Podcast University

Recent research from the psychology department at the State University of New York at Fredonia reveals that students who "attend" lectures by watching recorded podcasts gain higher exam scores than those who attend physically. This has been a shock to the professing community and brought the national spotlight to the lead researcher - Dr. Dani McKinney. The research was recently discussed in New Scientist.

Having experienced the benefits of recorded lectures first hand, the results of this experiment are not surprising. Not only can a student rewind and repeat key portion of the lectures but the ability to pause and bring up research articles or other background information allows a pupil to come up to speed on a topic before resuming the talking head in front of them. I would argue that a student observing a podcast lecture spends more time engaged in learning than a yawning coffee corpse waiting for the caffeine to take hold.

The scientific method needs to be more rigorously applied and the results repeated, but I believe Dr. McKinney is planning follow up large scale experiments. This finding is the seed of what could be a revolution in collegiate information transfer.

As a student and teacher of biochemistry I have often mused at innovative ways to transfer knowledge of protein architecture and function. I envision the classrooms of the future to hold large interactive holographic displays. A professor might guide an interactive tour of the cell while he/she explains the catalytic triad and the students are able to manipulate the structure while their classmates watch. For children I would suggest a Nerf version of amino acid building blocks having magnets embedded in the foam to illustrate hydrogen bonds. A group of graduate students and I have been visiting a local elementary school to teach them about genetics and enzymes. At first I was skeptical of how much they would actually "get" but to my surprise they "got" a lot more than I thought. With the advent of recorded lecture series there is no reason real science education could not start much early in the public education system of United States.

The Four Horseman

OK, which one of these guys came up with that name? Next they'll be "the four horsemen - men in tights"

Anyway, I couldn't help posting this mainly because of two new YouTube features - one - the colored border and - two - the HD button - you can watch it in high definition! Vimeo is cool but I knew YouTube wouldn't be that far behind.

Within the first two minutes of this video I was reminded that the UN is considering a resolution banning blasphemy. Talk about the religious folks playing the "hurt feelings card." Now it will be illegal in the eyes of the UN to question any religion's authority anywhere in the world.

Sunday Celebration - Peripetics

In the spirit of Albuquerque's own Felix Wurman I'd like to begin a weekly celebration of art - the Sunday Celebration. We have done this once before but we would like to make this a regular event.

The following piece entitled PERIPETICS is one of 20 incredibly creative videos displayed here by Smashing Magazine. These six dynamic sculptures were created by Zeitguised for the "opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.” The seamless use of graphics and sound enhances the already entrancing spectacle.

Religion is stale and rigid, life is not.

Cheerio my brethren! It is I, Dr. Reverend Lucius Chewbuculus, descendant of an ancient lineage of hairy creatures, who seeks peaceful progression by way of the warrior spirit of pre-colonial American antiquity. I hath come across an atheist blog post listing 101 quotes with regard to atheism or religion in general. Here I list and expand upon several quotes that stand out to me. Check out the link above to view all 101 quotes should this sort of thing suit your fancy.

First I would like to point to a few quotes that made me laugh. While I don’t necessarily believe in the magic of fairies, I certainly believe in the magic of laughter. What magic is this? It is impossible to say at this time, however reliable sources in my head say laughter amplifies and reverberates ones Chi, thus realigning the liquid crystalline structure of water in our cells thereby reducing the stress associated with stale rigidity. Laughter is clearly a complicated matter, so you’ll have to just trust me on this. I’ve seen mystical occurrences in the desert, so I am practically a prophet.

“The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” - Penn and Teller

“Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family.” - Steven Colbert

“It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” - Ludwig Feuerbach

“Gods don’t kill people. People with Gods kill people.” - David Viaene

Perhaps some or none of these quotes strike you as funny. No problem, I actually laughed at some and then cried a little. While I don’t necessarily believe in challenging all elves I should encounter at a crossroads to a dueling of swords, I do believe in the power of tears! Nothing in the physical universal is stable or static, this is especially true of life. Actually these conditions exhibit robust inhibitory effects on life. Our cells terminate at lipid structures that crash upon other cells and extracellular matrix and then recede, continually, much like the waves of the ocean. Just as the gravitational force of the moon impacts ocean swells, prophetic insight tells me that the cohesive forces of our tears induce dynamic fluidity of our cell membranes counteracting the stress associated with stale rigidity.

“Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived.” - Isaac Asimov

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” - Richard Dawkins

Many aspects of “religion” are stale, rigid and detrimental to inhabitants of earth. Laughter and tears can attest. The division of people into distinctly characterized sects, the installation of fear and manipulation by it, the intolerance of differences… just to name a few. These stale and rigid aspects of religion stand against life and unity! Religion as we know it is obsolete! I will however concede that many elements of “religion” are conducive to life and unity, such as the elements of “open” community gatherings that encourage interaction and celebration. While I would warn the “religious” to be wary of passing though life without questioning their beliefs and perspectives, I would warn atheists against the same. Perhaps “religion” doesn’t need to be abandoned altogether, just transfomed in a massive evolution towards a new age of enlightenment on earth. A progression that seeks to cultivate and harness free thought, to respect reason and diversity and to unite rather than divide.

VIVA LA TOM PAINE’S GHOST!

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

TAX TIME - a forecast for dollars and democracy

As I used TurboTax this year to file my 2008 returns I was mesmerized by the floating green digits in the upper right corner of the window. This number represented the amount of my money the federal government would return to me this year. This floating variable turned filing into a game where I, the player, tried to see how much a I could legitimately deduct to maximize that green number. What I find disheartening about this popular system of "doing your taxes" is the absence of social-consciousness. Of course the dollar amount of the return is important to each filer but the number that should also be highlighted and in bold is the amount of money the government will actually keep. If everyone were keenly aware of this number maybe they would feel a desire to see to it that Uncle Sam spend it wisely.

I had heard the IRS was going to write their own freeware to help taxpayers e-file with ease, but because of much lobbying TurboTax convinced them not to in exchange for offering their most basic service free to customers. I laud the IRS for attempting a threat on the free market of tax preparation swindlers and I think those eager software programmers over at the IRS might still have a future.

In the movie Stranger than Fiction the character Ana Pascal (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) refuses to pay the portion of her taxes going to government works she feels contradict her moral values (i.e. IRAQ). Rather than not paying a portion of her taxes what if she lived in a world where she could tell her government exactly which government programs she'd like her taxes spent on? To serious politicians the idea of line item taxation might seem juvenile and silly but in reality there is no reason a program written by the IRS as an addendum to TurboTax could not be put into action.

Here is the idea...

After e-filing your taxes a window shows up with the amount of money to be kept by the government displayed along with two buttons. Button 1 says, "I give my federal representatives the right to decide how to spend the money paid by me in the form of Tax for the year ----." Button 2 reads "I wish to appropriate the money paid by me in taxes to the federal programs of my choosing." If the user clicks button 1 the return is filed and the user goes on having a pleasant Sunday. If the user clicks button 2 then a cascade of buttons ensues. The first page might say "I allocate X% of my total withholdings to -(a drop down list of all the departments of the federal government - defense, education, interior, etc. etc.) After passing this initial breakdown step the user would have the option of ending it or continuing to further breakdown precisely how they want their money spent. For example, say a person wanted their withholdings to go to research on Parkinson's disease they could theoretically go as far as allocating that money within the NIH. At every level of allocation the user would maintain the ability to stop and be done, allowing legislatures to step in and finish the decision making process for them. The degree of participation could be anything from 0 to 100%. What would be accomplished by this? First, a heightened awareness of what exactly the government does would permeate all who participate to even the slightest degree, and second and most importantly, this would provide real power to the people in prioritizing our national agenda. I don't know what this experiment might look like but I predict that defense spending would decline precipitously while investment in education, infrastructure, and agriculture would spike.

In the age of the internet this kind of people-powered taxation mechanism is possible. It is merely a matter of prying the power from the citadel in Washington where amassed power has grown to a sickening head over two centuries while our fledgling democracy has come into adolescence as a nation. If the founders knew what level of personal connection would someday come through this thing we call the internet they would have advocated a mechanism as I have just proposed. This mechanism fits soundly into the enlightenment precept that "Government can only be empowered by its citizens."

If you like this idea do what my grandmother always did, write your congress person and forward this article to anyone you think might listen by copying this URL into an email.

Sincerely,
Your fellow tax payer

Open Lab 2008 now in print!

Last November we entered a post from TPG into a friendly competition for science writing on the web. Our entry was selected for this fine anthology and I am happy to announce it is now in print and available here at Lulu.com. (It will be available from Amazon later, but buying it from Lulu means that the proceeds go to organizing ScienceOnline '10 next January.)

At first I was skeptical of the validity of this competition thinking it might be like those "poetry anthologies" anyone taking a high school English class is solicited to submit to, but I now realize that openlab is a legitimate competition displaying the best science writing out there. Entries from some of my favorite blogs like Panda's Thumb, and not exactly rocket science have been selected in the past. There was even a shout out to the openlab competition in Discover Magazine on page 20 of the March 2009 issue. Along with us, two professional science writers for Discover were honored among the top 50 science posts for 2008 in openlab.

Participation in this process has been truly rewarding, introducing TPG to a broad range of creative minds and new ideas. Read our entry here. I encourage anyone reading this to consider participating in our own competition the theme of which is not relegated to scientific musings but is a challenge to integrate multiple forms of media into a flowing and coherent thought. On top of some cash you may even earn some new dendritic morphology.

Franklin a Fleming?

Thomas Paine came to America largely through his connection to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin provided Paine a critical letter of introduction which Paine presented in Philadelphia upon his arrival in 1774. The stories of these founders are tightly woven and many works attributed to one or the other may have been the result of conversations between the two. While Paine was the son of a staymaker (one who crafts corsets), Franklin was the son of a candle and soap maker. But the threads of their philosophical connection coalesce further as Franklin's ancestry is uncovered by modern historians. The Belgian paper Flanders Today reveals Franklin's ancestors were of Belgian (more specifically Flemish) descent. Franklin's DNA meandered to America from Flanders by way of England’s second largest city at the time - Norwich. This city is situated close to the North Sea and a "historic hotbed of religious dissent." The city was flooded with Flemish emigrants in the 1560s - mostly protestant weavers. They were fleeing persecution by a Spanish duke. Among these sartorial religious refugees were Benjamin Franklin's maternal great-great-grandparents. Though his grandfather Peter died 16 years before his birth, Franklin's writings reflect how he came to embody the "decent plainness and manly freedom" exemplified by his grandfather. The connection between clothes making and the ancestral trade of Franklin and Paine is more than serendipitous. Perhaps during the post-Renaissance middle class outgrowth crafting cloths for common people bound makers to their market and helped foster the memetic roots that would eventually rip arbitrary authority from the throne of England and place it squarely in the hands of the people. It might do the America of 2009 some good to once again start making clothes and furniture and all the myriad consumables that constitute CULTURE.

Bozeman Explosion

Bozeman, Montana is one of those places I visited through the pages of a book before being there physically. I walked through the campus of Montana State University in my mind's eye while reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which would become the first book along my travels down the rabbit hole of heady material. For those who have read it Robert Pirsig's descriptions of this collegiate mountain town give the place an electric but dissonant feel. It was here the author began his personal demolition into a being of more than one simultaneous opinion.

Today there was an explosion in the real Bozeman. It is not clear at this point what the cause of this conflagration was but the video seen below scares me. This was recorded only a few blocks away from the incident only a few months ago. I am not claiming these are the culprits but merely suggesting that the alibis of this group be collected and assessed. Displayed here is exactly the type of deleterious reprogramming the human brain can undergo; fervent righteousness - the enemy of reason - certainty.

PZ Myers on his blog Pharyngula describes this phenomenon in more detail while discussing points made by Richard Dawkins at a recent lecture.

"He talked quite a bit about the flexibility of the human brain, a property that was the product of selection, yet that same flexibility means it can be reprogrammed into deleterious byways, such as religion or fanaticism or unthinking patriotism."

I truly believe the most effective way to battle fanatically driven domestic terrorism (Waco, Oklahoma city, 9/11 etc. etc.) is not by building bigger prisons but by building larger libraries, and larger universities.




Regardless if this incident was accidental or intentional may the families affected by the explosion find solace in knowing that people all around the world are thinking about them and wishing that they do not suffer.

...I heard about this story on Twitter and though some may call this new form of media silly I think it the ultimate bypass of the corporate gatekeepers.

Founding Words

"The greatest threat to our democratic experiment will not come from those who would openly oppose us, but those who will silently follow us."
~Thomas Paine

An excellent site to reacquaint ourselves with the LIVING American genome.

Freedom to Write in Stone

USA Today has announced that humanists are happy about the recent supreme court decision regarding free speech. I consider myself a humanist yet I am not so happy about it.

The supreme court in essence ruled that a city government can decide which religious monuments to allow in public places. The issue at the center of this case began when a small religious group in Pleasant Grove, Utah known as the Summum church requested that the city display a three foot granite slab outlining its core principles, the "Seven Aphorisms" next to a monument listing the Ten Commandments that has stood on this public park since it was donated by eagle scouts in 1971. I have posted about this case before and you can find all the quarks surrounding this religion described in detail here.

The problem with the supreme court decision is that it allows city governments to choose which religions are allowed to mark up public places. In my mind when one religion is allowed to display their beliefs carved in stone then that automatically makes the surrounding space a public forum and therefore any person or peaceably assembled group of people have the right to place their words in that public forum as well.

As I said before...

"In the case of the Summon religion and their granite slab I feel like the only fair thing to do is tell the city of Pleasant Grove to either remove all religious writings from the public land or allow those tasteful and aesthetically pleasing views of other religions to be erected as monuments of equal size and equal real estate value. The city still has the right to refuse in this instance but has to be an equal opportunity censor."

What do you think?