Oh Really?

Well it is either Loonie Toons time or time for another school board race in Lawrence Kansas. If you really want quality schools then check out Michael Riley and consider carefully what he says:
"

Those beliefs lead him to maintain that parents should have a primary say in the public school system before the teachers, district, state and federal government.

“I think when I say decentralized, I feel that our primary responsibility is to the parents and then up from there,” Riley said."

Sounds good until you really think about it. After education involves more than just the parents.

And consider this tidbit:

"He says he does know some issues are on the minds of parents and Lawrence residents.

“Sex education and science standards have come up repeatedly,” Riley said. “These are issues that they’re concerned about and they’re concerned to know what school board members feel about these things.” " Oh oh.

Really he must hang out with a different crowd than I do.

He might really be OK, after all his kids did go to public school. But really do you want some of the parents you've met to be the ones that have primary say about running of local schools? Does my stake in the school system stop because my kids are grown and married? Doesn't business have a say here as well?

Come on Mr. Riley. Get real.

Check out the Journal World forums where yours truly has been accused of:

"Pdecell: Way to come out and bluntly tell us that public education is State indoctrination 100%. I'm sure we all want to line up for your brand of brainwashing for each and every one of our children. As a parent, I want you to keep your taxpayer opinions out of my child's easily manipulated mind."

Notice the nice scary rhetorical touches-"state indoctrination", "manipulated mind" oh yes and "brainwashing". Kind of reminds me of an old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

This shouldn't come up, but it has.

You would think that today in America a person's sexual orientation wouldn't be an issue in an election any more than whether or not a person is married, single or divorced. But in one Kansas Board of Education race apparently partisans have not gotten the message. Seems that Kathy Martin and her supporters are trying to make an issue of the fact that her opponent, Christopher Renner is openly gay.

According to this article in the Hutchinson News Online, Martin's supporters argue that this is a valid issue, as voters have the right to know everything about a candidate. Carolyn Simms, a Martin supporter says

"...that voters should also be given all the information possible about the candidates they'll be choosing from."

Really, now. Maybe I should hire a private detective to see what juicy non election related things are in Mrs. Martin's background. Of course I really don't have to do that since Mrs. Martin has embarrassed herself enough as one of the gang of six that spent thousands of dollars on sham evolution hearings a couple of years ago and was a supporter of a completely unqualified Board of Education Commissioner who ended up resigning.

So hello Mrs. Martin! This is the 21st century. We don't fight about whether the Earth is only 6,000 years old or so anymore and we don't care about a person's sexual orientation as a job issue. How laughable this would seem except that there are still folks out there who are blissfully unaware that time has moved on. Mrs. Martin you are so 19th century!

Well there goes McCain...

I see that John McCain has picked Alaska's governor Palin as his running mate. Intriguing choice since McCain likes to position himself as a maverick. But science wise the choice is a bit flaky, Palin seems to have bought into the beguiling argument that schools should teach both creationism and evolution. She is quoted here in the Anchorage Daily News:

"Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

Later on in the same interview she did back track a bit and qualified her remarks saying:

"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

Of course the state Republican platform according to the same article says that:

"We support giving Creation Science equal representation with other theories of the origin of life. If evolution is taught, it should be presented as only a theory."

And that merely echos the common misunderstanding people have about the meaning of the word theory in science.

Clearly though regardless of what she thinks about creationism and its cheap suit version intelligent design, she doesn't understand much about science. Too bad because I honestly felt this was an election where I could "kick the tires" to choose between two great tickets. But John McCain certainly hasn't helped himself here among moderates and certainly hasn't boosted my opinion of his science policy. If he wanted to go the conservative evangelical route he should picked Huckabee.

To give Palin her due she doesn't seem to have the sort of skepticsm about climate change that one might expect. But then again considering how rapidly Arctic climate regimes are being altered by global warming, she probably wouldn't be able to survive politically unless she supported programs to help her state cope with warming.

A New Second Life Blog...mine that is.

This Spring I will be on Sabbatical, doing some Second Life projects for our introductory biology courses. As part of the plan, I am to document my activities in a blog. That blog has been set up with the not very original name of Second Life Biology(http://www.slbiology.blogspot.com/) where my avatar Simone will be your main host. So at least some of my Second Life coverage will be shifted there, especially the more geeky aspects of Second Life issues including minutiae of scripting and various other sorts of geek attacks.

Death of a Colleague

Last week one of my colleagues died and yesterday there was a memorial celebration for her at the School. Her name was Betty Bullock and she was in our sociology department. Betty was a wonderful person and I had just started to get to know her when she took ill. We were planning a learning community between biology and sociology and we were working on how to frame the materials in a way that showed the connections between these fields. To us the connections were obvious, all about relationships and function and evolution at all levels whether we were talking about molecules, cells, the communities of sometimes distantly related cells, that make up multicellular organisms, or the communities of communities that make up the ecosphere.

I will miss Betty not only for the small connection we had built before she got sick but also for the lost chance to build our learning community, Betty and I. Nothing will be that community but I know what to do and what she would want too. Keep on going and make a community for biology and sociology and so yesterday I went to another friend, in sociology, who knew about what Betty and I were planning. Are you interested? Can we do this? Let's talk. It will not be the same learning community and we will have to start from scratch, but we both know Betty will be with us.

Science Friday in Second Life!

I am not much of an online chatter. I've tried chat rooms for instance and found them too confusing for my addled brain and in Second Life I have been to openings and parties and found them difficult to handle. But then I am sort of a solitary type whether in first or second life.

But I decided to look for some SL event Friday when I was spending a ton of time in SL rather than working on my Syllabuses (or should that be Syllabi?). So I decided to visit Science Friday, which if you are a listener, you know Sci Fri is streamed in to SL and to the Science Friday site and during which the host of Science Friday is in World.

And I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful the communal experience of listening in SL with a group was compared to just listening on the radio.

The avatars actually chatted (mainly texting) during the program's audio stream. I should point out that the host Ira Flatow was in World but not his guests. What I found though was that first of all the chat was surprisingly on topic. Second of all, though I did not contribute a whole lot, the chat in parallel with listening to the audio stream really forced me to pay closer attention to the broadcast than I otherwise might have. And this is in spite of the texting going on constantly during the broadcast.

Granted, the audience appeared to be really interested in the topics, but it would be interesting to test listener retention of material when just listening while in SL versus having real time messaging and social interaction while the material is being presented.

Here are some shots of the session from my Flickr stream:



This shows the audience..thank god for camera controls so that even though I was sitting in the audience I could effectively look at the audience including myself.

And next a shot of the Ira's avatar...



Now if only I could get an autograph.

If you are a Second Life member and have SL on your machine the Science Friday Site SLurl is
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Science%20Friday/128/128/2

Not much to see in the Science Friday sim itself but right near by is all kinds of neat science stuff so explore around! More on some of the new science stuff later...

To get you started visit Science School at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Science%20School/128/128/2

A Script Generator for Second Life

Anyone who scripts in Second Life knows that the scripting language has a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you are not used to event driven programming. So it would be nice to have a code generator-maybe something a novice could use. Well today a post on SLED, the Second Life Educator's list, had a brief mention of a system called Scratch for Second Life (S4SL).

S4SL can be down loaded for Macs and Windows machine. I tested the Windows version on my home Vista machine and hope to test the Mac version on my iMac at work later this week.

S4SL is developed by Eric Rosenbaum at MIT, using Scratch . Scratch allows you to program graphically by snapping together little "modules." It sounds like a lot of fun in itself! But getting back to S4SL, the program has 8 classes of modules including one called pen which apparently requires an extra set of tools. Here is the opening window loaded along side the Second Life client. The left hand part of the window shows the eight modules, and the shapes associated with motion commands.



Click on the image to go to my Flickr stream to see a large version of this screen. The basic idea is to snap together modules in S4SL. Then you press the copy code button. This copies the generated SL script into your clip board. So all you need to do is to rez an object SL, and paste the code in place of a new script.

S4SL is loads of fun and I spent a delightful evening making little Second Life "pets" that follow my Avatar around. The next image shows a Scratch program for a pet that exhibits random motion, but then attempts to find my avatar if it gets too far away.



The "modules" are color coded based on function and notice how the "modules" can be snapped together. This sort of approach ought to be appealing for novice programmers including biology types who are of course used to thinking of shape as related to function.

There are some limitations to S4SL. First, since it is in development, only some of the capabilities of SL's language are implemented. The code is fat, meaning there is a lot of non functional material in the code depending what sorts of features are enabled or disabled. Also the resulting code, because not everything is implemented may not work the way the user expects.

Originally I pasted the script into a cube prim for testing but it so happened I had a flexi prim representation of a phospholipid hanging around and I thought it would make a cool bacterium complete with flagella. So here is a brief movie (A still is here) of the resulting "bacterial cell:"



I think S4SL has a lot of potential as a learning tool. For instance someone interested in behavior could use the system, as my example suggests, let students design bots which mimic different sorts of orientation behavior. Students without any programming experience can give their simple prims behaviors and there are good pre-made S4SL projects that come with the down load to show how this can be done.

S4SL, a neat learning tool and lots of fun and it doesn't require any scratch for the fun.

New Features in Second Life

One thing Second Life users have long been screaming for is better integration with the web. Linden Lab's new Second Life client finally address these issues. First is an integrated media browser that allows the user to open a web page in a dedicated Second Life window rather than launching an external browser page. This feature works like OnRez's internal media browser.



What is really cool is that I can open my blog page and work on my blog from within Second Life. I am not sure if OnRez does this. But as a blogger I think this is really slick to be able to do.

SL has also introduced the ability to display a web page on a Second Life object or prim. This goes a a long way to enabling complex displays including large amounts of text on a prim, something that up to now has taken some really kludgy work arounds. To the left is a picture showing my avatar, Simone, with the media viewer interface on the left and my blog displayed on a prim.

There are some limitations. Right now you can not have multiple web pages displayed on the same parcel. Also the visitor cannot interact with the web page. So even though the web page's scroll bars show up on the prim, the user can't interact with the page.



However, if I am giving an in world presentation on my land or land where I have permissions I could control the display of pages from within the media browser. It is a bit clunky but you could do it. I think this would be most useful for web pages with URL's that include targets to areas with the page, or blogs where you want to display different entries.

Second Life's official blog has more information for Second Life users about these new features.
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/06/parcel-media-changes-in-1191-release-candidate/#more-1705

Creeped Out by Butterflies?

Well not quite. But last weekend Mme D and I went to Branson MO. While there, we decided to visit the Butterfly Palace. The big feature is a Butterfly flight room with plants and of course free flying butterflies. The building is spectacular but most of the first level is taken up by a gift shop. The shop has a lot of the what I call "nature kitch" that one finds in places such as The Rain Forest Cafe. But if you like cute poison arrow frogs and shirts that change color in UV light then the gift shop is for you. Indeed we did buy a couple of color changing shirts for grandkids.



The butterfly flight room is on the top floor and is indeed full of various tropical butterflies and we spent about two hours taking pictures. I "shot" most of the species present but found some very difficult to get good shots of, unless as happened several times I was taking pictures of expired butterflies. For instance, I was not able to get good shots of the blue upper wing surface of the Morpho butterflies.



So what creeped me out? Maybe it was the conspicuous lack of mention of the biology of the butterflies. For instance there is a wonderful coevolutionary relationship between Heliconid butterflies and their passion flower food plants. Maybe it was the fact that the facility does not raise its own butterflies but imports the chysalides from Central America so the visitor never gets to see the full life cycle. To be fair, I suspect other butterfly gardens do the same thing. But it does seem that there is a missed opportunity here in terms of education-maybe edutainment.
Maybe it was the silence of the butterflies coupled with country and Gospel music. Fortunately the butterflies flew to their own rhythms.



So what really what was creepy, was the total disconnect between the butterflies and any sense of the context these insects evolved in. Maybe the owners are of the mind set that butterflies were put here for our benefit and their origin and natural history are not important. Maybe they feel that any wiff of evolution or science will scare visitors away. Too bad. Too bad for the tropics, the butterflies, and quite frankly too bad for the visitors.

Reference:

Coevolution of Plants and Herbivores: Passion Flower Butterflies
Woodruff W. Benson, Keith S. Brown, Jr., Lawrence E. Gilbert
Evolution, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 659-680
doi:10.2307/2407076

What are they afraid of?

Here is a disturbing article from the Telegraph out of England. It seems a group of Dutch creationists are distributing copies of Sir David Attenborough's natural history documentaries that they have doctored to omit or minimize basic facts of science with which they don't agree.

Sir Attenborough comments that:

"Instead of saying "70 million years ago, something happens," they say "a very long time ago something happens". They also omit paragraphs such as: "This is inherited from my warm-blooded ancestors,"" Sir David told the Telegraph. "I would much rather they kept to the letter, as far as that is possible, of what I said."

But of course they won't, because the creationists want to indoctrinate their own kids with their scientific misunderstandings. To me not teaching kids about what science believes about how the world operates is a form of child abuse needs to recognized for what it is. If it was just their own children that were being so abused that would be bad enough but as the article notes:

"BBC documentaries have been made compatible with creationist views by replacing spoken English text by an adapted spoken Dutch text, or by cutting whole scenes."

This editing seems to be much like the sort of authoritarian massaging and muzzling of science that the Bush administration engages in routinely to gain political advantage. What are these creationists afraid of? Don't they think their faith can stand up to science?

Links

Creationists rewrite natural history

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/10/02/scihist102.xml

Tip of the antennae to a poster from Skepticality for pointing this article out.

A New Second Life Client

I am a CSI freak and interested in Second Life as an educational tool. So I eagerly last week's CSI NY which featured a crime involving a Second Life Avatar and promised a CSI Second Life site with crimes to solve and a CSI crime lab. Also involved was the use of a new Second Life client called Onrez from Electric Sheep. I must admit I was skeptical as was James Au over at New World Notes. He was afraid that Onrez would "AOL-ize" the Second Life experience.






But as he, I was impressed. First the interface is a bit more like using web browser in that there is an address window in the menu bar where you can directly type a Second Life address and teleport there. That saves a step in that you don't have to go to the SL world map first. Next, the menu bar includes a search feature for SL. Typing "education" into the search window gives a list of education sites in SL. Back and forward buttons work much like those of a browser but only within Second Life. Thus novice users might find Onrez more intuitively appealing.


There is more! Second Life supports the opening of web pages via its scripting language, but the Second Life client currently opens the web page externally by launching your default web browser. Onrez is much slicker. It has a built in Browser that opens a window within the client. Granted, the web as a texture on a prim would be slicker yet but Onrez's approach nice and clean. As James notes, right now you can't get certain web features such as quick time to work with in Onrez, but that apparently is coming.

The Onrez client does seem to be tweaked for graphics performance. For instance frame per second rates (fps) are better using Onrez (version 1). Earlier today on my land in Carmine, the SL clent gave fps of 12 and Onrez of 50 fps respectively in consecutive trials. That's is a bit extreme but Onrez seems to give around twice the frame rate as Second Life's current client release (1.18(3)5) on my machine (Specs here).

The average user will notice this speed difference and I found an amusing visual difference in the performance of particle scripts. For instance I have a script that produces little dragonflies around a coy pond in my SL house. (Hey haven't you always wanted a coy pond in your house?)




First, is a shot taken of this particle script's performance in SL. You might get a pulse of 10 dragonflies and they move at a pretty sedate clip. Next is a shot taken from the same vantage point using Onrez. Lot's more dragonflies and they move at a pretty good clip. I suspect this improvement is a graphic's issue rather than faster script execution time, but i don't have any good script bench marks such as are used to compare computer performance. I find it interesting that Second Life viewed via the Onrez client seems to use a lot less bandwidth than when viewed via Second Life's client. I don't know if that is real or how it is done.

Oh as for the CSI Second Life site, I quite frankly haven't played with the crimes scenes yet. I did visit the crime scene lab and was disappointed in the lack of functionality. Most of the equipment is not scripted. I think the CSI people missed a great chance to educate visitors about the science behind CSI. Also I found that novice visitors to the site were confused what to do. But at least they were spared to culture shock of Second Life's normal orientation since Onrez takes the user to CSI island by default.





The SL episode of CSI New York is a "two parter"; the second part to be shown in February. So it will be interesting to see how this experiment melding SL with broadcast television works out. Did I like the episode? Yes I did. There were lots of in world shots, and an arena fight involving some pretty nasty monsters to appeal to the novice gaming set. I am not a gamer but I suspect gamers might not have been impressed with the graphics. Maybe I am missed whether this is possible, but I would like to be able to visit the arena and other spots used to stage the CSI Second Life scenes.

A tale of two instructors

There is an interesting article titled "Adjuncts and God: Why are 2 instructors out of a job?" in this week's Inside Higher Ed. The first instructor, Steve Bitterman was reportedly fired from his job teaching Western Civilization at Southwestern Community College in Iowa for saying that Adam and Eve is a "fairy tale." The article quotes Bitterman as saying:

“A few of the students thought I was knocking their religion by not promoting it,” he said. “They were upset that I didn’t say that the Bible was literally true.” Bitterman said that he treats the Bible as a historically significant, important work, but that he does not accord it status beyond that. “That really seemed to come as a shock to some of them...”

The second instructor, Phil Mitchell was reportedly fired for his conservative views. including about religion. He is being defended by the Colorado chapter of the AAUP which reports on this case on it's website.

The AAUP says of this case:

"The American Association of University Professors, CU Chapter, finds substantial evidence that: A history of antipathy toward Dr. Mitchell’s political and religious convictions existed within the CU History Department. CU backed off Dr. Mitchell’s 2005 termination because, when challenged by media inquiries, the administration and tenured faculty could not document cause for his firing. Their stories changed several times, as each story proved ... An improper culture exists at the University of Colorado, wherein most of the faculty can be fired at any time for any reason, or for no reason, thus encouraging the administration and tenured faculty to suppress the academic freedom of the majority. Dr. Mitchell’s termination violates numerous Laws of the Regents protections of due process, shared governance, and academic freedom, as well as his First Amendment right to free speech."

In both cases, there maybe more to the situation, but from the outside it sounds like the notion of academic freedom is being trumped in the minds of some administrators by a desire to avoid lawsuits. There is a line between academic freedom and just plain offensiveness, but I think administrators need to realize that teachers develop particular points of view on topics related to their disciplines. Administrators and students need to remember that education at the college level is all about developing critical thinking skills and that means questioning one's assumptions and beliefs.

Sometimes that means dealing with the challenge of trying to understand beliefs and assumptions that are different from your own. Some times even the best intentioned instructors cross the line between good teaching and out and out boorishness, and our academic systems need to be a bit forgiving if instructors are going to be able to not just teach content but also the points of view important in their disciplines.

In Bitterman's case treating the Bible along with other religious texts is a standard way of looking at these texts from a historical perspective. In Mitchell's case, his conservative beliefs certainly color his approach to history and I see nothing wrong with him explaining those beliefs that are relevant to to his approach to history. In fact the students need to know that. Just students need to know how Bitterman's beliefs that the Genesis is not to be taken literally color his approach to history.

Teachers need to be free to teach their understanding of their own disciplines and not have to constantly watch where they tried lest they get fired because someone is offended. At the same time teachers have a responsibility to provide a safe space for student disagreement and challenges. Administrators need to take some responsibility too. They need to provide training for instructors on how to approach students with diverse cultural and religious belief. And administrators need to insure that academic freedom is maintained. After all instructors can only teach their best when they feel they are in a safe space.

New Semester

We just began our fall semester and there are lots of exciting things happening. First, I get to teach genetics in our brand new technology building. Lots of new equipment to learn and more keeps on coming. New books as well! I switched over to Griffith et al's book, Modern Genetic Analysis (9th edition). I am not sure all my students will be able to handle it but I am hoping the clear illustrations and engaging writing grab them.












In biology, we switched to Campbell et al's Biology: concepts and connections after several tries to get away from the more encyclopedic texts that seemed to intimidate our students. Personally I found myself handicapped by the smaller texts since they typically leave out the sorts of examples that I like to use.














Oh and our college now has a Second Life island. Not much there yet but I am ready-complete with office, or at least a prototype office. Looks a lot like my RL office but the aim is to have this be to offices like telephone booths are to Dr. Who's space ship.



The views and door are from my RL office. Here is a peek inside:

Creation Science Museum in NY Times

There is an interesting review in the NY Times of Ken Hamm's Creation Museum. It has lots of pictures and evaluates the museum mainly from the perspective of a museum visitor rather than evaluating the science.

From the article:

"For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate
arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific
principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief:
Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of
secularism and natural selection."

Sounds like fun. But overlay that with this study from Science which looks at the origin of resistance to science. The author's note that resistance to science comes when science conflicts with "common sense" and ideologies passed down by trusted sources. In this an article from Edge, the authors Paul Bloom and Deena Weisberg elaborate on their Science study. They note:

"...the developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in
children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive
expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific
claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is
a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by
people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy... in the United States, these
intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by
trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains
where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest."

Trust then has an important role in social learning. Thus, Bloom and Weisberg recommend that the best way for scientists to overcome resistance to science education is to work to convince the public that science in general is trust worthy. From my role as a teacher this suggests the need to give students at all levels the chance to do some sort of science and see for themselves the power of science to help us understand the universe.


Other Links:

Creation Museum Website
Why Do People Resist Science?

Technorati Tags:

Science
Education
Creationism
Learning

Anti-evolutionist may lead National Education Group

Yes it's true. According to The Lawrence Journal World in this story , Kenneth Willard (corrected), who was part of the conservative majority who questioned evolution, is unopposed in his bid to be president of the National Association of State Boards of Education.



Willard says that his disagreement with Darwin has nothing to do with the association's work. And personally if I felt that Willard could be impartial and genuinely interested in education, OK.



But remember, he is part of the same group that wasted thousands of tax payer dollars, not to mention thousands of man hours, on sham evolution hearings in 2005. And he voted for a poorly qualified candidate, Bob Corkins, to be Commissioner of Education in Kansas.

The chickens in the hen house might just as well elect a fox as leader.

Here's another article about this controversy from the NY Times. (Tip of the antennae to Mousie Cat for this link. See Mousie's take on Willard here.)

Update 8:21. See this entry from Josh over at Thoughts from Kansas which fills in more details about the Corkin incident.

Technorati tags:

Kansas
Evolution
Education
NASBE