Science online, stay on that treadmill edition

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Scale-A-Week: 21 February 2010 Photo by puuikibeach.

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“The Brain Scoop”

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This behind-the-scenes tour of The University of Montana’s zoological museum is pretty excellent. And the only full-time employee of the museum, one Emily Graslie, who is so excellently nerdy-charming in this video? She’s a volunteer.

Money quote: “The whole museum is basically overflow skull storage.”

Also, watch out for the orgy. No, really.

And apparently this is the start of a series. In fact, here’s episode 2 already.◼

First teaching experience: Midpoint assessment

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2013.01.16 - Campus That waking up to fresh snowfall, which won’t interfere with my schedule, and which I won’t have to shovel, is lovely and magical. Photo by jby.

Things I am at least starting to learn, a week and a half into this January-term teaching gig at Bard College (With a couple updates about 17:30h, same day.):

  • That, for some reason, a “spot quiz” is less threatening than a “pop quiz.”
  • That the logisitical difficulties of organizing a lab activity increases nonlinearly with the number of people performing said lab acitivity.
    • That I have not yet found a point at which this curve becomes asymptotic.
    • That I’m not sure there is one.
  • That kids today are still everyone is into Frank Sinatra.
  • That it makes me pathetically happy to discover more than half of the class is interested in the topic I’ve picked for the day.
  • That the ungodly lunchtime crowd in the dining hall will reliably thin out if I just wait half an hour.
  • That four and a half hours of daily class time is a vast, gaping expanse of emptiness.
  • That four and a half hours of daily class is not nearly enough time to teach all the science.
  • That it is possible to detect the precise moment when the temperature of class discussion transitions from “vigorous” to “heated.”
    • That it is not necessarily possible to change the subject before this point is reached.
  • That no one complains when I put on a video.
  • That I will never be completely prepared.
  • That I am, at most, one-third as hip and interesting and witty as I generally assume.

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Science online, is it Friday already? edition

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2012.03.29 - Twin trees Joshua trees! Photo by jby.
  • This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Sarah Hird does not believe that, in science, womens’ underconfidence is their weakness.
  • Brilliant. Want to survey a bunch of elusive mammals? Just sample the insects that have already collected DNA samples for you.
  • With a headline about tentacle sex, natch. The latest study on Joshua trees and their pollinators, discussed at Pharyngula.
  • Depends. Do 70-hour weeks sound “stressful?” Is being a professor the least stressful job?

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Campus life

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Bard College has buildings like this:

2012.01.06 - Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts Richard B. Fisher Center for Performing Arts. Photo by jby.

And like this:

2012.01.06 - Ward Manor Ward Manor. Photo by jby.

And also like this:

2012.01.06 - Bertelsmann Campus Center Bertelsmann Campus Center. Photo by jby.

Which is to say, it’s about what you’d expect for a Northeastern liberal arts college which has (1) been around awhile, and (2) has money for Frank Gehry. It’s a nice place to walk around in the winter sunshine, after a morning working in this building:

2013.01.05 - Reem-Kayden Center Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation. Photo by jby.

2012.01.06 - RKC II RKC from another angle. Photo by jby.

Had a good first meeting with my class this afternoon; we hit the ground running tomorrow!◼

New year, new challenge: Teaching!

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Chalkboard Blank slate. Photo by monikahoinkis.

Two days after ringing in the New Year, I had to wake up early to catch an eastbound plane. I’m starting out 2013 not by plunging back into the lab-greenhouse-office rotutine, but with a 3-week guest teaching gig at Bard College in upstate New York, as one of the faculty for Bard’s winter-term course Citizen Science.

Citizen Science is part of the Bard freshman seminar, and it’s primarily meant to help bring students up to a basic level of understanding how science and scientific reasoning work. Since the entire freshman class takes it, Bard brings on about two dozen temporary faculty to teach Citizen Science—and, while there are some elements of the course that are in place before we arrive, each faculty member builds his or her own curriculum.

That makes this my very first effort at building and teaching a course from (more or less) scratch. There’s a lot of starting material to work from, provided by the Bard faculty running the program, and by other CS faculty—course development is highly collaborative. But ultimately, what my students do for the next three weeks is entirely up to me—I have to pick readings, plan four and a half hours of in-class acitivites a day, and figure out appropriate homework assignments.

I spent most of my holiday vacation sketching out plans for the course, but I’ve still been scrambling to pull things together in the three days I’ve been at Bard. CS starts on Monday, but there’s an introduction/opening event this afternoon, at which I’ll meet my students and give them their first assignment, Robert Fisher’s essay “Mathematics of a lady tasting tea.” My class roster shows only three science majors out of 20 students—this will be one long exercise in talking about science with educated people who, after this month, may never set foot in a wet lab again.

Which is exactly what I signed on for.◼

Malware? Not here.

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So several people (all using Chrome) have now alerted me that they’re getting this alert when they navigate to www.denimandtweed.com:

Screencap courtesy Tim Vines.

Here’s what seems to be going on. That “known malware distributor” site, www.imachordata.com is Jarrett Byrnes‘s blog — apparently it’s been hacked, and Jarrett hasn’t been able to clean it up yet.

Why does this generate an alert for Denim and Tweed? I believe it’s because somewhere (probably multiple places), D&T links to imachordata.com — both because I’ve linked to posts there, and because Jarrett has commented here. However, so far as I can tell, there’s no malware on www.denimandtweed.com. Both an independent scan of the site by Sucuri and Google’s “Safe Browsing” diagnostic give www.denimandtweed.com a clean bill of health.

If anyone has further information, or some idea what I ought to do beyond these checks, please let me know in the comments. (I haven’t been able to replicate the warning message on any browser.) If imachordata.com isn’t cleaned up soon, maybe I’ll have to find and purge the links to it.◼

Science online, poisonous misinformation edition

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Bird - Duck - Mallard Quack. Photo by blmiers2.
  • The first Carnival of Evolution for 2013! Now online at Genome Engineering
  • Sure, why the hell not? Did “restless genes” help humans conquer the planet? (Seriously, this is a good piece.)
  • If it quacks like a quack … The science-free advice of Dr. Oz.
  • Diversity of sampling for the win. How hormonal birth control might mess with mate choice—for both straight and gay women.
  • I mean, really, who doesn’t know to smell their tea for bitter almonds? Thank the gods for dumb poisoners.
  • Very, very, effective cows. Are leafcutter ants farmers, or cows?
  • Don’t be the third reviewer. Unless you have to. Advice on how to peer-review a paper.
  • Smarter isn’t always better. Selecting guppies for bigger brains demonstrates that big brains are expensive.
  • Yow. Pioneering anti-GMO activist apologizes, says genetic engineering can be environmentally beneficial.

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State of the blog, 2012

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Daily visits to www.denimandtweed.com, 2012 (blue) vs 2011 (orange). Image and data from Google Analytics.

In all of 2012:

  • 222 new posts
  • 45,636 visits, up 20% from 2011
  • 32,385 “unique” visitors, up 35%
  • 122,363 pageviews, up 66%

Top-viewed posts, in descending order:

Miscellaneous landmarks:

It’s been a busy year, but a great one! If you’re still reading at this point, you must be one of my tens of loyal readers—instead of filling out a formal survey this year, why not say hello in the comments, and tell me why on Earth you’re still hanging around this unfashionable end of the outer eastern spiral arm of the Internet.◼

Science online, the nights after Christmas edition

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Vintage Romance Novels Romance novels are totally evidence of sexual conflict in humans, you guys. Photo by Stewf.

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