Science is Real

They Might Be Giants, a rock band who's been around for a long time are releasing a new set of children's songs that clarify the differences between science and belief systems.

This is the best thing I've heard in years and I hope parent groups embrace this as part of heir children's collection of music.

Pew on Science

A new PEW study on America's state of Science standing in the national psyche is complete.

I find the study to be flawed and misreported in a number of ways. One section of the study asks respondents fairly pedestrian questions about science which Americans largely answer correctly and another section that asks so-called textbook questions. Unsurprisingly fewer respondents get the textbook questions correct. The commentary of the report implies that the textbook questions are "more complex science topics", a dubious characterization. One could argue that the textbook material is last century's idea of complex (nuclear age vs information technology questions).

In fact, the most profoundly disturbing aspect of this report is the utter lack of recognizing the importance of computing to science (a topic for another blog).

In Scientific American, the study is handed down without any critical thinking and that becomes an invitation to bash American public school science education.

Given that American science is still the envy of the rest of the world one has to wonder why Americans still accept and perpetuate the idea that American science education is in crisis.

As this blog has repeatedly pointed out, American business interests have used science and math bashing as a public relations ploy to pass legislation to exploit foreign workers at the expense of American workers.

The latest such insulting allegation came from a broadside from Vineet Nayar, a so-called respected CEO of yet another IT services outfit from India.

The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn't hiring more people in his state. Vineet's short answer: because most American college grads are "unemployable." (In fairness to HCL, the company recently announced plans to open a delivery center in another state, North Carolina, and invest $3.2 million and hire more than 500 employees there over the next five years under a Job Development Investment Grant.)

Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.

As a result, Vineet said, most Americans are just too expensive to train--despite the Indian IT industry's reputation for having the most exhaustive boot camps in the world. To some extent, he said, students from other highly developed countries fall into the same rut.

In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. For the most part, he said, those institutions haven't been receptive to such industry partnerships.

More broadly, Vineet echoed the concerns expressed by other CEOs, including SAS Institute's Jim Goodnight and Cisco's John Chambers, about the failure of the U.S. education system to prepare the country's next-generation tech workforce (a subject Goodnight and others will dive into at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, Sept. 13 to 15).

Beyond the need to bolster competencies in math, the hard sciences, and basic problem solving, U.S. schools at all levels must place a greater emphasis on global history, foreign languages, and other subjects that prepare students for jobs and life outside this country. How many grads of U.S. colleges are ready or even willing to work abroad? Vineet asked rhetorically. "We need to define the American dream to be more global in nature," he said.

The unholy alliance of corporate greed teamed with offshore job pirating firms has over-saturated the American democracy to the degree that American public education has been thrown under the bus along with the American worker.

With American science STILL, AS ALWAYS leading the world in innovation and progress, Americans continue to be denigrated, demeaned, and insulted by the corporate global job raiders.

The truth is that American students continue to shine in math and science at all educational levels and the proof is in the pudding. And American students continue to pursue the American dream of freedom, prosperity, and personal happiness with the same vigor of their forefathers. They have nothing to apologize for.

American workers have the right to earn decent wages in their own country from the fruit of their own ingenuity. It is not Americans who are out of line here, it is incivility of the those who lecture us instead of working to create self-sustaining opportunities in their own countries.

The Math and Science Scam

The New York Times has a debate on the value of foreign technology workers that's worth reading.

Norman Matloff in Suppressing Wages With Younger Workers, provides an insight as to why studies of American education always imply that Americans are illiterate in these areas.

A core problem with the H-1B program is its impact on older U.S. workers. The median age of H-1B workers is 27, and since younger workers are cheaper, employers use H-1B to avoid hiring older (i.e. over age 35) U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Human resources departments routinely exclude the applications of older workers on the grounds that the applicants have experience beyond the range stated in the job ad. Proposals to grant green cards in lieu of H-1B visas are thus misguided, as they would still swell the young labor pool.

The hiring managers have a “gotcha” for the younger applicants too, rejecting them as lacking job experience in some special (but quickly learnable) skill.

The industry lobbyists note that 50 percent of Silicon Valley startups have been founded by immigrants. But since immigrants make up half of Silicon Valley engineers, the lobbyists’ figure merely shows that entrepreneurship rates of immigrants and natives are the same. There is no evidence that the displacement of American workers has produced a net increase in startups.

The world’s “best and brightest” should be welcomed, but most H-1B workers are not in that league. Meanwhile, many of our own best and brightest are squeezed out of the market once they become “expensive.” The industry’s
claim that American kids don’t study enough math and science is a red herring, and is rank hypocrisy, with the layoffs of thousands of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who were math and science whizzes as kids.

What Norman fails to observe is that high tech jobs were one of the job sectors in which [American] women reached and exceeded income parity with their male counter-parts.

This blog has long asserted that the math and science studies were largely manufactured to justify increased legalized job pirating practices.

Math and science teachers deserve an apology for being falsely accused of incompetence. On the other hand their complicit silence is unfortunate and sad.

Cosmic Ghost Ushers in an Age of Public Scholarship

CNN reports in Armchair astronomer discovers unique 'cosmic ghost' by Brandon Griggs a new phenomenon in knowledge discovery.

Van Arkel is a 25-year-old schoolteacher in Heerlen, The Netherlands, not an astrophysicist. But her startling find -- a mysterious and unique object some observers are calling a "cosmic ghost" -- has captivated astronomers and even caught the attention of the people who run the Hubble Space Telescope, who have agreed to take a closer look next year.

"This discovery really shows how citizen science has come of age in the Internet world," said Bill Keel, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama and a Galaxy Zoo team member. "There was a time when I spoke pejoratively of armchair astronomers. And I've gotten up at a star party and publicly apologized for that."

Not so long ago, the term "amateur astronomer" conjured images of stargazers peering through backyard telescopes. But today's are as likely to be analyzing reams of sophisticated data collected by observatories and posted on space-related Web sites.

Armchair observers like van Arkel increasingly are making significant contributions to science, said Steve Maran, spokesman for the American Astronomical Society, a group of 6,500 professionals. Amateurs have been invited to present papers at recent AAS conferences, "which wouldn't have happened years ago," he said.

A successful example of amateur-professional collaboration, the Galaxy Zoo project was launched last year by Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and Chris Lintott at the University of Oxford in England.

The pair were looking for help in cataloging archived photographs of galaxies -- one million images -- taken by the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in remote southern New Mexico.

Knowing that the human eye is sometimes more sensitive than a computer at picking out unusual patterns -- and that they didn't have time to do all the work themselves -- Schawinski and Lintott posted the images on the Galaxy Zoo Web site last summer.

The professors then invited amateur astronomers, with the help of a brief online tutorial, to classify the galaxies as spiral, elliptical or something else. Online galaxy-sorting might not sound as fun as, say, surfing YouTube, but it was an immediate hit.

"We were overwhelmed by the response. It completely melted the server," Schawinski said. "People tell us it's addictive. Some of [the volunteers] are professional astronomers, but most of them are not. They're just regular people who got excited about the project."

During the past year, more than 150,000 armchair astronomers from all over the world volunteered their time, submitting more than 50 million classifications.

The public's collective wisdom -- the same principle that guides jury trials or Wikipedia -- proved remarkably astute, Schawinski said. For example, if 33 of 36 volunteers thought a galaxy appeared elliptical, then astronomers could be confident the classification was correct, he said.

Van Arkel had been classifying photos on Galaxy Zoo for about a week when she came across the image that quickly became known as "Hanny's Voorwerp," Dutch for "object." The primary school teacher does not own a telescope -- "my [astronomy] background doesn't really go further than looking at the stars when walking outside in the evening," she said -- but when she posted her finding August 13 on the Galaxy Zoo forum, the astronomers who run the site began to investigate.

They soon realized van Arkel might have found a new class of astronomical object. The Galaxy Zoo team asked scientists working at telescopes around the world to take a look at the mysterious Voorwerp.

Their best guess: The Voorwerp is probably a cloud of hot gas punctured by a central hole 16,000 light years across and illuminated by the "dying embers" of a nearby quasar, Schawinski said. Quasars are distant, highly luminous astronomical objects powered by black holes; scientists suspect that light from the quasar still illuminates the Voorwerp even though the quasar itself burned out in the past 100,000 years.

"It's this light echo that has been frozen in time for us to observe," said Lintott, the Oxford scientist. "It's rather like examining the scene of a crime where, although we can't see them, we know the culprit must be lurking somewhere nearby in the shadows."

Galaxy Zoo leaders are eagerly awaiting images from NASA's orbiting Hubble, which is scheduled to train its powerful instruments on the Voorwerp in 2009. In the meantime, van Arkel is enjoying the fuss over her contribution to astronomy.

"It's amazing to think that ... amateur volunteers can help by spotting things like this online," she said. "What excites me the most is that all of this leads to more interest in science."

The opportunities for schools to act outside of the classroom are growing quickly and deserves far more attention by curriculum designers.

Soon to Be New Game: Crayon Physics Deluxe

Slate gives us a quick review of a new physics simulation game that is still in development and looks very promising;

Crayon Physics Deluxe

The Earth Stands Still

New reports on the possibility of alien life having rained to earth in India indicate that the DNA-less microbes can reproduce.

I learned to my surprise that there have been three red rains, all with cells that replicate at 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees F.), but without any known DNA for replication as we know in all other Earth life.

Comet Holmes in a distant galaxy suddenly defies the known physics of such celestial bodies.

Comet Holmes, discovered in 1892, had in recent years been visible only through telescopes until a dramatic outburst made it visible to the naked eye. In fewer than 24 hours, it brightened by a factor of nearly 400,000.

It has now brightened by a factor of a million times what it was before the outburst, a change "absolutely unprecedented in the annals of cometary astronomy," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist.

And numerous scientists no longer believe that global warming can be either controlled or reversed.

As early as 1992, he says, the US National Academy of Science recognized that adaptation needed to play a key role in humanity's response to global warming.

Some analysts argue that demoting adaptation efforts to the status of "poorer cousin" to emissions reductions in the public debate has cost precious time.

"We've known for 100 years that if you pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere, you're going to get global warming," says Daniel Sarewitz, a science-policy specialist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Despite the conviction that humans are warming the climate expressed in the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, specific aspects of the science remain riddled with uncertainties. This holds especially true for models trying to project regional effects, he says.

"We spend all this effort trying to understand climate dynamics, but the major variables are the interactions within society and between society and climate," he says, referring to everything from populations exploding along vulnerable coastlines to decisions about what types of crops to plant.

For example, Dr. Noble notes that in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, efforts to encourage growers to replace groundwater- gulping rice with grains that grow better in a drier climate are hitting a wall. "Farmers know that they'd be better off growing millet or sorghum," he says. "But there's no market for millet. If they have to live on what they produce, they'd rather produce rice than millet."

And while some of the highest-profile adaptation challenges may come from severe weather events, Noble adds that "ordinary" weather events can still pose enormous hardship, particularly in the developing world.

If "normal" rain comes in less-frequent but more-intense storms, one storm "could wash away half your crop. That doesn't qualify as a disaster, so you don't get disaster relief," Noble says. In that case, adaptation measures could range from runoff control efforts to government policies establishing crop insurance where it doesn't exist now. It also means building roads and bridges far more resilient in the face of flooding.

Ironically, many measures needed to adapt to global warming come from the same toolkit disaster planners and development agencies use today. "Adaptation means doing the things you do now, but doing them much better," he says.

From Time to begin 'adapting' to climate change?
The World Bank is hiring experts in 'adaptation' to a warming world. Coastal planners are starting to take it into account by Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The idea that teaching can continue to rehash last generation's syllabus is profoundly wrong. we are entering an age that requires immediate creative responses to events that have never been encountered by man before. Our schools need to be hardened to the new technologies that will be necessary to survive.

Anything less is negligent malfeasance.

Physics, Math, Science Videos

I owe reddit a hat tip on this one; JEE TV. This site bubbled up with wonderful videos done by teachers for science classes. Each video is a tutorial or demonstration of a math or scientific principle.

Very nice stuff.

Here's the linky.

The Power of School Science

With a hat tip to reddit.com, I came across a fascinating jr. high school science inquiry that nobody at the state or federal levels seems to have cared about [a year ago!] despite the fact that it's probably somebody's job to pay attention to small things like food poisoning.

From Hillel Academy, Spinach for Science Fair by Stacey Dresner:

In her project, “Quantitative Analysis of Bacterial Growth on Packaged Salads and Effect on Antibiotic Resistance and Nutrient Content,” Kaili [Janette] investigated several varieties of bagged salad greens.

She tested the bagged greens for bacteria content, and found “extensive growth of bacteria within 24 hours in the fresh “unwashed” samples.”

“I found the highest percents of bacteria in dark, leafy varieties such as spinach and Mediterranean” showing “a correlation between high levels of iron and high levels of bacteria.”

She washed the samples using different cleaning techniques n cleaning with sterile water, cooking with boiling water for five minutes, and using commercial cleaning rinse n water with a pinch of bleach. The only method that killed most of the bacteria was the commercial rinse. The others did not really inhibit bacterial growth.

“On all of bagged salads, it is printed that you do not need to wash before use,” she said. “I learned never to trust that phrase.”

Science Lab Safety

Students should always keep in mind that wearing a lab coat and safety glasses are important equipment in keeping themselves safe.