EduBloggers F-meme

Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog was named in Give a Lift to EduBloggers in the F-meme! as part of the F-Listers Revolution

To keep the link chain going add some of your education favorites and post the list to your blog. In any event take a look at these, I found some interesting new blogs.

Are We Doing Anything Today?
Timely Teacher Talk
Three Standard Deviations to the Left
Eide Neurolearning Blog
Speaking of History
Mindset Matters: Leading and Teaching with Smart and Heart
The Principal’s Office
Curious Cat: Science and Engineering Blog

And I will add, from our science and engineering blog list:

Confessions of a Science Librarian
Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education
eContent

Kids in the Lab: Getting High-Schoolers Hooked on Science

Kids in the lab: Getting high-schoolers hooked on science

Ballard is a senior at Madison West High School who is still shy of his 18th birthday. His work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics is part of the Youth Apprenticeship Program, an innovative project that gives exceptional high-school students an opportunity to get exposure and experience in their desired careers.

Created in 1991, the program is run by Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development, with collaboration from universities, schools and businesses. Statewide, more than 10,000 students have participated in 22 different program areas.
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Lan says nearly all of her apprentices have gone on to study science as college students, a reward that compensates the time mentors invest working with the young students.

“the [students] don’t really know how science works,” she says. “I think I’m trying to show them, ‘Yes, you can have a career; yes, you can have a family; and yes, you can have fun,'” she says. “Yes, you can do it!”

I attended West High School and enjoyed some science classes. We did unfortunately have one class, biology, where (due to budget cuts, I believe) they let some teachers go, and due to seniority rules for determining what teachers to layoff, we ended up with a teacher that had taught 2nd grade for like 15 years and really didn’t know much about biology. Otherwise the classes were pretty good.

And for Biology we luckily had a smart kid that could answer the other students questions. Though I remember my senior year design of experiments project didn’t go so well: I couldn’t get much to grow at all. So I was not able to actually determine which factors had what influence 🙁

Super Soaker Inventor Aims to Cut Solar Costs in Half

[Lonnie ] Johnson, a nuclear engineer who holds more than 100 patents, calls his invention the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System, or JTEC for short. This is not PV technology, in which semiconducting silicon converts light into electricity. And unlike a Stirling engine, in which pistons are powered by the expansion and compression of a contained gas, there are no moving parts in the JTEC. It’s sort of like a fuel cell: JTEC circulates hydrogen between two membrane-electrode assemblies (MEA). Unlike a fuel cell, however, JTEC is a closed system. No external hydrogen source. No oxygen input. No wastewater output. Other than a jolt of electricity that acts like the ignition spark in an internal-combustion engine, the only input is heat.

Here’s how it works: One MEA stack is coupled to a high- temperature heat source (such as solar heat concentrated by mirrors), and the other to a low-temperature heat sink (ambient air). The low-temperature stack acts as the compressor stage while the high-temperature stack functions as the power stage. Once the cycle is started by the electrical jolt, the resulting pressure differential produces voltage across each of the MEA stacks. The higher voltage at the high-temperature stack forces the low-temperature stack to pump hydrogen from low pressure to high pressure, maintaining the pressure differential. Meanwhile hydrogen passing through the high-temperature stack generates power.

“It’s like a conventional heat engine,” explains Paul Werbos, program director at the National Science Foundation, which has provided funding for JTEC. “It still uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.”

Very cool and yet another example of the benefits of educated engineers. The positive externalities are large for engineering education.

Really Widescreen Monitor (2880×900)

I foolishly bought a 22 inch “widescreen” monitor (I guess I can’t call it that now) last week. What was I thinking? Seriously the video shows a 2880×900 curved monitor from Alienware is scheduled to be released in the second half of this year. No price estimate is available yet. It is actually a rear projection DLP system. Last year, in Two Screens Are Better Than One we showed a Microsoft prototype very similar to this.

Preparing Computer Science Students for Jobs

in, Preparing Students for Jobs, Michael Mitzenmacher, a computer science professor at Harvard asks past students to comment on how well school prepared them for work.

In a recent “discussion” on another blog, I repeatedly heard the refrain that we ivory-tower pie-in-the-sky university computer science professor types just aren’t preparing students suitably for “real-world” employment. Personally, I think that’s just BS. However, I realize I may have a fairly biased viewpoint. I teach at Harvard, and, if I may say so, our students are generally quite good and do well in the job market. Having spent some time in industry, and, if I may so so, being perhaps more interested than the average theorist about practical issues, I attempt to add “real-world” aspects to my classes, like programming assignments in my undergraduate theory course.
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Please tell me, in your experience, did your education prepare you for your life after in the real world.

via: John Dupuis

UbuntuScience

UbuntuScience is a great source of information on hundreds of freeware and open source science software for the unbuntu operating system (linux), including:

KStars – A virtual planetarium
Coot – Superb tool for crystallographers
R – for statistical computing and graphics
LaTeX – text mark up system used by scientists in several fields (e.g., physics, mathematics) to write papers
BOINC – A software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources. Projects include: Climateprediction.net, Einstein@Home, LHC@home, Predictor@home and SETI@home.

50 Species of Diatoms

Photo of diatoms by Randolph Femmer (sadly the government deleted the site, breaking the link, so I removed it).

A photomicrograph depicting the siliceous frustules of fifty species of diatoms arranged within a circular shape. The image has been inverted to white on black to bring out details. Diatoms form the base of many marine and aquatic foodchains and upon death, their glassy frustules form sediments known as diatomaceous earth.

$500,000 for Innovation in Engineering Education

The 2008 Bernard M. Gordon Prize, recognizing innovation in engineering and technology education goes to Lawrence Carlson and Jacquelyn Sullivan, University of Colorado at Boulder. CU-Boulder Faculty To Receive $500,000 Prize For Innovation In Engineering Education

The $500,000 award honors them as founders of the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program at CU-Boulder, which infuses hands-on learning throughout K-16 engineering education to motivate and prepare tomorrow’s engineering leaders.
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The laboratory is essential to the ITL Program’s undergraduate curriculum in which engineering students from all departments, beginning in their first year, can take design courses in which small teams develop products to solve real problems. Leadership qualities emerge as teams call upon each member’s strengths to create and manage an engineering project from start to finish, and all teams showcase their creations in the semi-annual Design Expo. The first-year design course has contributed to significantly higher retention for all students across the engineering college.

A second element of the program’s curriculum is the extensive development and implementation of K-12 engineering education. About 1,700 students in grades three through 12 experience the excitement of hands-on engineering in weekly classes taught by engineering graduate students — helping them realize that engineering is about making a difference in the world. The classes are a partnership between the ITL Program and six neighborhood public schools in Lafayette as well as the Denver School of Science and Technology.

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids do

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our new wave of overprotected kids — and spells out 5 (and really, he’s got 6) dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer.

It is not necessarily the safest thing to try and eliminate all risks. Kids can learn to be safer when they work on not entirely safe things with parents or others that can teach them how to do so safely. And they learn to interact with the world around them and think like a scientist.

Science and Engineering Education Collaboration in Virginia

Two new schools to focus on technology

Two new schools focused on career, technology and engineering for high school and college students will open in Newport News and Suffolk. But while the Suffolk school will have a home in the Pruden Center for Industry, the other will look more like a network, reaching out from a base at the New Horizons Regional Education Center into six school districts, two colleges, at least one government agency and several area businesses.
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The Newport News academy is aimed at high school students and will focus on electrical and mechanical engineering, Johnson said. Students will follow the curriculum requirements for an associate of arts degree available at academy partner Thomas Nelson Community College, which can lead to a bachelor’s degree at another partner, Old Dominion University. Russo said emphasis will include robotics, modeling and simulation technology and engineering.

Instead of housing the school at New Horizons or Thomas Nelson, the academy’s classes will be taught in public high schools in Gloucester County, Newport News, Hampton, York County, Poquoson and Williamsburg-James City County, at New Horizons and at Thomas Nelson. Additional courses will be available online.