Beastly Video from the Taxidermy Contest

If you missed our taxidermy contest, take a peek at this feral video courtesy of New York magazine.


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Science in the Streets

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Science in the Streets: A free public engagement event from the History of Science Society Thursday, Nov 21, 3-6 pm, Boston Convention & Exhibition Center



[I have asked Conevery Bolton Valencius, who teaches at UMass Boston, to write a guest post about an event she is helping to organize at this year's HSS.  Many readers of this blog are interested in popular science & science popularization, and I urge everyone to join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion!]
Current newspaper headlines make clear how anti-science and science-illiterate many Americans are, at least about some political issues.  But there are effective and interesting efforts going on all around to engage people in the workings and the wonderings of science.  Further, historians of science are doing a lot of that work – and sometimes have particular insight about what is new or very old about rhythms of scientific skepticism or scientific enthusiasm. 
At next week’s annual conference of the History…
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Spies, Whistleblowers, and the Federal Shield Law

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The John-le-Carré-esque saga of Edward Snowden's run from the United States Government has sparked an interesting conversation on how to distinguish whistle-blowing from espionage. The fact that Snowden has been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 certainly ought to give us pause.  After all, this is a law that was originally passed during the First World War, one that was used, among other things, to silence pacifists and other opponents of American intervention as well as political dissidents in the ensuing Red Scare of the 1920s. No doubt, then, an argument can be made that just like one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, so too can a whistleblower be reclassified as a spy depending on which side of a political argument you happen to find yourself on.


Historians of science and STS scholars have thought a lot about the important work that all manner of classification can do. From Foucault's early archeology of the human sciences to Hacking's fora…
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Do you use a class journal?

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After reading Betsy Fulweiler's book this summer, I was once again motivated to model, model, model how to write scientific thinking.  She suggests using a class journal as either a class chart or in a notebook on the document camera.  Why is this so important?

The newest Science Notebooking folio that was just released days ago from FOSS talks about  using a class notebook to showcase:
how to organize your notebookhow to set up a page - with focus question, data section, making sense of your data and reflection/conclusionhow to use a new strategy - like a T chart, a graph, a sentence frame or a diagramthey should NOT be used to copy directly what the teacher thinks - that is the same as the old fashioned teacher directed notes on a chalkboardA teaching tip they include on the side state:

Use of the class notebook should be thoughtfully timed. Doing a class-notebook entry at the end of an activity is helpful to teach the components of a notebook, yet allows you to see what students do…
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