tingilinde

tees attacking anti-science

on teaching the controversy...   :-)

playing with ovens

Greg is a physicist/renaissance person who is playing with ovens these days.  Lot of interesting information and the promise of more.  Recommended for those who are cooking/baking curious!

perhaps not the standard corporate ladder

A construction photo of the USS Macon - enlarge and look at the guys on the ladder.  

how congress banned gun research

From the Journal of American Medicine and free -

Silencing the Science on Gun Research

Short and fascinating.  I wonder if the President could get around these things with an executive order?  Quality information would be useful, but one side is clearly paranoid and fearful.

 

 

 

 

why some kids have an inflated sense of how good they are at science

From NPR' Morning Editin - listen or read the transcript (about 5 minutes) ...  sort of obvious as there are multiple reference groups and the students only perceive their own local group.

and the study (behind a paywall)

The Reference Group Effect

An Explanation of the Paradoxical Relationship Between Academic Achievement and Self-Confidence Across Countries

1. Eva Van de gaer¹
2. Aletta Grisay²
3. Wolfram Schulz¹
4. Eveline Gebhardt¹

1. ¹Australian Council for Educational Research, Camberwell, Australia
2. ²University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

1. Eva Van de gaer, Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), Private Bag 55, 19 Prospect Hill Rd, Camberwell, VIC, Australia 3124 Email:Vandegaer@acer.edu.au

Abstract

Academic self-concept and achievement are positively related among students from the same school and country. Yet negative associations between these variables may be found at the level of schools and countries. In the present article, we propose how this apparent paradox can be explained in terms of reference group effects, in which high standards, norms, or benchmarks act to decrease academic self-concept, whereas low ones have the contrary effect. Multilevel regression analyses of the PISA 2006 data consisting of 353,403 students, 13,886 schools from 53 countries revealed an interesting pattern of relationships. Within schools, students’ science achievement and science self-concept were positively related although the size of this relationship varied considerably between countries, whereas between schools and between countries, this association was negative. Consistent with our hypothesis, the size of the between-school relationship was larger in countries with a higher percentage of selective schools. At the country level, the negative relationship between country mean achievement and self-concept was explained by country differences in educational benchmarks, standards, and norms next to country differences in response styles. In this article, we also discuss the implications for the validity of cross-cultural comparisons of self-concept.

 

snow fall

great writing in The NY Times

 

snip

...

Snow filled her mouth. She caromed off things she never saw, tumbling through a cluttered canyon like a steel marble falling through pins in a pachinko machine.

At first she thought she would be embarrassed that she had deployed her air bag, that the other expert skiers she was with, more than a dozen of them, would have a good laugh at her panicked overreaction. Seconds later, tumbling uncontrollably inside a ribbon of speeding snow, she was sure this was how she was going to die.

Moving, roiling snow turns into something closer to liquid, thick like lava. But when it stops, it instantly freezes solid. The laws of physics and chemistry transform a meadow of fine powder into a wreckage of icy chunks. Saugstad’s pinwheeling body would freeze into whatever position it was in the moment the snow stopped.

After about a minute, the creek bed vomited the debris into a gently sloped meadow. Saugstad felt the snow slow and tried to keep her hands in front of her. She knew from avalanche safety courses that outstretched hands might puncture the ice surface and alert rescuers. She knew that if victims ended up buried under the snow, cupped hands in front of the face could provide a small pocket of air for the mouth and nose. Without it, the first breaths could create a suffocating ice mask.

The avalanche spread and stopped, locking everything it carried into an icy cocoon. It was now a jagged, virtually impenetrable pile of ice, longer than a football field and nearly as wide. As if newly plowed, it rose in rugged contrast to the surrounding fields of undisturbed snow, 20 feet tall in spots.

...

pykrete and project habbakuk

In 1942 Lord Mountbatten convinced Winston Churchill of the merits of pykrete - a mixture of ice and wood pulp created by the eccentric English boffin Geoffrey Pyke.  The notion was to build an enormous aircraft carrier at least 2,000 feet long and 300 feet wide that could provide an airbase in the North Atlantic  The problem was that it required an enormous amount of wood and, of course, it would eventually melt.

£5000 was provided for a small test which took place on Patricia Lake in Jasper in the Canadian Rockies.  I first encountered it listening to an old timer in a tea house near the lake when I was hiking there years ago...

When your back is against the wall you are willing to try almost anything..

The name is from a book in the old testament and something that puzzles me.  I was told that it is from a verse in the book - something this source agrees with.

“Behold ye among the heathen, and regard and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told to you.” Hab. 1:5

But I like something a biblical scholar told me when I asked him for a bit of background ...  Habbakkuk was the only prophet who questions god's wisdom when he saw a great unjustice and asked why god wasn't doing anything about it.  Somehow I could imagine that squaring with the English sense of humor a bit better.

 

 

mr magoo pioneers the television telling of a christmas carol

While I was working out this morning I caught a WNYC Soundcheck segment on Mr Magoo's Christmas Carol.  It turns out this was the pioneering holiday animated show on television - before the Grinch, Charlie Brown and even Rudolph.

It is now 50 years old and will be shown Saturday night on NBC

_______

(the segment begins at the 25:00 mark and runs a bit over 10 minutes)

_______

It turns out this is one of Sukie's favorite versions of the book.  You can download a video copy from iTunes or purchase a dvd or stream from Amazon

the ferret mailing list

Manu online special interest groups tend to have a lot of infighting and other normal social problems with moderators lasting a couple of years before burnout.  A few are run by people who have serious people skills and a tiny percentage have sustained and thrived for many years. 

Today marks the 25^th anniversary of The Ferret Mailing List - one that Sukie has been active in from the beginning.  A remarkable achievement that has improved the lives of thousands of ferrets.

more wingsuit fun

The folks who do proximity flying have a high mortality rate. The lift over drag of a wingsuit is not very high