Mon, 17 November 2008 Show notes at www.laboutloud.com |
Mon, 3 November 2008 Find show notes at www.laboutloud.com |
Mon, 20 October 2008 See Show Notes at: http://www.laboutloud.com/episodes/ |
Mon, 6 October 2008 Find show notes for this episode at: http://www.laboutloud.com/ |
Mon, 22 September 2008 Find show notes for this episode at: http://www.laboutloud.com/ Comments[0] |
Mon, 19 May 2008  For this episode, we chatted with Dr. Karen Harpp, Associate Professor in Geology
at Colgate University in New York. Dr. Harpp talked with us about
her research, science outreach and creating connections between science
teachers and researchers.
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Mon, 5 May 2008 
In response to the movie Expelled:
No Intelligence Allowed, we decided to talk with someone who
has invested her life defending evolution. Dr.
Eugenie Scott, Director for the National
Center for Science Education, talks to us about the movie,
the NCSE response, and the place of evolution in science education.Comments[0] |
Mon, 21 April 2008 
For our contribution to Earth Day, we had the opportunity to chat with Bill Nye about his new show on the new Planet Green channel called Stuff Happens. Preview from the Show: I’m doing this other thing called “Stuff Happens� for the Discovery Channel. It’s strictly for a new channel Discovery is re-purposing – they’re calling it "Planet Green". So all the programming is green, or about environmental issues and stuff. And so this show is about consumer choices that you can make to live a more environmentally responsible life. I am a serious hobbyist. I have four kilowatts of solar panels and I have a solar water heating system that I, if you will, designed – along with a guy who’s worked in solar in southern California for many, many years…I hired him, and two very good plumbers, and these guys who were good with gas mains, and we re-rigged the whole house. So now I have solar hot water that pre-heats the water before it runs through two tankless hot water heaters. So my gas bill in the summer is less than $10. There’s an old supply chain from the South American Western Coast to North American farmers. And what is supplied is fish feed made from anchovies. So, American bacon pigs are fed fish from South American oceans. And so many fish are fished so aggressively that penguins are going out of business. The penguin ecosystem has been devastated, and penguin populations have been decimated by this practice. So we encourage you – the listener, the viewer – to buy…organic, grain-fed bacon. That’s what we want you to do to reduce the market for this anchovy feed. And it’s just something that humans are kind of doing by accident, but on such an enormous scale that’s it’s screwing up an entire ecosystem in the south western Pacific. The baby steps are important. The hardest thing for everyone to understand about the environment is that every single thing you do affects everybody in the whole world. And the reason, nominally, is that we only have one atmosphere. We can only breath from one source of air – we all share the air. So this is a fundamental idea that’s hard to get; it just doesn’t seem possible. I throw out this magazine and instead of recycling it, yeah – you’re lowering the quality of life of everyone on earth. So you go to the store and you buy one [compact fluorescent light bulb]. Ok, but if you replace every lamp in your house, or every lamp in the main rooms… Replace every one of those lamps, and you will see your power bill go down… Now there are some whining, unbelievable-freakin’ whiners out there who tell you that we can’t change to compact fluorescents because of the mercury - "there’s no way to get rid of the mercury that’s in those lights and it’s gonna kill everybody." So let’s keep in mind that it was the year 1951 when American industry went to buying more fluorescent lamps than incandescent lamps. That is to say, if you work at any sort of factory anywhere, they have fluorescent lights – ‘cuz it’s so much cheaper. And so those lights are required by law to be recycled and the mercury recovered. And there are services that recover the lights and recover the mercury. So we just gotta do the same thing for domestic consumers – for people that buy ‘em for their houses. For cryin’ out loud – this is not, if I may, rocket surgery. This is actually a little more complicated that: trying to motivate everyone to do the right thing with regard to their old lamps. And of course it can be done; it’s a metal. Who doesn’t want to recover a metal? It’s valuable, it’s shiny, you can see it – of course you can do it. Politically, [a scientific debate] is an unsophisticated idea. None of the three candidates remaining would ever consent to a science debate. None of them are scientists. None of them would admit to being experts in any way about anything about science. So of course they're going to say no; they have to say no. This pursuit of science debate is an exercise in futility. Instead, we need to rephrase it - in my opinion. My best idea so far, is to rename it something else - the "nondependence on foreign oil" debate, the "health" debate, the "energy" debate, the "competitiveness" debate - that's pretty good... But naming this thing the "science" debate sabotages it from the get-go. And of course I support the idea, but the best correction I can think of it to rename it. The "competitiveness" debate - yes. Links: Comments[0] |
Mon, 7 April 2008  This week we talk to Terry Devitt from WhyFiles.org.Preview from the Show: Subscribe to The Why Files with their RSS Feed Comments[0] |
Mon, 17 March 2008  Today's guest calls himself the Bad Astronomer. Phil Plait is an astronomer, an author, and a well-known blogger at www.badastronomy.com. Phil talks to us about myths and skepticism in the science classroom.Special Announcement: Don't miss Lab Out Loud's Conference Coverage live from the NSTA conference in Boston! Preview from the show: Plait: I am in fact a skeptic. In the public mind - if you ask somebody "what's a skeptic" - most people think it's a cynic or a denier, somebody who just doesn't believe in anything. And that's not strictly true. All a skeptic is, is someone who demands evidence for a claim. If you come up to me and say the sky is pink, I'm going to say "what is your evidence for this?". Or I'll say, "that's an interesting claim, but here's the evidence against it." It's someone who applies critical thinking, logic, evidence, observation, the scientific method to any sort of claim. Science is all about skepticism. They are hardly different - I mean skepticism is a tool of science. Richard Feynman (the physicist) said "science is a way of not fooling ourselves. It's a way of figuring what's out what's really going on". And skepticism is just a way of looking at things. It's making sure that if you're thinking about something, if there's a claim that's being made - whether it's by a person or even yourself, there's a way of examining it so that you can test its reality or not. And the problem is, it's not something we teach our kids. In fact, we teach them exactly the opposite. We teach them to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. We go to movies where the skeptic is always a jerk, and the end is always the supenatural cause or trust in humanity or whatever." Plait: Scooby Doo was a great cartoon because in the end, it really wasn't a ghost or whatever, it was always old man Marley wearing a mask, who didn't want the developers to come in and destroy his farm or whatever." Plait: When you're teaching kids to the test, and you're saying "here's how you do the math" without explaining why, "here's what you're supposed to get in the results in the lab" without explaining why, we're not teaching our kids science. We're teaching them nothing, we're teaching them belief, faith - and that's not what science is about. Science is not about belief, science is about evidence. Follow the Bad Astronomer: Posts from badastronomy.com discussed on the show:
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Mon, 3 March 2008 
This week we talk with Steve Silberman, contributing editor for Wired Magazine. Steve talks to us about the demise of the chemistry set (as related to his article Don't Try this at Home) and what that might mean for the future of scientific curiosity in our children.Preview from the Show: In the last few years, a kind of perfect storm of concerns and legislation has arisen that has had the unintended effect of discouraging amateur chemistry. Kids really want to fall in love with science. And I know how much the teachers really want to communicate their own enthusiasm about science to their kids. But with fears of liability, and these restrictive laws, and just a kind of general paranoia, instead what's being transmitted to kids is some kind of combination of boredom and fear. I would say that one of the reasons that I became a science writer was that I had a well stocked chemistry set when I was in elementary school, that contained many things that I am sure are now illegal. If we're cutting off the possibility of future generations of being interested in science - at the same time that the performance of American kids in science starts to go down around 12th grade, the number of science and technology related jobs in the world are going continually up - so we're creating a gap here where we need people in science and technology, but we're no longer giving them the access to the things that could help them become interested in the subject. Links:
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Mon, 18 February 2008 
Get a preview of what's in store for you at the 2008 National Conference on Science Education, as we chat with conference chair Joyce Croce. New to an NSTA Conference?
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Mon, 4 February 2008  In this episode, we chat with PZ Myers - lead author of the blog Pharyngula (Pharyngula is hosted at Science Blogs - a project from Seed Magazine). Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
Myers: What you want to do with a blog - it's such an informal medium - if you get all stuffy and treat it as something where you are going to write a formal treatise everyday, I don't think you'll get as much interest. So by keeping it personal, keeping it human, what I think I've done is open up a little window into a science professor's life, which is sometimes scary, but fun. Basler: Do you think that this type of casual communication [blogging] is something really important that the students are going to need in the future, or was it just an experiment to try out because you were blogging? Myers: Oh it's both. I mean, this is a brave new medium. I'm trying new things; I wanna explore this and see what we can do with our students. But I also think it's important for the future of science and science education - that what we want is active, involved learners at every stage of the game. And if this is a way that we can get people talking about science, then that's a huge step - that's important. Myers: My schedule's turning into a frightening thing; it's getting so packed full of requests to talk, but I try to indulge in as much as possible. Bartel: So you're working on Darwin Day instead of enjoying it, is what you're saying? Myers: Well, getting up in front of an audience and talking about evolution and talking about science, talking about philosophy in these ideas - that's not working is it? Links:
Books Discussed on the Show:
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Mon, 21 January 2008  In this episode, Dale talks with physicist Don Lincoln of the DZero detector experiment at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratories. Don talks about physics, Fermilab, his books, and some opportunities for teachers and students with QuarkNet.Preview from the Show: Basler: Can you give us an overview of what the [Fermilab] does, and what the facility’s goals are? Lincoln:
My own lab, Fermilab, accelerates protons
and antimatter protons near the speed of light and collides them together. Fermilab
has some other programs also where we accelerate protons and smash the protons into
a target, which is usually some material - nickel or something. And from that, we extract other particles – which
could be neutrinos – which is what we’re doing mostly - and experimenting with
those as well.�? Lincoln: Well I ask them why they hated physics. Usually they say “well, ‘cuz it was too math oriented and it was difficult�?. And I say, “let’s talk about the world. Have you ever wondered why the sun came up?�? or things like that. And usually I can get them to talk about some aspect of the world that they’re interested in, and show them that, in fact, the study of physics really is interesting in that it explains an awful lot, and shows these interconnections that they might not be aware of. Basler: And you have a book that could help out teachers… Tell us a little about that. Lincoln: Well actually I have two books. The first book…was written intentionally for people who come to my public lectures, because the people who come to the science lectures are usually of course very enthusiastic about science, and they’ve read many of the popular books. This particular book that I wrote, was actually aimed at them, for those who wanted to go a little bit deeper. The second book is not even out yet - it’ll be out in the summer of 2008 – details the new accelerator that is going to be turning on this year in Europe – the large hadron collider, and that one is also aimed at the general audience. Lincoln: High School teachers can join the QuarkNet program. They will then go and work with the researcher, for perhaps a week during the summer, and get a sense of what research is going on. Then they bring that information back to their classrooms. And for many of the QuarkNet center - of which I think there are 50 currently in the country - they get funded to bring high school students in the laboratory to work for the summer – and they get paid to work even. Don's Books:"Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos" The target audience for this book is a lay audience of science enthusiasts. I had high school teachers in mind as I wrote it. Find it at Amazon.com. New book: "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" (name subject to change, will be out summer 2008.) Maybe it's just better to say that the new book "describes in layman terms the exciting new research program about to start at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland." Links from Don Lincoln:
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Mon, 7 January 2008  On this week's episode, we talk with Dr.
Shoukhrat Mitalipov. Dr. Mitalipov is an Assistant Scientist and a Co-Director
of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Embryonic Stem Cell Core Laboratory
at the Oregon National
Primate Research Center, Oregon
Health & Science University. We talk with Dr. Mitalipov about his recent
breakthrough in cloning monkey embryos and the scientific methods that got him
there.
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Mon, 17 December 2007  Adam Rogers discusses the new PBS show titled WIRED Science.
Links Comments[0] |
Mon, 3 December 2007  Professor Sir Alec Jeffries talks to us about the discovery of DNA fingerprinting, its uses/abuses and its impact on society. Preview from the Show: I’ve been called the father of DNA fingerprinting - I think grandfather is more appropriate. So basically the baby has grown up and spawned its own offspring – so I’m now granddad – and they are thriving. …But obviously I keep a very, very great interest in watching… just how it’s being used, and indeed, on occasion how it’s being misused, or potentially misused. And on that point, I will certainly stand up and raise these issues. BARTEL: Can you tell us a little bit about how you
discovered the technology? First, DNA fingerprinting wouldn’t have happened without basic blue skies research; it came out of nowhere – it was unpredictable. And secondly, science is a lot of fun. Without that sense of fun, I wouldn’t have come up with this either. I think those are two important messages for the policy makers, but certainly for the young people of today – tomorrow’s future scientists.
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