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Tag: "Education"

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By Erich Vieth on October 24th, 2009

College classes free, for anyone

If you’d like to attend college classes over the Internet at a wide variety of prestigious colleges, consider visiting Academic Earth. According to the about page,

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

The participating universities include Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. I just finished watching an informative lecture on “The Origins of the Financial Mess.” I’m wondering what I’m going to view next. Maybe I’ll watch some more of Shelly Kagan’s 26-part series on the topic of “Death.”

Education • Featured • Internet
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By Brynn Jacobs on September 09th, 2009

A new 9/11 Curriculum?

The Associated Press is reporting that there is a new curriculum debuting in 7 states this year with the goal of teaching middle-school and high-school students about the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Developed by the September 11th Education Trust, the curriculum will focus on 7 areas “designed to help students reflect on the impact and legacy of September 11, 2001″. Sample units include:

  • Understanding 9/11 as history
  • Debating the government’s role during disasters
  • Discussing the nature of heroism
  • Evaluating foreign policy vis-à-vis national security

The Associated Press quotes former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani:

“This is one of the critical subjects on which young people should develop some ideas and thoughts. They’re going to have to live with this for quite some time,” he said. “It gives young people a framework in which to think about Sept. 11, all that it meant and all that it means to the present.”

I’m not quite sure what he means when he says that “They’re going to have to live with this for quite some time.” Does he mean the threat of terrorism? Does he mean the consequences of our reaction to 9/11?

American Culture • Education • Featured • History
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By Erich Vieth on July 26th, 2009

Nature video shows that turtles are full fledged animals

I once saw this activity at the turtle exhibit at the local zoo, and it didn’t take a biologist to tell me that I was not misinterpreting what I was seeing. These turtles seem incredibly almost-human, even though they didn’t smoke cigarettes afterward. Captured here in living color close-up, I’m posting this video as an animals-in the-wild education video:

Watching this reminded me of watching David Attenborough “Trials of Life” series with my then four-year old daughter. One of these exquisitely filmed Attenborough videos, which was on the topic of animal reproduction, included more explicit animal sex videos than I could ever had imagined, including elephant sex. At first I wondered whether I should be letting the video keep running. While I was contemplating my options, my daughter looked up and asked, “Daddy, what are those elephants doing?” I found myself saying, “Those are elephants having sex.” I didn’t offer any further explanation and my daughter didn’t request one. We quietly watched the entire video and now, 7 years later, my daughter doesn’t seem to be emotionally damaged from having seen the episode.

Oh, and according to doctors polled by the U.K. Guardian, having sex before going to bed is the second-best way to have a good night’s sleep. The winning solution was for couples to sleep in separate beds.

Communication • Education • Sex
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Longitudinal study tells us what makes people happy
By Erich Vieth on July 11th, 2009

Longitudinal study tells us what makes people happy

What makes people happy? On quite a few occasions, I’ve posted at DI with regard to ideas that I learned through reading various books and articles (a search for “happiness” in the DI search box will give you dozens of articles). What does that reveal about me, I wonder?

Today, I had the pleasure of reading an extraordinarily thoughtful article on this same topic: “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk appears in the June 2009 edition of The Atlantic. You’ll find an abridged edition of the article here.

Shenk’s article is anchored by the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest running longitudinally study of mental and physical well-being in history. It was begun in 1937 in order to study “well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), and it has followed its subject for more than 70 years.” The study was originally known as “The Grant Study,” in that it was originally funded by W.T. Grant. Despite all odds, the study has survived to this day–many of the subjects are now in their upper 80’s. Along the way, the study was supplemented with a separate study launched in 1937 dedicated to studying juvenile delinquents in inner-city Boston (run by criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck).

You’ll enjoy Joshua Shenk’s work on many levels. He writes with precision, providing you with a deep understanding of the featured longitudinal studies. You will also enjoy his seemingly effortless ability to spin engaging stories (there are dozens of stories within his article) and his exceptional skill at crafting highly readable prose. I’m writing this post as a dare, then. Go forth and read Shenk’s article and I guarantee that you will be thoroughly enriched and appreciative.

The Atlantic also provided a video interview of George Vaillant, now 74, who since 1967 has dedicated his career to running and analyzing the Grant Study. As you’ll see from Shenk’s article, Vaillant is an exceptional storyteller himself. The Atlantic article, then, might remind you of one of those Russian dolls, and that is a storyteller telling the story of another storyteller who tell stories of hundreds of other storytellers. For more than 40 years, Vaillant has not only gathered reams of technical data, but he has poured his energy into interviewing the subjects and their families and melding all of that data into compellingly detailed vignettes of the subjects. Telling stories is not ultimately what the study was supposed to be about, of course, and Vaillant also tells us what those stories mean for the rest of us. Truly, what makes people happy? Vaillant offers answers that you will be tempted to immediately apply to your own situation.

Vaillant has a lot to say about “adaptations,” how people respond to the challenges they face in life. As a Shenk explains,

American Culture • Community • Friendships/relationships • Health • Meaning of Life • Networking • Psychology Cognition • Science
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By Erich Vieth on July 08th, 2009

Quote time

I love to collect quotes. Such a high ratio of thought-provocation per word! I’d even bet that there is a the seed for a novel in most well-honed quotes. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Some of these quotes have made the rounds (the oldies-but-goodies), though I’d bet that you’ll find more than a few that you’ve never seen before. Enjoy.

In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.

Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.

Robert Byrne

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

Tom Stoppard (1937 - ), Jumpers (1972) act 1

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

Douglas Adams , Last Chance to See

“It is not acceptable to have a religion where the alternative to faith is punishment — that’s how you train dogs, not develop people.”

Deng Ming-Dao

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.

George Wald (1906 - )

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

H. H. Williams

Education • Meaning of Life • Quotes
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By Mindy Carney on May 24th, 2009

Parents Support Transgendered Child

An eight-year-old child in Omaha, Nebraska, the middle of three boys, has told his parents throughout his life that he is a she. Since he learned to talk, he has said, daily, that he is really a girl. His parents have come to believe him, and are letting him begin the next school term in a new school, as a girl, with a new name.

Ben-turned-Katie will not be allowed back in his Catholic elementary school. According to the priest in the parish, since the Catholic Church believes a person is born one gender and cannot change, his appearance at school would lead to too many questions and cause discomfort for the other children.

It might, of course. Certainly it would raise all kinds of questions, yes. Hard questions, the kind that parents aren’t sure how to answer. My guess is, though, that if the school called in an expert on the subject and held an assembly in which the child’s situation is explained in brief and concrete terms and the other children were allowed to ask any questions they had, parents were allowed to attend, etc., the issue could be handled and put to rest. Children that age are amazingly accepting, and what a wonderful life lesson it could be. That is how it would be handled in our school - or similarly, somehow - one of the many reasons we are there.

In watching the video, I was struck by the dedication of these parents to their child. I am so relieved, on Katie’s behalf, that she has this kind of support. In conservative Nebraska, this can’t be easy. I wish them well, and thank them for being the kind of parents every kid deserves to have. Unconditional love at its finest.

American Culture • Bigotry • Community • Culture • Education • Featured • Health • Human animals • Inspirational • Psychology Cognition • Religion • Sex • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on May 12th, 2009

P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots

P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots. Myers’ post springs from this passage from a new book by Pierce, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

American Culture • Education • ignorance
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Obama strikes all funding for abstinence-only sex education
By Erich Vieth on May 10th, 2009

Obama strikes all funding for abstinence-only sex education

As reported at Daily Kos:

Yesterday, President Obama struck a blow to the abstinence-only community, cutting ALL of their funding streams in his new 2010 budget. Obama made it clear that our government should no longer fund these failed programs that promote misinformation, misogyny, discrimination and, of course, juggling and cinder block wielding abstinence clowns.

Watch the videos posted at Daily Kos to get a real flavor for the opposition (Ms. Unruh), who repeatdly claims that babies are good, we need babies, and that birth control pills are attempts by the pharmaceutical companies to oppress women. She claims that using real birth control is an attempt to turn women into men.

Featured • Religion • Reproductive Rights • Sex
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By Tony Coyle on May 08th, 2009

MPAA to teachers - fair use needs a VCR!

According to the MPAA the fair use provision in our copyright laws is flawed and needs to be qualified. During the continuing DCMA hearings they have again surfaced the claim that ripping a DVD shouldn’t be allowed, since the teacher can copy the video using a video camera pointed at the TV screen.

Seriously!

That’s as ludicrous as requiring that teachers may only copy from a photocopy, and not from the original book!

They even created a video to demonstrate the process. Anyone concerned about fair use and copyright should be aghast at this blatantly stupid, but well financed, attack on rights. This ‘process’ is not only more cumbersome and time consuming (but teachers have loads of free time, right?) but also significantly more costly (you need a camcorder, tapes, and a tripod - in addition to the equipment you already have).

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

via [Ars Technica]
video after the fold

Communication • Education • Featured • Intellectual property
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NCSE has now signed up more than 1,000 Scientists named Steve.
By Erich Vieth on April 19th, 2009

NCSE has now signed up more than 1,000 Scientists named Steve.

The National Center for Science Education has now signed up more than 1,000 scientists named “Steve.” Here’s the petition that all 1082 Scientist Steves have signed:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.

Education • Evolution • Featured
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By Erich Vieth on April 02nd, 2009

Putting the bank “bailout” in perspective

Robert Sheer has crunched some big numbers and shared them at TruthDig:

The good news on the government’s “No Banker Left Behind” program is that, according to the special inspector general’s report on Tuesday, the total handout to date is still less than 3 trillion dollars. It’s only $2.98 trillion, to be precise, an amount six times greater than will be spent by federal, state and local governments this year on educating the 50 million American children in elementary and secondary schools. The bad news is that even greater amounts of money are to be thrown down what has to be the world record for rat holes…

Now Summers and the other finance gurus who move so easily from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue assure us that those professionals who made the toxic swap deals are too big to fail and must be entrusted with 3 trillion of our dollars to save themselves from disaster. And thanks to the laws they wrote, the bankers are likely to be covered for their socially destructive behavior by a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Economy • Education • Featured • Fraud • Politics • snake oil
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Educational Ruins
By Dan Klarmann on March 22nd, 2009

Educational Ruins

Anyone who has actually visited and studied ruins knows that they are created from orderly structures by a particular combination of forces.

First comes neglect, when people either lose appreciation for the value of the thing and stop maintaining it, or they simply abandon it.

Next comes vandalism, when people actively damage the structure to scavenge materials and souvenirs, to leave their own mark, or to intentionally destroy it. The latter is usually for religious reasons, as in purging earlier figureheads like Hatshepsut, Trotsky or the Bamiyan Buddhas.

But this post is about an institutional edifice. Education in the United States is falling into ruins. Sure, it still is funded in a nominal sort of way. But people have forgotten its value. They even vote against tax increases necessary to maintain current standards. Schools are closing; one K-12 building in my neighborhood is now condos. My Junior High school was razed for a housing development.

Pharyngula points out how the University of Florida is now planning to shut down its geology department as a cost cutting measure. Geology is the science that gave Darwin the leg up to understand how natural selection works before anyone else. Geology and its understanding affects meteorology, biology, sociology, history, exo-planetary studies, and more.

Florida is one of the states in which regular attempts are made to insert Creationism into school itineraries. And geology is the biggest stumbling block to accepting a Young Earth. But I hope that is not their underlying reason. It is simple neglect of education in general.

But there is a strong vanadlism movement afoot in this country. Anti-science forces are working hard to put non-scientific ideas into science classes. Texas is a recurring battleground as school administrators attempt to keep up education credentials in spite of the onslaught.

Recently, a doomed law is running the gauntlet in the Texas legislature to allow unaccreditable private schools to offer advanced degrees. See Hank’s A Master’s in Creationism. If that seemed too harsh, try Pharyngula’s If you fail an IQ test in Texas, do they automatically put you in the legislature?

Hank is Australian. Yet he cares about how this sort of behavior is making the United States seem ever goofier. To let our once-admirable education system crumble is a step backwards for the world.

American Culture • Current Events • Economy • Education • Politics • Religion • Science • ignorance
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A program that gets college students enthusiastic about the scientific theory of evolution
By Erich Vieth on February 24th, 2009

A program that gets college students enthusiastic about the scientific theory of evolution

David Sloan Wilson has written some terrific articles on the topic of evolution. I recently ran across a 2005 article he wrote for PLoS Biology www.plosbiology.org titled “Evolution for Everyone: How to Increase Acceptance of, Interest in, and Knowledge about Evolution.” The article explains the method by which Binghamton University has successfully infused its undergraduate curriculum with real-life applications of evolutionary theory. The EvoS program began in 2002. Here’s the mission of EvoS:

The mission of EvoS is to advance the study of evolution in all its manifestations, including all aspects of humanity in addition to the biological sciences.
Many organizations and websites promote the study of evolution, but EvoS is unique in two respects.

• EvoS is based on the realization that evolutionary theory will probably never be generally accepted–no matter how well supported by facts–unless its consequences for human affairs are fully addressed. Once evolution is seen as unthreatening, explanatory, and useful for solving life’s problems, then it becomes not just acceptable but irresistable to the average person (see the tutorial for more).

• EvoS makes a connection between evolutionary theory and the unification of knowledge, which has always been the goal of a liberal arts education and contemporary efforts to integrate across disciplines. The same kind of unification that took place in the biological sciences during the 20th century is now taking places for the human behavioral sciences and humanities–but is not yet reflected in the structure of higher education. EvoS is the first program to diagnose this problem and comprehensively provide a solution at a campus-wide scale.

David Sloan Wilson explains that the Binghamton program makes use of 50 faculty members representing 15 departments. The program was created based on the following assumption: “Evolution can be made acceptable, interesting, and powerfully relevant to just about anyone in the space of a single semester.”

Education • Evolution • Featured • Human animals • Psychology Cognition • Religion • Science • Sex
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