Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston; Jan McLaughlin, Science Consultant to the New Hampshire Department of Education and Bill Church, Teacher of Physics, Physical Science, and Robotics at Littleton High School discuss the Report on K-12 Science Education in USA and science education in New Hampshire.
Category Archives: Science
Balloon Molecules
Photo: “The example of the Cuban cluster [Fe4(n5-C 5H5)4 (µ3-CO)4] shows that you can build any molecule with some consideration: The iron atoms are located at the corners of the green tetrahedron, the orange-coloured Cyclopentadienyl-circles are penta-haptolinked to the iron atoms with the help of transparent balloons and the three-times-linking, black-red carbonyls are complexed through transparent balloons as well.”
Read more on Balloon Molecules.
China and USA Basic Science Research
US$425 million to boost Chinese innovation by Fu Jing:
The National Natural Science Foundation of China will provide 3.4 billion yuan (US$425 million) in funding for basic science, it announced last week (25 May).
“The boost has shown the government’s determination for China to become an innovative country by 2020,” said the foundation’s vice-president Zhu Zuoyan. He added that the foundation’s research funding is set to grow by about 20 per cent a year for the next five years.
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According to government plans, China’s total investment in science and technology should reach 2.5 per cent of its gross domestic product by 2020 — a share similar to that spent by industrialised nations.
By that time, China aims to be spending about US$112 billion annually on research and development (see China announces 58-point plan to boost science).
U.S. National Science Foundation Celebrates Opening of Beijing Office
The National Science Foundation is a U.S. government agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of $5.58 billion.
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According to the NSF report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, China ranked fourth in the world in the year 2000 in research and development, with $48.9 billion in expenditures. Two years later, the country ranked third, behind the United States and Japan, spending an estimated $72.0 billion on R&D.
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According to the NSF report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, China ranked fourth in the world in the year 2000 in research and development, with $48.9 billion in expenditures. Two years later, the country ranked third, behind the United States and Japan, spending an estimated $72.0 billion on R&D.
“It is important for the U.S. scientific community, especially young researchers, to be aware of and consider collaborating with colleagues in China in this environment,” said Beijing office Director William Chang.
The NSF Beijing Office is NSF’s third foreign office. NSF also maintains research offices in Paris and Tokyo.
Report on K-12 Science Education in USA
The National Assessment of Educational Progress from the United States Department of Education is the definitive report on k-12 science education based on testing 4th, 8th and 12th grade students. The report provides a huge amount of data on testing results. At first look, it seems basically things stayed the same over the last 5 years.
Various differences are shown (for example: “Most states showed no improvement at grades 4 and 8. Five of the 37 participating states, however, did improve between 2000 and 2005 – and did so at both grades.”). However, I remain a bit skeptical of reading much into such claims. Even if you changed nothing (just retest the students the next month say) and then look for differences between the two sets of data it is possible to find seemingly interesting differences. It is very easy to be fooled when you have a large pool of data and search for any differences that seem interesting.
We commented on one example of why it is important to be careful in making conclusions based on data recently (in our management improvement blog). Most often people look for the differences to highlight the differences. That creates a bias to find such differences, which leads me to be a bit skeptical of such claims without an explanation of why the data is convincing that such a difference is significant and not just variation in the data.
The data from the test does provide a resource for those interested in exploring these matters, which is good.
The Department of Education provides sample questions online. Try them yourself: they are interesting. Unfortunately, for some questions requiring written responses, they don’t actually provide what the answer should be.
Science scores up in grade four, stalled in grades 8 and 12
News stories:
- Test Shows Drop in Science Achievement for 12th Graders by Sam Dillon
- Top of the class: Virginia a model for science education
Forty percent of fourth-grade students and 35 percent of eighth-graders in Virginia’s public schools have a solid grasp of physical and life science, the NAEP reported.
Nationally, the proficiency percentage for fourth-grade students is 29 percent, and 30 percent for those in eighth grade.
- State pupils improving in science tests – but 4th- and 8th-graders still not doing as well as their peers across the nation
In fourth-grade testing, only Mississippi scored below California, while California’s eighth-grade scores ranked 42nd out of 44 states. Of California’s fourth-graders, 17 percent were proficient or better in science, and half scored below the basic level. Among California eighth-graders, 18 percent were proficient or better, while 56 percent were below basic.
Wide achievement gaps persist for California’s economically disadvantaged students, with 73 percent scoring below the basic level, and among its ethnic minorities, with 74 percent of black eighth-graders and 73 percent of Hispanic eighth-graders scoring below basic.
Improving Undergraduate Science Education
The Meyerhoff Scholarship Program program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County uses innovative strategies to improve the performance of undergraduate science students.
At the start of their freshman year, all Meyerhoff Scholars attend an accelerated six-week residential program, called Summer Bridge, which includes course work, cultural explorations and meetings with leaders in science and technology. Summer Bridge sets up patterns for work and study that will shape student’s experiences for their years at UMBC and beyond.
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Rather than fostering a climate of competition, the program stresses cooperation and collaboration. Scholars rely on mutual support and continually challenge each other to do more, creating a positive learning environment.
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Rather than fostering a climate of competition, the program stresses cooperation and collaboration. Scholars rely on mutual support and continually challenge each other to do more, creating a positive learning environment.
Why American College Students Hate Science by Brent Staples:
The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals.
While the need to improve science and engineering education is real we should remember that many good efforts exist. Expanding on the good efforts that exist and continuing to improve education system will benefit not just those students that participate but all of us that benefit from the work they will do.
”It’s Cool to Be Smart” by Kate Swan:
The strategy is working. When UMBC researchers compared the performance of early Meyerhoff graduates with that of students who had qualified for the program but gone elsewhere, Meyerhoff Scholars were twice as likely to graduate with an engineering, math, or science degree, and more than five times as likely to attend graduate school in those fields.
Seeing Machine from MIT
photo: an image (of a staircase) created to approximate the view through a seeing machine
MIT poet develops ‘seeing machine’ by Elizabeth A. Thomson
The work is led by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She developed the machine over the last 10 years, in collaboration with more than 30 MIT students and some of her personal eye doctors. The new device costs about $4,000, low compared to the $100,000 price tag of its inspiration, a machine Goldring discovered through her eye doctor.
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The pilot clinical trial of the seeing machine involved visually impaired people recruited from the Beetham Eye Institute. All participants had a visual acuity of 20/70 or less in the better-seeing eye. A person with 20/70 vision can see nothing smaller than the third line from the top of most eye charts. Most participants, however, had vision that was considered legally blind, meaning they could see nothing smaller than the “big E” on a standard eye chart.
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Goldring and colleagues are now working toward a large-scale clinical trial of a color seeing machine (the device tested in the pilot trial was black and white).
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The pilot clinical trial of the seeing machine involved visually impaired people recruited from the Beetham Eye Institute. All participants had a visual acuity of 20/70 or less in the better-seeing eye. A person with 20/70 vision can see nothing smaller than the third line from the top of most eye charts. Most participants, however, had vision that was considered legally blind, meaning they could see nothing smaller than the “big E” on a standard eye chart.
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Goldring and colleagues are now working toward a large-scale clinical trial of a color seeing machine (the device tested in the pilot trial was black and white).
Donald Knuth – Computer Scientist
Love at First Byte by Kara Platoni:
In the early ’60s, publisher Addison-Wesley invited Knuth to write a book on compiler design. Knuth eagerly drafted 3,000 pages by hand before someone at the publishing house informed him that would make an impossibly long book. The project was reconceived as the seven-volume The Art of Computer Programming. Although Knuth has written other books in the interim, this would become his life’s work. The first three volumes were published in 1968, 1969 and 1973. Volume 4 has been in the works nearly 30 years.
Its subject, combinatorial algorithms, or computational procedures that encompass vast numbers of possibilities, hardly existed when Knuth began the series. Now the topic grows faster than anyone could reasonably chronicle it. “He says if everyone else stopped doing work he would catch up better,” deadpans Jill Knuth, his wife of nearly 45 years.
Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms – Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms – Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching
Usually a lone wolf, Knuth collaborated on his typography programs with some of the world’s best typographers and his students. He produced two software programs, the TeX typesetting system and the METAFONT alphabet design system, which he released to the public domain. The programs are used for the bulk of scientific publishing today. “He made everybody’s life so much better and made the scholarly work so much more beautiful,” Papadimitriou says. “He has exported a lot of good will for computer science.”
See photo:
He likes to hide jokes in the index, as in Volume 3, where “royalties, use of” leads you to a page with an illustration of an organ-pipe array, a little wink to the 16-rank organ that dominates his home. He plays four-hands music with Jill, who swears that the neighbors tend to complain that the music emanating from their house is in fact not loud enough.
Related:
- Invention Machine
- Computer Science Revolution
- Donald E. Knuth home page
- Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science – NPR interview podcast
Golden Buckyballs
In the hunt for golden buckyballs:
Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and at the University of Nebraska report in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered hollow molecular structures made of pure gold — golden buckyballs.
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“You can put another atom in the center,” Wang said. Depending upon the kind of atom put at the center of the cage, he said, you could create a material with novel chemical, magnetic or even optical properties. “We intend to try that.”
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“You can put another atom in the center,” Wang said. Depending upon the kind of atom put at the center of the cage, he said, you could create a material with novel chemical, magnetic or even optical properties. “We intend to try that.”
Related:
Entirely New Antibiotic Developed
Potent antibiotic to target MRSA
A potent antibiotic which kills many bacteria, including MRSA, has been discovered. Scientists with Merck, isolated platensimycin from a sample of South African soil and have developed an antibiotic based on that discovery.
If the compound passes clinical trials it will become only the third entirely new antibiotic developed in the last four decades.
Details in the journal Nature reveal the antibiotic works in a completely different way to all others.
It acts to block enzymes involved in the synthesis of fatty acids, which bacteria need to construct cell membranes.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) is a type of bacteria that is resistant to certain antibiotics, including: methicillin and other more common antibiotics such as oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. Staph infections, including MRSA, occur most frequently among persons in hospitals and healthcare facilities who have weakened immune systems. More information on MRSA is available from the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Related:
Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge
Image by Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media. The Synapse Revealed – Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. The brain contains billions of neurons, whose network of chemical messages form the basis of all thought, movement and behavior.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science created the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge: “In a world where science literacy is dismayingly rare, illustrations provide the most immediate and influential connection between scientists and other citizens, and the best hope for nurturing popular interest.” The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2006. See information on the 2005 winners (including the image shown here).