Science Education & Policy

Can your school-age child break this code? VS LBH NER NTRQ ORGJRRA RYRIRA NAQ FVKGRRA NAQ PNA ERNQ GUVF GURA JUL ABG RAGRE GUR NYNA GHEVAT PELCGBTENCUL PBZCRGVGVBA If so, The School of Mathematics at The University of Manchester, where Turing helped develop the earliest stored-program computers following his pioneering Enigma Code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WW2, wants to help develop those skills and is organizing a competition to celebrate Turing's centenary. The Alan Turing Centenary Cryptography Competition (sponsored by travel website Skyscanner, linked to for spending…

Adult science literary has tripled since I was a kid, despite the shrill claims that teachers are incompetent, people are stupid and science education is "dismal" that we seen thrown around in consumer media and the advocacy-based segment of science blogging.  In reality, people are pretty smart about science, but it can be humbling and people are less confident about things that are difficult. Nothing shows that more than asking parents themselves what questions from their kids they find tough to explain.  Kids are curious and it may take two or three levels of explanation to get…

It isn't just Americans concerned about science, though Europeans seem a little dramatic about it.   Currently, America can only employ 16% of its Ph.D.s in academia, what most academics regard as 'science', so there is a glut of post-docs and not enough grants to give them all jobs, but Europeans have a different sort of problem - young people are not going into science at all. Business Leaders, European Schoolnet and the European Commission have launched the EUR8.3mn initiative to encourage European teenagers to study science and maths, a much needed skill set if the region's economy…

Germany can again be recognized as a very special place regarding the sciences: The advantage of a hazelnut rod ... is the possibility to attach test-nodes (Testnosoden) at the tip. This allows to search more aimed at different oscillation patterns. … on my left pinky finger, there is a polarization ring made from ferrite material; this serves the determination of polarization, which means, whether the water vein spins right or left handed. This is from a diploma dissertation presented to the faculty for landscaping architecture at the University Weihenstephan-Triesdorf in Bavaria. The…

I'm a professor here at UC Davis.About 3 weeks ago, students on our campus were holding an Occupy protest. They were behaving peacefully and the situation seemed quite stable. After only 1 day of this protest, the leadership of UC Davis made the terrible mistake of calling in the police to try to get the students to leave. As most of the world knows, the police attacked the students as they sat peacefully, posing no threat to anyone. The police used high grade pepper spray on the students, often spraying it right into eyes, mouths, etc. About a dozen students were arrested. The unprovoked…

The EU is everything that can go wrong with bloated, inclusive bureaucracy.  Their proposed constitution had bits of bizarre legal fluff like 'children have a right to be heard', they don't want a strong currency because it damages their individual, heavily subsidized economies if they have to pay more to stay competitive and they make being anti-science into an art form. A short while ago they sent the public into a panic by declaring X-ray scanners couldn't be used because they might cause cancer - hey, I don't want to be X-rayed either but if the EU really cares about preventing…

Turkey Day is coming, and with it, the deadline for Obama’s 12-member “Super Committee,” a group of Congress members tasked with carving $1.2 trillion off our national debt. If the bipartisan group can even reach a deal (so far, they’ve missed their own deadline by at least ten days, flatly refused each others’ proposals and been awfully closed-lipped about possible compromises), it seems like everyone’s going to feel the pinch. Everyone, that is, who can’t buy his or her way out of it. Last week, the American Petroleum Institute — the notorious “Big Oil” lobby representing Chevron, Exxon…

Anecdotes are not data, the saying goes, but people sure believe them.  An article in JAMA says doctors should consider the use of narrative, patient stories and testimonials, to boost public acceptance of health issues such as cancer screenings and vaccination mandates. They advocate "counternarratives" to neutralize personal stories, think celebrities in the news media sharing their health knowledge, that seek to support quackery like homeopathy and anti-vaccine beliefs, along with narratives about the process of scientific study and discovery, to unmask the often hidden work of…

The name of George Augustus Linhart is in fact "widely unknown". In effect, he was a Viennese-born USA-American physicist-chemist, partially associated with the Gilbert Newton Lewis' school of thermodynamics at the University of California in Berkeley. As a lone small boy, he had arrived (from Austria via Hamburg) at New York in 1896, but was officially USA-naturalized only in 1912. He was able to pick up English in the streets of New York and Philadelphia, when occasionally working as a waiter and/or as a tailor - just to somehow survive. But, nonetheless, he could successfully graduate a…

How do we learn best? It depends on the individual! In the video below, Salman Khan is demonstrating what those of us in psychology, education, and intelligence research already knew: Everyone learns at a different pace, in different ways. And I'm not reducing this to 'visual learner' versus 'kinesthetic learner', etc. I mean linear versus non-linear, and all stages in-between.  A personal story... When I was in art school, I took 3D modeling for the first time. That software was wicked intense and complicated, and like nothing I had ever used before. The first day of class, my…