Thursday, 14 January 2010

The End of the World....?

For IPC, please go to Counterbalance and read the article pages on Angels and Demons and the Large Haldron Collider, and the science (or lack thereof) in Angels and Demons. This page links to four other pages that need to be read as well, to whit:
  • Anti-Matter
  • The Physics of Creation
  • The God Particle
  • Other Technical Notes
Read through these pages for tomorrow and come prepared to discuss them in class- if you agree with the author, Adrian Wyard, or disagree, and why; if the science in Angels and Demons is accurate or not.

Wednesday, 6 January 2010

Science Article Titles

Effective immediately, the Critical Evaluations aforementioned will be expanded, such that all students will now be required to provide a list of the titles of both Science Friday and World Science in their respective subjects. On Science Friday this will be due on Mondays; for World Science this will be due two school days after World Science comes out, or the next Monday, whichever comes first. Science Friday comes out every Monday; World Science comes out twice a month, but at random intervals.

Only titles are due, and only titles from that issue that just came out. On any given Friday, you will have between five and ten Science Friday articles. Any given World Science issue will have up to twelve articles. Look through the articles and find the ones that pertain to your respective discipline (marine biology, biology, chemistry, or chemistry & physics). Write a list of the titles down. If you are unsure if an article is about your discipline just from looking at the title, you may have to click on the link for World Science or listen for some thirty seconds to Science Friday.

The easiest way to do this is to put your email address into the World Science website, in the top left corner, and wait to receive your email with the links. If you do not do this, it will become very difficult to determine which articles belong to the most recent disbursement of articles. For Science Friday, the easiest way is to go to iTunes and subscribe to the free podcast of "Science Friday" by putting "Science Friday" into the search parameter. If you do not have iTunes, you can download it for free here (even if you don't own an iPod). If you do not have iTunes and don't want to download it, you can remember to check Science Friday on your own every weekend.

You will be graded by percentage of the number of articles, receiving points for every correct article you include, and for every incorrect article you do not include. Thus, for example, if your class is Biology, and you include an article on "Breast Cancer Gene Patents Challenged", that is clearly about biology, and you get points. If you include an article on "Do Moon Craters Harbor Caches of Water Ice", this is clearly not about biology, and you will lose points.

Hopefully, this will help all students 1) realize that there are many articles to pick from in their Extra Credit Critical Evaluations, which are still due at the end of each month, and 2) become more inspired to do the Extra Credit.