PBS’s Inside the Teenage Brain is now online.
Author: Lensyl Urbano
Longer School Days?
Peter Orszag advocates for increasing the length of the school day by about 2 hours.
As a teacher, I know I would appreciate a little extra time in all my subjects. Based as my experience as the sole teacher in a middle school classroom, I think about how much more we could have done with the extra time to round out the curriculum. But I think it only makes sense to add those two hours if they’re used properly. More of the same — like sitting at desks — is unlikely to help a lot.
Orszag points out that there’s some evidence (see Dobbie and Fryer, 2011 (pdf) and Fryer, 2011 (pdf)) that longer school days have improved student performances. But it’s crucial to note that the longer days are part of extensive changes in the curriculum that I don’t think can be separated from the other changes: “frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations” (Dobbie and Fryer, 2011); “a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations” (Fryer, 2011).
When I think of longer school days, I tend to think of a more apprenticeship model. Giving students time to work on personalized projects, interacting with experts as they need.
Ultra-Violet Vision: Seeing like the Butterflies and the Bees
Dr. Klaus Schmitt has some utterly amazing photographs that simulate what bees and butterflies can see. They can see ultra-violet wavelengths of light, which we can’t.
Schmitt maps the ultra-violet in the image to blue to make it visible to our eyes.
His site (Photography of the Invisible World (updated)) has a lot more pictures and information about the process.
Monet’s Ultra-violet Vision
The eye’s lens is pretty good at blocking ultra-violet light, so when Claude Monet (whose works we visited earlier this year) had the lens of his eye removed he could see a little into the ultra-violet wavelengths of light.
Monet’s story is in a free iPad book put out by the Exploratorium of San Francisco called Color Uncovered (which I have to get). Carl Zimmer has a review that includes more details about Monet and how the eye works.
P.S.: All of Monet’s works can be found on WikiPaintings, a great resource for electronic copies of old paintings (that are out of copyright).
Painting the Universe: How Scientists Produce Color Images from the Hubble Space Telescope
The Guardian has an excellent video that explains how the images from the Hubble Space Telescope are created.
Each image from most research telescopes only capture certain, specific colors (wavelengths of light). One camera might only capture red light, another blue, and another green. These are captured in black and white, with black indicating no light and white the full intensity of light at that wavelength. Since red, blue and green are the primary colors, they can be mixed to compose the spectacular images of stars, galaxies, and the universe that NASA puts out every day.
The process looks something like this:
NASA’s image of the day is always worth a look.
How to Watch a Meteor Shower
Space.com has an excellent guide about the best way to observe meteor showers; dress warm; after midnight; be patient). The Lyrid meteor shower is on this week.
To take good photos of a shower you’ll need to do long exposures or get lucky. Details on the photo above here.
On the Loss of Boredom in the Internet Age
I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! ….”
It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.”
— Clay Shirky in an interview with Sonia Saraiya on Findings.com
We need a little boredom, to let our minds wander and thus to spur creativity.
Zoë Pollock, on The Dish, highlights the thoughts of Clay Shirky and the response of Nicholas Carr on loss of space for boredom in the internet age.
History of the Atmosphere (from the Formation of the Earth)
Joel Cayford has posted a nice image showing the composition of the atmosphere over time — since the formation of the Earth.
Note that, although the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life has been around for over 4 billion years, there has only been oxygen in the atmosphere for about 2 billion years.
Oxygen is an extremely reactive gas, which is why we use it when we “burn” carbohydrates for energy. But it also means that any free oxygen added to the atmosphere would easily react with rocks, water, and other gasses in the atmosphere, so would not be available in the quantities needed for air breathing organisms until it slowly accumulated.
Also, you need a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere to produce enough ozone to form the ozone layer that protects life at the surface from high-energy, cancer-inducing, ultra-violet radiation from the Sun.