Author: Lensyl Urbano

Tunisian revolution

NPR had a great article today summarizing what’s been going on in Tunisia.

I played the article this morning. We had a little discussion about the conflicting groups in Tunisia and the possible causes of the revolution. It would be nice to be able to follow the emergence of a democracy in real-time.

Protests in Tunis. (Image by Habib M’henni, via Wikipedia).

U.S. Immigration Data

Raymond Cohn has a great table of immigration data on the Economic History Association website.

This data ties very nicely into the work we’re doing on graphing. The Excel file with the post 1820 data, and another with pre-1790 data, make it easier to work with (note the pre-1970 data comes from the Wikipedia page on the history of immigration; it was the easiest source to find a table of data).

Since each small group of students is responsible for a different wave of immigration, the groups will create bar graphs showing the countries of origin for each wave. They should look like these:

U.S. Immigration from 1820 to 1831. Data from Cohn (2010).

and,

U.S. Immigration from 1900 to 1914. Data from Cohn (2010).

Plotting the time series as a line graph would be another great way to slice the data:

Comparison of U.S. Immigration Rates from Great Britain and Central Europe. Data from Cohn (2010).

Note that the data in the table is as a percentage of total immigration, so the numbers do not compare directly from one time period to the next; however, the proportions still work to show the same patterns.

Amoebas “farming” bacteria

An amoeba going through cytokinesis (Robinson, 2002).
If you look carefully you can see the amoebas zipping around. I also have a really cool larger version too, which shows the entire slide..

Well, since certain organelles within our cells (mitochondria) have their own DNA, it’s been suggested that they were once separate organisms that became the ultimate symbionts. Now, someone’s found that single celled amoebas may actually farm the bacteria they eat.

P.S. While looking for a picture of the guilty party, I came across this nice image of the amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, splitting into two on Wikimedia Commons.

The meaning of life?

A key premise of the Montessori approach to education is that, given children’s innate drive to learn, learning is its own reward. Extend this to adults and you realize that the “work” should provide its own motivation. Cristin O’Keefe notes that in 1847, Thomas Dent Mutter pointed out:

The world is no place of rest. I repeat, it is no place of rest but for effort. Steady, continuous undeviating effort. Our work should never be done and it is the daydream of ignorance to look forward to that as a happy time, when we shall wish for nothing more, and have nothing more to accomplish.
–Thomas Dent Mutter (1847) via Cristin O’Keefe via Harriet via The Dish.

I sometimes wonder, with our adolescents being somewhere between childhood and adulthood, if sometimes neither set of rules apply. For some students, they’ve not yet discovered the “work” that inspires them and, without that overarching objective to drive them, can’t find the motivation for learning.

Adolescence can last a long time.

Revolution

One of my students expressed an interest today in learning more about the French and Russian revolutions. Coincidentally, there’s a piece by Josef Joffe that makes the connection between the recent Tunisian revolution and Marx’s ideas about the recipe for a successful revolution.

A country needs to have a certain level of education and wealth to overthrow a tyrant:

If you are poor, you have neither the time nor the energy to engage in politics. If you are not educated, you lack the cultural skills to articulate your demands—to agitate and organize.
— Joffe (2010) in Why Tunisia Isn’t a Tipping Point for the Arab World

Samuel Huntington, took this idea forward in his book, The Third Wave. He looked at democratic revolutions between 1974 and 1989 from around the world and found that 75% of countries had a revolution when they developed to the point where the per-capita (per person) income was between $1,000 and $3,000. Tunisia’s per-capita income is $1,000 (when adjusted for inflation).

P.S.: The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has an excellent picture series from the last few weeks.

Recessive genetic diseases can be useful!

Misha Angrist, who is having his entire genome published online, argues that extricating genetic diseases from the population can have unintended consequences:

“… the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who’s to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn’t similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?
–Misha Angrist in an interview with Maud Newton, A Conversation with Misha Angrist, Publisher of His Genome

(via: The Daily Dish)