Ryandom Sample

Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students are often encouraged to maximize their engagement with supervised research and minimize teaching obligations. However, the process of teaching students engaged in inquiry provides practice in the application of important research skills. Using a performance rubric, we compared the quality of methodological skills demonstrated in written research proposals for two groups of early career graduate students (those with both teaching and research responsibilities and those with only research responsibilities) at the beginning and end of an academic year. After statistically controlling for preexisting differences between groups, students who both taught and conducted research demonstrate significantly greater improvement in their abilities to generate testable hypotheses and design valid experiments. These results indicate that teaching experience can contribute substantially to the improvement of essential research skills.

 

 

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract

I do love darts. Time to leverage programming and stats to make me better!

This website will be going dark to protest SOPA/PIPA on the 18th of January, in solidarity with other websites like reddit.com, boingboing.com and wikipedia.com.

SOPA and PIPA are efforts by the US House and Senate respectively to introduce legislation that will enable the US to authorize DNS blocking of websites. That was a geeky acronym, but if you are unfamiliar, the key point I think you need to know is that this is what China does as part of it’s great firewall to block “undesirable” information. It is internet breaking censorship, worthy of dictators, not the United States of America. SOPA and PIPA are legislation paid for by media corporations , in the guise of protecting intellectual property, that seriously threaten your freedom. To prevent you from maybe illegally streaming a copy of last week’s Modern Family, corporations are willing to install the same type of blocking system employed by dictators world-wide.

As a rule of thumb, whenever you are asked to grant a new power to the government, it is a good practice to imagine your worst political enemy now having that ability, and how you would feel about it. For my father, that would mean Ted Kennedy or Dianne Feinstein For me, it means George W. Bush and Dianne Feinstein. (Feinstein is a sponsor of PIPA).

Do you want a website to be “black holed” from the internet on the say-so of  a corporation without due process?

Friends, family and readers, please join with me and write your congressperson:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/wyrfaqs.shtml

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Last week I saw a nice art project posted over on Engadget: Matt Richardson’s “Fade Away”. It uses a servo-powered pan-tilt arrangement and laser to write out tweets that contain the text “Fade Away” on a phosphorescent sheet.

It is a very clever and beautiful piece of art, and struck me because it is so much better than a  laser pan-tilt rig I am building an attempt to solve a more practical problem: The biblical plague of crows that invade campus each night in the fall and winter, and then spend the next few months defecating on everything in sight.

One of my discoveries a while back is that I could drive off the crows from my lab window using my green laser pointer. The crows really don’t like it.

Continue reading →

Sorry I haven’t been posting here all that often. I sort of found it easier to keep the updates going out with Facebook. The blog is kind of long form, so the only time I post to it is to whinge. So here is a quicky. Today is pretty good.

Crap day today.

Sometimes grad school seems so rough. Then I remember that on a semi-regular basis I get to wake up and say “I need to get access to a supercomputer today”, or “have to get ready for that international meeting I’m going to”, or even the simple fact that I get to roll in to work everyday in rumpled shorts and a semi-clean sweatshirt.