It’s been raining here. A lot.
Elder offspring: Remember that huge mushroom we saw on the field after soccer practice?
Dr. Free-Ride: With all the rain we’ve been getting, we’ve been seeing a lot more mushrooms this spring.
Elder offspring: Rainbows, too.
Dr. Free-Ride: We should call Uncle Fishy and see if he’s interested in going “bird watching” with us this weekend.
Elder offspring: Or mushroom hunting.
I’m sure there’s a thoughtful post that could be written logically connecting these points and shedding light on a “big picture” issue or two that needs to be tackled. However, I’m heading to class (to talk about the Strong Program in the sociology of science and return midterms), so I can’t crank out that post just yet. (And, rather than helping me out by writing the post, the elves just take my notes and make shoes. Selfish elves!)
I’m a total sheep. Cool kids like Chris Clarke are making subversive Chevy Tahoe commercials, and I just couldn’t help myself.
I made one too.
Please, before you rant up my comments, I fully believe that you are a responsible SUV driver. It’s the irresponsible ones I encounter on my commute that make me angry …
You might think, from the title of this post, that I have a completely worked out answer to the question of how to improve science education in the U.S.
I don’t.
But, I have some observations that bear on the question, and I think looking at them might help us move in the right direction.
The U.S. Department of Education has just announced the results of a study comparing what’s going on in 8th grade science classrooms in the U.S. , the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Japan, and Australia.
You will be shocked — shocked! — to learn that U.S. science students did not do as well as their counterparts in the other four countries in the study when it came to learning science content.
The Dept. of Ed. press release, and a wee bit of commentary, below the fold.
I told you it was coming …
The UConn philosophy graduate students have launched a new group blog, named “What is it like to be a blog?”
Procrastination (which is an essential part of the graduate school experience) may yield some interesting philosophical reading for the rest of us.
Last week Kevin Vranes wrote an interesting post about “skeptics”. One of the things he brought out is that, depending on the context, “skeptic” can be an approving label (here’s someone who won’t be fooled by flim-flam) or a term of abuse (there’s someone who stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the facts of the matter). As well, Kevin notes that, especially when scientists are dealing with folks from outside the scientific community (e.g., journalists or politicians), terms like “skeptics” and “the mainstream” can be used to designate something like tribal memberships: here are the people that are worth listening to, and there are the people whose opinions can be dismissed.
I think the issue of labels is an important one, not only in scientist-lay person interactions, but also in scientist-on-scientist contexts. While I agree with Kevin that some labeling sets us on the path to intellectual laziness, there are instances where labels can actually be useful. The trick, as always, is to figure out just how much weight a label can carry for us and then not pile on any more than that.
In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.
Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both rusty on the basics of scientific methodology and at least a little scared of thinking hard about technical issues, it was prompted by the particular strategy Chris Mooney set forth for his reporting in The Republican War on Science, and by Steve Fuller’s critique of that in his essay for the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris’s book. And, in a comment on my post, Steve Fuller brings us back to the question of the particular strategy Chris was using, and of the sorts of standards to which journalistic work guided by this strategy ought to be held. I think this is a fair question, but it brings us into the turbulent waters at the confluence of science and politics, where journalism may go beyond presenting an objective picture of the terrain and may exhort us to choose a side.
So you might want to grab a life-jacket before we begin.
Oh wait, it looks like I don’t …
GrrlScientist, the resident online quiz maven, points us to the online tool EgoSurf. Said tool does a “deep search” with the search word you provide, looking for links to the domain you indicate (like, for example, your weblog).
So, I went egosurfing with this site, using both my nom de blog and my real name as the search terms. As you’ll see from the results (below the fold), I might have an easier time letting go of my ego than some of my sibling bloggers because … well, there’s less to let go of.
On April 1, internet quizzes seem at least as appropriate as renouncing our principled stands on the world, so here we go again. GrrlScientist poses the first part of the question: are you an idiot?
But she doesn’t deal with the obvious follow-up question: what are you going to do with that intelligence?
My answers (as measured by quizzes that actually claim not to be “scientific measurements of what kind of person you are”) below the fold.