This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

Stacy Baker’s students from Staten Island Academy presented their projects in information technology for all the attendees to ohhh and ahhh at. One student, Salina’s, project involved conducting a survey of the student’s peers to learn about how they use blogs for getting information, with Facebook being the most popular site and sites that cover wide variety of subjects being preferred over subject-specific ones. Ammar introduced us to the fantastic ptable.com interactive periodic table, which I concur is the hands-down best one online today. Similarly, Melina reviewed iPhone applications and how students use them, with nearly half of students using apps to help with studies, and a similar number finding themselves overwhelmed by too much data.

Mike presented on starting his own blog, and how writing for his blog was different than writing for class because he knew the public would be reading it, which meant he really had to check his facts and accuracy. One child prodigy was building games in flash as well as fractal tree generators and science experiments concerning video games and mathematical abilities. Not only was his aptitude in programming these games highly impressive, but I was also inspired by how open-source software and science enables fantastic demonstrations as his.

Alex and Carl presented on educational video games, and how, while they find popular Playstation games engaging, educational games are often two-dimensional and boring. The students had not played Spore, which I am enchanted with but also believe it could be more educational in teaching evolution. Same with my enjoyment of Portal, which plays games with physics in a maze of puzzles.

Alex conceptualized a game called “Body Pod” which would involve traveling around the body in an avatar. This sounded very much like the Federation of American Scientists’ free game ImmuneAttack, where you fly a miniature craft around the human body performing medical tasks for patients. I’ve played the game briefly, and was blown away by how educational it was in addition to having great graphics, action, and engaging game play.

Audience members asked the students if Web 2.0 made their biology class easier than their other classes, with the response that it actually made it more challenging. It is the non-Web 2.0 classes that were standard and easier to get through.

The students were fans of Facebook, but didn’t see the point in Twitter, to which an audience member suggested that the advantages of Twitter were not obvious and that people needed to learn the nuances of the application in order to appreciate it.

The issue of access to the Internet and the availability of computers came up. As this is a private school, the students come from families that can afford computers and have the education to use them, while students from lower-income districts can’t participate in Web 2.0 learning to the same degree, increasing the digital divide. Ms. Baker correctly pointed out that this is a community issue, where the local community must find ways to overcome shortages of computers and internet access lest they fall behind.

Additional:

See the wiki for this session, which has links to additional resources.

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.

This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

Maria Droujkova and Blake Stacey hosted this small session on tools for visualizing mathematics and building an online mathematics community. Stacey started off by dazzling us with Greg Egan’s Light Mill applet, which provides a two-dimensional simulation of a Crookes Radiometer, one of those light bulb-like objects with a fan inside that spins when placed in sunlight (I also learned they spin backwards when placed in the refrigerator). The simulation shows the movement of atoms driving the turning of the fan blades.

Greg Egan’s Light Mill Applet
Credit:

Then Stacey demonstrated a python script he wrote in 15 minutes to simulate the Moon’s orbit around the Earth to scale using VPython (I’ve been fiddling with the processing java framework for similar apps). While such simulations are simple and can’t compete with video games, Droujkova made the insightful observation that when you are the programmer, capable of tweeking the variables and logic within your simulation, the simple program becomes far more engaging and enlightening.

Droujkova pulled up a Theory of Change mind map she had worked on, illustrating how a network of people interested in mathematics in local areas can affect big change.

Theory of Change
(Click to Enlarge)
Credit: Maria Droujkova

In it, she identifies five communities of math enthusiasts, of which I would consider myself in the “Humanistic” category:

1. Executable mathematics: mathematics you interact with, an abacus, logarithmic ruler, rubics cube, mathematical objects become social objects that people can play with and interact with, Google Analytics, (My own recent examples: Daqarta Audio analyzer and Eureqa Data inference program) GraphJam
2. Psychology of mathematics: covers math anxieties, values of mathematical sophistication (precision, logical arguments), meta-cognitive skills (problem solving),
3. Mathematical Authoring: science fairs, competitions, there is nothing for students to demonstrate mathematics until graduate school, give kids an opportunity to build their own math objects (The Government 2.0 session mentioned President Obama bringing winners of science fairs to the Whitehouse)
4. Humanistic Mathematics: make mathematics a spectator sport, demonstrate the beauty of mathematics in art, music, spectator sport, stories, youtube, illusions
5. Community Mathematics: compared to science mathematics has no online coverage, math 2.0, networks, social objects, (Google Android’s Maths Workout combines social networking with math challenges and Arthur Benjamin, the Mathemagician)

Droujkova pointed out that, if you think there’s a lack of public interest in science online, think of how it feels to be in mathematics. She has set up a math interest group in order to organize people with diverse interests in mathematics and foster an ongoing dialogue.

Additional:

See the wiki for this session, which has links to additional resources.

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.

This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

Super-giga-kudos to Abel Pharmboy and Damond Nollan for addressing what has been a conscience-pinging aspect of attending Science Online each year: the fact that I spend Martin Luther King day blogging about the conference. The presentation focused on historic Durham, home of North Carolina Central University (NCCU), ranked number one among public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and Martin Luther King’s history of visiting the locale.

One personal difficulty I’ve had teaching our neighborhood kids about computer science is the incredible lack of prominent African Americans in Computer Science. Women are well-represented historically (if not presently), but African Americans make up a scant 0.25 percent of Computer Scientists according to one source. For this reason, I was thankful to be introduced to Dr. Marjorie Lee Brown (1914-1979), a mathematician at NCCU who acquired the first mainframe computer for a Historically Black College and University through a $60,000 grant from IBM in 1960. Dr. Brown is going into my slides next to Grace Hopper the next time I’m referencing Computer Science role models.

An interesting statistic that was brought up in the session was that, while minorities haven’t adopted personal computers as much as whites, they have outpaced whites in the adoption of cell-phone technologies:

Technology Adoption Among Ethnic Groups

Is this a potential in-road to bringing minorities into the online forum? This depends on the cell phone. As smartphones become more affordable and more prevalent, I am optimistic that these palm-computers will help connect minorities to the online community. However, organizations like The Kramden Institute, which provides refurbished computers to honors students in need, will continue to be the only substantive way of bridging the digital divide.

The presentation covered Dr. Martin Luther King’s many visits to the area, and introduced me to this variation of a Rabbi Hillel Silver quote Dr. King made:

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values.

The two are not rivals. They are complementary.

Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.

As someone who is beginning to lean toward spiritual naturalism over militant atheism, replacing the word “religion” with “spirituality” makes this quote, not just acceptable, but highly-enlightening.

Additional:

See coverage of the Casting a Wider Net: Promoting Gender and Ethnic Diversity in STEM session.

See the wiki for this session, which has links to additional resources.

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.

This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

“How far can you stretch a metaphor before it finally snaps?” – Tom Servo, MST3K

Adding visuals to blog posts and science articles is an essential means of drawing a reader into your content. while I am big on posting CC images in my daily links, I realized with this session that I am not always cognizant of whether the images I post help my readers grasp certain complex concepts (with the exception of maybe my post on thermodynamics). Glendon Mellow’s oil paintings and Felice Frankel’s photography provide unique ways of looking at scientific concepts that give readers a conceptual hook for retaining those ideas.

Mellow’s work Haldane’s Precambrian Puzzle was a delightful metaphor for the complexity of assembling the puzzle piece fossils in the geological strata into a coherent and accurate picture. The painting is a collection of ceramic tiles that, when put together in one configuration, depict a rabbit skeleton in the same geological layer as several trilobites, which would be problematic for evolutionary theory.

Haldane’s Precambrian Puzzle
Credit: Glendon Mellow

However another arrangement of the tiles provides a more accurate depiction of things. It was noted that this also symbolizes all scientific pursuits, such as looking at data in different ways to make new discoveries. This reminded me of when scientists discovered bits of fossil they had collected of multiple organisms turned out to be a single alien-looking animal or the historical debate over Hallucigenia sparsa and which side of the animal is up.

Felice Frankel’s photograph metaphors were much more challenging, and I had to agree with her that they were too open to interpretation without the prose of the book they appear in, George M. Whitesides No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale; however, it is undeniable that her photography enhances the ideas and strengthens the reader’s understanding and retention of the concepts. One of my favorite photos from the session was of a single string vibrating on a viola, representing electron excitation, which made the whole concept of electron orbitals more concrete for me.

Ann Allen of the Charlotte Observer brought up a personal experience where she was driving in Florida, saw a strange cloud in the sky and thought it had something to do with the Air Force Base. Then she completely forgot about it until she got home and her husband told her the Challenger Space Shuttle had blown up. Without context, she could not retain the memory of what she had seen, but, with it, she has kept the memory, and the neurological-quirk she experienced with it, to this day. Metaphors provide the context that enables understanding in our readers and allows them to retain the empirical facts associated with them.

I jotted down a note in my laptop asking myself, “What kinds of visual metaphors do we use in Computer Science?” When Mellow reminded me of a CS metaphor I had posted in response to his session last year, where I mentioned the metaphors we use to interface with our computers, like the metaphor of the desktop, recycle bin, and folders, representing the complex processes of organizing data on hardware. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, pioneer in computer science, used to bring 11 centimeter strips of phone cord to meetings to illustrate one nanosecond of network traffic.

Several participants brought up the point that everything is a metaphor, words are metaphors and we understand everything in the world through metaphors. Serendipitously, I am reading You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier, where he further elaborates on this idea of everything being a metaphor with the way our senses interpret the world:

The visible colors are merely words for different wavelengths of light. Every sound wave is actually composed of numerous sine waves, each of which can be easily described mathematically. Each one is like a particular size of bump in the corduroy roads of my childhood… But the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient; there is no “smell pixel.” Think of it this way: colors and sounds can be measured with rulers, but odors must be looked up in a dictionary.

While our eyes and ears are tuned to gradients, our olfactory senses are like a library of metaphors for chemical signatures. Many breeds of dogs have long noses to accommodate the extensive library of chemical signatures they are able to identify.

Dog Nose
Credit: Narisa

One of the things I really enjoyed about this session was the artists’ enthusiasm for hearing interpretations of their work that they had never considered. The open nature of the humanity’s, its free-association, is an imaginative exercise that allows us to find new connections in empirical analysis.

Additional:

See the wiki for this session, which has links to additional resources.

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.