Faster than Light

Physicists at CERN believe they’ve measured neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Since most of modern physics is based on the speed of light being the upper speed limit for practically everything, (remember, in E=mc², c is the speed of light) this is somewhat of a big deal. NPR has an article:

Notes

1. Neutrinos themselves are quite fascinating and elusive particles. Sciencemadefun has a nice video explaining what is a neutrino.

2. Victor Stenger provides an interesting perspective on these results. He points out that the theoretical particles, tachyons, move faster than light, but they can’t move slower than light, so, seen from the point of view of a tachyon, time would move backward. Only photons move at the speed of light.

Do Single Sex Schools Make a Difference?

A recent article by Diane Halpern in Science looks at the data about single-sex schooling and finds little evidence of benefits.

There’s a podcast interview with Halpern that elaborates on the story, but Tamar Lewin’s article in the New York Times does a great job at looking at the different sides of the issue.

… sex-segregated education—is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence. There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.

— Halpern et al., 2011: The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling

My personal, (very) anecdotal experience would argue the opposite, however. At least in secondary school, not having all the inter-gender interactions was quite beneficial. It may not have made me the best student (or even a good student), but it was at least one less complication to worry about while I was trying, or trying to avoid, learning.

The author are directors of the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, so they do have a definite point of view. Their Why Co-Ed? page makes the arguments for Co-Ed schools in nice bullet points.

Their arguments seem to be based on the evidence that gender segregated schools encourage stereotyping, usually to the detriment of the girls. Gender segregation is particularly suspect when it’s based on the idea that boys and girls learn very differently. There are certainly differences (e.g. as in their approach to games, and blogging) but having all this diversity in approaches and perspectives in the same classroom has been generally beneficial in my experience.

My only real major outstanding question is the effect of the increased sex drive that comes with puberty on students’ ability to learn. Although they admit it as a potential problem, their counter is that students in single-sex environments don’t learn how to interact properly with the other gender. Adolescents need all the opportunity they can get to learn how to normalize their interactions with the opposite gender. My own anecdotal evidence would definitely support this contention, but I’d like to see it backed up with more research, nonetheless.

… the rise in testosterone at puberty, which happens in both boys and girls, has one clear-cut effect: elevating sex drive in both males and females. There is no question that this can change the dynamics in a middle- or high-school classroom;

…

… there is evidence that gender segregation disturbs boy-girl interactions when the two sexes do come together at lunch, recess, or more formal social gatherings.2 Lacking the opportunity to work together in a serious, non-sexual environment, boys and girls may over-glamorize, misunderstand, and even harass the other sex when they do have a chance to mingle outside the classroom.

— Halpern et al., 2011: The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling

I’m troubled about the use of the word “may” in the second paragraph; the evidence either way seems equivocal. It’s good, though, to see someone compiling the research.

I do think single-gender education should be an option that’s available, but I’d like to see the arguments either way be based on sound science. The simple fact that boys and girls learn differently (on average) does not mean they would benefit from learning separately.

The Ingredients of “Character”

Some key performance-character strengths:

zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

Paul Tough’s thought provoking article is a great overview of some of the recent research on character, and discusses a few attempts to instill character building into school.

Levin [co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools ] noticed that … the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

Much of the work on character is based on the universal character characteristics identified in the book Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Peterson and Seligman, 2004) and the research of Angela Duckworth (her research page is a good place to find copies of her publications).

Duckworth’s Grit Scale, seems to be a remarkably good predictor of GPA, and perhaps more interestingly, corresponded inversely to the number of hours of television students watched: “gritter” students did better in school and watched less TV.

Among adolescents, the Grit–S [short Grit Scale] longitudinally predicted GPA and, inversely, hours watching television. Among cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point, the Grit–S predicted retention.

— Duckworth and Quinn (2009): Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S)

The grit survey would probably be a useful addition to the Personal World curriculum.

One interesting application discussed in the article is at the KIPP middle schools in NYC. There they issue a Character Report Card and integrate discussion of character into all the classes: a language class might talk about how much self control the protagonist in a novel has and how that works out for them.

I’d be extremely reluctant to have to grade my students on twenty four character traits. While it might be a useful rubric to have and discuss and build on students’ positive self-conceptions, I fear that it might also significantly reinforce the negative conceptions as well.

Imbuing a language of character as a subtext of the curriculum seems like a great idea however.

Performance vs. Moral Character

One important critique of much of this work is that it focuses on “performance” character, the character traits that predict high achievement, rather than “moral” character which focuses on the ability to work well with others.

These two perspectives on the same character traits need careful attention. From a performance perspective, social intelligence, can be seen as a way of getting ahead – something that is somewhat manipulative, but from a moral perspective, social intelligence is intrinsically beneficial to the person and the society around them.

And perhaps this is the biggest problem with performance-character. It is extrinsically motivated: do this and you will get this reward. The intrinsic nature of moral-character seems much more in line with a progressive approach to teaching. Certainly, much care should be taken in how we think about and include character building in education.

The Character Education Partnership has a number of lesson plans and best practices for all grade levels, that focus more on moral character.

Giving Students the Opportunity to Fail

Finally, Tough talks about the fact that students need the time and space to explore, try difficult things, and to fail, in order to really build character.

The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.

— Dominic Randolph (2011) in Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

This is tied into the central theme of the movie Race To Nowhere and the book The Price of Privilege, that argue that, for many affluent students, the stress of excessively high academic expectations are having some seriously negative effects.

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

(hat tip to Ms. D. for the link to the article)

Superfund Sites in Your Area – And Other Environmental Cleanups in Your Community

Want to find your nearest superfund site? The EPA has an interactive page called, Clean Up My Community, that maps brownfields, hazardous waste, and superfund sites anywhere in the U.S.

Note:

Brownfields are places, usually in cities, that can’t be easily re-developed because there’s some existing pollution on the site.
Superfund sites are places where there is hazardous pollution that the government is cleaning up because the companies that caused the pollution have gone out of business, or because the government caused the pollution in the first place. The military is probably the biggest source of government pollution, particularly from fuel leaks and radioactive waste.

3d Molecule of the Month

cyclohexane — Cyclohexane, from the interactive model on 3Dchem.com.

Molecular models tend to fascinate. As a introduction to the chemistry of elements, students seem to like putting them together, and they tend to enjoy finding out what their molecules are called.

You can’t beat fitting together molecules by hand as a learning experience, but 3Dchem has a nice collection of interactive, three-dimensional molecules, including molecules of the month.

spiral-periodic-table — Periodic spiral of the elements (from 3Dchem.com).

They also have three-dimensional periodic tables showing the sizes of the atoms in the traditional tabular form as well as a spiral.

elements-by-size — Periodic Table showing the elements by size.

Loom: Spider Catches the Moth

Ridiculously beautiful computer animation of a spider catching a moth by Polynoid.

Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

They have more on their website and on their Vimeo page, including a few animations showing how they created these works of art.

Periodic Table Spiral Galaxy

The objective is to show the shape of the whole and to express the beauty and cosmic reach of the periodic system.

— Stewart (2006): The Chemical Galaxy

periodic-table-galaxy — Chemical Galaxy II: A new vision of the periodic system of the elements by Philip Stewart.

Periodic Table of the Elements - a traditional view by Wikimedia Commons User:Cepheus.

The traditional periodic table of the elements breaks the elements into rows as their chemical and physical characteristics repeat themselves. But since the sequence of elements is really a continuous series that gradually increases in mass, a better way of displaying them might be as the spiral, sort of like the galaxy.

When the chemical elements are arranged in order of their atomic number, they form a continuous sequence, in which certain chemical characteristics come back periodically in a regular way. This is usually shown by chopping the sequence up into sections and arranging them as a rectangular table. The alternative is to wind the sequence round in a spiral. Because the periodic repeats come at longer and longer intervals, increasing numbers of elements have to be fitted on to its coils. …

The resulting pattern resembles a galaxy, and the likeness is the basis of my design. It seems appropriate, as the chemical elements are what galaxies are made of.

…

The ‘spokes’ of the ‘galaxy’ link together elements with similar chemical characteristics. They are curved in order to keep the inner elements reasonably close together while making room for the extra elements in the outer turns.

— Stewart (2006): The Chemical Galaxy

While the spiral version of the periodic table is not used a lot, it is scientifically valid. There are other ways of representing the spiral and the periodic table itself. It all depends on what you want to show.

Benfey's spiral table first appeared in an article by Glenn Seaborg, 'Plutonium: The Ornery Element', Chemistry, June 1964, 37 (6), 12-17, on p. 14. (via Wikimedia Commons)

Indeed, Mendeleev’s monument in Bratislava, Slovakia has the elements arranged as the spokes in a wheel.

periodic-table-monument — Monument to the periodic table and Dmitri Mendellev (photo by mmmdirt, caption via Wikipedia).

What does, “Good for the Environment” mean?

Recycling-Rates — Recycling rates for drink containers in the United States.

A number of my middle-school students seemed to believe that recycling is the be-all and end-all of environmentalism.

h01_25367113 — In October, 2010, toxic red mud broke through a holding dam and flooded several towns and flowed into the Mercal River. Red mud is a waste product produced when extremely corosive sodium hydroxide is used to dissolve aluminum out of bauxite. In this picture, "A Hungarian soldier wearing chemical protection gear walks through a street flooded by toxic sludge in the town of Devecser, Hungary on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2010. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)" (image via The Boston Globe)

We were trying to determine what type of material would make for the best drink bottles.

I have a deep reluctance to reflexively consider anything, “good for the environment,” considering that the environmental impact of any particular product is a complex thing to assess. My students, on the other hand, seem to think that recycling is good and all the rest of it can go hang.

I’d want to add up all the environmental costs: the raw materials; the energy input; the sources of the energy input; and the emissions to the air and water, especially all the other external costs of pollutants that people tend not to want to pay for. To my students, these things have been invisible.

Perhaps it’s the success of the environmental movement that’s pushed things to the background. We’re not struggling through smog everyday – although we’ve had some bad days this summer – and even big issues, like the BP oil spill, are a bit remote and seem so far away.

So, I tried showing the Story of Stuff today. It’s definitely a piece with a “point-of-view”, but I was hoping it would be provocative.

h16_25373407 — At least 4 people and many animals were killed. Many of the 120 injuries from the red mud spill were from chemical burns. "Tunde Erdelyi rescues a cat from the toxic sludge in the village of Devecser, Hngary on October 5, 2010. (REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo)" from The Boston Globe.

And it was.

It certainly got a lot of the students agitated, ready to challenge its assertions about just how bad pollution problems really are today, which created a nice opening for me to point out the need for skepticism in the face of any information received. Of course, at that point they were probably a little skeptical about me too, but reasoned skepticism is at the heart of the scientific perspective I’d like them to learn as “apprentice” scientists.

I’d like them to read Orwell too, but that’s another battle.

One student was stimulated enough that, I hope, they’ll actually do a little research into the facts presented in the video and present their findings to the class.

I’ll also have to do a little follow-up on how to argue. In particular I’ll need to post a picture of Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement and point out that it’s better to try to refute the actual argument rather than attack the messenger.

We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.