Scientists are scamming us

I didn't catch this Daily Show video when it first aired in October, 2011. Well worth watching:

On a more serious note, this dysfunctional thinking by many conservatives is coming under increasing scrutiny. This is both good and bad news. It is becoming ever clearer that though Republicans tend to have serious issues with at least some scientific findings (but not all--not, for instance the science that we use to develop new weapons), all of us are susceptible to gross distortions. Chris Mooney has written a new book that focuses on Republican lapses. Here's an excerpt from a spin-off article from The Atlantic:
Why is the American political system so irrational? Why is it that, even though a lot less partisanship and a lot more compromise would be good for the country, nobody can seem to get us there? The good news is that science is starting to figure this out. The bad news is that it seems to be fundamentally rooted in who we are -- creatures who can detect bad and emotional reasoning when others are guilty of doing it, but not so much when we're doing it ourselves.

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For want of a half penny, a future was lost…

Yesterday, my son shared the video below - Neil deGrasse Tyson's "We Stopped Dreaming (Episode 1)". It took me back to childhood memories when I was inspired to be a scientist. I remember watching the Apollo launches. I think I remember listening to the Gemini 4 space walk – I was four, and my father recorded it on reel-to-reel, but I don’t remember him ever replaying it. I remember staying up late and falling asleep…thankfully to be awoken by my mother just before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. ...Skylab, ...the test flight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Years later, I left behind aspirations of a science career (practicalities…how much money does the average physicist make anyway?) for one of engineering, but the love of space, cosmology, NASA…all still with me…which is why what Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying in this video saddens me all the more.

I worry that decisions Congress makes doesn't [sic] factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow.
Apart from the applicability of that to just about any of the current Congress's decisions, he’s dead right in this specific instance. We are not funding science. We are not encouraging and developing engineers. We are failing in educating our young people, not only in the technical fields, but in general. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) compares 15 year olds in 65 industrial countries. From the 2009 report:
The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a collaborative effort among OECD member countries to measure how well 15-year-old students approaching the end of compulsory schooling are prepared to meet the challenges of today’s knowledge societies. The assessment is forward-looking: rather than focusing on the extent to which these students have mastered a specific school curriculum, it looks at their ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. This orientation reflects a change in curricular goals and objectives, which are increasingly concerned with what students can do with what they learn at school.
“…to meet real-life challenges.” Care to guess how the U.S.A. fared in the latest, 2009, assessment? You can see here for yourself, but I’ll spoil it:
  • Reading – 17th (out of 65)
  • Mathematics –31st (significantly below the average)
  • Science – 23rd
We fail. We fail across the board. We fail where it matters. I’m not sure how we will fare in the 2012 PISA, but I seriously doubt we’ll improve. Our system doesn't support it anymore. Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, in their book “That Used to Be us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back”, quote Matt Miller, one of the authors of a 2009 McKinsey & Company report titled The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, who said
They [American students] are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs – not $40 to $50 an hour.”
I don’t know what the answer is. I admit a selfish cop out - we home educate our children – so I don’t think often on what can or should be done; we've taken responsibility for preparing our children ourselves. Still, one simple solution seems to be to promote science, math and engineering. And we start doing that by not cutting NASA’s budget. Fat chance. How much would YOU pay for the universe?

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Clean Energy 101

If you want a good starting point for learning the facts about clean energy, The Union of Concerned Scientists is offering an excellent resource, "Clean Energy 101." If you'd like to learn about the pollution caused by coal plants, and how sustainable energy would cut this pollution, check the article called "Benefits of Renewable Energy."

A Typical Coal PlantA typical 500-megawatt coal plant produces 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours per year -- enough to power a city of about 140,000 people. It burns 1.4 million tons of coal (the equivalent of 40 train cars of coal each day) and uses 2.2 billion gallons of water each year. In an average year, this one plant also generates the following: 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, equivalent to half a million late-model cars 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to cutting down 100 million trees 500 tons of small particles 220 tons of hydrocarbons 720 tons of carbon monoxide 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber 170 pounds of mercury, 225 pounds of arsenic, 114 pounds of lead, 4 pounds of cadmium, and other toxic heavy metals Trace amounts of uranium
Here are each of the main topics covered:

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How to destroy science education in America

Try to think of a great way to destroy math and science education in the United States. Think of something that Osama bin Laden would have tried to do if he had tried to destroy math and science education in the United States. You might propose this: Defund the STEM Fellows GK-12 Program. Guess what? The U.S. National Science Foundation has done just that. Here is an excerpt from page 29 of the March 4, 2010 edition of Science (full article available online only to subscribers):

Researchers are shocked and upset by a decision by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to cancel a high-profile and successful fellowship program that is brought more than 10,000 graduate students into elementary and secondary schools around the country. A recent evaluation says the graduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (stem) Fellows in K-12 education program, begun in 1999, brings science to life for students, improves the skills of their teachers, and offers graduate students valuable training in the classroom. So participants don't understand why the president's 2012 budget request would abandon a $55-million a year program that addresses key aspects of the Obama Administration's push to improve US science and math education.

Officials at NSF say that the program has been effective but claim that it is now time to move on. The scientists involved in the program aren't buying this piece of garbage explanation, however. They know that the program was wildly successful, and that it has been highly touted, even by NSF in its recent budget requests to Congress. In its most recent independent evaluation, last fall, this program was declared to be achieving most of its goals pursuant to "substantial and credible evidence." It has been a win win win program, except that it had a "modest impact on the graduate students' research skills. Of course it has, since these graduate students are spending more time learning to be good teachers.

The fellows became better teachers, learning how to work collaboratively and how to communicate science to a non-technical audience. The public school teachers improve their knowledge of science and welcome to having graduate science students in the classrooms. The fellows' new skills made them better college instructors, and their off-campus experiences gave them an edge in finding full-time jobs after graduation.

Consider what the NSF has recently said about STEM Fellows:

This program provides funding for graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines to bring their leading research practice and findings into K-12 learning settings. Through collaborations with other graduate fellows and faculty from STEM disciplines, teachers and students in K-12 environments, and community partners, graduate students can gain a deeper understanding of their own research and place it within a societal and global context. The GK-12 program provides an opportunity for graduate students to acquire value-added skills, such as communicating STEM subjects to technical and non-technical audiences, leadership, team building, and teaching while enriching STEM learning and instruction in K-12 settings. This unique experience will add value to the training of U.S. graduate students and will energize and prepare the students for a broad range of STEM careers in a competitive globalized marketplace. Furthermore, the GK-12 program provides institutions of higher education with an opportunity to transform the conventional graduate education by infusing and sustaining GK-12 like activities in their graduate programs.

By slashing the STEM Fellows program, the Obama administration will now save $55 million per year. Let's put that in perspective. This country spends more than $2 billion per week pretending to fight a war in Afghanistan while actually propping up corrupt leaders and the poppy crop and antagonizing dirt-poor civilians-- Afghanistan is a place where the U.S. military struggles to find even 100 members of Al Qaeda, according to the CIA. The war has nothing at all with which to commend itself, and yet we spend more than $2 billion per week on this "war." That comes out to about $1 million for every five minutes. In other words, we have just destroyed a perfectly good science and mathematics education program, a program that brought 10,000 math and science graduate students into elementary schools and high schools, at a time when we are desperate to find ways to teach those students science and mathematics. We destroyed STEM Fellows GK-12 to "save" $55 million per year, the amount of money we burn in Afghanistan every five hours. This is an absolutely pathetic display of bad priorities by our Peace President (who is also willing to toss out hundreds of billions of dollars to his buddies on Wall Street). I can't think of a better way to move the United States toward second world or third world status. [Lest there be any confusion, I voted for Obama and I am sorely disappointed with him, yet I still consider him a much better President than John McCain would have been--I am not claiming that Obama is trying to destroy math and science education, only that he has made a terrible decision.]

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Pressure, Temperature, Volume!

Warning - Science Geekery ahead! Am I the only person in the world who gets that we can control for Boyle's Law? While reading a (Science Fiction) book, by a very respected author*, I encountered a scene where a character brews some coffee. Yum! I love coffee! But my delightful anticipation was immediately spoiled by the character's complaints about how the low ambient pressure makes for lukewarm coffee! Seriously? Have people never heard of these amazing newfangled devices called pressure cookers? Heck, Europeans have had little stovetop espresso makers for many many years, that are essentially little one-shot pressure cookers! With the correct setup such equipment can produce strong, hot coffee regardless of the ambient pressure! Whenever I come across such obvious stupidity it kills the story for me. Get the little details right, people! Let me enjoy my stories and enjoy my coffee (regardless of ambient)! * in defense of the Author, he is an older American, so can be excused for not really understanding the difference between coffee and the pale brown caffeinated beverage that shares that name in the States.

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