My last post for the basic concepts series involved phases of matter and transformations from one phase to another. This post will look at how a phase change can be put to practical use in a common household appliance — the freezer. My aim here is to give you a good thermodynamic feel for how a freezer works. As a bonus, I’ll explain why leaving the freezer door open is a futile strategy for cooling down a hot kitchen.
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
Online source for hands-on chemistry (for kids).
Since Sandra has posted links to sites with brainy games for kids*, and Karmen is working on her list of science education web sites for children, I thought I’d mention one of my favorite online destinations for kid-strength chemistry. Luddite that I am, what I like best is that the site isn’t hypnotizing your child with a virtual chemistry experiment, but actually gives you activities to do with the child in the three-dimensional world.
A branch of learning that ‘need not be learned’?
Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I’ll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of learning can it be said that it gives its proficients no advantage; that it need not be taught or, if taught, need not be learned?
Bill’s take is “scientific methodology” here can be read “philosophy of science”. So, what do I think?
Does thinking like a scientist lead to bad science writing?
In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn’t always the best mindset for communicating science. (It’s more than a suggestion, actually — the second chapter of the book is titled “Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead to Bad Science Writing.”) Since it’s connected to our prior discussion of ambiguous scientific writing, let’s have a look at Porush’s diagnosis of bad science writing and the ways he thinks it could be better.
Book review: The Ethical Chemist.
People sometimes worry that throwing ethics coursework at scientists-in-training is not such a great strategy for training them to be ethical scientists. (I’ve explored worries of this sort myself.)
For one thing, at many schools the existing coursework may be a fairly broad “moral issues” course aimed at understanding what it means to be a good person rather than a good scientist.* Or the ethics course on the books may have more to do with meta-ethics (the examination of various theoretical frameworks grounding claims about what is good and what is bad) rather than practical ethics. And if the instructor for the course comes from a non-science discipline (like philosophy or religious studies) and is teaching from texts from that discipline, there’s a good chance that the student will ask herself, “What does any of this have to do with being an ethical scientist?”
Chemist Jeffrey Kovac’s book The Ethical Chemist: Professionalism and Ethics in Science is a text that, for those charged with teaching ethics to chemistry students, aims to sidestep these worries.
Chem 2.0
The June 25th issue of Chemical & Engineering News has two pieces that talk about ways people are using features of the “new internet” (or Web 2.0) to disseminate and explore chemistry online.
Fine-tuning an analogy.
Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor’s research group.
I’m not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I’m hoping you can help.
Extra benefit of the growing ‘green chemistry’ movement.
There’s an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener — that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening of the chem labs may not just be good for the environment — it could be better for student learning, too.
First, consider a chemist’s description of how to revamp laboratory experiments to make them greener. The article quotes Ken Doxsee, a chemistry professor at University of Oregon:
Birth order, familial environment, and ‘intelligence’.
There’s another piece in the New York Times today about how birth order and family dynamics might play a role in “intelligence” (as measured by IQ — an imperfect measure at best). This is a follow up to their earlier story about research reported in Science and Intelligence that claims, based on research on male Norwegian conscripts, that “social rank” in a family accounts for a “small but significant” difference in IQ scores. (Zuska reminds us of the dangers of drawing too strong conclusions from limited data.)
Today’s Times piece seems to be a round-up of anecdata of the sort that readers would find engaging as they quaff their coffee. However, I think the anecdata suggest ways that the system under study is complicated.
And while we’re admitting you to college, let’s throw in the Ph.D. program too!
Another article from Inside Higher Ed that caught my eye:
The chancellor of the City University of New York [Matthew Goldstein] floated a unique approach this week to dealing with the long lamented problem of low enrollments in the sciences: Offer promising students conditional acceptances to top Ph.D. programs in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) as they start college. …
In a speech Monday, Goldstein envisioned a national effort in which students identified for their aptitude in middle school would subsequently benefit from academic enrichment programs that their own local high schools might not be able to provide (The chancellor described the proposed program as one that could have a particularly strong impact on increasing woefully low minority enrollments in the STEM fields).
Upon entering college, students would be offered a spot in a top Ph.D. science or math program, provided they meet certain performance requirements throughout their undergraduate years.
“It sends a very strong statement to students who have not necessarily had the encouragement … that very elite places genuinely believe in them and, at an early age, they are prepared to make an investment to serve as an incentive for those students to continue to do very good work,” Goldstein said.
Some of my initial reactions to this proposal: