Hundreds of universities have gone to online-only teaching in a short amount of time. Here are Steve Bellovin's comments (Columbia) on his experiences.
Sort of amazing seeing this happen even in small numbers in the US.
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With the temperature around 12 degrees at 8 a.m., Jacquelyn Farnsworth said her husband, an electrician who usually works outside, was assigned indoor duty.
But Farnsworth’s daughter, Josephine, 3, doesn’t get indoor duty. She attends an outdoor preschool that doesn’t have an indoors.
Instead, the hardy kids who go to The Nursery School bundle up in layers of winter gear to head into the woods even on frigid days like this one. Several days a week, Josephine and her friends spend hours breaking sticks to build forts, digging holes in the ground and learning to wield tools — including knives and bow saws — that few American adults allow small children to use.
Their parents have embraced it.
“They’re running around. They stay warm,” Farnsworth said. “It gives her time to have free play with other kids.”
Antoina Groneberg’s innovative depiction of zebrafish brain development has just reeled in Science’s annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” prize. A dancer since she was young, Groneberg taught students jazz and modern dance as a side job while pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at Champalimaud Research in Lisbon, Portugal. When she heard about Science’s unusual contest, it seemed a natural fit. “Science and dance have always been my passions,” says Groneberg, who is now a postdoc at Charité University Hospital in Berlin.
That’s the pairing that Dance Your Ph.D., hosted by Science and AAAS, is seeking. The contest challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through the most jargon-free medium available: interpretive dance. “Antonia Groneberg’s choreography, inspired by zebrafish larvae, merged dance and science for an aesthetically stunning and intellectually profound masterwork of art,” says Alexa Meade, one of the contest judges and an artist who uses mathematics and illusion in her work.
Groneberg’s doctoral thesis explored how the motions of groups of zebrafish larvae affected each individual animal’s brain development and behavior, teasing out the impact by raising some larvae in isolation and documenting any differences. “We used to joke that my Ph.D. was easily danceable as it’s about movement,” Groneberg says. “Some colleagues accused me of picking my thesis topic because of that.”
Largely shot over one hot weekend at Champalimaud Research, the video incorporates colleagues, some of her dance students, children of the adult participants, and others on the Lisbon campus. (Groneberg says she went around asking, “Do you have toddlers I can borrow?”)
Speaking of the Royal Institute .. Chris Bishop had a classic lecture complete with dangerous demonstrations (as it should be). I can't believe he had nitrogen tetroxide in the same room as an unwitting audience though...