March 25, 2008
On my bookshelf is a book that I have been wanting to read for a long time, but it never seems to make its way to the top of the pile. Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos seems like the sort of book that presents science at about the right pitch for me.
Greene was at BYU today, and I attended his Forum address, which could have been entitled "String Theory For Dummies." (A video of the address will be posted here at some point.) Like I said, about the right pitch.
I noticed on Greene's bio that he hosted the NOVA special, "The Elegant Universe," which inspired this sketch by Brian Regan ...
March 06, 2008
Scientific American reports on a study attempting to explain the biological basis for why girls seem to have superior language skills compared to boys. As a father of two sons experiencing some of the trials and tribulations of pre-school, I notice these stories. Apparently, girls completing linguistics tasks show more brain activity in areas specialized for language encoding, while boys show activity in areas relating to visual and auditory functions. What does this all mean?
[I]t implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.
Subjects ranged from 9 to 15 years of age. The next question is whether these differences persist with age.
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October 23, 2006
By the time I graduated from high school, I had dissected three frogs, a pig and countless earthworms in my quest for a well-rounded education. I had also learned how to use a Bunsen burner, mostly to heat substances to create a reaction guaranteed to produce that great sulfur smell. I was lucky in Chemistry -- my total bill at the end was around $8 for assorted tubes I could not find. My lab partner's bill was over $150 because he broke that really big beaker they tell you not to break. All of this lab angst may be coming to an end, according to the NYT, with online high school laboratories.
Obviously, labs are expensive. So students at some high schools find themselves unable to take a class in say, zoology. Voila, the Internet! Through online high schools, students can take courses they are interested in and create chemistry explosions or dissect animal cadavers online in video-game like simulations. Some educators are skeptical, arguing that no simulation can duplicate a real chemistry lab or biology lab. One educator expressed disdain that a student would graduate from high school without learning how to turn on a Bunsen burner. Surely this teacher was speaking metaphorically; I'm not sure what the act of igniting a gas flame teaches a person who wants to be pre-med. (I've used a gas stove thousands of times for cooking. I should be an M.D. by now.)
Some of the arguments seemed familiar to me. During my five-year journey teaching legal writing, I often witnessed heated arguments over whether teaching students electronic research could replace traditional library research. Often faculty would invoke the same rhetoric: "To do research, you have to smell the books." "How can someone graduate without having to wade through four volumes of Shepard's citations?" "I just like the way the case looks in the book." Ah, the Bunsen burner!
July 31, 2006
Mississippi State University is getting $37.2 million dollars in federal R&D earmarks this year, just as its senior senator Thad Cochran has ascended to the chair of the appropriations committee. Its earmarks from last year totaled only $19.8 million, while Ted Stevens of Alaska was chair. Among the past beneficiaries of government largess in Mississippi are the Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center at MSU Stoneville, the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park at MSU Starkville, and the Thad Cochran Research Center at his alma mater Ole Miss. 
According to CSM:
"Universities have long mastered the whole vanity game of naming rights [for new campus facilities], and in recent years they've added politicians who, unlike philanthropic donors giving their own money, are the Thad Cochrans of the world giving someone else's money," says Ron Utt, a budget expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Besides the interesting tale of MSU's success in garnering federal funds, CSM has a companion piece detailing the increasing efforts of academic institutions to lobby Congress for "directed appropriations."
Academic earmarks jumped from $15 million the first year of the Reagan presidency to $336 million in fiscal year 1989, the year he left office. By the 1990s, academic institutions rivaled defense contractors as consumers of lobby services to win federal earmarks - and helped define a new lobbying specialty in Washington's K Street corridor.
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January 28, 2006
Orin Kerr asks Where Were You? when the Challenger disaster occurred 20 years ago. I had just been having this conversation with friends yesterday, so I remember exactly where I was. I was a junior in high school in Biology II class. (I had to wince to realize that Orin is three years younger than I am.) Our teacher was letting us watch the Challenger take-off, so we saw the disaster occur live. At the time, I didn't instantly assume that something had gone wrong. The shuttle looked to me like a three-stage rocket in a cartoon, and the stages were exploding and falling off as expected. When our teacher ran out of the room to get the other science teachers, we all realized that something had gone horribly wrong.
Our trigonomotry teacher took this opportunity for the next month to remind us that trigonometry errors had caused the disaster, so we had better pay better attention. Knowing that I would probably never work for NASA, I just went on as usual.
August 03, 2005
I suppose it is to be expected in a world of new discoveries, but half the things I learned in high school are proving to be wrong. This whole "Pluto is not a planet" thing has inspired me to start a list. "Things That Were Facts But Are Now Not." As I take my children to museums and read the plaques on the exhibits, I seem more and more ignorant.
1. Our solar system had nine planets, including Pluto.
Enough said.
2. We don't know why the dinosaurs disappeared, but it may have been due to climatological change, the smallness of their brains, or some other crackpot theory like a giant asteroid.
Apparently, the asteroid theory that was presented with such disdain twenty years ago has won, according to the Milwaukee Public Museum.
3. The Rosenbergs were innocent people who were executed wrongly.
Apparently, according to the International Spy Museum, they were proven as spies sometime in the 1990s.
4. Alger Hiss was framed.
OK, that probably wasn't considered a fact then, but my extremely liberal U.S. history teacher sort of made it sound like that. Or, it could have been that in the movie she showed us, Whitaker Chambers was sweating all the time. He looked like he was lying to me. Again, the Spy Museum people say he was a spy.
Does anyone else have any examples so that I can catch up to the 12th grade level?
December 04, 2004
Last night Tom Ashbrook had an interesting program on "America's Lag in the Sciences." The theme was that the United States is not training enough American scientists and engineers.
This is from one of Tom's guests, Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, who is currently the president of Cal Tech:
In the last 20 years, many of the students in American universities who majored in the sciences and engineering came from Asia. Today, significant numbers are staying in Asia because the schooling there is so improved, and because we have made it harder to study here. And Asian scientists who have been successful here are returning home. None of this is lost on the governments of, say, India and China, which are putting huge sums into modernizing their science infrastructure and universities.
The implication seems to be that the U.S. is taking the first steps on the road to financial ruin (Baltimore begins his article by asking: " The United States is the richest nation on Earth, the world's biggest beneficiary of the global economy. But will it last?"), but the connection between basic science and economic development is not linear. Physical, legal, and market infrastructure must combine to create an environment in which science can develop into economic benefit. These other countries have begun to develop the institutions necessary to thrive, but they are still at the beginning of the journey.
Nor is it clear that having scientific innovation distributed among other nations, including India and China, is a bad thing for the United States. As they develop, we will lose some battles, but we are winning a much larger war. I operate on the assumption that a prosperous world is good the the U.S. In my view, Baltimore's argument comes from the opposite -- and in my opinion -- antiquated view that the U.S. must dominate science. This argument comes from the same fount as the anti-outsourcing arguments, and at base the argument is not only jingoistic, but misguided.
July 15, 2004
Tyler Cowen has been writing about economics as science -- or not -- and he points to this recent entry (entitled "Uh Oh") on Dave Tufte's blog, summarizing a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking:
In short, 1) economists publish papers with results that are not replicable, and 2) few make enough effort to notice. Economists - we have a big problem here. It looks like we fib to each other, and then wink at the liars. This is not the way to run a science.
Tufte also supports the finding of the paper with a few (shocking) personal anecdotes. This isn't news, exactly. Most economists I know are pretty open about the fact that their discipline lacks the rigor that we typically associate with the sciences. Nevertheless, Tyler Cowen must be right: "economics is surely a science. We produce empirical knowledge which is subject to process of testing, broadly interpreted, and feedback."
Closer to home, most law professors avoid the problems inherent in scientific inquiry by avoiding data. Though that is changing in some areas of law.
April 14, 2004
Scientific American describes two brain studies, one demonstrating that aesthetic sensibility activates the prefrontal cortex, and the other showing that flashes of insight emanate from the right hemisphere of the brain’s temporal cortex (thus supporting the notion that insight is neurologically different from routine problem solving). If you have having trouble visualizing this, here is an interactive brain map. So I wonder: what part of the brain is motivating Professor Kevin Warwick? (Link courtesy of TJ's Weblog.)
December 18, 2003
The fall colors are long gone in Wisconsin, but another new favorite blog (The Loom) is paying tribute to William Hamilton's attempt to explain fall colors as an evolutionary adaptation.
He and Brown proposed that a brilliant leaf was, like a peacock's tail, a signal. A peacock's tail takes a huge investment of energy, energy that could otherwise be diverted to fighting off parasites or surviving other stresses. A strong male can afford to use up this energy, which makes the tail an honest ad for its parasite-fighting genes. In the case of leaves, trees are not sending signals to other trees--they are sending signals to tree-eating insects.Trees, after all, are as besieged by insects as birds or other animals are by internal parasites. They fight their enemies a sophisticated arsenal of chemical agents, sticky traps, and other weapons of mass arthropod destruction. Hamilton and Brown proposed that trees that have a strong constitution warn off insects by changing colors in the fall. In a sense, they say, "I can shut down my photosynthesis early in the fall, pump a lot of red or yellow pigments into my leaves, and still have enough energy left to annihilate your babies when they hatch in the spring. So just move along."
Now, I am not a biologist (though I did read parts of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory!), but this strikes me as at least a little far-fetched. It reminds me of the old expression, "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." I have another explanation for fall colors: they just happen as the leaves die. It's going to take more than 100 birch trees in Norway to convince me otherwise.
