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cultural literacy
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teaching &
education
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Mars Express flyby of Phobos (ESA) on 12/29/2013 Experience Earthrise (NASA) simulation video on the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8's Christmas Eve happy winter solstice! (12/21/13 5:11 pm EST) (Earth & Sky) everything you need to know new color images of asteroid Vesta (NASA Dawn) no artist could paint like this Water plumes on Europa (Hubble) finally, the smoking gun Clay-like minerals found on Europa's crust (NASA Galileo) indications of a comet or asteroid collision? China soft-lands rover on Moon (NY Times) 3rd country on the moon; first soft landing in 40 years |
radius gap found between smallest stars and largest brown dwarfs (Sky and Telescope) smallest stars have T > 2000 K; brown dwarfs T < 1800 K help search for erupting black holes (Radio Galaxy Zoo) something to do while you're waiting for dinner, for Santa to arrive, for the start of the next football bowl game, or for your visiting relatives to leave a "holiday light show" (Hubble) a celestial wreath of reflective dust is this year's holiday image molecular surprise in the Crab Nebula (Sky and Telescope) argon (hydride) ESA successfully launches Gaia (12/19) (ESA) to map 1M stars, 1% of the galaxy Giant star cluster in the making (Astronomy) W49A, much bigger & brighter than the Orion Nebula |
Why do so many hot Jupiters rotate opposite to their revolution? (Astrobites) the short answer: a companion farther out closest brown dwarf has a planet? (Astronomy) Atmospheric signatures of water on 5 exoplanets (Hubble) KOI 2700b: planet or comet? (Astrobites) a planet with a tail or a comet too close to its star? Inner edge of Habitable Zone farther out than some think? (Nature) the inner edge is at 0.95 au (not 0.5 au) say new climate models |
Galaxy in a Bottle: simulating the formation of spiral galaxies (Astrobites) AGNs: less effect on host galaxies than thought? (Astrobites) Milky Way back to having 4 arms again (Earth & Sky) an upgrade from 2 Life possible in the very early universe? (Nature) microwave background would have provided sufficient heating Anomalies in cosmic background radiation unexplained (Nature) another year of data analysis needed to resolve the problem? double SMBH in galaxy core (Scientific American, WISE) with nice spectral evidence Dwarf Galaxies: tracking our neighbors' past (Nature) |
computer evidence for holographic universe? (in a narrow selection of non-real universes) (Nature) if it behaves like a hologram, is it one? tired of multiverses and holographic universes? how about rainbow gravity? (Scientific American) different wavelengths of light experience different spacetimes |
the end-of-the-year looking forward, looking backward A Deadly Mix in Benghazi (NY Times) neither the Republican Congress nor the Obama administration got it right on the Libyan attack and Why we'll never stop arguing about Benghazi (Politico) Red and Blue States Move in Opposite Directions in Polarized US (Washington Post) The West has lost control of the world and disaster awaits (London Telegraph) really? Ted Cruz: the first year (Dallas News) the resurrection of the Know-Nothing party The Year in News (Indy Week) the good, the bad, & the ugly in NC and the Triangle (well, mostly the bad and ugly) The misplaced priorities of college football (Indy Week) Happy Holidays from your government (New Yorker) what it accomplished this year and a view from the other side, The year Washington fled reality (Senator Tom Coburn) gee, he didn't mention the 40 votes to defund Obamacare, his own Senate's inability to pass a farm bill, the House's inability to deal with immigration... I wonder why? (plus he claimed Congress avoided a government shutdown... what planet is he living on?) spying, continued Edward Snowden: the interview (Washington Post) why he thinks he's been vindicated State of Deception (New Yorker) Why won't we rein in the intelligence community? 46 recommendation for the NSA (New Yorker) 5 Lies the NSA would like you to believe (Guardian) the lies the NSA told on '60 Minutes' US Court Finds NSA spying Unconstitutional (NY Times) finally Demand Your Privacy (Washington Post) it's the only way the illegal spying will stop current events The Cruelest Cut of All (Washington Post) unemployment benefits to stop for 1 million+ and How Congress is making the employment problem worse (Washington Post) while the rest of US looks the other way 9 questions about South Sudan that you were afraid to ask (Washington Post) miscellaneous science Why milennials can't grow up (Slate) sad, and true, but still hilarious and the related.... How snowplow parents trap their kids (Washington Post) What dialect are you from? (NY Times) the answers to 25 questions will tell where you're from How journals like Nature, Cell, and Science are bad for science (Guardian) Has the Vermeer mystery been solved? (Vanity Fair) the story of the Penn-and-Teller film, Tim's Vermeer What Happens to the Brain after a Concussion (NY Times) is it time to outlaw football? Get Rid of the TSA (Washington Post) the most useless government appendage idRid o politicians The Year of McCrory Lies (IndyWeek) unfortunately, his policies have ruinous consequences for NC citizens The Bible as Bludgeon (NY Times) you'd better have religion if you run for office The Decay of American Political Institutions (Francis Fukuyuma) the fix will require more than reforms... some ideas |
the NY Times series on Science/Math education: the new math: Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils (NY Times) Is American Culture to Blame for Failing Schools? (NY Times) wow, I think someone finally has got it right Why Other Countries Teach Better (NY Times) why students do better overseas: better teacher training; better school funding; lack of elitism Teachers Tell Us How To Fix Science/Math Education (NY Times) including a devastating comment about the quality of NC education students When Even Gifted Students Can't Keep Up (NY Times) in math & science, the best have to fend for themselves (or maybe go to a special school?) Math & Science: Not Just for Geeks? (NY Times) gee, let's use hip-hop, TV & movie scripts, video games etc., to teach science & math, because that's what real life is like, right? What's Missing in Science Classes (NY Times) women and minorities ____________ WUNC's series on NC Teachers: The Political Power of Teach for America in North Carolina Schools of Education produce effective teachers... utter NONSENSE says an independent study ____________ Pope Center: UNC-CH needs to cut 80% of its 4000 courses, (i.e., all the "trivial" ones) (Raleigh N&O) actually from October, but I missed it The Selling of ADHD (NY TImes) or why guidance counselors should be banned from schools The Wrong College Ratings (NY Times) you can't reduce complex education issues to a rating |
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solar system |
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3.5-BY old Mars lake may have harbored life (NY Times) (don't get too excited, "life" means microbes) Planetary astronomers alarmed by proposed NASA funding (Nature) zero new proposals to be funded in 2014 'comet of the century' ISON fizzles (death march, uhh movie, included) (Sky and Telescope) 'ballyhoed comet is a speck not a spectacle'... 'ISON is now ISOFF'... when will astronomers stop crying 'wolf'? December guide to the naked-eye planets (Earth & Sky) Venus (at its brightest!) and Jupiter in the evening; Mars, Saturn, and Mercury in the early morning |
supernova remnants seeing Cas A in 3-D (Chandra) an unexpected reverse shockwave heats the interior of the Tycho A (Astronomy) |
Prevalence of Planets that might be Earth-like (Astrobites) Electrostatic Activation of Pre-Biotic Chemistry (Astrobites) |
why does Dark Energy accelerate the universe? (Preposterous Universe) an award-winning writer (for his Higgs boson book) makes dark energy almost unintelligible (at least to me) 3 star-forming clouds at z ≈ 7 seem to be merging into a galaxy-to-be (Sky and Telescope) 2 supermassive black holes in death spiral (Earth & Sky) IceCube detects extraterrestrial neutrinos (Astrobites) |
photon torpedoes to solve energy crisis (Scientific American) yeah, maybe in the 24th century Infinity Dispute Divides Mathematicians (Quanta) |
the sky free download: Viewing the Night Sky with binoculars (Astronomy) Hello Darkness, My Old Friend (New Scientist) how to reclaim the night reading best science/math books of the year: from Scientific American from The Royal Academy of Science best books of the year 10 best 100 notable (NY Times) Moral Monday convictions impinge on citizens' right to assemble (Greensboro News & Record) where else do you go to protest the behavior of the legislature?? how can protesting be a criminal act? America the Vulgar (Wall Street Journal) public policy Governor McCrory and his Reindeer Games (Raleigh N&O) as in "500,000 people ... denied Medicaid benefits and the 170,000 families whose unemployment benefits he’s ended' Black Friday and the Race to the Bottom (New Yorker) Walmart & Target workers can't afford what their stores sell Is Obama (finally) getting serious about addressing income inequality? (New Yorker) President's speech here Transparency International's Annual List US is 19th least-corrupt.... only 1 in 4 Americans bribe higher-ups Greatest Hit Fallacies from Republicans on health care (Washington Post) their hypocrisy shows no bounds 0.5 Million people die each year in hospitals due to mistakes (NY Times) why can't we get data on which hospitals are safe and which are deadly? |
Who Says Math Has to Be Boring? (NY Times) 90% of students have no interest in pursuing STEM careers... 4 suggestions for fixing this NC ranks dead last in making teacher pay a priority (Charlotte Observer) '"... how much worse NC has been than every other state in the past decade" NC, where it now takes 15 years before you get to make $40,000 When No Child Dreams of Being a Teacher (Raleigh N&O) and you wonder why 14,000 (!) NC teachers left this year to teach somewhere else? The Value of Experienced Teachers (Raleigh N&O) but it's not what the NC Republican legislature cares about testing Can't We Do Better? (NY Times) how to respond to the PISA test results 15-year-olds lag in International PISA tests (NY Times) even Vietnam is better than us in science & math but so what? maybe we're better at other things, like creativity? no wait, we only do better in int'l tests involving memorization.... and anyway, "students are already graduating from college at higher rates than can be absorbed by the labor market" (so what's the point of getting smarter???) try your hand at 7 questions here (aimed at 15-yr-olds) Can Harvard Stop Giving So Many A's? (CNN) no, it's inbred in their culture |
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sky events best-of-2013 Venus appearance is happening now through December (Astronomy) comet news how to find comet ISON: (I last saw it on the morning of 11/19/13 when it was m = 4.9, brighter than Uranus... and brightening by about 0.1 magnitude per day.... it's visible in binoculars in a reasonably dark sky... it looks fairly point-like, i.e., a tiny nucleus/coma with no tail... I couldn't see it with the naked eye... it's getting so close to the sun, and the moon is getting closer to it, I don't think it's worth looking for till after it rounds the sun in early december However, comet Lovejoy IS worth looking for... it's much larger and brighter, bigger than the largest globular clusters, and noticeably different from stars the best finding chart Nov 15 - Nov 27 (on white background) (includes both Comet Lovejoy and comet ISON) live finding charts (position) for ISON for Lovejoy on black background magnified live finding charts (position & magnitude) for ISON for Lovejoy (curiously this site says ISON is 20x brighter than Lovejoy; it is clearly not.... perhaps it is referring to surface brightness??) finding chart for mid-November (11-21) on dark blue background solar system news 'Black Beauty', oldest Mars meteorite found on Earth (Physics World) at 4.4 billion years old, from a time when Mars was wet and warm Seeding Life on Other Worlds (astrobites, astro-ph) Could terrestrial microbes have made it the Jovian moons? yes! Cassini's view of Saturn and Earth (NASA) Mercury, Venus, Mars too Gravity maps finally reveal why back side of the Moon has so many craters (Nature) higher temperatures on the moon's near side caused maria flooding MAVEN, newly-launched Mars orbiter intends to find out what happened to the Martian atmosphere NY Times NASA asteroid news 2002 UX5, largest Kuiper belt asteroid less dense than water (Nature) a challenge to planetary formation theories Risk of massive asteroid strike underestimated (Nature) Chelyabinsk asteroid twice as massive as previously thought Hubble finds an asteroid with 6 tails (Nature) solar winds pushes away dust tails |
A look at the solar system's nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri (Hubble) part of the triple-star system alpha Centauri Ionized metals found in black hole's jet (Sky and Telescope) an indication that black-hole jets are powered by the accretion disk and not black-hole spin |
Planet radius as a proxy for planet composition (astrobites, astro-ph) planetary radius is a strong indicator of composition |
new CMB Planck data may hint at new quantum mechanics (Scientific American) is the lack of large-scale CMB inhomogeneities evidence for quantum non-equilibrium in the early universe? Scrapbook of the Milky Way's Formative Years (Hubble) collected images of galaxies go back 11.7 billion years |
28 high-energy 'extraterrestrial' neutrinos (perhaps even 'extragalactic') detected by ICECUBE over past 2 years (Science) (Science commentary) (NY Times article) Will ARCONS transform astronomy (again)? (Sky and Telescope) a single incoming photon unleashes a cascade of thousands of electrons (rather than a single one, as in CCDs); it also has the capability to include a spectrum and a light curve in an image the electron is spherical to within 1 part in 1028 (!) (Scientific American) null electric dipole moment result deals blow to supersymmetry Photons detected without changing their quantum state (Nature) result encouraging for quantum computers |
commentary Hate is a Cheney family value (Guardian) Dick Cheney: the luckiest man live? Final Thoughts on JFK (Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal) All you wanted to know about the assassination Are We Alone in the Universe? (Paul Davies, NY Times) yeah, ok, you can't do statistics with a a sample of 1, but what's his point? chemistry calculations show that electrons can bond with inner- shell electrons, not just outer-shell electrons (Nature article) (Scientific American commentary) experiments to follow? public policy Revisiting the Gettysburg Address (Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard) "After ... shutting down the government, we are far from modeling ... why our democracy should be viewed as the 'best hope' for humankind. The world sees in the US the rapid growth of inequality; the erosion of educational opportunity and social mobility; the weakening of voting rights" The Virtues of Expanding Social Security (Paul Krugman, NP Economics) finally, some rational thinking is a climate change revolution imminent? (Washington Post) how long before the 'supine Congress' stops listening to oil & gas lobby lies and misdirection? The Year the Monarchs Didn't Appear (NY Times) the dire consequences of losing the birds & the bees, & the butterflies Where the Druggies Live (Washington Post) blue staters are into illegal drugs... red staters abuse prescription drugs... Minnesotans like alchohol... Cal and RI have the most substance disorders House Republicans set to require science grant recipients justify their work to be in the interest of 'national defense' (Nature) is astrophysics in the interest of national defense? The Shame of American Health Care (NY Times) we pay more & get less than other advanced countries Our Insane Food Policy (Joseph Steiglitz, NP Economics winner) " the arrangement proposed in the House Republicans’ farm bill ... takes ... money necessary for bare survival from the poorest Americans, and gives it to a small group of the undeserving rich, in return for their campaign contributions and political support." How Obamacare shows how Americans are becoming jerks (Guardian) or at least selfish and self-centered Why Obamacare works in Kentucky, Washington, and Connecticut (Washington Post) and why it would work if Republicans would spend more time trying to help fix it instead of obstructing it |
A Campaign to Recruit Top Students to become Teachers (NY Times) NC Business Group Plans Big Push on Education (Raleigh N&O) but will they ask actual teachers for input? Recent grads suffering 'curse of great attitudes' (Raleigh N & O) "a generation ... that played video games (and) saved entire worlds"... taught "to never settle for anything that makes them unhappy", and "told that they are the most intelligent students ever" finally faces reality or put more bluntly, Are Kids Too Coddled? (NY Times) “While American parents are pulling their kids out of tests because the results make the kids feel bad, parents in other countries are looking at the results and asking themselves how they can help their children do better.” Economic status biggest factor for successful students (Raleigh N&O) duhhh... stop blaming teachers instead of society Frequent Testing Enhances College Learning (NY Times) double duh... For better public education, invest more and invest early (Raleigh N&O) triple duh... |
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rare hybrid eclipse on Sunday, November 3 (Earth & Sky) in US, only east-coast viewers get a glimpse, at sunrise & just after in Durham, sunrise is 6:43 am; partial eclipse ends at 7:08 am; (remember this is the 1st day of non-daylight-savings-time) 28% of the sun's diameter will be covered at sunrise eye safety for eclipse watching similar eclipse timings/predictions for other US cities Cassini reveals new views of Titan's (methane & ethane) lakes (JPL) 28 solar flares in the past 7 days; who says we're not at solar max? (LA Times) including a speeded-up solar movie, with appropriate sun music best-of-2013 Venus appearance is happening now through December (Astronomy) how to find comet ISON: (it still requires a telescope; on 11/6/13 it was m = 7.5, brighter than Neptune... and brightening by about 0.1 magnitude per day.... binoculars in a dark sky should work by the 2nd week of November?) live finding chart & magnitude finding chart for early November finding chart Nov 9 - Nov 18 (also includes Comet Lovejoy, which is brighter! than ISON) finding chart for all of 2013 |
Boomerang Nebula: ALMA finds coldest place in the universe T = 1° Kelvin |
2 (or is it 40?) billion Earth-like planets in just our galaxy ! NY Times link Guardian link Washington Post link National Academy of Sciences Earth 2.0: why it's possible (OnPoint, NPR 1-hour audio) for a (slightly) more pessimistic view, see late December above |
clear perspectives on the new LUX results no evidence (yet) for WIMPs (see sept-oct link below for earlier announcements) |
privacy Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin? (Mother Jones) sometimes it's hard to tell the difference Tech elite outraged by NSA... Oh, really? (Milwaukee Journal) 'delicious irony' What social media and the NSA have in common (Washington Post) what kind of society are we creating? current events Calling America: Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? (NY Times) is anyone there? on America the missing It's time to nationalize the banks: How Bad Was It? The costs of the recent bank-caused financial meltdown (Federal Reserve Bank) $120,000 for each US household! so why aren't Americans rioting in the streets? Walmart: An Economic Cancer on American Cities (Salon) case study: Asheville, NC The Obama Adminstration and the Press (Committee to Protect Journalists) despite pledging an open government, the Obama administration has been outright hostile to journalists and whistleblowers The Gun Report: November 8, 2013 (NY Times) 10,300+ have died by gun violence since Newtown, less than 1 year ago Lies and Trickery in NC Voting (The Independent) NC Attorney General should declare NC voting law unconstitutional A Tale of Two Surgeries (Raleigh N & O) the absurd US healthcare system War on the Poor I War on the Poor II War on the Poor III |
Why Republicans hate public education (Independent Weekly) Overthinking (about teachers' bad pay, loss of tenure, loss of pay for more education) (Raleigh N&O) Continual talk won't solve the threats to public schools Investing in Student Achievement (North Carolina Justice Center) what NC's declining support for education will mean When the good teachers leave, so does NC's future (Raleigh N&O) the story of another teacher who can no longer afford to teach Have NC teachers reached the boiling point? (NC Policy Watch) Walk-In stands up for education in Durham (Raleigh N&O) NC Teachers Deserve to be Heard by Legislators (Raleigh N&O) Teacher events protest NC education funding (Raleigh N&O) McCrory says there are 'legitimate gripes' oh really!?! so where was he when all this happened last summer? Keep our teachers from walking away (Raleigh N&O) NC: highest number of certified teachers; 3rd lowest teacher pay... so much for the value of certification |
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