Author Archives: curiouscat

Designed Experiments

One-Factor-at-a-Time Versus Designed Experiments by Veronica Czitrom:

The advantages of designed experiments over [One Factor at a Time] OFAT experiments are illustrated using three real engineering OFAT experiments, and showing how in each case a designed experiment would have been better. This topic is important because many scientists and engineers continue to perform OFAT experiments.

I still remember, as a child, asking what my father was going to be teaching the company he was going to consult with for a few days. He said he was going to teach them about using designed factorial experiments. I said, but you explained that to me and I am just a kid? How can you be teaching adults that? Didn’t they learn it in school? The paper provides some examples showing why OFAT experimentation is not as effective as designed multi-factor experiments.

NSF: Girls in Science and Engineering

via: Girls in Science and Engineering – NSF book. The 2003 book from NSF on Girls in Science and Engineering offers advice on improving k-12 engineering education for girls.

Girls who are overly protected in the lab or on the playground have few chances to assess risks and solve problems on their own. In SMART classes, once-dreaded mistakes become hypotheses. Girls are urged to go back to the drawing board to figure out why their newly assembled electric door alarm doesn’t work or why their water filter gets clogged. Supported by adults instead of rescued, girls learn to embrace their curiosity, face their fear, and trust their own judgment.

I must admit most of the advice I read for how to improve education for girls is really about doing a better job of science and engineering education for anyone. There is also some good advice (in this booklet and elsewhere) that is specifically about how to improve education for girls. And those practices have been shown to lead to increased desire by girls to to pursue more education, and and achieve future success, in science and engineering fields.

Improving Elementary Science Education

Experts Combine Efforts to Improve Elementary Science:

“We want to address ways to make science education more interesting for the students, and incorporating engineering and technology into elementary science programs often motivates the students to learn the science,” explains Tufts University Professor of Mechanical Engineering Chris Rogers, who is also the director of CEEO. Research on how people learn suggests that weaving engineering and technology into basic science curricula can deepen students’ understanding of and interest in science, which can be especially critical for young girls.

Good advice.

Improvements compared with conventional instruction Researchers expect that including engineering in science instruction in this way will help students deepen their understanding of the material. The curriculum design will also be informed by the “theory of triarchic intelligence,” developed by psychologist Robert Sternberg, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts and director of the PACE Center. Sternberg’s work indicates that course instruction that builds a combination of analytical, practical and creative skills to improve student achievement compared with conventional instruction.

NASA Tests Robots at Meteor Crater

John Hunter at Meteor Crater

NASA Auditions Robots for Lunar Exploration Missions

Arizona’s famous Meteor Crater is a long way from the Moon. But for a menagerie of intelligent robots hoping to earn supporting roles in NASA’s lunar exploration plans, the massive impact crater west of Flagstaff is center stage.

In September, several such robots and an autonomous Moon buggy called Scout were put through their paces in the rough desert terrain. During a two-week campaign conducted by NASA’s Desert Research and Technology Studies team — a collection of government, university and industry scientists and engineers known as the Desert Rats — the robots demonstrated their ability to work side-by-side with space-suited researchers, helping with the kinds of tasks that actual astronauts will have to perform as they begin exploring the Moon and establishing outposts.

The photo shows me at Meteor Crater. I visited it, and some other sites in Arizona, a few years ago. It is interesting but hardly seems that amazing to me More travel photos: Glacier National Park, Kenya, Rocky Mountain National Park, New York City.

13 things that do not make sense

13 things that do not make sense by Michael Brooks discusses such things as dark matter, the horizon problem and the placebo effect:

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

NSF Undergraduate STEM Scholarships

NSF Undergraduate Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM).

“This program makes grants to institutions of higher education to support scholarships for academically talented, financially needy students, enabling them to enter the workforce following completion of an associate, baccalaureate, or graduate level degree in science and engineering disciplines. Grantee institutions are responsible for selecting scholarship recipients, reporting demographic information about student scholars, and managing the S-STEM project at the institution.” Students apply directly to the school.

Related: July post on this program (applications are taken each semester) – More science and engineering fellowships and grants

Tree of Life

Tree of Life (showing 3,000 species, based on rRNA sequences), from the University of Texas. Humans are shown in the upper left “you are here.” I must admit this graphic doesn’t quite work for me but I figure some people might like it.

NSF Engineering Education Program Grants

Grants awarded by NSF for engineering education programs include (next applications due Aug 2007):

Extraordinary Women Engineers (start date Oct 2006) – “to encourage more academically prepared high school girls to consider engineering as an attractive option for post-secondary education and subsequent careers in order to increase the number of women who make up the engineering workforce.”

Colleges of Engineering as Learning Organizations (Sep 2006) – “Based on the framework developed by Senge the PI will work with engineering colleges and departments to develop a rubric that will allow them to self-reflect, make governance decisions that benefit the organization, the faculty, and the students and continuously improve.”

Service-Learning Integrated throughout a College of Engineering (Sep 2005) – “Service-learning is the integration of academic subject matter with service to the community in credit-bearing courses, with key elements including reciprocity, reflection, coaching, community voice in projects.”

More Nutritious Wheat

A wheat gene, now present but inactive, could boost nutrition if it were active. Wheat’s lost gene helps nutrition

The gene occurs naturally in wheat, but has largely been silenced during the evolution of domestic varieties. Researchers found evidence that turning it back on could raise levels of the nutrients in wheat grains.

Writing in the journal Science, they suggest that new varieties with a fully functioning gene can be created through cross-breeding with wild wheat. “Wheat is one of the world’s major crops, providing approximately one-fifth of all calories consumed by humans,”
…
“This experiment confirmed that this single gene was responsible for all these changes.”

The researchers deduced that the reverse process – enhancing GPC-B1 activity – ought to produce plants which have higher levels of these nutrients in their grains and mature faster. The UC Davis team is already making such varieties, not by genetic engineering but through crossing domesticated wheat plants with wild relatives.

Report on Use of Online Science Resources

The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science (pdf) from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

“40 million Americans rely on the internet as their primary source for news and information about science,” second to TV.

Another interesting piece of data: “59% of Americans have been to some sort of science museum in
the past year.” I find this unlikely but… That rises to79% for those that have visited a science website.

The respondents also reported extremely positives views of science, such as (see page 26-28):
To be a strong society, the United States needs to be competitive in science 39% strongly agree 50% agree 8% disagree 1% strongly disagree
Developments in science help make society better 31% 58% 8% 1%
Scientific research is essential to improving the quality of human lives 35% 56% 7% 1%
Science creates more problems than solutions for us and our planet 3% 19% 52% 19%