Teaching Science 2.0

• Must-read NOAA paper smacks down the deniers: Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.” « Climate Progress

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  • Nothing occupies global warming deniers more than trying to prove the U.S. temperature record — a tiny portion of the global temperature record — is not reliable. 

  • Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?

    A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. Coastal temperatures are rising. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in mountainous areas, upward as well.

• Unscientific America, Part 1: From the moon-landing deniers to WattsUpWithThat « Climate Progress

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  • ow desperate is WattsUpWithThat to mislead the public about climate science? On Saturday, former TV meteorologist Watts ran a post “Flashback: Snow in Buenos Aires – first time in 89 years.”
  • poor state of the nation’s schools
    • Poor state? A US Senator probably shouldn’t be disparage an institution that their policies shape. Oh, and only 6% of Americans believe that the Moon landing was a hoax. Although it is laughable, it is hardly an indictment of schools. - post by brunsell

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• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: A Challenge to Climate Change Skeptics

  tags: science, climate, earth

• What Questions Can Science Answer? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

  tags: science, education, nos

  • what does science actually have the power to do?
  • All that is completely mixed-up, because science does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data.
  • cience passes judgment on ideas about how the world works.
  • Science doesn’t pass judgment on phenomena; it passes judgment on theories.

• NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - El Niño Arrives; Expected to Persist through Winter 2009-10

  tags: science, earth

  • NOAA scientists today announced the arrival of El Niño, a climate phenomenon with a significant influence on global weather, ocean conditions and marine fisheries. El Niño, the periodic warming of central and eastern tropical Pacific waters, occurs on average every two to five years and typically lasts about 12 months.

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• Arctic Ocean’s Ice Layer Thins ‘Dramatically,’ Study Concludes - Bloomberg.com

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  • 
    • I wrote about this same thing in response to George Will’s column on arctic ice earlier this year. http://www.ericbrunsell.com/2009/02/will-arctic-ice-and-global-warming/ - post by brunsell
  • he layer of ice over the Arctic
    Ocean has thinned “dramatically” this decade, with its thin
    seasonal blanket for the first time making up a bigger portion
    of the total ice than the thicker, older coat, a study said.
  • In 2003, 62 percent of the ocean’s ice cover was older,
    thicker ice, with 38 percent in seasonal layers, the researchers
    found. Five years later, 68 percent of the ice cap was made up
    of seasonal ice.

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• Researchers Pleased With Final Stem Cell Rules : ScienceInsider

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  • surplus embryos donated by couples receiving fertility treatment.
    • This makes sense. IF you think this is wrong, DO NOT fight stem-cell research, fight fertility treatment. Of course, it is much more difficult for the “Christian Right” to vilify couples seeking to have kids… - post by brunsell

• Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace | Edutopia - Annotated

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  • Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace

• U.S. Department of Education Study Finds that Good Teaching can be Enhanced with New Technology

  benefit of hybrid structure

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• Dude, Where’s My War on Science?

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  • In their zeal to find a “war on science” episode to claim as their own, however, these conservatives forgot one essential matter: substance. If the claims about climate science in Carlin’s report—co-authored with another EPA employee from the same office, John Davidson—aren’t plausible; if leading climate scientists do not accept them; if they lack all credibility; then where there’s smoke there’s no fire. For not only would the EPA be correct to reject Carlin’s claims on substantive grounds, but indeed, as an expert scientific agency it would be bound by its mandate to do so.
  • Carlin’s report claims the globe is in a cooling trend. This is an egregious misreading of the last 10 or so years of global temperatures, and is based quite literally on a trick: If you begin with the hottest year on record—1998—then of course it looks like we’ve been cooling since then.
  • Carlin’s claims were, in fact, considered—and rejected.

• Buchanan Blathers About Evolution : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

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  • volution is descriptive, not prescriptive; it explains how life developed on earth. The only relevant question is whether that explanation is accurate or not, not whether it does or does not have some disturbing philosophical implications that we might not like. If it’s true, it’s true, no matter how much some might wish it wasn’t.
  • And here Windchy does his best demolition work.

    Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a “completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection.”

    • Seriously? This is the best demolition work against evolution? Evolution is wrong because Wallace wrote it, not Darwin? What about Lamarck? - post by brunsell
  • This is false. Darwin and Wallace came up with very similar theories entirely separate from one another. Darwin had begun developing his theory two decades before it was published and it was only at the very end, in 1858, that Wallace contacted Darwin and sent him a manuscript. By that time, Darwin’s ideas had already been sketched out in great detail but not made public. In the end, both men had their papers presented at the same meeting of the Linnean Society in London (coincidentally, 151 years ago today).
  • Standard creationist nonsense. Nebraska Man was not a hoax it was a very tentative identification by a very good scientist that was only turned into a “missing link” by a popular publication in England. HF Osborn took a single weathered tooth, very tentatively said that it may be anthropoid in origin and then scheduled a search for more remains to find out for sure. When they found further remains and it turned out to be a peccary tooth that had been weathered to look more anthropoid, that tentative classification was withdrawn and that was the end of it. Far from being some embarrassing moment for science, this illustrates exactly how good science is done
  • how science works to correct such false claims
  • human embryos have pharyngeal arches just like fish do
  • he fossil record looks exactly how it must look if evolution by common descent is true. It could not possibly look any other way.

• The BEAST: America’s Best Fiend

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  • 
    • Crude — I wish it could have been done without denegrating folks with special needs. But, he did get in some good questions that probably would have been ignored… - post by brunsell
  • Kentucky state line, the
    grand unveiling of a 60,000 square foot bellwether of our culture’s sheepish
    intellectually depravity: The Creation Museum
  • thou shalt not lie,
  • We were
    in Kentucky, totally surrounded by a throng of unthinking beasts and their
    hired guns, and I was acting like an unhinged menace.

  • You said the dinosaurs wouldn’t eat Adam and Eve…”

    “Right,” slipped in Ham.

    “Whyyyyy?” I pleaded. “Why not? Why not?”

    “In the garden,” Ham said, looking over me into the filtering crowd, “you
    know, the Bible tells us in the garden before sin, in fact in the world before
    sin, all animals were vegetarian and so was Adam and Eve, and even though
    they have sharp teeth…”

    “Why they have sharp teeth?” I interjected in my slow droning falsetto.

    A cameraman, most likely from a local news outlet, rushed to Bunting’s left
    to film the inspiring exchange.

    “Right. There’s a lot of animals that have sharp teeth, uh, that only eat
    plants,” Ham ruminated, “for instance most, most bears are primarily vegetarian,
    yet they have teeth like a lion or a tiger…”

    “They eat fish!” I vehemently disagreed. “I saw it on the Discovery Chan-nel…
    but it’s sec-u-lar.”

    “Some of them do,” Ham conceded, “but a panda eats only bamboo.”

  • Ham went into a lengthy shtick about “assumptions,” mentioning “carbon dating
    can only date things back to a hundred thousand years.” This was from a guy
    who firmly believes the earth is precisely 6003 years old.
  • The theater was, perhaps, an effective propaganda
    tool for small children and certifiable fools.
  • As we made our final pass by the freshly minted intellectual tragedy

• Secret of Scotland’s Shrinking Sheep Solved — Siva 2009 (702): 2 — ScienceNOW

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  • shrinking an average of 5% over the last 24 years
  • As a result, Ozgul and colleagues propose, grass has become available for more months of the year, meaning the Soay sheep do not have to bulk up as much. In addition, Hirta’s harsh winters used to kill small ewes born to young mothers. But now these small ewes survive–and because of their low birth weight, they never get as big as normal sheep. That drives down the average size of the entire population, the team reports. Further mathematical modeling allowed the researchers to propose that natural selection has played little–if any–role in the shrinkage of the Hirta sheep.
  • But he says that other mechanisms may be at work.

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