professors and think-tanks. There needs to be a paradigm shift in education that makes better use of technologies that already exist and can help expand educational opportunities and level the playing field so rural and inner-city children have similar learning experiences to those from wealthier suburban schools. In addition, the possibility to begin personalizing education to better-match individuals interests, and therefore increase student engagement and learning in and out of schools, will become a reality. I will be posting more about this in the future, as well as remote science experiments being developed for a global iLabs Network, being developed by MIT and Northwestern University. This network will allow high schools and universities to access physical experiments, for which they do not have the resources to do, from other locations and facilities that do have the required hardware and software, via the Internet. This is in the first stages of development and testing, but in the next couple years will begin expanding the lists of possible experiments all schools have available to them.

There is so much to do, and little time in which to do it, if the U.S. is remain at the top level of science, engineering and technological innovation, and have a work force that can keep the country competitive with good jobs in the future.

There is a Correlation between Child's IQ and Birthweight

2008-12-28T07:57:00.000-08:00

I found an interesting, short article on Scientific American. There is a direct, positive correlation between birth weight and IQ scores for children at the age of seven. I am not sure if this is true or not, and will look into it, but if one assumes that larger babies have correspondingly larger brain mass, this would seem to make sense. A newborn is literally moving from one world into a brand new world, and will naturally be overwhelmed by the huge amount of environmental stimulus. More brain mass should allow the infant to better comprehend, learn and adapt over time. The effect is more pronounced for boys than for girls, but the effect is significant for both genders. There are several other related articles that can be linked to off this article, so I recommend checking those out if you are interested in this topic.

Guess: What am I?

2008-12-26T08:24:00.001-08:00

This comes from the site http://www.bl.com/ben/things/warranty.html. A student brought this to my attention. To what do you think this is referring? Thanks, MC.

"WARNING: This Product Warps Space and Time in Its Vicinity.

WARNING: This Product Attracts Every Other Piece of Matter in the universe, Including the Products of Other Manufacturers, with a Force Proportional to the Product of the Masses and Inversely Proportional to the Distance Between Them.

CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight.

HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles Per Hour.

CONSUMER NOTICE: Because of the "Uncertainty Principle," It Is Impossible for the Consumer to Find Out at the Same Time Both Precisely Where This Product Is And How Fast It Is Moving.

ADVISORY: There is an Extremely Small but Nonzero Chance That, Through a Process Know as "Tunneling," This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present location and Reappear at Any Random Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbor's Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damages or Inconvenience That May Result.

READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to Certain Suggested Versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the Primary Particles Constituting this Product May Decay to Nothingness Within the Next Four Hundred Million Years.

THIS IS A 100% MATTER PRODUCT: In the Unlikely Event That This Merchandise Should Contact Antimatter in Any Form, a Catastrophic Explosion Will Result.

PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability Is Implied Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to the Heat Death of the Universe.

NOTE: The Most Fundamental Particles in This Product Are Held Together by a "Gluing" Force About Which Little is Currently Known and Whose Adhesive Power Can Therefore Not Be Permanently Guaranteed.

ATTENTION: Despite Any Other Listing of Product Contents Found Hereon, the Consumer is Advised That, in Actuality, This Product Consists Of 99.9999999999% Empty Space.

NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: The Manufacturer May Technically Be Entitled to Claim That This Product Is Ten-Dimensional. However, the Consumer Is Reminded That This Confers No Legal Rights Above and Beyond Those Applicable to Three-Dimensional Objects, Since the Seven New Dimensions Are "Rolled Up" into Such a Small "Area" That They Cannot Be Detected.

PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That When the Consumer Is Not Directly Observing This Product, It May Cease to Exist or Will Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State.

COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The Subatomic Particles (Electrons, Protons, etc.) Comprising This Product Are Exactly the Same in Every Measurable Respect as Those Used in the Products of Other Manufacturers, and No Claim to the Contrary May Legitimately Be Expressed or Implied.

HEALTH WARNING: Care Should Be Taken When Lifting This Product, Since Its Mass, and Thus Its Weight, Is Dependent on Its Velocity Relative to the User.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe, Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Re-emerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe Cannot Be Guaranteed."

Very clever!

Some Major Problems and Issues Requiring Science to Solve

2008-12-20T06:12:00.000-08:00

President-elect Obama's choices for his primary science team are some of the more important selections he will make. Here is a post written a year ago that outlines why I would make that statement.

When one thinks about the variety of problems we face as both a national and global society, it becomes clear that science will be looked to to develop answers and solutions to many of these problems. It is also clear that we need to think of this as science in the broadest sense, as all areas and disciplines will need to contribute. This goes to the heart of the definition of consilience, as numerous areas of knowledge and expertise will need to mix together if we are to make solid progress in finding effective solutions.

To get the ball rolling, consider the following broad issues/problems. All of these will require contributions from a variety of scientific and technical areas of study...multidisciplinary tasks galore:

* Quality of air and water
* Fresh water supplies for much of the west and southwest
* Disposal of solid wastes (everyday garbage)
* Modernization and maintenance of national power grid
* New energy sources, better energy efficiency and conservation
* Climate change (both at an understanding level as well as preparing for consequences)
* Improved electronic encryption algorithms as we digitize everything (medical, financial records, etc)
* Transportation infrastructure
* Telecommunications networks, both development and maintenance
* Continued improvement and progress in computing technologies
* Mass electronic data storage
* Medical treatments for the disease of your choice. This includes stem cell issues, genetic engineering, drug R&D, and so on.
* Military related technologies
* Improved search technologies for earth-crossing asteroids (something I have yet to hear policymakers talk about publicly, but there are literally many thousands of sizeable objects that cross earth's orbit we should try to identify and monitor)
* Food supplies and quality control
* Disposal of nuclear wastes, nuclear proliferation issues
* Nanotechnology in general
* Security technology of all types
* Robotics
* Implementation of educational strategies and structures based on brain research and learning theory to best prepare the next generation of workers
* Continued development of network theory, game theory, etc., and progress in our understanding of complex systems for physical and social applications
* Materials science and development

I encourage comments with additional major issues that are technical in nature and subject to progress via scientific avenues; this is not at all a complete list. What we cannot forget is that further inclusion of other areas of study are intimately connected with just about everything on the above list, such as ethics, state/national/international law, economics, political science, sociology, public policy, military concerns, all areas of engineering, business/industry, job creation, international relations, anthropology, and countless subfields that fall under these larger areas of specialization.

The quicker we as a society recognize and realize the complexity, multidisciplinarity, and difficulty level of finding both short-term and long-term solutions to problems found in any of these areas, the better off we will be. The next president will need to address all of these during the course of an administration, as will every other prominent political figure in every nation across the globe. We will not be able to ignore any of them, and these loom as multi-generational issues that need to be solved. This will require leaders who are able to connect with the masses and communicate the seriousness of the issues, as well as move his or her nation toward a mindset of long-term planning and policy, something we seem to not be very good at.

We need to find and create massive numbers of people who are trained in the all of the sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology, and all the other fields mentioned above to remain competitive in a global marketplace, as well as the maintain and improve the quality of life for future generations. It is challenging work, but do we have any other choice but to address these challenges? Does our consumption-based and entertainment-driven society have the backbone and means to deal with these issues? Will we leave the world in better condition for our kids and grandkids than what we inherited?

Selections of Science Advisers Show Obama Wants Change in Science Policy

2008-12-20T05:41:00.000-08:00

The general public will likely overlook the latest appointments President-elect Obama has made today. In naming science advisers, the public largely does not connect the dots of what those selections tell us about the President's views or the path the President wants to follow into the future. There are very few scientists who have 'big names' and there is next to no conversation or debate among average Americans about these selections as there are when, say, Secretaries of State and Defense are named. Those much more notable Cabinet positions have popular, 'big name' individuals at the helm.

Obama is appointing Harvard physicist John Holdren to the position of science adviser, who is the go-to person on science policy. A Harvard marine biologist, Jane Lubchenko, will direct the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), whose primary concern now is climate change. These two individuals are big names in the scientific world and are both experts in climate change. Two other scientists who will co-chair the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology are Nobel laureate and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Harold Varmus and MIT professor Eric Lander, an expert in human genome science.

While not household names, this is an impressive team. It also tells us something that will be an ENORMOUS difference with the respect and role science plays at the top of government policy: there actually will be respect for science and a respect for open inquiry, and a goal of gathering facts, data and evidence for policy decisions. The Bush administration has been notorious for ignoring science that contradicts the path ideology laid down, particularly in climate change policy (or a complete lack of such policy, as it turned out). The Bush White House routinely ignored policy initiatives and edited out of papers those scientific findings and evidence from government scientists that contradicted Bush policy. I suspect the world is breathing a collective sigh of relief as well with these appointments and the use of science Obama has in mind. I also would imagine that, while not interested in a formal position within the administration, former Vice President and Nobel laureate Al Gore will play a big role in the development of policy and gaining public and global support for U.S. leadership in its approach to one of the great crises humans have ever collectively faced.

I applaud these selections in the form of a standing ovation, as I am sure scientists all over the world are doing this morning. Science is going to lead the way in the solutions to an enormous number of incredibly important problems and issues. My next post will be a re-post of something I wrote a year ago. While largely under the public radar and fanfare, these are some of the most important appointments Obama will make, and will have a lasting impact on how we are able to attack significant problems for decades to come. I sense a renewed energy and enthusiasm and sense of urgency in the scientific community is upon us.

Inefficiency when Multi-Tasking

2008-12-18T21:23:00.000-08:00

The Drs. Eide found a study showing what happens in the brain when driving and talking to someone else...not on a cell phone, but to someone else in the car. It turns out that this type of multi-tasking, just listening to another person while trying to drive, involves visual and spatial areas of the brain that are also needed for driving. In other words, listening robs attention and capacity from the parts of the brain required for safe and effective driving. Cell phone use while driving certainly does the same sort of thing, but we are just learning what happens physically in the brain that makes cell phone use so distracting and dangerous.

I should mention that I often, at stoplights, observe how many cars drive by with cell phones to the driver's ear. My record so far is seeing 8 cars in a row with drivers with a phone to the ear. The illusion for those individuals is that the cell phone conversation does not affect the driving, so there is no danger. We need to change this myth with the hard data and evidence of studies such as this to show multi-tasking is not as hardened as we want to believe.

I am looking forward to seeing additional studies related to classroom participation and learning while there are side conversations that disrupt other students.

Genius in a Group-Think Era?

2008-12-06T05:40:00.001-08:00

Found an interesting article off Yahoo. It asked the question if Albert Einstein is the last great genius. This is a legitimate question in an age where 'group-think' is becoming the rage. There are obvious benefits to mass collaboration, largely making use of Web 2.0 tools and applications, and the best set of examples I have found are in the book Wikinomics.

One would like to think that individuals can still make a difference. I suspect this will still be the case, but less frequently than in the past. Ideas can blossom so quickly once numerous people share concepts and possible solutions to problems, but I would argue that there lies a chance that group-think may, in some cases, have one idea catch on that leads the pack on a path that ultimately runs into a dead-end. The notion of 'trends' and 'fads' hold true, and the 'latest craze' idea can attract most minds of the group. It may turn out that it will take an individual or small subset of the larger group to break from the group mindset, think outside the box, and develop an original idea that becomes the next focus of the group. Perhaps a good structure to a mass collaboration is to have numerous subsets working on different aspects of the problem from different points of view, so as to resist the temptation to fall into a 'fad' mentality. This falls in line with 'Mediciexity.' One example of the 'fad' mentality may be string theory. The concept of the 'string' is attractive to solving the ultimate questions of the universe, and over the past couple decades many of the most promising and powerful theoretical and mathematical minds have become part of that 'group.' However, all these years later there is not a viable, i.e. testable, theory that fits into the experimental realm of physics. Time will tell if this mass collaboration is worth it in the end...it may end up one brilliant idea, from one brilliant person, completely separated from the string theory group, will end up being correct. Individuals may still change the world.

Perhaps the notion of individual genius making its mark in the modern mass collaboration age is evolving to the point of the genius required to form the right group. Web 2.0 technology has been applied in an unprecedented way by Barack Obama and a small, few person group of advisers. The creativity, forward-thinking plan and then the discipline and message-delivery by Obama himself has taken a young, smart, but relatively unknown and inexperienced politician whose future was supposed to be a decade away (according the group-thinking of the more traditional political parties)to the presidency. It still takes individuals or very small groups to develop a concept and start the larger group/collaboration, so perhaps this is where we will see genius more often than not.

There will always be a place for individuals, so we need to be careful not to push young minds, which tend to be the most creative and open to new ways of thinking, entirely into a group-think mindset...they still need to be encouraged to think for themselves, be skeptical of the group, and not be afraid to offer up 'outside the box' thinking and creative solutions. I want my students, at least, to never shy away from individual interests and ideas, and to not just go along with the latest fad if they don't agree with it. As always, I am not a proponent of going with one way of doing something, but rather using variety; not to fall into a 'whole language only' or a 'phonics only' way of learning, but rather taking the good things from each and using them. Variety, in this case group-think and individual-think, and the good that comes from each, is the spice of the new Web 2.0 life.

Repeat Post: What are the Goals of K-12 Education?

2008-11-30T20:49:00.001-08:00

I wanted to bring this old post back, with a hope of getting a larger discussion going, and to just , get us thinking about what we want from K-12 education in this country. With a new President coming in, I think we will see No Child Left Behind improved upon. This will likely fall into how progress of students is measured. Barack Obama has been talking in terms of longitudinal progress of individual students, with long-term learning being the goal, rather than snapshots of different groups of kids year to year. I would like to suggest that individual student growth be measured in a way as is done with the Measure of Academic Progress, or MAP, testing. This national exam series allows for more accurate student placement in math and English, as well as the establishment of growth targets for students and a measure of student academic growth.

Below is a link to an old post from last April. I hope it helps get us thinking about what we want as we are making a national and global transition from manufacturing and industrial economy to an information and energy economy, with global competition for jobs running wild.

http://vonscience.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-are-goals-of-k-12-education.html

The Science of Thanksgiving

2008-11-29T17:04:00.000-08:00

This is for my senior students, who shared with me some Thanksgiving science anecdotes before the holiday. Scientific American has a few articles related to the science of Thanksgiving. Enjoy!

Learning Enhanced Through Stories

2008-11-20T23:03:00.000-08:00

Learning and memory can be enhanced and improved 2- to 7-fold when done through stories, rather than through listening or just straight factual reading. The Drs. Eide have a post up with some additional references. It appears that this is true because story comprehension requires both hemispheres of the brain, whereas other types of learning stay within one or the other hemisphere. Research like this is what educators need to pay attention to.

E = mc^2 Verified using QCD

2008-11-20T22:49:00.000-08:00

The most famous equation ever written down (besides 1 + 1 = 2, perhaps) is E = mc^2. People who never had physics can quote it, although I suspect most have no clue what it truly means. Now, using a very mathematically sophisticated theory called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, it has been shown that Einstein's equation accounts for the strange situation where a proton's mass is made up mostly of the energy of complicated particle interactions within the proton. Quarks and massless gluons make up the guts of a proton, and lattice calculations from supercomputers in Europe have now verified that the energy-mass equivalence works out to produce the observed mass of a proton, which is 1.6 x 10^-27 kg. Very cool! From a press release:

" According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

But resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles -- in equations called quantum chromodynamics -- has been fiendishly difficult.

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

For those keen to know more: the computations involve "envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows."

Al Gore's 5-step Proposal for Energy Independence

2008-11-12T18:03:00.001-08:00

Former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore wrote a recent op-ed in the NY Times. He outlined how the U.S. can begin to make real change regarding its energy usage, ultimately reaching a point of energy independence. Below is an excerpt where he outlines 5 points to address to reach such a goal:

"What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis -- and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.

Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with "smart" features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid -- $400 billion over 10 years -- pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.

Third, we should help America's automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. Approximately 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from buildings -- and stopping that pollution saves money for homeowners and businesses. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.

Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world's efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.

Of course, the best way -- indeed the only way -- to secure a global agreement to safeguard our future is by re-establishing the United States as the country with the moral and political authority to lead the world toward a solution. "

Will we have the political will to transform the nation and its thirst for energy? The technology for most of what is proposed already exists. It will take a massive effort from out science and technology base, but I do not doubt this will work if we put our collective minds to it. No nation in the history of the world can accomplish great things like the U.S. has, when it has the right leadership and the collective will of the American people behind it. Now is one of those times.

Read the entire op-ed here.