Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The EPA has a number of excellent tools on its website that give access to a lot of environmental information. The Surf Your Watershed pages are particularly nice because they have specific links to citizen-based groups working in your watershed. Ours is the Lower Missouri Watershed, and the groups working there include schools, groups concerned about fish, and land trusts.
The site also links to the USGS streamflow data and some of their scientific research done in the area.
The EPA’s student resource page has a few interesting publications on the life cycles of a few common products: CD/DVD’s, cell phones, and soccer balls.
They’re a bit noisy, and would probably benefit from being reproduced in a more interactive format (Flash maybe), but they’re still a useful resource for talking about life cycles.
They’re a less dramatic presentation which can supplement the advocacy of the Story of Stuff video.
The EPA’s Enviromapper website is great way to identify sources of hazardous materials and other types of pollution in your area, which might be a good way of stirring up student interest in the topic.
Not only can you map the broad category of pollution – air, water, radiation etc – but you can also find specific information about the different types of pollution or potential pollution the EPA has information about. I found a nearby site with sulfuric acid, for example.
And, if you want to slog through a lot of closely written reports, you can find a lot more details about any site you come across. Some of this information might also be useful – who knows?
In response to a question asked on the Car Talk radio program, Rhett Allain does the math to find out if falling bird poop can crack a windshield.
The answer: maybe. There are just a lot of assumptions that have to be made. Is falling bird poop spherical? What’s its density? How does the bird poop deform on impact? What is the compressive strength of automobile glass?
This is however an excellent real-life application of back-of-the-envelope physics and algebra. It required calculating:
Andrew Sullivan highlights Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’ explanation of why it’s so important to be civil in any argument.
I’ve come to see civility as important for a variety of reasons, but honestly, practical reasons loom rather large. First of all, it’s generally hard to win a name-calling contest. If I call someone an America-hating pinko, they can fire back that I’m a right-wing tool of the military industrial complex. Those two insults seem essentially to cancel each other out: why give someone an area that can end up a draw if I believe that I can prove all of my other arguments to be correct? Second, I find that if I’m civil, I can actually (sometimes) persuade people I’m arguing against that they’re wrong about an issue. In contrast, if I begin a debate by insulting someone, it only further entrenches him in his initial position, thus making it more difficult to talk sense into him. …
Being polite isn’t the same as being a pushover, nor is it the same as false collegiality that needlessly avoids confrontation. Indeed, I think that kind of fake collegiality should be avoided: the review I published this year of Robert Pape and James Feldman’s Cutting the Fuse is probably one of the harshest critiques a graduate student has produced of a work of that stature. But again, it eviscerates their argument without really personalizing the matter.
— Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (2011) in Special Abu Muqawama Q&A with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
A couple days ago I had students present their physics lab reports to the class. They did a good job, but I think I need to emphasize the importance of including graphs in their results. It’s much harder to look for trends and patterns in the data without charts, especially when presenting to an audience.
An interesting political science study (via Yglesias) found that it’s much easier to change people’s minds when you show them graphs, even when people don’t want to believe what you’re telling them.
[P]eople cling to false beliefs in part because giving them up would threaten their sense of self. Graphical corrections are … found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction.
–Nyhan and Reifler (2011): Opening the Political Mind? The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information on factual misperceptions
Teachers know how hard it can be to correct misconceptions – people tend to stick with the first thing they learned – so it’s good to see that graphical corrections can make a big difference.
Fortunately, my physics students are changing over to math next week, so we’ll be able to use their experimental data to draw lines, find gradients and do all sorts of interesting things.
If you pull apart the nucleus of an atom, you’ll find that the mass of its parts is greater than the mass of the original nucleus. That extra mass is where nuclear energy comes from; it’s called the binding energy.
How so?
Take a helium atom for example. Its nucleus typically has two protons and two neutrons*, which in nuclear physics is usually called an alpha particle (α).
While we usually say that the mass of a proton is 1 atomic mass unit (u), its actually a little heavier. The mass of a proton is 1.00728 atomic mass units (u), while neutrons weigh 1.00866 u.
The combined mass of the two protons and two neutrons in the helium nucleus is 0.03035 atomic mass units more than the mass of a helium nucleus made up of the very same particles.
Why?
The one equation that everyone remembers from Einstein (perhaps from all the t-shirts) is:
Energy (E) is equal to mass (m) times some constant (c is the speed of light) squared. What it means is that mass is energy, and vice-versa.
When the four nucleons combine, the extra mass is transformed into the energy that holds them together in the nucleus of the atom. The mass can be directly converted to energy, the binding energy of the atom.
How much energy is released?
Somewhere around 10,000 times more energy is released from a single nuclear reaction compared to a single chemical reaction (like the combustion of TNT).
* Helium with two neutrons would be written 
, where the bottom number is the number of protons and the upper number is the atomic mass, which is the sum of the number of protons and the number of neutrons.
So other than digging in Morocco, where do we get more phosphorus? Here’s a hint: the symbol for phosphorus on the periodic table… is “P.”
— Horwich (2011): The end of phosphorus on APM’s Marketplace.
Marketplace’s Jeff Horwich has an excellent article on the uses of the element phosphorus, where it comes from, why it’s getting scarce, and where we might get more.
The answers to these questions are:
Marketplace tells the story in much more detail.