al-mofhariz

I just arrived in Chicago where I will be attending a conference on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at the University of Chicago beginning tomorrow. The event is jointly sponsored by the University of Chicago Press, the Fishbein Center for the History of Science, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I have rarely seen a conference with a more promising line up (the program is here ), and I'm really looking forward to it. (There's also a rumor that a certain other member of this blog, who happens to be a postdoc at Northwestern University, might also be there tomorrow. I hope he is!!) I'll be live-tweeting at least portions of the event. Follow me at @STS_News. And look for a summary of the event soon here on American Science.   Kuhn!!!!

Hey, science friends. As many of you know, the NY Aquarium was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy. Many aquarium staff also lost their homes and belongings to the storm , while they tirelessly protected the sea animals in their care. One of them was shark researcher Hans Walters who gave an amazing talk at the Secret Science Club during Shark Week in August. You can help him and his colleagues recover—and thank them for defending the aquarium—at a super-fintastic fundraiser Tuesday, November 27, 6:30 to 9:30 pm at Irish Exit in Manhattan, 978 2nd Ave (between 51st and 52nd). A $15 cover gets you half-price drinks and $5 appetizers. Zookeeper James Gottlieb of the Prospect Park Zoo will be guest bartending—and he’s donating all his tips to the cause!  Find out more or make a donation here: http://nyaqfundraiser.wordpress.com/

Do you feel like you are running on a hamster wheel?  Do you feel like we are working harder and not smarter?  One of the ideas that I have grasped onto over the past few years is the idea of a "curriculum economy".  We have soooooo many things to teach and so little time.  We try to teach random discrete skills and it is overwhelming to us and confusing to the kids...right??? My FOSS representative, Kip Bisignano introduced me to the concept of infusing my language arts skills into my content area.  After all, our principal wants us to teach reading/language arts for 90 minutes or more at the detriment of our science or social studies instructional time. Guess what happened?  My reading scores went from mid 70% to 94% (three years in a row!). I have created a new packet of activities that you can use to imbed language into your science class around the topic of weather.  I am charging for this one because it is 27 pages of stuff you can use!  (B...

My favorite thing about this blog is that it sticks things deeply in my craw, and I cannot pull them out, so now my craw is full. Today, I'd like to return to a discussion we were having several months ago about ontology ( here , here , here , and here ). It's never let me go. I'd like to return to it by considering Jennifer Karns Alexander's 2008 book, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control .  The Mantra of Efficiency won the Society for the History of Technology's Edelstein Prize , for "an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology published during the preceding three years." Like all Edelstein-winning books, Mantra was the subject of a special conference session, this one at SHOT's 2010 meeting in Takoma, WA, which included commentators like Bill Storey , Wiebe Bijker , and Tom Misa . At one point, the discussion took an unexpected turn. Misa said that Alexander's account of efficiency pointed to a post-cons...

Something about the fall makes me want to connect with nature.  You may have seen my previous blog about spiders...today, I'm into Owls... I love to teach about owls and do so throughout the year.  We always read aloud "Owl in the Shower" by Jean Craighead George to bring to life the plight of the loggers vs. owl lovers in the western states.  It's a great books because it shows both points of view...as well as the point of view of the owl. Today we watched a few You Tube videos to show owls and owl pellets. This is a great one from http://hookedonscience.org - a nifty little website I stumbled across this weekend. Next, I introduced how to dissect an owl pellet using the website KidWings .  This is a great place to find instructions, worksheets, etc....as well as a virtual dissection option. I passed out the owl pellets and we went to town...notice, a few of my students chose to do it online rather than using the real owl pellets. I personally think it i...

I asked Joseph November , Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, to share this techno-prophesy with our audience. He was kind enough to oblige me. Enjoy! (If you want to read more, check out his new book ): Closing in on December 21, 2012 , there are few credible signs of the prophesied apocalypse. However, there’s another set of 2012 predictions, one pertaining to the use of electronics in medicine that just might be worthy of your notice. Lusted's 1962 Paper, as reprinted in 2000 In “Bio-Medical Electronics-2012 A.D”  [pay-wall], Lee B. Lusted, M.D. imagined he was writing a letter to his 1962 Proceedings of the IRE audience from fifty years in the future. In his short but captivating essay, Lusted, a radar engineer-turned-radiologist who at the time headed the National Institutes of Health’s first effort to computerize biology and medicine, set forth his vision of what medicine would be like in the future he was helping to build. Besides offering f...

This is the third installment of a four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. Part I is here , Part II is here , and Part IV will appear next week.  The first decade of the new millenium put the big—as in big money—in "Big Ideas." From  The Tipping Point  (2000) to Freakonomics  (2005) to Ted Talks (which started streaming in 2006), an intellectual economy emerged that put a premium (and a price) on counterintuitive conclusions. Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/08/01/jonah-lehrer-david-brooks-and-other-malcolm-gladwell-wannabes-photos.html# In many ways, this was what I called "the house that Gladwell built" in my first post . However,  my second post  suggested a more structural explanation for the sort of popular science peddled by Malcolm Gladwell and what one source has called "the Gladwell clones and wannabes who specialize in writing counterintuitive books that explain the world." L...

Boy did I have fun last week with my students in my after school club of "Green Hornets".  This club is for a growing population of students at my school who are "naturalists" at heart.  Have you ever noticed at recess the group of children that would rather look at the clouds, play in the bushes or trees, or simply pick clover? Those are our naturalists and they love the outdoors! With all the research in the past few years that says that kids no longer want to play in the woods, I started thinking....why not?  Sure, some kids would rather play video games...but I still have a group of kids who would LOVE for us to let them play in the woods surrounding our school at recess.  And then I wonder....what about those kids who play video games??? Have they ever even been in the woods???? So...I asked one of our moms at our school (who is also a master gardener) to come to our recess time on Friday and offer some activities for the kids to participate in.  She has a...

On October 29, Hurricane Sandy morphed into an epic Frankenstorm that annihilated coastal neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey and sent the Atlantic Ocean , Hudson and East rivers, and Gowanus Canal pouring into our homes, businesses, and critical urban infrastructure . Climate scientist and physicist Adam Sobel of Columbia University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory joins the Secret Science Club to discuss the science of Sandy and extreme weather . He asks:  --How did Sandy evolve into a superstorm and why was it so devastating? Are more powerful hurricanes and megastorms the new norm? --What meteorological models and techniques were used to project Sandy’s destructive path? What do we need to know in order to be better prepared? --How will climate change affect forecasting, sea levels , urban storm surge models, and future weather events? Dr. Sobel is an atmospheric scientist and professor at Columbia University in the departments of Earth and Environment...

I'm flying out tomorrow morning for the History of Science Society's Annual Meeting in San Diego. The philosophers of science will be there too, and the whole thing kicks off (of course) with more talking about Kuhn ! I hope all our readers at the conference will turn out for the Forum for the History of Science in America 's business meeting and distinguished lecture. During the meeting we will announce the winner of the FHSA prize for the best book on the history of science in America published in 2009-2011 (look for an interview with the author soon thereafter). If you'd like to get involved in the forum in any capacity, please feel free to drop in. After the business meeting, we can all turn our attention to James Fleming, the FHSA distinguished historian lecturer, giving a talk called "At the Cutting Edge: Harry Wexler and the Emergence of Atmospheric Science." See you all there on Friday at noon in the Spinnaker room . Whether or not you make it to the ...

This is the second installment of a four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. Part I is here , and Parts III and IV will follow in the next two weeks. In 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote a widely-read New Yorker piece called "The Truth Wears Off." It began with a provocative question: "Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" Source: http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/12/13/p233/101213_r20317_p233.jpg Lehrer's answer, both in the piece and in follow-ups elsewhere, was "yes." He calls the frightening failure of scientists to reproduce one another's results (or even their own) the "decline effect"—an old phrase for a new fear. However, it's not just science that's in trouble. In the wake of Lehrer's recent travails, something seems wrong with science writing, too—big, bold claims seem unable to weather scrutiny. In what follows, I'll treat the problems facing science and scienc...

This past weekend, Princeton hosted a workshop in honor of Thomas Kuhn called " Structure  at 50: Assessing and Reassessing Kuhn and his Legacy ." What follows is a guest post by Princeton Ph.D. candidate Michael Barany summarizing the days' events.  Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions turned fifty this year. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions had no right to go beyond this first edition Penned as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (and far exceeding its allotted word count), the work scarcely had any right to exist, much less to win a wide readership, much much less to become one of the most influential books ever written.   This much was abundantly clear from the talks and discussion at a star-studded workshop titled “Structure at 50: Assessing and Reassessing Kuhn and his Legacy” at Princeton University this past Friday and Saturday.  Kuhn and his Structure are two things people love to love and love to ...

We have been talking a great deal about the history of capitalism on American Science, particularly focusing on how histories of science, technology, and the environment relate to this recent sub-field. ( This post nicely aggregates the discussion.) I want add to this dialogue by considering a topic that also touches on an earlier post on the relationship between literature and science—in this case, I want to examine Henry David Thoreau's work as a land surveyor, and how it might have contributed to his literary vision.  Henry David Thoreau, a Land Surveyor, Wearing a Beard My dad is a land surveyor, and I spent a summer working on field crews. Since I began studying the history of technology, I've been thinking about how one could write a history of changes in technologies and practices within that profession. In some ways, surveying is a thoroughly mundane activity. It is often nearly invisible, beyond those times when we occasionally spot a surveying crew out in the field. ...