Lab Out Loud®

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We welcome Jodi Peterson to the show this week.  Jodi serves as the Assistant Executive Director for the NSTA Office of Legislative and Public Affairs, and talks to us about what we might see for science and science education with the Obama administration.

Make sure to tell us what you think about Science in its Rightful Place. Comment below, and participate in Seed Magazine’s discussion (see below).

• NSTA Legislative Affairs
  
• Sign-up to receive the NSTA Express
• NSTA Express Archives
• Rising Above the Storm: Science Education in the 21st Century
• Obama “Rightful Place” for Science

“The Search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us” from change.gov

Obama Weekly Radio Address on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan (video).

The Administration is still working with Congress to refine the plan, but in the address, President Obama lays out the key priorities. He goes into detail, noting that the plan will update our electric grid by laying more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines; weatherize 2.5 million homes; protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans in danger of losing their coverage; secure 90 major ports; renovate 10,000 schools; and triple the number of science fellowships.   [Link]

Seed Magazine’s “What is Science’s Rightful Place” Discussion

In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of “a world connected by our own science and imagination.” And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to “restore science to its rightful place.”

At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama’s vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and colleagues in science, and outside science, to respond to the President’s idea of a “rightful place” for science. What is science’s rightful place?

Restoring science to its rightful place in government and in wider society will be no simple task; it will demand fresh ideas, the engagement of America’s scientists and engineers, and the collaboration of other cultural and social institutions.

On Tuesday we bore witness to a milestone with multiple facets: the victory of racial equality, the demise of anti-intellectualism, the triumph of hope over fear, and the evolution of democracy itself. Today we also entered a new era of curiosity, open inquiry, and hard work in pursuit of something bigger than each of us. History will call this the birth of our scientific renaissance.

We invite you to share your thoughts and comments on the rightful place of science. Send text, audio, video, image to responses@rightfulplace.org or join the conversation on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rightful-Place-Project/46391575761

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Dr. Jeffrey Kahn

Dr. Jeffrey Kahn is Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.  Dr. Kahn reminds us of the importance of ethics in science – from the classroom to public policy.

Ethics Resources:
Bioethics.net
Kennedy Institute of Ethics
High School Bioethics Curriculum Project
Bioethics in the News (Google News)

Molly Nash Case:
The Nash Family: Breaking New Ground in Medicine
Making Lives to Save Lives by Dr. Jeffrey Kahn
Genetic Testing of Embryoes Raises Ethical Questions (CNN)
Genetic Selection Gives Girl a Brother and a Second Change (CNN)
Designer Babies from Salon.com
Adam’s Gift from People.com
A Design for Life (BBC)

This episode is sponsored by Frey Scientific

Frey Scientific has offered science educators quality science products and dependable service for nearly 50 years. Working with leading educators and manufacturers, Frey provides the required equipment and supplies for your science classrooms and laboratories, as well as being leaders in Lab Planning and Renovation. Frey Scientific is part of the School Specialty family of science companies that includes Neo/SCI, Delta Education, and CPO Science.

School Specialty Science: Helping educators engage and inspire students of all ages and abilities to learn. To learn more, visit www.freyscientific.com.

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As we rapidly approach November 4th, we were able to talk with Lesley Stone from SEA (Scientists and Engineers for America) to discuss the role of science in the upcoming elections.

Links:

• SHARP Network
• Views from the Experts
• McCain and Obama’s Answers to Innovations 2008
• Candidates’ Forum for Innovation
• Obama’s Responses to Science Questions from Nature.com
• Campaign 2008 (from Physics Today)
• Obama’s Science Advisors (from Wired.com)

Preview from the Show:

Science and tech have fueled the American economy to a great extent, and as you talked about in 1957 with Sputnik, we funded science really heavily, and now we haven’t been doing that as much, so there are going to be real changes if America can’t compete on a technological level in the global economy.

We don’t want to put science in its own little ghetto and just pretend that it’s just one single issue, when almost every important issue in the campaign revolves around science – like health, climate change, environment, energy – all these have scientific underpinnings… But we do need to hear about what they think about scientific issues as well, and how they intend to incorporate science into their administration.

I think that there is a tendency for people to focus on their own career path, and I think it’s really important to remember that you’re part of a broader society and that these elections matter to you even if sometimes seems that the relationship between you and the elections is remote – every person, every citizen has a responsibility to find out what their politicians are doing. And the science teachers can really help with that. They can help their students to understand that, they can show their students the SHARP network, where you can easily see the science and tech policy views of the people that represent you, and also really important is urging the candidates to respond to this questionnaire.

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Sir Harold Kroto

To open our second season, we talked with Sir Harold Kroto. Kroto won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 (along with Curl and Smalley) for the discovery of fullerenes. He talks to us about a loss of hands-on experiences in our world, how to reform science education, and offers a new resource for science (and other) educators.

Links:

• Sir Harold Kroto, Frances Eppes Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, FSU
• Harry Kroto’s Personal Website
• Autobiography of Sir Harold Kroto from Nobel Foundation
• Wikipedia entry of Sir Harold Kroto
• Sir Harold Kroto, FRS
• VEGA Science Trust
• GEOSET
• MAKE Magazine

This episode is sponsored by Frey Scientific

Preview from the Show:

Kroto: I think it’s clear that science education is not in great shape. If we look at the way in which the number of kids going in to science has not increased sufficiently, and we have massive technical problems to solve for survival and sustainability, and so we have to use all the tools at our disposal. And the new one, the internet, which has hardly started, and it seems to me that one way of using it effectively, would be to create a global cache of educational materials that teachers anywhere in the world can actually download.

Kroto: Our world is now full of technology which is almost impossible to get your hands on, or if you want to understand it, it’s very difficult for young kids to understand it…. I think people haven’t fully appreciated that my generation, and generations before, learned how the world worked by breaking it up and taking it to pieces and trying to put it back together again.

Dale: What advice do you have for [science teachers] to reform, or jumpstart science education?

Kroto: Well, it’s a massive problem, because it’s not just the teachers, it’s what the kids do themselves. I don’t know how to solve it really, because the world in which I was immersed was the world in which I was immersed, and it was a hands-on one. When the telephone didn’t work, I went inside it – and the bell wasn’t running or something…. But now if the television set doesn’t work – it’s obsolete. That presents a massive problem for the science teacher, and engineering and technology teachers. It needs really development of hands-on skills. And the problem is that modern kids are so subjected to immediate gratification, they don’t have the patience to go through rigmarole that I did.

Kroto: We’re now in a highly technical world, with many people in influential positions – in politics, in law, in journalism – who know nothing whatsoever about science. And yet, they’re making decisions on science, they’re talking about science, they don’t understand science. All they know about science is what is the use of it? They are not interested in the culture itself. They don’t go to a poet and ask “what’s the use of your poetry?” They don’t go to a writer and ask “what’s the use of it?” They can see, because they’re used to that culture, and see the essence of Shakespeare, or whatever the language. In our case, on average, people who are non-scientists just look at the scientific progression as a bunch of people who produce some useful technology. But they don’t think of us as a culture, which is what we are. And in fact, I would say, one of the most important cultures, because we are based on a very important philosophy, which is doubt, and to question everything, and to not accept dogma unjustified by experiment.

Brian: You are actually starting a new tool that is going to try to help teachers get a little bit firmer foundation on what they’re doing, and give them some resources. Could you tell us a little bit about that before you go?

Kroto: The new technology out there allows us to see a person teaching, together with the teaching material. And so what we are doing, in Florida State, is setting up what we call GEOSET – Global Education Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology. And math as well, and other things… so it’s not just restricted to the sciences. There are two screens, one with the video, so it’s like YouTube, and the second screen is almost like Wikipedia, but it’s downloadable. In fact, PowerPoint is what most presenters use.

Direct download: LOL17.mp3

Senator McCain answered 14 of today’s most difficult questions on science and technology.  Visit the SEA website to see McCain’s full responses.

Senator Barack Obama has already submitted his responses.

Now you can directly compare the two major presidential candidates on science, technology, health and related issues. [Link]

Scientists and Engineers for America

The Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) put together a few questions for our Congressional and Presidential candidates. Senator Barack Obama has submitted his responses.

Senator McCain has yet to answer. You can urge him to answer.

SEA also has a comparison of the candidates’ positions.

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Bill Nye

For our contribution to Earth Day, we had the opportunity to chat with Bill Nye about his new show on the new Planet Green channel called Stuff Happens.

Preview from the Show:

I’m doing this other thing called “Stuff Happens? for the Discovery Channel. It’s strictly for a new channel Discovery is re-purposing – they’re calling it “Planet Green”. So all the programming is green, or about environmental issues and stuff. And so this show is about consumer choices that you can make to live a more environmentally responsible life.

I am a serious hobbyist. I have four kilowatts of solar panels and I have a solar water heating system that I, if you will, designed – along with a guy who’s worked in solar in southern California for many, many years…I hired him, and two very good plumbers, and these guys who were good with gas mains, and we re-rigged the whole house. So now I have solar hot water that pre-heats the water before it runs through two tankless hot water heaters. So my gas bill in the summer is less than $10.

There’s an old supply chain from the South American Western Coast to North American farmers. And what is supplied is fish feed made from anchovies. So, American bacon pigs are fed fish from South American oceans. And so many fish are fished so aggressively that penguins are going out of business. The penguin ecosystem has been devastated, and penguin populations have been decimated by this practice. So we encourage you – the listener, the viewer – to buy…organic, grain-fed bacon. That’s what we want you to do to reduce the market for this anchovy feed. And it’s just something that humans are kind of doing by accident, but on such an enormous scale that’s it’s screwing up an entire ecosystem in the south western Pacific.

The baby steps are important. The hardest thing for everyone to understand about the environment is that every single thing you do affects everybody in the whole world. And the reason, nominally, is that we only have one atmosphere. We can only breath from one source of air – we all share the air. So this is a fundamental idea that’s hard to get; it just doesn’t seem possible. I throw out this magazine and instead of recycling it, yeah – you’re lowering the quality of life of everyone on earth.

So you go to the store and you buy one [compact fluorescent light bulb]. Ok, but if you replace every lamp in your house, or every lamp in the main rooms… Replace every one of those lamps, and you will see your power bill go down… Now there are some whining, unbelievable-freakin’ whiners out there who tell you that we can’t change to compact fluorescent because of the mercury – “there’s no way to get rid of the mercury that’s in those lights and it’s gonna kill everybody.” So let’s keep in mind that it was the year 1951 when American industry went to buying more fluorescent lamps than incandescent lamps. That is to say, if you work at any sort of factory anywhere, they have fluorescent lights – ‘cuz it’s so much cheaper. And so those lights are required by law to be recycled and the mercury recovered. And there are services that recover the lights and recover the mercury. So we just gotta do the same thing for domestic consumers – for people that buy ‘em for their houses. For cryin’ out loud – this is not, if I may, rocket surgery. This is actually a little more complicated that: trying to motivate everyone to do the right thing with regard to their old lamps. And of course it can be done; it’s a metal. Who doesn’t want to recover a metal? It’s valuable, it’s shiny, you can see it – of course you can do it.

Politically, [a scientific debate] is an unsophisticated idea. None of the three candidates remaining would ever consent to a science debate. None of them are scientists. None of them would admit to being experts in any way about anything about science. So of course they’re going to say no; they have to say no. This pursuit of science debate is an exercise in futility. Instead, we need to rephrase it – in my opinion. My best idea so far, is to rename it something else – the “nondependence on foreign oil” debate, the “health” debate, the “energy” debate, the “competitiveness” debate – that’s pretty good… But naming this thing the “science” debate sabotages it from the get-go. And of course I support the idea, but the best correction I can think of it to rename it. The “competitiveness” debate – yes.

Links:

• Planet Green
• Bill Nye the Science Guy
• Nye Labs
• Eyes of Nye
• Bill Nye on Wikipedia
• Greener Pastures from the New York Times
• The Science Channel: 100 Greatest Discoveries

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This week we talk to Terry Devitt from WhyFiles.org.

Preview from the Show:
Our primary mission is to look at what is going on in the world every week and find some corner of the scientific enterprise that lends itself to a public conversation about science, and then we drill down into that, to contact the best experts that we can find to try to shed light on those dark corners of science – the places and things that people don’t know about, and to provide more than what you’re going to get in a straight-up treatment of science than one routinely encounters in popular media. I think it’s safe to say that after we complete our formal educations, most people only encounter science through popular media, and so a big part of the Why Files mission is to help people come to grips with science – what it is, why it’s important, why it makes a difference in our lives on a daily basis.

It’s really essential that people in a democracy have some understanding of how we generate knowledge, because it impacts our lives in important ways every day.

Links:
Why Files Educator Page
Why Files Classroom Materials
The Why Files Archives
Baseball Spring Training
The Science of Polling
CSI’s: Cool Science Images

Subscribe to The Why Files with their RSS Feed

Direct download: nstalol13.mp3