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It’s the time of year again for my annual guest post on the
science books I chose to add to my niece’s and nephew’s growing libraries.
Children’s books are pricey, hovering around $20 a pop for a
hardcover, so they make fantastically generous gifts for families struggling to
keep shoes on ever-growing feet. Paperbacks are about half that, but I tend to
get the hardcovers because my nephew, four years older than my niece, can pass
them down to her with the covers still intact after multiple readings and that
game where you place the books on the floor and leap from cover to cover so
that carpet alligators won’t eat you.
My nephew is in the second grade this year, so he’s at that
murky in-between age where he’s still enough of a little boy to want to be read
to, but enough of a big kid to want to read to himself. It’s hard to find books
that bridge that gap. I got him a combo of books with more grown up stories of
real people, since he’s been getting into the nonfiction world of biographies
that still have cool illustrations. I also threw in some chapter books that are
appropriate for his reading level.
My niece is in preschool, so picture books are where it’s
at, and the sillier, the better. I’m going to start this party with books at
her age level because I share her love for the silly.
Kids love Mo Willems as much as they love dinosaurs, so this
book is like the chocolate and peanut butter of children’s books. This is his deliciously
ridiculous riff on the traditional Goldilocks story, with three dinosaurs
setting out bowls of pudding to lure a tasty little girl into their home for
dinner. My niece, like most preschoolers, is greatly impressed by expert-level
silliness, and Mo Willems should have an honorary Ph.D. in it. He’s also the
author of Caldecott Honor winning Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, which I strongly recommend even if it
doesn’t have dinosaurs in it. Discouraging pigeons from driving buses is good advice
regardless of scientific merit.
There Was a Tree by Rachel Isador. Nancy Paulsen Books (October 11, 2012).
Ages 3 and up.
Based on the song “Green Grass Grew All Around,” this story is paired
with vivid color and crunchy textured cut outs depicting the plains of Africa.
The song begins with a seedling that grows into an acacia tree that provides a
branch for a nest that holds an egg that hatches into a bird that serves as a
home for a flea. There’s even some
sheet music in the back so you can sing along with a little one at
bedtime. In case you need some
inspiration, here’s Melissa Etheridge’s version of the song. It’s a preschool course on ecosystems!
Nightsong by Ari Berk, Illustrated by Loren Long. Simon & Schuster
Books for Young Readers (September 25, 2012) Ages 4 and up.
There’s a special place in my heart for both bats and tracking
systems. I wrote a book about a
baby bat named Sam a couple of years back, so I’m always on the lookout for books by fellow bat
lovers. Nightsong provides the most elegant explanation of echolocation I’ve
read. Chiro is a baby bat exploring the night sky for the first time. His
mother teaches him a special song to sing so thathe can “see” the world in the
dark. Chiro sings out and the world sings back to him in a symphony of sonar.
He “sees” a flock of geese fly overhead, and tasty insects below. He’s also
unbearably cute, with the puppydog face of an Australian flying fox on the body
of a little brown bat. Just try and resist this face.
Willoughby is afraid of the dark. The phases of the moon don’t help,
as it slowly melts
away in the sky into nothingness. But Willoughby’s curiosity
about where the moon goes when it disappears overcomes his fear, and with the
help of a snail and a dream, he travels into space to find that even though he
can’t see it, the moon is still there in the sky. The illustrations of the moon
are silver over absolute black, and the pages shimmer with beautiful images of
the moon, including a diagram of its core. The silvery inks give off a halo
effect under a reading light, lending a dreamlike quality to the entire book.
There’s Nothing to Do on Mars by Chris Gall. Little, Brown
Books for Young Readers (February 1, 2008). (Age not listed, but in my opinion,
it’s appropriate for 4 and up).
I have to be honest, I got this because it reminded me of the Spaceman
Spiff stories in the old Calvin and Hobbes strips. Davey Martin and his robot dog Polaris live on Mars, and they are SO
BORED. Even with the Martians and
his awesome hovercraft, Davey is BORED. The story isn’t spectacular, but the
illustrations of a completely fantastic Mars are, which is why I decided to buy
it.
Basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar writes the story of a brother
and sister who
discover the history of African American inventors by exploring
an old house and the everyday items within it. Frederick Jones brought us
refrigerated trucks, allowing us to get fresh food from thousands of miles
away. Dr. Henry Samson invented the gamma electric cell, which brought us
nuclear power. Dr. Valerie Thomas invented the Illusion Transmitter, giving us
3D projection, and George Crum gave us potato chips. Potato chips!!! There are
16 inventors covered in the book, which has fold-out pages with mini-bios throughout. I’m unsure if these scientists and
engineers will make it into my nephew’s curriculum in school, so I’m glad
Jabbar was inspired to put this out into the world. It’s just wonderful.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer.
Illustrations by Elizabeth Zunon. Dial (January 19, 2012). Ages 6 and up.
This is the autobiography of a young teenager in Malawi named William
Kamkwamba who brought electricity to his village by following a diagram of a
windmill he found in
a library copy of an old textbook. He salvages junkyards for
parts to build it after being forced by poverty to quit school in the eighth
grade. He’s now attending Dartmouth College because HE BUILT A WINDMILL OUT OF
SCRAP METAL AND POWERED HIS VILLAGE. Yeah. When I was fourteen, I was sitting
on my ass watching MTV and wishing I could quit school and become Joan Jett. This
book is a bit on the youngish side for my nephew, but I think the story itself
is geared toward a kid his age. It’s somewhere in the gap between little boy
and big boy that I mentioned earlier.
Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? by Roberta Edwards and illustrated by True
Kelley. Grosset & Dunlap (September 8, 2005). Ages 8 and up.
The Who Was? series is a great collection that gives brief,
simple-to-read biographical facts
on various historical figures. I also got my nephew one on primatologist Jane
Goodall, but she’s in the Who Is? category until further notice. The da Vinci biography contains line
drawings of his inventions from weapons to life preservers to flying
machines. It’s a solid bio told
simply, but there’s also a bit on da Vinci’s study on anatomy that kids might
love for the gross, or be frightened because, well, corpses. Think about the kid
you’re buying for and make a judgment on whether s/he will be happily grossed
out or miserably freaked out. Of course, lots of biblical stuff interspersed
with Copernicus. The Renaissance was nuts, am I right? The Goodall bio is chock
full of facts on chimps as well as biographical information on Goodall.
I also got a special gift for the kids; Mattell Hot Wheel versions of
the Curiosity Mars Rover, in packages signed by some of the “Blue Shirt”
members of the Mars Science Laboratory team. I got each a rover to open and
play with, and another that’s signed so they can be the Supreme Rulers of Show
and Tell. Auntie Allyson believes in giving them a show-and-tell edge.
I can’t really express to all of you how much a new book
means to a family. Story time is precious bonding time between a child and a
loved one, as well as an opportunity to teach and learn. Books are pretty tough, and can be
tossed around without breaking, and easy to store, which means they’ll be in
good condition to pass along to younger siblings and cousins when they’ve been
outgrown.
If you don’t have a little one to buy for, please consider
picking up one of these titles to toss into a Toy Drive bin. I promise, a needy
family will cherish a book that they can own and read again and again (and again
and again and again until parents want to pull their hair out). It helps kids
learn to read when they’re read to.
Plus, you could be giving a kid a lifelong memory of a beloved story.
My hypothesis is this: Children can never have too many good books to read. In order to prove/disprove this hypothesis, I have set up the following experiment: I buy my niece and nephew stacks and stacks of books, and then ask them if it’s too many. We have yet to reach maximum bookage, and I’ve been sending several pounds of them every year for seven years. I plan to publish the results of my research once my four year-old niece turns eighteen in the Journal of Auntie Allyson, and am positive it will stand up nicely to peer review.
Once again, I scoured the shelves of my local indie bookstore, Vroman’s, in search of science books for the kids. The secret to finding some of the best science books for kids is to walk past the science section and just start browsing titles in the kids’ fiction section. I mean, there are some decent titles to be found sorted by subject in science/math/education, which I’ll detail here, but sometimes books that seem like a silly story about a pair of cats playing all night is actually a fantastic conversation starter about the night sky and everything in it. Give it some thought when you’re browsing through the stacks. A book about different kinds of monsters with googly eyes and jagged teeth is actually kind of a neat way to introduce a child to adaptation. You just ask, “Why do you think the googly-eyed monster has that dark fur?” You hope the kid says, “So you can’t see him hiding in the closet!” At this point, you’ll of course have to invest heavily in nightlights and scooch over in your bed when the inevitable nightmare hits. But you know, ADAPTATION! Maybe that was a crap example.
The books I got for my niece and nephew this year include the story of Galileo, a dinosaur who doesn’t know she’s extinct, a giant squid who eats homework, lots of poop (oh how little kids love poop), and a universe full of star dust.
If you’re at a loss for what to buy the little ones in your life this holiday season, consider my recs, below. And then read to them. If you find a kid that has too many books, please send me your data. I’ve yet to discover one, and am sure that I have discovered a new law of physics, and will be shocked to find my hypothesis disproven. If you don’t have any little ones in your life, please consider buying a couple of these and tossing them in a toy drive bin or donating to your local school’s library.
These are all appropriate for ages 4-7 (and grown-ups will get a kick out of them, too)! I’m linking to Amazon, but consider buying from your local bookseller this year, and explore the store.
This is the story of the Big Bang, told in a cumulative style, like This Is the House That Jack Built or The Twelve Days of Christmas. Author Karen Fox begins her story with a very heavy speck of dust that grows into a universe: electrons, neutrons, protons, all dancing together to make atoms. The illustrations expand and spread out over the pages using carefully considered color that looks like the messy/fun work of pre-schooler on Red Bull. “These are the bits that were born in the bang when the world began.” You can almost hear Sagan reading it aloud to you.
This is the dust, so old and new,
Thrown from the blast
Intense enough
To hurl the atoms so strong and tough
That formed in the star of red-hot stuff
That burst from the gas in a giant puff
That spun from the blocks
That formed the bits
That were born in the bang
When the world began
And so she continues through to the inevitable conclusion: You, me, the dinosaurs, your mom, that mean kid down the street who throws rocks at cars, the street itself, the neighbor’s dog who poops on the lawn…all came from a star, which means we’re all connected and as old as the universe itself. This is a lovely introduction to cosmology. Hell, I understand it better. I hope her next book is on quantum mechanics.
Edwina is a dinosaur. She bakes cookies, goes to school, helps little old ladies cross the street, and everyone loves her. Everyone but Reginald von Hoobie-Doobie. Reginald spends all his days trying to convince everyone that Edwina simply cannot exist, even though everyone in his class can clearly see that she is there, baking cookies. You can see how this would be a good time to bring up the topic of Climate Change.
This is the history of Galileo Galilei, told simply and elegantly by author Peter Sis. I’m going to put out a warning that he doesn’t gloss over Galileo’s trial and imprisonment by the Church, and it might be a little upsetting for kids. Then again, if your kid didn’t need therapy after seeing Bambi’s mom get turned into venison ravioli, this shouldn’t be too difficult. The illustrations are rich, intricate, and powerful.
Though it might be a little hard to get through the page on Galileo’s trial, the final artwork depicting the astronomer standing on his roof, secretly gazing up at the night sky while the unknowing guards stand below is inspiring and hopeful. In this way, Galileo is presented as victorious, because as the famous song goes, “You can’t take the sky from me.”
You see what I did there with the Firefly theme song? See? Also, this is a Caldecott Honor book, which means my contention that the illustrations are hauntingly gorgeous holds up under peer review.
A country cat and a city cat live very far away from each other, but play under the same moon. This one’s a lovely conversation starter about how animals adapt to different environments, but I like it for more personal reasons. Though my niece is three-thousand miles away, we’re both sleeping under the same moon…or more likely, getting out of bed to get into some trouble. I like any book that encourages kids to look up at the night sky and wonder. This is one of them.
I adore this. A little girl. A lab coat. Safety glasses. The scientific method. Eleven experiments and their results.
Question: Can a message be sent in a bottle to a faraway land?
Hypothesis: The hole in the bottom of the toilet leads to the sea.
What you need:
Message
Bottle
Toilet
What to do:
1. Write a secret message.
2. Place inside bottle.
3. Flush.
Results:
Toilet overflowed
Plumber called
Still awaiting rescue
There are ten more of these, including one with a bologna sandwich and a pair of sneakers. This is science comedy gold. With diagrams. I once worked in a lab where an ant fried an 80k laser. This isn’t that far off.
I’m cheating a little here in that is in no way a sciencey sort of book. However, the characters are: A boy named Tim, a ninja, an astronaut, a time-traveling monkey, a sunburned crocodile, and a giant squid.
I’m going to chalk up any story involving a giant squid as a win in the column of any fan of biologist and cephalopod lover, PZ Myers.
Scientists study it. Everybody does it. Dung beetles eat it. Archeologists dig it up by the truckload. Hippos make a lot of it. What is it? IT’S POOP! Kids love poop. This book takes its shit very seriously. Blue whales have big, pink poops because they eat a lot of shrimp. Hippos navigate by poop. Termites use their poop to farm mushrooms. Yes, termites farm. Holy shit.
I also purchased a brick containing fossilized dinosaur poop. It comes with a pick and brush so the kids can excavate the poop fossil. Yes, you can purchase fossilized dinosaur poop.
Using an orange and a flashlight, Edward Gorey explains the earth’s rotation to a group of crosshatch ink gothic children. Oh yes.
I also picked up a few picture books and a flip-book on dinosaurs, that allows my niece to make different crazy looking dinosaurs by flipping any one of three cardboard panels. As I wrote earlier, you can find some gems by wandering away from the science section and into the fiction stacks. Look for pictures that make you gaze a little longer, and think of ways you can use the story to talk about science with the kids you love. This will help teach them critical thinking skills, and sharpen their imaginations.
[NOTE: This post originally appeared at our new home at Scientific America.]
Four years ago on this date, the Time Lord and I officially tied the knot. I wrote the piece below last fall, as The Calculus Diaries was coming out, but it didn't really seem to fit anywhere --too "math-y" for the mainstream, too intensely personal for your average science publication, and honestly, still kind of a work in progress. But in the spirit of the blog as "writing lab," it seems appropriate to post it here, on our fourth anniversary, as a way of saying thanks to the man who irrevocably changed my life ... for the better. Here's to many more years to come.
Shortly after becoming engaged, my now-husband and I drove from a conference in San Francisco to our new home in Los Angeles via the scenic route along the Pacific Coast Highway. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel just north of Malibu and found ourselves admiring the brilliant orange, red, and purple hues stretching across the darkening horizon, savoring the peaceful sound of ocean waves lapping against the shore. Against this idyllic Hallmark moment, Sean put his arms around me, pressed his cheek to mine, and gently whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?” A
Fourier transform is a mathematical equation that takes a complex wave of any kind – water, sound, light, even the gravitational waves that permeate the fabric of space time – and breaks it down into its component parts to reveal the full spectrum of “colors” that are otherwise hidden from human perception.
Another woman might have been taken aback by Sean injecting a bit of cold hard math into the warm hues of a romantic ocean sunset – talk about over-analyzing the scene and spoiling the mood! Me? I found it charming, yet another intriguing color in the spectrum that makes up this multifaceted man with whom I have chosen to share my life. My husband is a theoretical physicist. He spends his days pondering big questions about space, time, and the origins of the universe.
It’s not just Fourier transforms that lurk in the nooks and crannies of our marriage. Our pillow talk includes animated discussions about Boltzmann brains, the rules of time travel, poker, phase transitions, and the possibility of a multiverse: the notion that there are an infinite number of universes out there, beyond our ken, perhaps containing carbon copies of ourselves – the same, and yet somehow different. I have issues with this concept, especially when I’m sleepy: all those universes filled with doppelgangers cluttering up the landscape just strikes me as crowded and untidy. But Sean wrestles with these questions all the time, and is adamant in his defense. “It’s infinity,” he reassures me. “It’s not like we’ll run out of room!” I guess the multiverse has unlimited storage space.
I wasn’t looking to fall in love, and never imagined I would be a wife. Years of failed relationships had convinced me that I had no gift for making love work. My romantic calculations seemed doomed to failure, always slightly off, never quite yielding the right combination, no matter how intricately I manipulated the numbers. By the time Sean entered my orbit, my heart had been broken into little pieces and reassembled so many times, I was convinced the telltale cracks would never fully heal. I gave up on dating, buried myself in work and told myself it was better this way. I built a thick wall around my heart and guarded the perimeter zealously.
Love stole back into my life, ninja-like, while I was looking the other way. Sean is a scientist, and I am a science writer, but our day-to-day lives were like parallel lines that never met. Our paths didn’t cross until we discovered each other’s blogs online. We quickly formed an online friendship, both recognizing a kindred spirit across the vast expanse of Cyberspace. Two months and many emails later, we arranged to meet over dinner at a physics conference in Dallas.
Physicists are often unfairly characterized as absent-minded geniuses, socially inept, with zero fashion sense, a la Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. It's an exaggeration, but there is a tiny element of truth to that. So I was pleasantly surprised when a tall, lanky man with boyish good looks and an engaging smile appeared in the hotel bar, sporting jeans and a casual-yet-chic jacket. This was not your stereotypical physicist.
He ordered a martini. “I’d like to taste the vermouth,” he instructed the bartender. (He is a man who takes his cocktails seriously.) We chatted about science, art, music, and books, with the odd foray into personal details and more philosophical musings. A first date is usually fraught with self-conscious anxiety, as each person strives to present only the most flattering colors in their personal spectrum -- preferably through a soft-focus lens. But we had an instant rapport, an easy familiarity from our electronic exchanges that translated effortlessly into “meat space.” By the end of the evening, I was smitten, and happily, the feeling was mutual.
We defied the geographical distance, racking up countless frequent flyer miles. Six months after that first encounter, he proposed, and a year later, I found myself married and living in sunny southern California. I felt as if I’d stepped into an alternate universe where the calculations of love had finally worked out in my favor. I had become my own doppelganger.
With my new life came a new appreciation for the secret language of scientists: mathematics. Like many people, I had steadfastly avoided all things math since high school. My eyes glazed over at the merest glimpse of an equation. I was convinced it was irrelevant to my life – or at the very least, unnecessary. But now that life featured a man who left technical papers scattered about the house, filled with mysterious symbols that might encode the secrets of the universe. Our living room boasted a white board with a constantly changing parade of scrawled equations, and our groaning bookshelves now included massive tomes on quantum mechanics and general relativity.
The deep, technical aspects of his work was the one part of Sean’s life that was truly closed to me, although as someone who writes about physics for a living, I certainly grasped the basic concepts -- far more than the average non-physicist. But if I wanted to appreciate the full spectrum of the man I’d married, I would have to learn a little bit more of his language. So I resolved to overcome my longstanding kneejerk rejection of all things numerical and teach myself the basics of calculus.
Sean was patience personified during my quest, explaining basic concepts, leaving practice problems on our white board every morning for me to solve, and artfully dodging the occasional bit of metaphorical heaved crockery whenever I hit a frustrating obstacle (“Integrate that!”). The frustration was real: Our communication gap when it came to math was a yawning chasm at the outset. Often I didn’t even know how to phrase my questions in a way he could comprehend.
Slowly, surely, that gap began to close as he helped me see that equations were all around me. We found calculus in the rides at Disneyland, and the exquisite architecture of Antoni Gaudi. We went to Vegas, learned to shoot craps, and Sean tutored me in the calculus of probability (and a spot of game theory for good measure). Even our quest to buy a house became fodder for exploration.
It turns out that the world is filled with hidden connections, recurring patterns, and intricate details that can only be seen through math-colored glasses. Those abstract symbols hold meaning. How could I ever have thought it was irrelevant? This is what I have learned from loving a physicist. Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.
As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.
Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.
I will never listen to ocean waves or view the setting sun in quite the same way again. I looked out over the water that evening and saw a picture-perfect ocean sunset, but there was so much more that I missed. Sean looked out onto the same scene and saw the rich complexity of nature expressed in mathematical symbols, the fundamental abstract order lying just beneath the surface. And through his eyes, I can now catch a glimpse of that hidden world -- proof that love can transform you just as surely as the Fourier equation transforms a seemingly simple ray of white light into shimmering technicolor. Happy anniversary, Time Lord!
UPDATE: Was running around doing anniversary stuff all day yesterday, but as a commenter points out, I failed to identify xkcd, Randal Munroe's brilliant Webcomic, as the source for the two cartoons. Usually I link to image sources somewhere in the text, but failed this time. Although if you didn't recognize the source, you really should be reading xkcd on a regular basis. He updates three times a week. Go! Read him! Wedding photo by Jen Kerker Photography. And the video -- for those who didn't click through to YouTube -- was an award-winning entry to a UK jobs site ad campaign, believe it or not: reed.co.uk's "Love Mondays" series.
"If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten," Rudyard Kipling once observed. The same could be said for science. Biologist Sean B. Carroll (not to be confused with the Spousal Unit) cited the power of storytelling during a daylong Summit on Science, Entertainment and Education last Friday, organized by the Science & Entertainment Exchange with funding provided by the Moore Foundation. This is something we started talking about while I was still director of the Exchange, and I was thrilled to see the day finally happen -- a room filled with leaders from all three sectors, brainstorming ideas on how best to combine their efforts to transform US science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, by adding one more letter: an "A", for the Arts, giving us STEAM.
By now the depressing statistics are all too familiar: the US ranks #25th worldwide in math, #21st in science (behind countries like Estonia and Slovenia), #27th in percentage of college graduates in science and technology, and a pathetic #48th in the quality of K-12 math and science education. The only area where American students excelled? Self confidence! US students are #1 in thinking they rock at math and science, which would be fine if this confidence were based in reality. It isn't. "The rest of the world is rising and the US is falling asleep at the wheel," Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, told the assembled crowd. Improving the nation's standing doesn't just require political will, he emphasized, but also inspiration -- and that's where Hollywood can help, by partnering with scientists and educators to "help us reconnect what we do with what we dream."
I always say that science in film and TV can inspire, but it's not intended to actually teach rigorous science. That said, it's a terrific way of leveraging the appeal of Hollywood -- and the entertainment industry's consummate skill at branding and marketing for mass audiences -- to engage and motivate students. Some of us have even written books using, say, the adventures of tiny blonde vampire slayers to illustrate physics concepts. Imagine all the untapped potential for things like DVD bonus features, interactive online gambits like LOST University, and -- someday -- original online teaching tools tied to film and TV series, and in line with broad curriculum requirements, available as a resource for teachers nation-wide. That's the vision, anyway. From the Summit website:
We know that this is a complex, systemic issue and that there are no magic bullets for solving the problems. But one way to encourage interest in science is by capitalizing on the pre-existing interest in entertainment. Film, television, and other forms of popular media have the very real potential to engage students in learning about many aspects of STEM and to generally increase their interests in these disciplines as possible career options. This has been demonstrated by the increase in the number of students studying forensic science after exposure to the popular television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. This is genuinely informal education: Learning something about the practice of science and the characteristics of scientists themselves through the lens of entertainment television programming. Despite some of the inaccuracies in this portrayal, it leaves us wondering how formal education can take greater advantage of the ability for film, television, and video games to engage students using entertainment programming as jumping off points for deeper learning or of wholly new content developed by working closely with content creators in the new media world.
So last week's summit was a jumping off point for exploring ways these three communities might do that. If you drew a Venn diagram for science, entertainment and education, storytelling is where they would all overlap. As Carroll pointed out, today's cognitive psychology tells us that "human thought is structured around stories"; a strong narrative framework presents a structured, coherent argument for whatever information is being presented, and makes it far more likely that people will retain that information. We can even follow Kipling's lead, drawing on the thousands of untold stories in the history of science to inspire the entertainment industry -- which in turn can provide fodder for the education community to use to inspire and motivate students in the classroom.
For instance, Carroll talked about Roy Chapman Andrews, who headed a Mongolian exploration back in 1922, accompanied by a famous Hollywood cinematographer named James B. Shackelford. This was no guided safari: Andrews was armed at all times (both rifle and pistol), to defend the expedition from local bandits. But the hardships were worth it in the end: He and his team found tons of dinosaur fossils during their trip, along with the first discovery of dinosaur eggs (in nests!). That, and Andrews' colorful swashbuckling tales, landed him on the cover of TIME magazine, and may very well have inspired the 1940s B movie serials that led to the creation of fictional swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones. (Carroll mentioned just one little-known fact: Andrews apparently hated snakes. Coincidence???)
Of course, in addition to scientific storytelling, we also need to convince students that science is relevant -- we need to answer the age-old "When am I ever going to use this?" question -- and creative by making it less monotonous and boring. So says Tony DeRose of Pixar, who started out as a computer scientist, then taught for several years before ending up in the entertainment industry doing award-winning animation on such hits as The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and the Toy Story franchise -- "So this summit is really all about me!" (Jen-Luc Piquant loved the fact that DeRose was sporting a colorful Ratatouille print shirt.) "People don't realize how much math is in Pixar movies," he said, citing coordinate geomtry, trigonometry, matrix algebra, even math incorporating the fourth dimension. In fact, he insists it's possible to use examples of animation technology and math to augment the standard curriculum through college sophomore year.
There's also been plenty of new mathematics developed by and for the entertainment industry, which is why DeRose also emphasizes the importance of bringing creativity back into the classroom: "We need to train students for tomorrow -- for technologies that don't yet exist." Those students will be the ones inventing and using those future technologies. Encouraging creative innovation is the objective behind the Young Makers program, culminating in the annual MakerFaire in the Bay Area, which drew 600 exhibitors and over 80,000 attendees in 2010. (For those who aren't fortunate enough to have a Pixar compuer scientist as a father, the program now has a mentorship component built in.)
DeRose engages in these sorts of activities all the time with his two sons: one year, they built a giant potato-shooting "Gatling gun"; another year, they built an eight-foot-tall pneumatic fire-breathing dragon named Saphira, a project that required the boys to learn about welding, metalwork and how to read schematic diagrams, not to mention developing a safety plan and building in an emergency kill switch. And that's another pet peeve for DeRose: our educational system actually discourages risk-taking in students: "We teach kids how to avoid risk, when we should be teaching them how to manage risk." He has teenaged boys, and "They sometimes want to do dangerous things." Rather than tell them no, he teaches them to take those risks into account when designing, say, a giant fire-breathing dragon.
DeRose's remarks on risk actually came up during a brief breakout session to allow attendees to chat with the morning's speakers. And that's when this happened:
Yes, that's the Spousal Unit, Sean M. Carroll, finally meeting his doppelganger, Sean B. Carroll, and making an odd sort of in-joke history in the process. Somehow the space-time continuum survived.
"Most people never discover what they're good at," according to Sir Ken Robinson, and those that do usually have to "recover" from their formal education first. For Robinson, true learning is about combining imagination, creativity and innovation -- and our current emphasis on STEM as being somehow separate from the humanties/creative arts isn't a good approach either. There are more synergies to be explored at the science/art (and entertainment) interface than walls between them. He told an entertaining story of serving on an interdisciplinary educational commission with members from both science and the arts. One was a British comedian named Lenny Henry ("a British Chris Rock") who heard that Nobel laureate Harold Kroto was also a member and panicked, convinced he had no business being in such august company. What the comedian didn't know was that Kroto, upon hearing that the comedian would be on the commission, had the same reaction: he was intimidated by the others' fame and talent in the arts.
His point? "People are intimidated by others' disciplines, but we share the same anxieties, and the same approach to creativity," Robinson argued.The status quo in education is "leaching the life blood of the respective disciplines. We need a culture of education," and to do that, we must "make common course with other fields." My favorite Robinson quote came after he commented that the power of human imagination is ultimately what separates us from other animals: "A dog might get depressed, but it doesn't listen to Coldplay and get drunk." I also liked his emphasis on how creativity is about taking action and doing something -- or, as artist Chuck Close observed in a recent interview, "Inspiration is for amateurs." Nor is it about total freedom: discipline and constraint are absolutely essential to coming up with truly original ideas.
Okay, so all day we'd been hearing about education from the perspective of the policy folks, the scientists, and the entertainers (not to mention knights of the realm with plummy British accents) -- what about the voices of those in the trenches? Among the afternoon's featured speakers was award-winning high school science teacher Janet English, best known for taking a team of her students aboard NASA's vomit comet to conduct science experiments in zero gravity. (While English found her experience exhilarating, the day's emcee had the opposite reaction: "If you have motion sickness [in microgravity], you find out what it's like to throw up in front of Buzz Aldrin. You will not get me back in that metal canister of hell!")
Anyway, English brought along 15 of her students, who spoke of their abiding love for the Mythbusters, for teachers who don't just throw facts at them, but encourage them to explore and do experiments (say, by building their own trebuchet!), and of their love storytelling.
English's experiences in zero gravity provided ample examples of her approach to teaching. It's one thing to memorize the laws of gravity and the Newtonian concept of inertia. (Snore.) It's quite another to experience it firsthand in a microgravity environment: suddenly, just the tiniest upward force will send you shooting toward the ceiling, and you won't stop or slow down until you hit that ceiling. English uses this to get her students thinking about what we take for granted back on Earth, and how even common activities might change in microgravity.
For instance, can you hula-hoop in microgravity? English posed this question to her students, and did the experiment during her stint on the vomit comet. (The answer is no, although you do get a very nice temporary facelift.) Can a spider spin a web in microgravity? That experiment has also been done, and the answer is a qualified yes -- the spider adapts to the new environment within a few days. (Before then, no, the spider is hopelessly at sea.) Okay, so what about the famous light saber duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker? Yes, nerdgassers, we know that REAL light sabers wouldn't work like that, but English provided a re-enactment using two toy light sabers, wielded by one of her students playing Vader and TRON: Legacy producer Jeff Silver as a bearded Skywalker. ("Jeff, I am your father.") The toy sabers make a satisfying smack! on earth, but in microgravity, the minute the sabers touched, "Skywalker" and "Vader" would spin in opposite directions -- in accordance with Newton's "equal and opposite reaction."
The process of learning incorporates both play and storytelling, according to Will Wright, a game developer best known (thus far) for Spore. He insists that "Play is the natural way we interact with the world," and videogames exploint that kind of learning process. Gamers "observe a result, form a hypothesis, test, and discard or accept that model, thereby intuiting the underlying rules of the system." Not only are players driving the experience, but they are allowed to fail. To illustrate the importance of the freedom to fail, Wright -- or maybe it was DeRose during the morning breaout session -- told of a study in a pottery class, where half the students were graded according to the quality of their finished pots, and the other half were graded according to quantity: the number of pots they made. In the end, the latter group had more failures... but they also had more high-quality pots than the group that was discouraged from experimenting and taking risks.
I learned this critical lesson through the process of earning a black belt in jujitsu: I started out clumsy and unskilled, failed repeatedly -- which in martial arts usually involves getting knocked on your ass over and over again -- but kept trying until I got something right. Real learning has more to do with discipline, hard work and perseverance than with innate ability. Gamers also learn through failure -- they keep trying until they master one level, before advancing to the next -- but it's failure that takes place in a virtual space, a kind of "safe haven" that encourages them to experiment, to take risks, to try new things that might not work, but hey, now they know it doesn't work and can move on to try different strategies In short, it's an "apprenticeship model" that teaches them to think like scientists. (That said, you can restart a game: "You can't restart the universe." But oh, wouldn't that be awesome!!!)
Liz Vogel, director of education for Walt Disney Studios, also emphasized learning through play. She started out as a scientist, then taught for a bit, then found herself at Disney -- yes, just like DeRose. Her scientific colleagues' reaction wasn't always positive: "Oh, you're going to sell out," she heard more than once. (Le sigh.) But she also encountered outmoded attitudes at Disney, where folks had the notion that "fun" and "learning were at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Vogel ultimately convinced her Disney colleagues to establish programs with four critical elements: (1) it must be child-focused, (2) it must be interdisciplinary, (3) is must me collaborative and involve mentorship in some form, and (4) it must be interactive, fun and engaging for the students. Oh, and it's imperative to bring in educators from the beginning, rather than at the very end to rubber stamp one's efforts. Of course, all this costs money. Ultimately, said Vogel, "You need a spectacular plan that shows some return on investment." This needn't be profits, per se; promoting the "brand" in the eyes of the public is a currency all its own.
That said, pure "edutainment" isn't the answer either, which all too often demonstrates a "failure to engage with the wonder of ideas," according to Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene. "It's not just about explosions and confetti and over-saturated colors."
But you do want to create something that students will be talking about. Producer Jerry ("Don't call me Shirley!") Zucker -- mastermind behind the Airplane! movies, Ghost, and Kentucky Fried Movie, as well as a co-founder of the Exchange -- asked whether educators should start being more concerned with "selling" STEM education to their students, because as it stands, "The kids aren't buying it." Furthermore, "Hollywood feels no sense of obligation; it is not in the business of altruism." But Zucker thinks the two goals need not be mutually exclusive: to his mind, it's eminently possible for Hollywood to work with scientists and educators to create effective teaching tools using storytelling, and turn a profit in the process. "I think there's an enormous business opportunity there."
It wasn't all talks by invited speakers and breakout sessions. There was a special performance by a cappella singing sensation The BackBeats (doing a killer medley of Lady Gaga numbers, among other bits), and impassioned "spoken word" performances by a pair of actor/poets, Steve Connell and Sekou Andrews. Sekou performed a powerful solo piece riffing on the concept of Venn diagrams as applied to education that brought the house to its feet in a standing ovation. I found a video of an earlier performance of the same piece online:
Connell performed earlier that morning, in a spoken word piece that riffed on his childhood love of superheroes and the day his mother told him that superheroes weren't real -- at least not the ones in the comic books. Instead, he learned that "Superman is a single mom waitressing at Denny's" to make sure she can feed her kids, and countless other everyday folks who press on against the odds. Best line: "It's not heroic to take a bullet when you know you can't be killed."
And you know, teachers are superheroes too, struggling against the current to reach kids who don't yet know what it's like to be fully engaged with learning. And since each student is different, an approach that works for one might not work for another: "Good teaching doesn't scale," lamented Zucker. And as high school teacher Tyler Johnstone pointed out, there's a lot of money invested in keeping things the way they are. But he believes it's still possible to create "pockets of innovation" to supplement formal education/curriculum.
So, after all that shared wisdom and insight and talking about the problem and discussing potential solutions, it's fair to ask: what next? What are we going to do about it? In that regard, last Friday's summit was just the beginning, a means of getting the conversations started, of planting seeds that, it is hoped, will give rise to successful collaborations between science, entertainment and education. (There's an online forum to ensure the participants stay in touch.) The first step: The Moore Foundation is offering a $225,000 grant to "establish collaborative partnerships among scientists, entertainment industry professionals, and educators to develop educational products or services that effectively leverage the resources of the entertainment community (including film, television, and video games) to improve educational outcomes in science classrooms." The deadline for proposals is May 16th, and for those who are interested, forget just compiling a bunch of existing clips loosely organized around broad topics in science:
We are seeking ideas that go beyond taking existing entertainment media (e.g., clips from a film or television series; segments from a video game) and developing curriculum-based lesson plans around them. Rather, we are looking for true partnerships among the three stakeholder groups to develop ideas that are fully integrated among the science, entertainment, and education communities. Winning ideas will benefit the entertainment community by helping to raise awareness of a film, television show, or video game and will benefit the science and education communities by offering fresh approaches to engaging students in STEM-based topics.
Check out the link for more specifics about how to apply. I expect there will be naysayers and the usual skepticism from the "meh" contingent, but since money is always a limiting factor in such discussions, let's at least give props to the Moore Foundation for putting their money where their mouth is. And as Sir Ken Robinson said, creativity is more about doing, and that, in turn, leads to innovation -- even though there is also a high risk of failure. Remember the story of the pottery students; you have to ruin a few pots before you can achieve greatness. So why not take a risk with the goal of possibly making a meaningful difference? The stakes for our schools, and for future generations, could not be higher.
I overhead an exasperated parent the other day: “The kid just won’t stop asking ‘why’ all the time. Everything I say, she challenges. She’s driving me absolutely nuts.”
We need more kids like that.
I know, easy for me to say since I’m childless by choice, but I really do believe that the biggest danger we face as a society is a populace that doesn’t want to think for themselves. I am more than happy to have students challenge me about the material I teach. In reality, though, they spend a lot more time challenging me on my attendance policy, my lack of understanding that they missed class due to a hangover, my grading policy, and my refusal to allow ‘do-overs’ for tests that didn’t produce the desired scores. Most disppointingly, so many test answers are phrases regurgitated directly back from my notes with no evidence that the writer spent even a few seconds considering what those words meant and whether they were right.
While professors hate this trend, marketers but be thrilled. Someone tried to argue the other day that the Tesla Model-S electric car was actually cheaper than a luxury gasoline sedan. He told me that the New York Times said that the $57,400 list-price Tesla Model-S was actually only $35,000 "when you accounted for tax credits and gas savings".
Sure enough, there was Elon Musk saying that the Tesla sedan would cost $57,400 list price, $49,900 after tax credits, and $35,000 “after factoring in gas savings”. Anyone have a bell go off there? A 'one of these things is not like the others' moment?
You can’t directly compare the first two items with the last. There is a difference between one-time costs (purchase price and tax credits) and the more-nebulous issue of "gasoline saved" because the latter depends on how much you drive. It will vary from person to person and it's money you get back, not money you don't have to put out in the first place.
“The ownership cost of Model S, if you were to lease and then account for the much lower cost of electricity vs. gasoline at a likely future cost of $4 per gallon, is similar to a gasoline car with a sticker price of about $35,000. That’s why we’re positive this car will be the preferred choice of savvy consumers.”
Arg. Now we’ve got leasing thrown in and I have no idea how they calculated the cost of the electricity used to charge the car. Inquiring minds want to know. Or, at least, they should.
Goodyear does a pretty nice job in advertisements for low rolling resistance tires. They tells us that we’d save 2600 miles worth of gas over the life of the tires. An asterisked statement tells us that this estimate includes a lifetime of 65,000 miles and a 4% increase in fuel efficiency. They even provide a calculator for you to input your car's mileage so you can see how much money you’d save.
During interviews for my Physics of NASCAR book, I interviewed a Todd Meredith, a manager at Joe Gibbs Racing. I always ask whether a race shop has any employees with a physics background, since most are mechanical or aerodynamics engineers. Todd thought for a moment and said,
“Yeah, I think we do… but I bet he doesn’t use anything you taught him.”
“I bet he does,” I shot back, “because we taught him how to think.”
That started a really productive and interesting conversation about the importance of science and math and how they are taught. In the end, racing is real-time advanced problem solving, and all the skills you learn as a scientist, engineer or mathematician are exactly the skills you need to be part of a race team.
Fundamentally, science and math are about learning how to evaluate data to ensure it’s valid, synthesizing multiple data sources, critically analyzing that data and coming to conclusions. We need these skills more now than at any other time in history. Climate change, energy, manned vs. unmanned space programs, oil well leaks… even if you don’t understand the details of the science, you HAVE to be able to understand if you’re getting the truth or being sold a load of goods.
It’s hard enough for scientists to find ‘The Truth”. There are significant disagreements on directions for action in many areas (climate change, transportation, etc.) because we simply don’t have enough data to make unequivocal conclusions. Although there have been some issues with advocacy getting in the way of science, that’s nothing compared to the number of people who are purposely twisting science to their own goals. If Shakespeare were alive today, I suspect he would have chosen "public relations persons" rather than lawyers as his occupational target of choice.
The honorable people in marketing and public relations bring to light the most positive accomplishments of their company. There are those who are less honorable. How much "news" is actually a minimal re-write of a press release? Some science "news" sites are simply places for universities and companies to post their news releases, and some science journalism is little more than a thin re-write of said news release. Science is not the only place this happens.
I heard a NASCAR broadcaster make the following claim: "NASCAR offsets 100% of the carbon emissions from this race via their tree-planting program." Anytime someone says "100%" or "always" or "without exception", my ears perk up.
OK, NASCAR has been (and is) doing a lot of good things to be environmentally responsible. They were recycling used oil before it was cool, they are initiating recycling programs at tracks, even getting teams to minimize how much they run generators during race weekends. All good things, but not very exciting. Newspapers don't want articles about recycling oil.
But tree planting… beautiful PR idea. Get your biggest stars out to dig the holes, put the trees at a local school or park. Bingo. So how many trees do we have to plant?
Some brilliant NASCAR PR person did major damage to the cause of logic and educating the public by deciding that they would plant ten trees for every “green” flag during a race. Green flags wave at the start of the race, and after every caution, so the number of green flags depends on the number of accidents and amount of debris on the track.
This is just wrong on so many, many levels, and it's not like this is difficult science.
Combusting one gallon of gasoline produces 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. One gallon of gasoline weighs about 7 lbs – the additional mass making up the carbon dioxide comes from the oxygen that combines with the gasoline during combustion. Two octane molecules combine with 25 oxygen molecules, which explains how the weight of carbon dioxide is greater than the weight of the fuel.
But the important point here is that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted is directly proportional to the number of gallons of gasoline combusted. Not only does this have absolutely NOTHING to do with how many green flags wave during a race, it’s a number we can calculate with pretty reasonable precision.
Forty-three cars run 500 miles, each getting about 4 miles per gallon. I am overestimating the amount of fuel used by just a little: the cars get about double the gas mileage during cautions and some cars don’t run the full race. I’m calculating the upper bound. It wouldn't be hard to use the data on exactly how many laps were run by each car, but I'm not the one claiming I'm planting enough trees to offset the emissions, so I'm making an estimate. When you do the calculation, it's about 5,375 gallons of gas in a 500-mile race.
I know – you’re horrified at this tremendous waste of gas. Get over it: In 2009, the Department of Energy says the US consumed 137.93 billion gallons of gasoline. That means this country uses 4,373 gallons of gasoline every second. I guarantee you I could easily find enough U.S. NASCAR fans who would volunteer to use less gasoline in their everyday lives to compensate. Compare a weekend of NASCAR (including the media coverage and fans getting to the track) with a weekend of the NFL. You can make a better argument for saving fuel and emissions by eliminating a weekend of NFL football than you can a weekend of NASCAR.
Nonetheless, my hypothetical NASCAR race still uses 5,375 gallons of gasoline, which means that 104,275 pounds of carbon dioxide (about 52 tons) are released into the atmosphere.
One of the first things I remember learning about science is that people breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, while plants “breathe in” carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Photosynthesis combines water, carbon dioxide and energy from the sun to produce sugar and oxygen gas:
Six carbon dioxide molecules and six water molecules combine to produce one sugar molecule (the C6H12O6) and six molecules of oxygen. Plants covert the sugar into organic matter like stems, leaves and stalks.
The problem with plants is that they lose their leaves (and, if they live in my house, they die). The real masters at storing carbon are trees, because trees convert sugars into cellulose -- long chains of the repeating unit C6H10O5. As long as the tree is growing, it’s sucking up carbon dioxide. Since each of us generates about 2.3 tons of CO2 each year, we should all be doing out part to encourage trees to grow.
Now for the tricky question: How much carbon dixoide does a tree absorb? Turns out that's not as easy a question to answer as I thought. You can find numbers ranging anywhere from 10-70 lbs of carbon dixoide per tree per year.
Let’s analyze this. Since carbon dixoide is mostly stored as wood, the amount and type of wood are going to be important. In other words, when it comes to trees and carbon sequestration, size matters.
Assume a cylindrical tree. The volume of the tree goes like the diameter of the tree squared times the height. Compare two trees of the same species the same height, but diameters that differ by a factor of two. The one with the larger diameter stores four times as much carbon dioxide (pi r squared!). The difference in storage is even larger, of course, because trees (unlike people) continue to grow upward, as well as getting larger around the trunk as they age.
Trees with denser wood store more carbon dioxide than trees with less dense wood. Next time you’re at the home improvement store, compare trim made from pine with that made from oak or cherry. I’ve summarized the mean densities of a couple of different species of trees on the graph below, which shows the height of the tree on the vertical and the type of tree on the horizontal axis. Sorry about the labels being so small. From left to right, they are: balsa, red pin, red oak, cherry, ebony and lignum vitae. The densities are given in kg/cubic meter and range from 160 to almost 1400. Red pine has a density of 370 – 660 kg/m3, whereas ebony (a hardwood) has a density of 960 – 1120 kg/m3. The champ in terms of tree density is a tree called Lignum Vitae, which has a density of 1280 – 1370 kg/m3.
I noted that the larger the tree is, the more carbon it has stored. So you might think big trees are the best to plant. But what's really important is how fast the tree is growing - how fast it can convert carbon dioxide into wood. Big means that the tree has stored a lot of carbon. Fast growing means that the tree is storing a lot of carbon
A tree grows slowly in the early years (while it's putting down roots), then has a period of more rapid growth, and finally tapers off as it approaches its maximum height, as I’ve diagrammed below. The region of maximum growth is at the steepest parth of the curve, so you want to plant trees that are near the maximum in the derivative of their height vs. time curve. Unfortunately, most nurseries do not put this data on the little tags that hang on the trees when you go to buy them. Forestry types tell me that Southern Pine may reach its maximum growth period in 20-28 years, while Douglas Firs on the Pacific Coast require 60 years. Things are a little more laid back on the Left Coast.
Speaking of laid back, consider also that tropical trees account for 95% of all tree-based carbon dioxide sequestration on Earth. A tree without leaves isn’t doing much photosynthesis, which means it’s not removing carbon dixoide from the atmosphere. Tropical trees work 12 months of the year, while boreal trees only work 3-6 months of the year. Tropical trees are mostly hardwoods and grow more quickly than their cold-weather relations, so there are a lot of people who advocate that, if you're going to support tree planting, you should send money to oragnizations that are trying to re-plant tropical rain forests because those trees are more likely to have a larger impact than the pine trees you plant at a local park in New York.
There are some ways of estimating how much carbon dioxide a tree will take in each year, like determining the mass of the tree based on its dimensions. One is a really great exercise for middle or high school students. They find that:
A 10 year old Grevillea robusta (the southern silky oak, an evergreen Australian tree) that is 45 feet tall and 6 inches in diameter would sequester about 64 lbs of carbon dioxide per year.
A newly planted Acacia angustissima (native to Central America and the US) at 2.5 yrs, 15 ft tall and 3” in diameter would take up about 21.5 lbs of carbon dioxide per year.
Calliandra calothyrsus (powder puff tree, Mexico, Centra America) that is 10 years old, 15 feet tall and 8” in diameter would remove about 65 lbs of CO2 per year.
In general, trees planted in the US have a difficult time reaching the numbers tropical trees can achieve. Most people, noting that environment, rainfall and other conditions matter, will use an estimate that a tropical tree can absorb an average of 50 lbs of carbon dioxide per year. "Tropical" usually means within 23 degrees North or South of the Equator, but let's count Florida as "tropical".
Let’s be generous and use the 50 lbs of carbon dioxide per tree per year number, which is probably 1.5 to 6 times larger than reality. To offset the 104,275 lbs of carbon dixoide from the NASCAR race, you would need 2,085.5 year-trees. "Year-trees" means that the product of the number of trees times the years the trees are sequestering carbon needs to equal two thousand and eighty five. You could plant 2,085 trees and they will compensate for the race in one year. Or you could plant a thousand trees and compensate in just over two years.
Last year’s Daytona 500 had nine cautions, so including the green flag that started the race, there would have been 10 green flags and NASCAR planted 100 trees. The calculations above show that those 100 trees will offset the carbon emissions from the race in just under 21 years. And I'm being really generous with giving each tree credit for 50 lbs of carbon dixoide per year. If that number is 25 lbs per tree, we're talking more than 40 years before all the carbon from those five or six hours last February have really been accounted for. (And yes, I do know that the race went 520 miles due to multiple green-white-checkers and I didn’t add in those extra 20 miles, which is another 215 pounds of carbon dioxide, and ignoring that probably accounts for the laps under caution and the cars that dropped out before the race was over.)
That estimate doesn't include the carbon emissions needed to take care of the trees for that long: fertilizers, vehicles, replanting trees that die, etc.
In 2009, Petaluma Junior High School received 30 trees from NASCAR and Infineon Raceway to offset the carbon emissions from the race in Sonoma. Sonoma is a road race, so it is shorter (224 miles) and we’re “only” talking about 2,408 lbs of carbon dixoide. The kids from that junior high school are going to have their own kids in junior high school before the carbon from that race is offset.
Offsetting carbon emissions from planting trees is not the panacea it has been advertised to be. One website calculates that, in order for the Earth to become carbon neutral, we would have to reforest a land area approximately equal to Spain every year and maintain that land in perpetuity.
The small impact NASCAR's trees will have on the environment is at least good; however, their decision to pursue - and publicize - a non-scientific approach to the problem is grievously wrong. I'm offended NASCAR thinks I'm stupid enough to fall for this.
I'm also a wee bit irritated at some members of the "NASCAR media" who are willing to parrot the 'facts' they are handed without question. I don't expect them to be experts, or even have time to call up a scientist to ask whether it's accurate.
The fact of the matter is that you get credit for sequestering carbon as it is sequestered, just like you get credit for paying down your mortgage as you make the payments. You don’t own the house by taking out a mortgage and you don’t offset your carbon emissions the minute the trees are in the ground.
As I tell my students over and over again: If you don't understand something, the last thing you should do is repeat it.
Neat trivia I learned while researching, but couldn't slip into the blog: Forestry professionals use the abbreviation "dbh" when describing trees. dbh means "diameter at breast height". Breast height is defined to be 1.4 meter. There are apparently very strict physical requirements for being a forrestry professional.
Since joining Twitter earlier this year, I've become a Tweet-happy fool, easily overtaking the Spousal Unit in sheer volume of Tweets. (It helps that so many science-writing pals are Twittering fools, too.) But while that medium has its strengths, it's really not the place for any kind of substantive debate. So when the folks at Quirks and Quarks sent me a link to this op-ed in the Globe and Mail, I really couldn't sum up my reaction in a series of 140-character tweets to do the topic justice. Because honestly, it kinda pissed me off.
Let me set out some caveats upfront. What I know about Quebec's current educational crisis could fit in a couple of paragraphs, tops. Apparently there is a significant high school dropout rate, a problem that is "particularly acute among boys." (This is no doubt a situation that exists in other major cities in the US, as well as Canada.) And the author, Sumitra Rajagopalan -- a biomechanics professor at McGill University -- is well-intentioned and to be admired for putting her money where her mouth is and working with underachieving teens in her far-from-copious spare time. My problem isn't even with the "complete rethink" she advocates for science education, namely, focusing on hands-on activities. I am all for finding creative and innovative ways to get students engaged and thinking deeply about math and science. Sometimes you need to get your hands dirty. She's right: at-risk students in particular "find regular classrooms stifling, and are often starved for hands-on activities."
No, what got my knickers in a twist was the constant harping on the "feminization" of the classroom and the repeated hearkening to outmoded (and unhelpful) gender stereotypes throughout the entire article -- and it wasn't all that long an article. This is not conducive to a thoughtful critique. At all. It's an unnecessary distraction that merely serves to undermine Rajagopalan's broader message. Consider just these few sample quotes (and if you suspect I'm being unfair and taking them out of context, follow the link to read the whole thing):
"Boys are born tinkerers. They have a deep-seated need to rip things apart, decode their inner workings, create stuff." I think we can agree that many boys do have this tendency -- although we could debate whether such behavior is culturally learned vs. innate. Those are the ones that tend to gravitate towards science. Or mechanical engineering. Or NASCAR garages. But note the implicit assumption that these interests are for boys -- what about the girls who like to tinker with stuff, and be creative? Where are the hands-on learning activities for them?
I humbly offer my co-blogger, Diandra, as an example of a compulsive tinkerer. She's an experimentalist who works in condensed matter physics and nanotech, and builds stuff in her lab all the time. She also wrote The Physics of NASCAR (see sidebar) because of her curiosity about the sport, and impressed all the tough guys at the track with her deep knowledge and intelligent questions about the intricate workings of car engines, tires, auto bodies, and so forth.
Also? I am married to a (male) theoretical physicist. The Spousal Unit generally does not enjoy this sort of thing; his expertise lies in pondering deep questions about time, entropy, and the origin of the universe, augmented with well-chosen equations. Hanging picture frames or towel rods is the extent of our combined expertise in the tinkering department -- and we called my construction worker brother to ask a couple of questions about the towel rod project before drilling (questions about the structure of the wall; the drilling/installation was self-evident). The point is, this has less to do with gender than Rajagopalan makes it out to be. People learn differently -- not girls and boys. Some like to get their hands dirty and build stuff, others don't.
That goes for the folks who teach math and science, too:
"Enter today's typical math/science teacher. She's young and female with a social sciences background. She went through high school believing that 'math sucks' and 'science is for geeks.' Like most girls, she's never held a wrench.... Forget tools-based activities -- this teacher has hardly done any herself." There is so much contempt dripping from these sentences, I'm frankly shocked they were written by a woman scientist. Again with the unnecessary gender stereotyping! No doubt there are some math and science teachers in high schools who fit this description, but there are plenty of others who don't. I've met quite a few high school math teachers in recent weeks, while touring for The Calculus Diaries, and they were both male and female -- and the female teachers had just as strong backgrounds in math, science or engineering as the male teachers who showed up. I guess the "social science" types just stayed home, lest they be asked to solve a differential equation on the spot, or be ridiculed by Rajagopalan and her ilk.
Here's where we get into her beef with the so-called "feminization" of the math and science curriculum:
"Gone are the math drills and abstract problem-solving. Instead, there's the socio-cultural context of science and math. So solving a math equation becomes an essay question -- complete with the reasoning behind the reasoning and how this is related to the student's life experiences." Ahem. First off, what, exactly, is uniquely "feminine" about this? Framing "hard" science and math as uniquely "male" is (a) incorrect, and (b) fosters exclusionary behavior for women who might otherwise be interested in those fields. Note also the breezy dismissal of historical and cultural contexts -- they're just so girly! -- and the strong preference for "rigor," which, in Rajagopalan's mind, apparently only extends to math drills and problem sets.
As a science writer with a humanities background, I believe very strongly in bringing science back into the broader culture, not setting it off as something scary or separate -- which is not the equivalent of "dumbing down." Understanding the history of math and science can actually enhance learning and student comprehension. Ditto for exploring deeper questions of why something is so, the reasons behind the math and science, and for tying what one learns in class with one's own daily experiences. As I wrote in The Calculus Diaries, I did quite well in my high school math and science courses, but I still ended up with math anxiety, because I was just blindly following rules and figuring out the "tricks" -- my deeper comprehension was entirely lacking. (And it's not a gender thing: Chris Mooney interviewed me recently for the Point of Inquiry podcast and admitted his experience had been similar.) The entire book is about finding math in the world around me, then building my own problem sets (with the help of the Spousal Unit), and it's also chock-full of historical and cultural references. The rigor of a math or science class should include those aspects as well.
Which is not to say we should dispense with the traditional forms of "rigor." (The book doesn't include many derivations, because there's plenty of other math books available that cover that; but it does include a "further reading" list of the resources I found most useful.) I studied classical piano as a child (from age 8 through my sophomore year of college) and I'd compare a traditional math class to practicing scales. It's absolutely essential to do those rote exercises, over and over again, no matter how tedious, because without them you will never develop the technical proficiency needed to execute a decent performance of, say, Chopin's Ballade #1. But if that's all you ever do -- if you never stop to think about why you are practicing those scales, or have the chance to see them used creatively in a brilliant musical composition -- you will never have a deep appreciation of music, and, more critically, you will never be able to write your own symphony some day. You need both elements. It's not either/or, any more than the problems in math and science education can be reduced to male vs. female.
"Fewer male graduates now would mean fewer scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs in the future." Well, yes, it might very well mean that -- unless the girls step up and become scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, too. You know, like Rajagopalan herself. I'm glad she's concerned about the boys, but traditionally, girls are far more likely to be pushed out of math and science fields. Why isn't she concerned about the impact of that on the number of scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs in the future? It reminds me of all the hand-wringing generated by a series of 2006 articles in the New York Times about how boys were suddenly at risk of being overtaken by the girls in academic achievement, and who will hire them/marry them then? Huh? Won't someone think of the poor emasculated boys?
Look, it's not that I don't care about the boys; I just don't see why they're being singled out for special concern. We need to do a better job educating all our students about math and science, steering them toward careers in those fields -- regardless of gender.
So what is Rajagopalan's vision for the ideal Future Science Classroom?
"Instead of spotless science labs, how about a workshop in every school, replete with metal sheets, machinery, and Krazy Glue? Here, boys could roll up their sleeves and get down to some real work. And never mind those soot-stained hands, dirty fingernails or even the occasional bleeding finger. This is their way of learning." Um, I believe those classes used to be called "shop." They are, indeed, excellent for the kid who likes to get his -- or her -- hands dirty. Because once again, Rajagopalan is traffacking in gender stereotypes. But apart from that, here's where we find common ground. I just wouldn't limit it to one kind of lab. I mean, Neil Gershenfeld has had smashing success with his "fab labs" at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where male and female students can play, build and create to their heart's content -- learning more about math and science -- and the process of math and science -- than they'd ever learn in the standard curriculum. And today, the New York Times has a story about a chemistry and physics of cooking class at Harvard -- a class that draws both male and female students. Let's dispense with these meaningless labels of "masculine" and "feminine" and just support any kind of hands-on activities that foster student involvement and deeper learning in math and science.
Having ragged on the poor woman for an entire blog post, I'm willing to bet that, when cornered, she'd concede at least some of the above points. She's a woman in science, after all; she can't be blind to those concerns. She also didn't have a lot of space in her Op-Ed for nuance. But it's unfortunate that the substance of her message was drowned out -- for me and many other readers --by the constant harping on boyz, boyz, boyz and the gratuitous digs at "feminization."
In my grouchier moments (one of which I am having right now), I am considering a public relations campaign to make fun of people who can't do simple math and shame them into either acquiring some fundamental skills or staying quiet and not bothering the rest of us with their ignorance.
I've devoted a significant part of my career to education: working with K-12 teachers, teaching at a university, developing programs for the public. I'm beginning to wonder whether we are not all just wasting our time and we would do much better to focus on developing an elite cadre of high-powered science literate researchers who will discover wondrous things and save us all from ourselves. Of course, that won't work because the people who know the science will be prevented from fulfilling this task by the science-ignorant who comprise the public, as well as the executive and legislative branches of the government.
I'm tired of hearing from people how hard math is. Do you ever hear people saying things like "oh, yeah, reading. I was just never good at that." Admitting that you are illiterate is harder than admitting that you are an alcoholic or a drug addict at this point. But admitting that you can't do math - well pfftt, I could never do math either, so that's just OK.
The truth is that most people don't want to be bothered, just like most people would rather state their opinion about things without wasting time looking up the facts. The NASCAR race I'm watching features the AT&T ‘Fastest Pit Crew of the Year Award’. Fans VOTE for the fastest pit crew. The last I looked, time is not subject to human opinion. Sure AT&T donates $20,000 at the end of the program to a deserving charity. But how silly do you have to be to think that 'fastest' has anything to do with your opinion? How about sponsoring something mathematically meaningful, like showing us a histogram of all the pit stop times, showing who was exceptionally fast or slow.
ADDITION: Anonymous Coward noted in the comments below that there could be different definitions of fastest. I should have given more information. The contest is per race and the voters are given no information about either what 'fastest' means or numerical information as to the pit times. I'd have no problem if they just switched it to "most valuable" because -- as you point out -- people can make their own interpretation of what is most valuable. Perhaps it is because I am a physicist: In my mind, "fastest" is a pretty precise term. Thanks for the comment!
A Dallas Morning News article on September 15th about dove hunting contained the following in an article by one Ray Sasser.
Remember your old geometry lesson about the long side of a triangle being equal to the two shorter sides. That means a dove 40 yards out and 10 yards high is 50 yards from the gun and clearly out of range. -- Dallas Morning News
Umm... No. Even if you don't remember the formula, just draw the picture. Or, God forbid, use some common sense. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? If you had to walk 40 feet East and 10 feet North, but you had the option to walk directly there, wouldn't you just intuitively know that it was shorter to take the direct route? (Yeah, those ought to be 'yds' not 'ft' in the drawing, but I am in the middle of moving and trying to do this in a big ol' hurry.)
Apparently not if you work at the Dallas Morning News. The point of the DMN article was that people shouldn't try to kill things that are out of their accurate shooting range. Shooting something incompletely is worse than shooting it dead, as the injured animal generally dies an agonizing death a few hours or days later.
I realize this is the state that thinks that history textbooks have a pro-Islamic slant, and that creationism should be taught in science class; however, I am confident that there is nothing in the Bible that casts doubt on the validity of the Pythagorean theorem. That's it on the right, where d is the distance to the shooting target. The distance to the target is 41.2 yards, not 50 yards. (Thanks to Brian for pointing out my error in units.)
I don't think I'm being too demanding. This is pretty simple math. Squares and square roots are not beyond the ken of ANYONE who wants to understand them.
And that, unfortunately, seems to be the crux of the problem. I know plenty of people who can calculate how much the 40% off sweater on sale at Neiman Marcus will cost, but claim that things like mortgages or interest on their bank account are just too hard to understand. If you don't understand percentages (and compounding), perhaps you shouldn't be allowed to take out a mortgage. (I know, not feasible because it would lead to another financial crisis.)
Maybe we need to start applying intense social pressure to science and math illiterates. What we really need is branding. Let's recruit personalities from the fields of music, acting and sports who are willing to stand up for math and science. Great advertising opportunity: "If Paris Hilton can understand it, certainly YOU can."
Or maybe I've just been watching too much television lately.
Pop quiz! Answer the following before reading further:
A: 6+9=__+4
B: __+8=12+5
C: __+3=5+7=__
D: True or False: 6+8=3+11
E: 160=___
I've become painfully aware recently how sloppy communication can be. I am surprised how many times I have to reply to an email asking for clarification because of unclear writing or simply not taking the time to think things through. And that's with other scientists.
The GK-12 program I run at the University of Nebraska places graduate students in upper elementary, middle and high schools to work with teachers on improving math and science education for their students. We spend an entire day of the week-long orientation discussing communication. I break it down roughly into "scientific" communication and "normal person" communication. That's probably not a fair breakdown, but we really have to emphasize to the students that, although it is perfectly OK to reply to a scientist's idea with "here's why that won't work", it's a death knell for the relationship if you do that with a teacher (or, often, a spouse).
At the end of the year, one of my students made an observation I wholeheartedly endorse. "I like scientific communication better," she said, "It's just faster." And clearer, I would add.
Although Jennifer and I come from very different disciplinary backgrounds, I think one of the reasons we've hit it off is that we share the trait of wanting to use words properly. Jennifer recognizes that scientists and mathematicians use words and symbols to convey very specific meanings. If I use the word "velocity", she's likely to ask if there's a reason I didn't say "speed". (Speed is a scalar, velocity is a vector. Sometimes it makes a difference, sometimes not.)
Nowhere, perhaps, is the specificity of symbols more rigorous than in mathematics. My mother was a graduate student in math, then economics, while I was in elementary and middle school. I remember seeing her scribblings filling up scads of yellow legal pads and asking her once "when do I get to learn this language?" And math is definitely its own language. One of the biggest problems teaching (or communicating) science and math is that sometimes words mean different things in the discipline than they do everyday life.
But the equal sign should be an easy one, right? It means, well, equal.
Apparently, American students have a much less clear idea of the meaning of the equal sign than their Chinese, Korean and Turkish compatriots. A study by Capraro, et al in Psychological Reports (106(1), 49-53 (2010)), which draws on their previous data in Li, et al. (Cognition and Instruction, 26, 195-217 (2008) compares 6th grade students from different countries. Both papers originate from the research group of Mary Margaret Capraro and Robert M. Capraro at Texas A&M University. Incidentally, "et al." translates literally in Texan to "and them".
The results from the first two questions I posed from their study (6+9=__+4 and __+8=12+5) were surprising/appalling. Only 28.6% of American students got these questions right. The Chinese and Korean rates were in the 90+% range and the Turkish rates were 61% and 79% respectively.
As is often the case, we learn more by looking at the wrong answers than the right ones. The first two problems were designated "Type A" and "Type B" - similar, except the missing numbers are on opposite sides of the equal sign. The third problem - the one that lent itself to the title of this blog - is classified as "Type C" and provides a slightly different probe of the understanding (or misunderstanding).
For the "Type C" problem __+3=5+7=__, American students got the first blank right 23.8% of the time, while the rates for other students were 98.6% (Chinese), 86.5% (Korean) and 60.2% (Turkish). Interestingly, the correct rates for the second blank were much more comparable: 86.7% (American), 97.9% (Chinese), 93.3% (Korean) and 86.0% (Turkish).
What this strange disparity between the first and second blanks tells us, the authors argue, is that American students disproportionately don't understand the equals sign. The most common wrong answer for the first blank was "2". It is true that 2+3 = 5, but 2+3 definitely doesn't equal 5+7. Almost 90% of the students recognized that "5+7=12", but a significant number of those got the first blank wrong. This is apparently a common misconception among American students that isn't seen nearly as much in student from the other countries studied: the belief that the answer is the number immediately following the equal sign.
In their previous study, the authors used the True/False question "6+8=3+11?" to test understanding of the reflexive property of the equal sign. Reflexive, which I had to look up, means a=a. The popular phrase "it is what it is" embodies the mathematical philosophy of reflexivity. The educators doing the study, though, realized that students with the misconception I mentioned above - the answer is the number immediately after the equals sign - would get this question wrong for that reason and not because they don't understand that a=a.
In their new study, they replaced that question with "160=___", and expected the blank to be filled in with "160". But a number of students put an operation in that blank, like 80*2 or 40+120. Those answers are not wrong, but (strictly speaking), but they indicate that those students look at the equal sign as indicating that a mathematical operation is required and not solely as a representation of equality.
I've always thought of the equal sign as the pivot on a see saw. Whatever is on the left has to balance with whatever is on the right. If I fill in the blank with a 6, there's only 9 on the left and 12 on the right, so the see saw isn't balanced. OK, I can't draw a picture for the multiple equals signs on one line, but you get the idea. Who ever thought that something as seemingly simple as 'equal' could be so complicated?
At this point, you might be thinking that this seems like a bunch of quibbling over a precise definition of interest only to the highly mathematical. One of the original motivations for this study was the low performance of American students relative to their international counterparts on standardized tests like the TIMSS and the PISA tests. There apparently isn't much explicit attention to the equal sign in middle school curricula and, the authors (along with other math educators) believe that not understanding the equal sign puts students at a distinct disadvantage when it comes time to learn algebra. If you put 'x' in place of the blank, you realize you're actually doing algebra answering the questions I posed at the start of the blog.
These misconceptions carry over to physics. For example, consider the force on an object falling: F = mg. The force gravity exerts on a ball falling through the air is equal to the product of its mass times the acceleration due to gravity (in the absence of air resistance - sorry, I felt compelled as a professor to add that. I couldn't help myself.)
Students identify gravity as a force, but a significant number of them also identify a force "F" in the above equation as distinct from the force of gravity. The problem gets worse when there are multiple terms on the right-hand side of the equation due to multiple forces.
It is amazing that something so seemingly fundamental can so impact a student's education. One of the (many) reasons I am looking forward to Jennifer's book is that I speak fluent calculus. Imagine trying to explain to someone how to walk. That's what me teaching calculus is like. One of the best reasons for using peer teaching (students teaching each other) is that they explain things in ways I wouldn't have thought to use. Listening to them explaining how they understand an idea helps me realize how I can explain it better. It's research like this that reminds me that sometimes the better part of teaching is listening.
ADDED 8/13/10: An interesting study notes the need for better prepared mathematics teachers, as well as a significantly strengthened math curriculum. Jennifer and I have been talking a lot here recently about stereotypes. Although we've focused on those in the media, this article, by researchers at the University of Chicago in PNAS, suggests a scary chain: Female first and second grade teachers who are anxious about math pass that anxiety along to their female students. More female students are likely to agree with the suggestion that boys are better than girls at math after being exposed to this anxiety, and the female students who did agree with this stereotype performed worse in math as the year went on. Great article and PNAS makes the full text publicly available.
AND: A Christopher E. Granade speaks on the topic of 'equal' - a very nice post focusing on the importance of relationships and how that is really at the base of math and science.
A couple of months ago, co-blogger Diandra wrote about scientist stereotypes she encountered in a 4th grade class, in which very few of the kids believed she and the other female scientists who visited were, you know, actual scientists, because everyone knows scientists are all nerdy white guys in lab coats, right? And she trotted out the familiar refrain of how the media fosters such inaccurate stereotypes, particularly film and TV. We had a spirited email exchange at the time, and this seems like a good time to revisit the topic, since I'll be talking about it quite a bit during SETI-Con this coming weekend. (If you're in the Bay Area, stop in and say hi.)
We can certainly debate the extent to which popular culture reflects a society's values, and to what extent it shapes those values in turn; it's probably a bit of both. And I'm not sufficiently familiar with the kinds of films and TV shows your average 4th grader might be watching to build an effective counter-argument to Diandra's charge at the K-12 level. But I can make a very strong case that, especially when it comes to the current crop of adult-oriented TV shows, there's an astonishing -- and likely unprecedented -- diversity in the range of fictional characters who happen to be scientists. We've come a long way, baby, over the last 50 years, in terms of how scientists are portrayed in film and TV.
I was reminded of this back in April, when the Science & Entertainment Exchange sponsored a screening of an independent documentary by David Gargani called Monsters from the Id, as part of the Los Angeles United Film Festival. Gargani's film weaves the intersecting themes of over thirty classic films in order to tell the untold story of the Modern Scientist and his role in inspiring a nation. (Science fiction buffs will recognize that the title alludes to the 1950s classic film, Forbidden Planet, itself a reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest.) Check out the trailer:
We held a panel discussion after the screening, with JPL scientist Kevin Hand, marine biologist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, and Scripps Institute biologist Kristen Baldwin, moderated by yours truly. I think we all pretty much agreed that while we enjoyed the film, we weren't crazy about the basic premise, namely, that during this Golden Age of science fiction films, the mad scientist stereotype gave way to the scientist as hero and family man, and this was a Positive Thing for science. I suppose it's accurate enough, but the operative word here is "man" ("white man"). Women are mostly decorative in films from this era, and/or damsels in distress, and Forbidden Planet was no exception (Altaira merely exists to order shiny new dresses from Robbie the Robot, and tempt good men away from their duties). They certainly weren't depicted as strong, smart, independent scientists in their own right. And scientists of color (any color) are nowhere to be found.
Such is no longer the case. Sure, the time-honored stereotypes still exist -- mad scientists, social misfit nerds, bookish Plain Janes -- but they're part of a much broader landscape of scientist characters. In fact, I'd argue that we might just be in the midst of a different kind of Golden Age of science-themed film and TV -- one where diversity is the name of the game. Consider this random sampling of Hollywood scientists just from the last five years or so (warning: there may be a few inadvertent spoilers):
NCIS. How could you not love Abby, the pig-tailed punk/Goth sassy lab technician with mad hacking skills, who is so hip and edgy, she makes the cool kids look like nerds? She is rightly the most recognizable (and wildly popular) regular cast member on that show.
Numb3rs. You've got dreamboat mathematician Charlie Eppes, along with his best friend Larry the absent-minded physicist. Larry might be a bit of a stereotype, but Amita, Charlie's brilliant computational physics girlfriend, most definitely is not: she is a beautiful, strong woman in a traditionally male field, she's Indian (but not an obvious ethnic stereotype), and she contributes as much to solving FBI cases as any of her male counterparts. (Ditto for the female FBI agents on the show.) For a season or two, we also had a female physicist heading up the CalSci math and physics departments, played by the Rubenesque Kathy Najimy, who ended up dating Charlie's father (a retired civil engineer).
C.S.I. (Vegas edition). A.k.a., "pretty people doing science." It proved to be a winning formula. Gil Grissom brought the catchphrase "follow the evidence," into millions of households, along with science-minded characters of all shapes, colors and sizes. Greg the DNA technician (he later became a full-fledged field agent) is a white male in a lab coat, true, but he's cute, smart, listens to great music, and has a passion for Las Vegas history. And he's surrounded by smart attractive cohorts with colorful personal histories: a former stripper/single mom turned CSI, a black CSI with a gambling problem, a female CSI with a tragic family history, etc. The show's strength is its diverse cast, since their varied backgrounds drive some fascinating subplots and supply necessary conflict... and personal growth.
Bones. Head vs. heart is a major theme in this series, which is why the lead character of Temperance Brennan often struggles to steer clear of jargon when she communicates with non-scientists, and with reconciling her messy emotions with her rational scientific training. But she's beautiful, spunky (with martial arts skills), idealistic, and she has romantic entanglements just like anybody else. And like Grissom, she has a lab filled with smart, attractive scientists of diverse backgrounds. Okay, Zack's social awkwardness led to him being imprisoned for colluding with a crazy serial killer early on in the series, but ya gotta love Jack Hodgins, who revels in analyzing bugs and various icky substances, and devising nifty -- and often risky -- lab experiments to test his hypotheses ("King of the Lab!"). The man is passionate about his science, he's rich, smart, good-looking, and chivalrous, and he makes science look good by being so.
Lost. Sure, there was a lot of magic and mysticism in this series, but they had some terrific science-minded characters, most notably Season 5's heartthrob physicist Daniel Faraday. There was also Charlotte, the beautiful archaeologist, and Sayid, the sexy, morally ambiguous Iraqi assassin with mad electrical and mechanical engineering skills (he rebuilt his share of radios out of salvaged parts).
Eureka. You want diversity? Eureka gives you a whole town full of brilliant scientists, in lots of different fields. There are men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, all of them brilliant and valued for being so. Tesla High School's "cool kids" are the science whizzes and honors students, not your stereotypical jocks and cheerleaders. An average IQ is grounds for ridicule and being a social outcast. My favorite transformation on the show occurred with Carter's daughter, Zoe: a runaway rebellious sort who found her true self in Eureka when she discovered she was actually incredibly smart and talented in the sciences. She might never have figured that out on her own, and provides a terrific role model for high school students.
Fringe. Okay, Walter Bishop fits the "mad scientist" stereotype -- he's literally mad, having been rescued from an asylum to help Olivia and his son Peter solve the weekly mysteries and ferret out the Big Multi-Dimensional Mystery that forms the narrative arc of the series. But he's charming and lovable, a truly original character, and his troubled relationship with Peter forms the heart of the show. Audiences adore Walter; he's the main reason they tune in, week after week.
Breaking Bad. Chemistry teacher Walter White finds out he has a terminal illness and turns to manufacturing meth to raise enough money to provide for his wife and family after he's gone. He's not a hero, he's a basically good guy driven to desperate measures. And the result is a gritty, emotionally compelling drama with lots of real science woven into the background (although according to one of the technical consultants, some of the meth lab details are deliberately wrong -- for obvious reasons).
Big Bang Theory. Yeah, I know, this is the show many physicists love to hate, particularly the character of Sheldon, who is the poster child for socially inept scientists, and the root of much of the show's humor. But, like Walter Bishop, he is also the most beloved of the main characters, as evidenced by the huge cheer that went up during a Comic-Con panel last month when a clip from the series was shown featuring Sheldon. There's some validity to the criticisms. The sitcom genre traffics in stereotypes more than your average drama -- do you think Seinfeld was representative of real New Yorkers? -- and some episodes are better than others about rising above cheap laughs. But at its best, the characters on this show are smart, funny, likable people, and it's really about their relationships. It's also the top rated sitcom these days, and just snagged a record-breaking syndication deal of $1 million per episode. Bad for science? I doubt it. It means there are likely to be more scientists on TV in the future, because that's been shown to be a commercially successful model.
The point is, when I flick through the channels these days, I see a lot of diversity in how scientists are depicted. There are men and women, with varying degrees of
attractiveness, some geeky, some cool, representing many different
ethnic backgrounds, some socially awkward, some suave and sexy, some
thin, some heavyset, some short, some tall, and so on. They have
friends and families, they struggle with balancing the personal and
professional, they grapple with ethical dilemmas -- in short, they are
complex human beings, not two-dimensional caricatures, and they interact with each other in very interesting ways. This gives the writers a lot more creative fodder to work with, week after week, season after season, to keep the show fresh and compelling (because ultimately we're talking about fictional entertainment here, not earnest documentaries).
If scientific
stereotypes persist despite all of this, can we still credibly place the blame firmly
on film and TV? I just don't think it's that simple. I'm sure popular culture plays an important role in shaping public perception, but it does so in conjunction with other influences that are far more nebulous and tough to pin down. If we're too quick to take the fallback position that it's all popular culture's fault, we won't get very far in furthering our understanding of the myriad influences that shape our perceptions of science and scientists -- which in turn will give us clues about how to effectively change the negative perceptions.
This is a good, basic rule of life, not just one of those things you say when you don't have anything to add except a shrug.
Nature had a very interesting article about the Broader Impacts criterion, one of two criteria that the National Science Foundation uses to determine whether grant proposals should be funded. I'm not just saying that because I'm quoted in it, either. Corie Lok does a great job establishing the issue in the first paragraph.
"Research-funding agencies are forever trying to balance two opposing forces: scientists desire to be left along to do their research, and society's demand to see a return on its investment."
NSF requires that every proposal - research, education or outreach - include a plan to promote the 'broader impacts' of the project, with broader impacts basically meaning "How does this work benefit society?" Beyond your publishing papers and the basics of preparing graduate students for careers, what are you doing that helps us explain to the taxpayers and the Congress why it is so important to fund science? There is a lot of misunderstanding of the Broader Impacts criterion in the community and, I think, within NSF itself. Still. (Note added: I run the broader impacts toolbox site, which was funded by a grant from NSF, but isn't an official site. There is a lot of information on the criterion itself, along with some reports.)
The reason I raise the issue is that a recurring theme of this blog is the image of scientists as portrayed in the media. Just after I arrived at the University of Nebraska, my department chair and his wife went for dinner and a movie with myself and my husband. Sue Kirby, who became one of my favorite collaborators, was an elementary school teacher with a deep love of science. The other three of us were university physicists. We went to see the movie "The Saint". If any movie could have benefited from the Science and Entertainment Exchange, this would be it. A basic premise of the movie is that Elisabeth Shue has developed a valid way to do cold fusion that will permanently solve the energy crisis. She is carrying the secret around on six little post-it notes that she hides in her bra.
OK, maybe that's just a plot device so that the Saint (Val Kilmer) can seduce her in order to steal the notes. Or maybe some misguided writer thinks that science is actually so simple that one person discovers something and can write it down on six tiny pieces of paper with no lab notebooks or computer files or anything. Anyway, poor Sue was mortified during the movie because the three of us were laughing so hard that people were starting to look at us and wonder if we were all on something. We couldn't help it. The portrayal of science was so outrageous that it was fall-down funny. Come to think of it, the four of us never went to another movie together after that...
And then last week, I saw the same movie on television. The hosts were offering helpful commentary at the commercial breaks) and had an exchange something like...
SHE: "Are you cold?"
HE: Yes - that's all due to the beautiful and extremely intelligent Elisabeth Shue.
SHE: But she's not cold, she's hot.
HE: Yes, but we all know there's no such thing as 'hot fusion'.
Uh...you mean like what happens in the Sun? I was watching movies because I was home with a respiratory infection, so the laughter was a little limited because my ribs hurt every time I had to breathe in.
This relates to Broader Impacts because of a story I told for the Nature article. My collaborator Gayle Buck (a science education researcher now at Indiana University) and I were doing a pilot project in which we had three or four graduate students working with Sue Kirby's fourth-grade class on circuits. We were planning a grant in which we wanted to study the impact of contact with real scientists on student images of science and scientists. The program to which we were writing had a goal of teaming graduate science and engineering students with K-12 teachers, so we had recruited a few graduate students -- all of whom happened to be female -- to come and work with the kids. We didn't set out to get women students, those were just the students who were interested in participating. Our goal was to see what the students learned about the process of science in their quest to make a bulb light with just a battery, a bulb and a single piece of wire.
About halfway through the process, as I'm standing there watching with a smile as bulbs are lighting and students are saying "cool" and smiling about how they understand science, Gayle approaches me.
"Guess what?" she asks. "The students don't believe you're scientists."
She had been interviewing students out in the hallway and asking them questions I never would have thought to ask. Like "Who are these people helping you?"
And darned if the fourth grade students weren't overwhelmingly positive that the women graduate students in the class could not possibly be scientists. Even with prompted with "could they be scientists?", the kids had all sorts of reasons why they weren't.
"They're too pretty. Pretty women wouldn't be scientists."
"They smile too much."
"They talk in ways we can understand."
"They act like they want us to understand them."
In short, the students were sure that the women in the classroom helping them -- all doctoral students actively working in labs -- were student teachers. Gayle, Sue and I ended up writing a paper about the study - we tried a bunch of things to reinforce the idea that the women were, in fact, scientists. We videotaped them in their labs explaining their experiments, we mandated that they be called "scientists" or "engineers" and not "graduate students" and we even bought a button machine and made them nametags with "Scientist" in big letters. I was outvoted in my idea to tattoo the word "Scientist" on their foreheads. Some issue about IRB considerations or something.
That was a pivotal moment for me, because it made me realize that I had spent a lot of my career doing things for which I had absolutely no evidence of any impact, let alone a positive impact. I've spent my life being told that I should be out there and visible as a role model for women in physics, when the fact is that I may have been talking to an audience that thought I was there to explain to them what scientists do and what science is like without it registering that there was actually a scientist in front of them. My skepticism about the Broader Impacts criterion is in part because it fails to consider that having a limited number of projects that are well thought out and assessed might be a much more impactful way of addressing the issues than having a lot of well-intentioned scientists doing things that could have minimal, if not negative impact.
Changing the perceptions people have about science and scientists is nowhere near as easy as putting good role models in front of them. Sure, you will hear scientists in interviews talking about how Neil Degrasse Tyson, or Eugenie Scott (or my personal hero, Laurie McNeil) inspired them when they were young and doubtful about their ability to succeed, but that's a minority of people. We learned, for example, that the fourth graders got much of their ideas about who does science from the cartoon 'Dexter's Laboratory', which was big at that time. (The study was done at a school where about 78% of the students qualified for free or reduced lunches. Few of the students in our study were likely to have relatives who were scientists or other first-hand experience with scientists or people they recognized as scientists).
Jennifer and I had a short e-mail volley about a blog that was posted in response to a question about what it is like to be a scientist. One quote from the blog in question:
The only scientists you’ve probably met are the ones you see on TV or in the movies. Who’d want to be any of those? Who wants to be Dr. Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb or Flint Lockwood from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or anyone on The Big Bang Theory? Flint and those painfully nerdy guys from The Big Bang Theory are nice enough but few people would want to be them. And Doofenshmirtz is lame and evil.
OK, I've had animated discussions myself with David Saltzberg, the scientific advisor for The Big Bang Theory who periodically blogs about the science in the show, about why they don't have a gorgeous non-geeky woman scientist on the show. (And if the writers aren't sure how one would behave, I can give you a list of people they can visit.) David assured me that people like Sheldon and Leonard. My experience with the fourth graders makes me skeptical without a little more study. I certainly don't endorse the blogger's comments about 'lazy writers' using scientists as easy targets. Anyone who's worked with writers for television or the movies knows that a 'lazy writer' remains unemployed. Busy writers on deadline without even any idea of who to ask might write something that 'sounds' scientific without checking it, but most writers are pretty dedicated to getting things right.
Jennifer reeled off a plethora of scientists, mathematicians and engineers on fictional programs (i.e. entertainment, not documentary or educational) that counter the points made in the blog. I doubt it took her more than two minutes to come up with those names. But my experiences with the kids make me wonder whether my perception of those characters is in any way similar to the perception of the average television watcher. Do these characters have any impact (much less positive or negative) on the way people perceive scientists?
I propose a study of what the average person -- not me, Jennifer or probably most of the people who read this blog -- thinks about scientists on television, becoming a scientist or even knowing scientists. I'm somewhat hampered by the fact that time has prevented me from watching a lot of popular television in the last year. But on the plane home last night, I was thinking about some of the questions I would ask.
I would pick a couple different cohorts: one of people who are scientists, one of people who work with scientists, one of people who aren't scientists, but say they like science, and one of people who aren't scientists and say they don't like science. I'd ask them all the same questions. And if there is one thing I've learned about studying people, I've learned that qualitative research (i.e. on a scale of one to seven where one is strongly disagree and seven is strongly agree, how do you feel about the following statements) is very limited. So I'd give them a web-based survey with a lot of open-answer questions and then I'd follow up with an interview in which you could probe some of the common themes that emerged from the survey.
OK. In reality, I'd enlist the talents of my friend Vicki, who is one of the best mixed methods researchers in the country. She'd take my ideas, add her own, and put them into a useful form from which something valid might be deduced. A good collaborator is a blessing, especially when they are also a dear friend. So these are just the ideas off the top of my head.
Maybe you'd like to try this yourself: The ground rules are that we're dealing only with fictional television programs. No NOVA, no news, no documentaries. Dramas, comedies, cartoons are all fair game. Let's consider 'recent' as being the last two years or so. I won't impose a hard cut-off, but don't pull out shows that were canceled five years ago.
1. List all the recent television programs you can think of that have scientists or mathematicians on a recurring basis. (Not the Law and Order episode where there was a scientist killed, please.) Only characters who have names are eligible. (Not the one listed in the credits as "Scientist #1".)
2. List all the characters on those shows who were scientists and as much as you can remember about the particulars of the character. Name, type of scientist, relationships with other characters.
3. For each of the characters you listed, rate on a scale of 1 to 7 with 1 meaning strongly disagree and 7 meaning strongly agree (I didn't say that was useless or invalid, just not complete). I'd ask some specific questions like:
a. I would aspire to be like that character
b. I would invite that character to a party that included my friends and family
c. I would date/marry/sleep with that character
d. That character is a good role model for people in terms of encouraging them to become a scientist.
e. That character makes scientists look evil
f. That character make scientists look stupid
g. That character would be a good mother or father
h. That character causes all of the trouble he or she gets into by things that he or she does.
I probably should plan to disguise the purpose of the study by asking similar questions about doctors or lawyer or firefighters. Maybe veterinarians.
That would be my start -- and I wager that the analysis of those answers would raise another series of questions to answer in the interviews.
And, of course, that's the way science works. Sometimes, the mark of good research is that it raises more questions than it answers.
Now, I just have to find some funding for this study!
The perfect pick-me-up when gravity gets you down.
2 oz Tequila
2 oz Triple sec
2 oz Rose's sweetened lime juice
7-Up or Sprite
Mix tequila, triple sec and lime juice in a shaker and pour into a margarita glass. (Salted rim and ice are optional.) Top off with 7-Up/Sprite and let the weight of the world lift off your shoulders.
Listening to the Drums of Feynman
The perfect nightcap after a long day struggling with QED equations.
1 oz dark rum
1/2 oz light rum
1 oz Tia Maria
2 oz light cream
Crushed ice
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
In a shaker half-filled with ice, combine the dark and light rum, Tia Maria, and cream. Shake well. Strain into an old fashioned glass almost filled with crushed ice. Dust with the nutmeg, and serve. Bongos optional.
Combustible Edison
Electrify your friends with amazing pyrotechnics!
2 oz brandy
1 oz Campari
1 oz fresh lemon juice
Combine Campari and lemon juice in shaker filled with cracked ice. Shake and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Heat brandy in chafing dish, then ignite and pour into glass. Cocktail Go BOOM! Plus, Fire = Pretty!
Hiroshima Bomber
Dr. Strangelove's drink of choice.
3/4 Triple sec
1/4 oz Bailey's Irish Cream
2-3 drops Grenadine
Fill shot glass 3/4 with Triple Sec. Layer Bailey's on top. Drop Grenadine in center of shot; it should billow up like a mushroom cloud. Remember to "duck and cover."
Mad Scientist
Any mad scientist will tell you that flames make drinking more fun. What good is science if no one gets hurt?
1 oz Midori melon liqueur
1-1/2 oz sour mix
1 splash soda water
151 proof rum
Mix melon liqueur, sour mix and soda water with ice in shaker. Shake and strain into martini glass. Top with rum and ignite. Try to take over the world.
Laser Beam
Warning: may result in amplified stimulated emission.
1 oz Southern Comfort
1/2 oz Amaretto
1/2 oz sloe gin
1/2 oz vodka
1/2 oz Triple sec
7 oz orange juice
Combine all liquor in a full glass of ice. Shake well. Garnish with orange and cherry. Serve to attractive target of choice.
Quantum Theory
Guaranteed to collapse your wave function:
3/4 oz Rum
1/2 oz Strega
1/4 oz Grand Marnier
2 oz Pineapple juice
Fill with Sweet and sour
Pour rum, strega and Grand Marnier into a collins glass. Add pineapple and fill with sweet and sour. Sip until all the day's super-positioned states disappear.
The Black Hole
So called because after one of these, you have already passed the event horizon of inebriation.
1 oz. Kahlua
1 oz. vodka
.5 oz. Cointreau or Triple Sec
.5 oz. dark rum
.5 oz. Amaretto
Pour into an old-fashioned glass over (scant) ice. Stir gently. Watch time slow.
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