Lab Out Loud » Dale

Episode 80 – Paul Herder and the National Ocean Sciences Bowl

Dale — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:30:30 +0000

Paul Herder

For our final episode, we talk with Wisconsin colleague Paul Herder. As coach of the Marshfield High School National Ocean Sciences Bowl team, Paul has led the team to win the NOSB for four consecutive years. Paul talks to us about the regional and final competitions, his recent retirement from teaching, and what he is now doing with his life.

Links:

Wisconsin’s Lake Sturgeon Bowl:

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Analyzing the Google Hertz Doodle

Dale — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:18:31 +0000

Google honored physicist Heinrich Hertz with a Doodle on what would have been his 155th birthday. The wavy doodle scrolls by with color coded crests and troughs that represent the letters in the standard Google logo.

Just like the Newton doodle, this logo screams for analysis.

Finding the frequency of the Google doodle in Logger Pro

It turns out that the doodle is a simply animated gif. Since gif files can be opened in Quicktime, I used the video analysis in Vernier’s Logger Pro to get the time for the doodle’s first trough (the first “o” in Google) to pass. This value is 0.8 seconds. That makes 1.6 seconds for a complete period and 1/1.6 seconds gives us a frequency of 0.62 Hertz. If this letter was traveling at the speed of light, it would have a wavelength that is 483536 kilometers long.

Using the photo analysis in Logger Pro, I found the wavelenghs for the other letters of the doodle by scaling the photo with the wavelength calculated for the first “o” in the doodle.

Here are my results:

Google Wavy Doodle Results

Episode 75 – Superbowl of the Mind

Dale — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:30:00 +0000

This week we talk with Jon Dudas, president of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Dudas talks to Lab Out Loud about their upcomingrobotics competitions, how they teach kids how to try, fail and succeed, and how hands-on robotic lessons can enhance the classroom experience and spark interest in science education and careers.

Links:

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Episode 74 – There’s a Zombie in my Classroom

Dale — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:30:16 +0000

Dr. Steven Schlozman

This week we talk with Dr. Steven Schlozman, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Lecturer in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Schlozman talks to us about his start in teaching, his recent book “The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse” and how to use zombies to teach science.

Links:

The Zombie Autopsies
“The Zombie Autopsies” (Amazon.com)
Steven Schlozman Profile at Harvard
George Romero Continues Undead Obsession with ‘Zombie Autopsies’
Potential of a Zombie Attack Considered by Guest Speaker (the Utah Statesman)
A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Zombie Neurobiology
Inside Zombie Brains: Sci-fi Teaches Science (CNN)
The Neuropsychology of Zombies (Boston.com)
Essential Zombie Films
The Walking Dead, AFC

More Links:

The Zombie Autopsies Book Trailer

Zombie Autopsies 101 from Daniel Lagin on Vimeo.

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Episode 72 – 2011 Science Breakthroughs of the Year

Dale — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 06:30:45 +0000

To kick off the new year, we invited Pamela Hines , senior editor at Science, to talk with us about science in 2011. From the farthest reaches of the universe to the deepest mysteries of the cell, Hines highlights the major science breakthroughs of 2011. Listen to the episode to hear about these discoveries, and what we might expect to see in 2012.

Links

Science/AAAS
Science Magazine Editors
Subscribe to Science (K12 Teacher Membership Requires verification of teaching status)
2011 Breakthrough of the Year
“HIV Treatment as Prevention” (Science Abstract)
“HIV Treatment Dramatically Prevents Heterosexual Transmission” (Science Insider)
Hayabusa Mission Website
“Australopithecus sediba May Have Paved the Way for Homo“ (AAAS News Release)
“Malaria Vaccine Meets (Modest) Expectations” (Science Now)
Laser Mosquito Killer (YouTube)

Science/AAAS cover art courtesy of Science/AAAS. Readers may view, browse, and/or download material for temporary copying purposes only, provided these uses are for noncommercial personal purposes. Except as provided by law, this material may not be further reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, adapted, performed, displayed, published, or sold in whole or in part, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Featured image courtesy of lead author, Dr. Myron Cohen.

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Episode 68 – Modeling Instruction in the Science Classroom

Dale — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:30:44 +0000

Mark Schober

This week we talk with Mark Schober about using Modeling Instruction in the science classroom. As president of the American Modeling Teacher’s Association, Mark shares with us a history of modeling, how it can be used in the classroom and that it is for more than just physics courses.

Links

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Episode 66 – But Are They Really Learning?

Dale — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:30:49 +0000

Frank Noschese

This week we discuss teaching techniques with Frank Noschese. Frank is a high school physics teacher at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y. and an active blogger. We talk with Frank about blogging, active student engagement, flipped classrooms, psuedoteaching, and the Khan Academy. Join the conversation and leave your comments.

Preview from the Show:

There’s a lot of research and evidence to backup the fact that having a more interactive class does work. And there’s a lot of ways to go about being interactive. One way is with the questioning technique that you were talking about in the Harvard justice videos; I haven’t seen them, but it sounds like that’s one way. Or using clickers is another way. Or with whiteboarding and modeling, where the kids are working in groups on these problems, and they’re working on them on these large whiteboards that maybe two or three kids can work on at a time, and they share and present their solutions to the problem. So there’s lot of different techniques depending on the size of the class and the materials that you have, so I don’t think anybody should just be able to throw their hands up and say “well based on my situation, the only thing I can do is lecture”, because there’s always different techniques.

If you think back to even how you learned – something that you found you had to struggle through, whether it was a sport or an instrument, or a kind of arts and crafts, woodworking – anything like that. You worked hard at it, got feedback from someone who knew what they were doing, there were lots of tests along the way to see if you were getting it or not. That kind of interactivity and feedback is so necessary for learning. And then there’s also people that say – we had this conversation on twitter a few months ago – where somebody said “but kids do learn from lecture, there are kids that are gaining.” And it’s true, there are kids that do still learn physics through lecture, and what we think is going on there is that the kids are doing these active engagement strategies in their head, so they’re trying to think ahead: “what’s the next step this would take”, or “how does this fit in with that,” and they’re doing it in their head. And these are very few kids that actually know how to learn from a lecture, and I would say the bulk of students just sit there and think that they’re going to learn from osmosis.

Links:

Action-Reaction (Frank’s Blog)
Frank on MSNBC talking about
Frank on flipped classrooms with USA Today
Follow Frank on Twitter
Frank on the Web: Frank’s Posterous, Noschese 180, Win? Fail? PHYSICS!, WQDYH?
Harvard’s Justice with Michael Sandel
A Private Universe
dy/dan (Dan Meyer)
Geoset (Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology)
Veritasium Science Videos

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Physics falls short for Farmers Insurance ad

Dale — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:04:46 +0000

I was flipping through my most recent copy of Wired magazine when I noticed this Farmer’s Insurance ad. At first glance, I was happy to see that they were using the metric system until I noticed that middle flight. Wait, the cow went a distance of 185 m/s?

Farmers fails physics

Yes, this is just a silly ad. I should relax and let it slide. Right? Then again, the insurance business is all about numbers, units, and equations.

Speaking of equations, let’s take a look at those numbers again.

A closer look at the numbers

The cow is a projectile launched at 70 degrees off the horizontal with an initial velocity of 42 m/s.

Oh no. It’s not just a little slip on a label; all the distances are wrong too.

Zip over to the Wolfram Alpha site for the correct answers.

Wolfram Alpha can solve this

Looks like I’ll be saving this image for my physics students to investigate. I guess it is back to school for Farmers.

Episode 62 – The Sitcom Experiment

Dale — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 05:30:24 +0000

Bill Prady

Bill Prady, Executive Producer and co-creator of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, joins us to talk about one of our favorite science shows.

Links:

Direct download: LOL62.mp3

Lab Out Loud is Changing!

Dale — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:30:54 +0000

For almost three and a half years, Lab Out Loud has been providing shows that discuss science news and science education by interviewing leading scientists, researchers, science writers and other important figures in the field. However, we have always wrestled with the fact that we were not being true to the title of our show.

Many of our listeners have felt the same. One commenter wrote:

For a show called Lab Out Loud, why don’t we ever hear the sounds of lab?

We admit that our critics are right. While many of our guests work in a laboratory environment, our show has failed to bring you to their lab.

Quite frankly, we were lazy; we have relied on the voices of people instead of the symphony of tools and facilities that are really doing the science.

Well, the charade is over. Today, we are proud to announce that Lab Out Loud is moving to where it belongs – the laboratory. From this point on, Lab Out Loud will no longer do interviews but focus on the sounds of the lab instead.

Fun With Chemistry by jemsweb, on Flickr

Each episode will showcase a specific field of science. Today we start with the Soundtrack of the Chemistry Lab. Listeners can interact with the show by identifying their favor sounds in the comments. Was that a buret or a pipet? Only the trained ear can tell!

Direct download: LOLv2-e1-chem.mp3

If chemistry is not your thing, don’t fret. You’ll be able to find harmony with one of our future episodes. Squishes and Scalpels will be up next for our biology fans followed by Sediment Drifts and Sifts for the geologists.

Got a favorite lab sound stirring in your head? Leave us a request in the comments. We’ll have it ready to play in a few weeks.

With your help we hope to finally turn up the dial on every laboratory so they can be enjoyed as intended – Out Loud!