Pencil ready? To mark the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, here’s a brief quiz (essay format, of course) on the epistemology lesson embedded in his comments from a February 12, 2002 Department of Defense news briefing. The comments, poetically transcibed by Slate, are as follows:
Category Archives: Current events
What’s your legislative agenda for the first hundred days?
The 110th Congress has been elected. Whether it’s the crowd you voted for or not, there’s quite a lot of talk now about a new direction, a new civility, possibly even a new pony (but I might not have heard that last part right).
So, given that the Congresspersons will be looking for our votes again in another two years (along with a third of the Senators), this seems like a good time for the people (i.e., you all) to put together an agenda for these elected representatives of ours. To streamline things a bit, and in keeping with the overarching themes of this weblog, let’s restrict the wish-list, at least for the moment, to issues to do with science, education, and matters of ethics — broadly construed. It would be good if you could provide a brief description of why your agenda item should be a priority, and whose needs or wants it will serve. If you’ve got a clever plan for funding it, so much the better.
If we can hammer out some good science/education/ethics goals for the legislative branch, I’m prepared to launch a letter-writing campaign to communicate them to the legislators, and a Congress-watch to keep track of how well they do at achieving these goals.
Seems to me that they ought to care what we want even after they’ve gotten our votes. Let’s make sure they know what that is — and that we’ll be watching!
Get out there and vote, people!
I voted. If you’re registered to vote, you should, too. If you don’t know your polling place, you can check here. If you think you are registered, but you don’t appear on the voter rolls at your polling place, ask for a provisional ballot.
If you have trouble, don’t let it slide! Make some noise:
National Campaign for Fair Elections; phone 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683).
VoterStory.org
Register complaints about voting machine problems: 1-888-SAV-VOTE (1-888-728-8683).
Please don’t sit this one out! It’s your democracy too!
Online AP science classes — with lab?
Adventures in Ethics and Science field operative RMD alerted me to a recent article in the New York Times (free registration required) about an ongoing debate on the use of online instruction for Advanced Placement science classes. The crux of the debate is not the value of online science classes per se, but whether such courses can accomplish the objectives of an AP science course if they don’t include a traditional, hands-on laboratory component.
The debate is interesting for a few reasons. First, it gets to the question of what precisely an AP course is intended to do. Second, it brings up the question of who has access to AP courses — and the special challenges presented for science instruction in some regions. Finally, I think it also prompts an examination of how colleges and universities deal with incoming student bodies whose preparation for college is rather more heterogeneous than homogeneous.
Full disclosure: As some of you already know, I regularly teach an online section of my philosophy of science course.* As well, about a hundred years ago, I was a high school student who took a bunch** of AP classes and AP tests.
“Stereotype threat”, women, and math tests.
Regular commenter Blair was kind enough to bring to my attention an article from The Globe and Mail, reporting research done at the University of British Columbia, that illustrates how what we think we know can have a real impact on what we can do:
Over three years, researchers gave 135 women tests similar to those used for graduate school entrance exams. Each woman was expected to perform a challenging math section, but not before reading an essay that dealt with gender difference in math.
Of the four essays, one argued there was no difference, one argued the difference was genetic and a third argued the difference stemmed from the way girls were taught in elementary school.
The fourth essay covered the subject of women in art; it has long been held by researchers that simply reminding a woman of her gender will negatively impact her test performance.
Any guesses as to the outcomes?
Write some letters to save the Tripoli six.
As Revere notes, the trial of the Tripoli six is scheduled to resume on October 31. This means the time for serious action is now.
As Mike Dunford points out,
If you want to do something more than just get mad, if you want to try to change things, you will need to do more than read blog articles and post comments. You need to write people. You need to call people. You need to send faxes and emails.
Honest to goodness, a letter on paper, in an envelope, addressed and stamped to get to its destination, is going to signal that this really matters to you in a way that emails will not — because you took the trouble to do something that was labor-intensive. Writing an original letter (rather than using a form letter) will further increase the chances that your plea will be taken seriously.
So I’m asking you to do something hard. But I’m also going to provide you some help in doing it.
U6 soccer and the Nobel Prize.
I’ve been thinking about Zuska’s post on the negative impacts the Nobel Prizes might be having on the practice of good science. She quotes N. David Mermin, who opines:
[T]he system [of prizes] had become a destructive force…these things are systematically sought after by organized campaigns, routinely consuming oceans of time and effort.
I feel the pull of this worry — although I’m also sympathetic to a view Rob Knop voiced in a comment:
What I like about the Nobel Prize : once a year, there is a celebration of science that almost impinges upon the public consciousness. Yes, we are probably over-elevating individual scientists, and yes, for some, the prize has become a goal rather than a recognition, and yes, doubtless there are biases in the selection. But, it’s nice to see the world celebrating and being excited about science occasionally.
No doubt, part of this is my persistent belief that science is cool, dammit, and the public ought to get psyched about it. And, part of it has to do with my two degrees of separation from Nobel Prize winners this year. But I think the concerns raised in Zuska’s post are good ones.
And, I think at least a certain part of the concern ties in naturally to things I’ve been working on with the U6 soccer team I coach.*
Gabba gabba! One of us! One of us!
Following up on my earlier post on Roger D. Kornberg’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, I want to call your attention to this comment from the esteemed Pinko Punko:
Well, in the press conf. Dr. Kornberg stated he absolutely and first and formost views himself as a chemist, and his training (Ph.D.) was under a world famous chemist. He considers himself a physical scientist whose goal is to understand the mechanism at the molecular level of a protein machine. Now, perhaps this is somewhat simple chemistry as many of the steps boil down to hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions. You will also note in the history of the Chemistry prize, many nucleic acid-transaction relating research programs have been awarded in addition to post-translation modification of proteins, essentially what many would consider biochemistry. He was on many people’s shortlist for the Chemistry prize, perhaps just not those [who] consider themselves primarily chemists. Dr. Korberg referred to Chemistry as the “Queen of the Sciences” and the fundamental basis for molecular understanding.
(Bold emphasis added.)
So, since he:
- Trained as a chemist,
- Uses chemical methods to study the systems he studies, and
- Acknowledges chemistry as the Queen of the Sciences,
I, for one, am satisfied that Kornberg is a chemist.
(He didn’t need the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on top of those three to convince me, but it’s not like I’m going to make him feel awkward for having one.)
Quick notes on the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
As Bora noted, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger D. Kornberg for a piece of research (the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription) that strikes lots of folks as being within the bounds of biology rather than chemistry.
I can’t do an elaborate discourse on this (as I have sprog-related errands I must do this afternoon), but I want to get some initial responses to this on the table:
My mom on the Nobel Laureates in Physics.
Since, as I mentioned, my mom worked with data from COBE, and thus, was in a position to cross paths with newly-minted Nobel Laureates John Mather and George Smoot, I shook her down for some information about the pair.
Disclaimer: I suspect Mom exaggerates more in her anecdotes about her children than in the ones she tells about her work place, but I’m counting on her for the details here.