Photo by Never House.I am reliably informed that the monthly round-up of online writing about evolution is available now at DNA Barcoding. Reserve a nice long block of time to peruse the links—this month’s carnival is bigger on the inside.◼
Getting all “House of Cards.” Photo by drewgstephens.◼
This story is, rightly, blowing up the science-y internet:
Kiera Wilmot got good grades and had a perfect behavior record. She wasn’t the kind of kid you’d expect to find hauled away in handcuffs and expelled from school, but that’s exactly what happened after an attempt at a science project went horribly wrong.
Wilmot apparently mixed some “household chemicals” together inside a small plastic bottle, producing a reaction that caused the bottle to explode. She told police that she meant it as a scientific experiment—clearly she was curious to see what would happen, which makes it an experiment in spirit, even if it didn’t take place in a lab. The chemicals involved aren’t specified, but anyone who grew up among nerdy teenagers probably remembers doing exactly this, and probably can recall the recipe. Trouble is, Wilmot did it on school grounds, outside of a supervised science class. And the response of the folks who run her school was totally fucking disproportionate:
After the explosion Wilmot was taken into custody by a school resources officer and charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. She will be tried as an adult.
One of the people who might have something to say about this said this:
“She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone,” principal Ron Pritchard told the station. “She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too.”
And now a sixteen-year-old girl with no prior behavioral problems and good grades is at risk of acquiring the kind of criminal record that screws up job interviews, credit checks, and applications to college. All for setting up an experiment you can see performed in any number of YouTube videos.
And, oh yeah, Kiera Wilmot is African American. DNLee digs into the sad, infuriating racial component of this whole sad, infuriating mess over at Scientific American, and this is really her wheelhouse. My only contribution to that part of the conversation is: I grew up in a rural, predominantly white, predominantly middle-class school district. Among my friends, when I was sixteen, were any number of white, male, middle-class kids who set up “experiments” far more dangerous than what we’re told Kiera Wilmot did. They set off explosions with household chemicals, firecrackers, model rocket engines—and none of them were charged with felonies.
I’m pretty sure none of them would’ve been charged with felonies even if they’d set off one of these experiments on or near school grounds. Yes, they might’ve been suspended a day or two, or made to attend a safety lecture, but no one dismissed the destruction of their future with the blandly hateful accusation that they “made a bad choice.”
Because they were white, teenaged, middle-class boys in a rural school district, and blowing things up was just what white, teenaged, middle-class boys did. Everyone knew that.
There is, at least, a Change.org petition. I’d suggest that you sign it.◼
Stress relief. Photo by dolanh.◼
Photo by jhritz.Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, Amy Dapper takes a look at a new study suggesting that thinking about science might promote moral behavior.
In all four experiments, the authors found exposure to scientific thinking led to more moral behaviors. Study participants that were exposed to the scientific priming (or in the first experiment, that had greater previous exposure to science) reported date rape as being more wrong, were more likely to report that they would participate in prosocial behaviors and divided the $5 more evenly between themselves and the anonymous participant.
Of course, I’m flabbergasted by these results, because all of the scientists I know are selfish, amoral hedonists—that’s why we’re all clamoring for cushy, overpaid jobs on the tenure track. But maybe you should go read the whole thing and see what you think.◼
Environmental variation across the range of Joshua tree. Image via The Molecular Ecologist.This week at The Molecular Ecologist, I’m showing how to use the popular open-source statistical programming language R to estimate species distribution models.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are handy any time you want to extrapolate where a species might be based on where you know it actually is. Maybe you’re trying to figure out where would be fruitful to do more sampling; maybe you want to know where your favorite critters probably lived back during the last ice age; maybe you want to know what regions will be suitable for your favorite critters after another century of global climate change.
Given how widely useful SDMs are, it’s very nice to be able to estimate them using multiple methods implemented within a single open-source framework. To get a taste of the capabilities provided by R and a select set of add-on packages, go read the whole thing.◼
Are you going to Snowbird? Photo by Al_HikesAZ.◼
Chemistry lab. Photo by Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands.It’s called Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching (buy it over on Indiebound). It’s about teaching science to undergraduates, which is a thing I’ve been trying to do, lately. And I wrote a review for ProfHacker.
In their new book Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching, (Harvard University Press, $24.95) Light and Micari argue that undergraduate education in the sciences should go beyond imparting a basic set of knowledge, and make learning science more like the experience of doing scientific research.
If teaching science to undergraduates is also a thing you do, may I suggest you go read the whole thing?◼
Math, in the field. Photo by Wanda Dechant.◼
Bees. Photo by wondermac.◼