I’ve procrastinated in answering the question. I have to admit that I’m scared for our future, and that makes it hard to confront. While in general, when professors say “It seems that each year’s students are a little less prepared”, they are basically suffering from a specialized case of the “Back in my day” syndrome, this time that’s not entirely true. Under the “No Child Left Behind” act, test scores in the key fields of math and reading mattered so much that in some cases other subjects – including science – weren’t taught in all grades, but were rather focused on during the years they were tested. This means that where once kids got science every year of grades K-12 – at least in the form of getting to watch caterpillars become butterflies in kindergarten, and growing seedlings in 2nd grade – now kids may only get science every 3 years.(2) Every year since its passage during the Bush administration, a new batch of kids entered grade school and a new batch graduated. With every successive year, the kids graduating have spent more years under “No Child Left Behind”, and every successive year the kids have become less prepared for college in those areas that aren’t tested by the standardized tests.

It is my hope that whatever comes after “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) will be able to change our current slump into poor performance in the STE (and often M) parts of STEM.

To fix things,  a lot of repair work needs to be done. If you’ve ever built something, you know that it is sometimes just easier (and cheaper!) to tear something down and rebuild from scratch than it is to repair what you’ve got. With a kid’s education, however, we don’t have the option of using a sledge hammer to return everything to flat so that we can just start the building process over again. This means that in building a vision for STEM moving into the next decade, we need to include in our vision mechanisms to repair the harm NCLB has done. This means this vision needs to include ways to reignite that flame of science enthusiasm most children have when small – when they go through that dinosaurs and planets loving phase – and then feed that flame with as much inspirational content as possible. We have to both revive a starved curiosity and make up for material never learned in youth. This isn’t easy, but if we want to have a society that supports science it must be done. Put more positively, we have to inspire child-like curiosity while providing rigorous content.

Before I go any further, I have to acknowledge the added challenge of trying to teach science to a post-scientific society. Due to a lack of belief in vaccinations, the US society has lost its herd-immunity to deceases such as mumps, measles, and whopping cough. Recently, a Facebook group that facilitated parents purposely giving their kids chicken poxs instead of simply vaccinating them was in the news. The US hasn’t signed onto to the Kyoto climate protocols in part because the lobbying power of “climate skeptics;” people who turn a blind eye on scientific data showing conclusively that our planet is warming. Evolution is still not consistently taught due to the control of Christian conservatives over school systems (and in some cases just because teachers find it easier to not teach evolution than to deal with the wrath of parents), and Big Bang cosmology is missing from astronomy lessons designed to be as inoffensive as possible to those who may believe the universe is as young as a few thousand years old. I don’t know how our society achieved such an anti-scientific state. It shames me to see how we have culturally gone backwards as multiculturalism has been used as an excuse to label science as a culture and as something one isn’t required to believe in. If we are going to build a society rich in people who understand and support science, those of us who are scientifically literate need to find ways to respectfully say, “you are wrong” to people who choice to believe things not supported by the observational reality of our world and our universe. While one should be as respectful as possible of another’s religious beliefs, beliefs aren’t facts, and believing in something doesn’t make it true. Data, repeatably acquired and confirmed by more than one scientist: that is what makes something true. As a community, scientists need to consistently promote a data driven view of reality, and we need to work to get critical thinking, data analysis, and, well, reality into the classrooms.

This starts to define a picture of what STEM education must look like as we move forward. We have set of required outcomes: Must inspire child-like curiosity, must have a high efficacy in order to transfer a lot of content (and thus make up for lost time), must create people who want to see the data behind statements like “vaccines cause autism,” must demonstrate that we live in an evolving universe that is both physically and biologically changing over time due to a variety of driving forces. These basic science concepts need to be taught within the context of a world that relies on engineering solutions to problems, using technology to communicate, and that has statistics driving everything from medical research to economic models.

I don’t have the silver bullet of an idea that can address all these needs, but I do think the above problems suggest ways to concentrate our efforts and funding as we move forward. To inspire child-like curiosity, we need to expose kids (and adults!) to STEM content that is so amazing that they can’t help but forget their learned inhibitions and they revert to the “Why? How? What?” of a captivated child. This is something that can we done through effective communications of modern research and it may be most effectively done through kids magazines (remember the ones that came with the book order forms in elementary school on the ’80s? Anyone remember what they were called?), through after school and museum / science center focused programs, and through public outreach programs such as movies, TV shows, podcasts, and blogs that work to inspire through communications. To be effective, it is important that each of these mechanisms for inspiration be scaffolded with a system that facilitates questions and answers, and community building (e.g. with classroom discussions, online forums, and other discussion mechanisms).

With a healthy curiosity in place, it is also necessary to engage a healthy skepticism. This many require a fundamental change in how science is taught in some places . There is a temptation when teaching (and I know I’ve fallen prey to it at times) to teach science as a series of facts connected by equations and experiments. What is missing from this paradigm is the story of how we know what we know. When confronted with a new fact or theory, a skeptical thinker should ask, “But how do you know that?” If we expect our students to simply take what we say as gospel, then we are raising them up to see science as a faith-based system, and any “authority” figure can easily step in teach them any crazy idea is true. If we instead teach them science as a series of facts and theories that are derived from data and experiments, and if we can teach them there should be a line of evidence, mathematical proof, or other set of data demonstrating what we teach them, then we train them to expect evidence to back up what people tell them, and people without evidence will have a much harder time tricking them later.

One content area that can be used to convey the “How we know” part of science is the story of the universe itself. From Big Bang cosmology, to the evolution of the earth through plate tectonics and geology, to evolutionary biology itself, we live a universe that is ever changing and that conveniently leave evidence of how it is changing in both this cosmic and terrestrial fossil record. Each of these scientific areas has multiple lines of evidence, and an interesting human story behind the discoveries. They also lead naturally into a discussion of the planet and universe’s future. Part of teaching students not only what we know, but how we know it includes engaging them directly in data, and in these areas, there is often data that students can find intellectually accessible. In fact, many different scientific lines of study have data sets that can be meaningfully analyzed by students.

In the current digital era, many of the sciences possess more data than can be readily analyzed by the professional scientific community. From protein folding simulations to animal behavior videos to astronomical images, data exists in abundance that needs a pair of human eyes to analyze it in a way that computers at this time can’t be programed to do. Many different citizen science projects exist to facilitate everyday people – including students – participating in data analysis, and in many cases curricula exist to help students solve basic problems using the data they look at. This type of an exercise can serve two different purposes: It gets students’ hands dirty doing actual science and it provides a context for learning statistics. Recent motivational work done to try and understand why adults participate in citizen science found that many of them said they always wanted to be a scientist, but then didn’t become one because they didn’t feel they were capable. By providing students an experience being part of the scientific process, confidence in their own competency as a scientist can be instilled at an early age. At the same time, the importance of teaching statistics within a meaningful context can’t be stressed enough.

It is amazingly easy to twist statistics in ways that obscurate reality. From polling results that say “Candidate X has pulled into the lead” when in reality Candidate X is statistically tied with two others, to medical studies that stress how on new medicine A 55 people out of 70 had their symptoms improve after just 3 days without stressing that the same thing happened in 53 out of 70 people not on medicine A, and across so many other examples people get mislead by misused numbers. By teaching statistics in a meaningful context that allows students to understand both a data-driven research study and the statistics used to describe it, statistics can be made more tangible. With a solid understanding of statistics, students will not only ask “How do you know that?” but they will also ask “How many standard deviations above background is that result?” and “What was the margin of error in that result?”(3)

With a strong grounding in science as a process and statistics as a way of understanding significance, it become possible to apply the problem solving methods of science to engineering new solutions to new problems. From devising the experiments (how do you determine how different genes in guppies are linked, and which are dominant?) to devising solutions to problems (how do you use a Lego robot and camera to build a log cabin with 4 different colored walls?) science teaches the problem solving skills needed in engineering and utilizes technology in all of its myriad forms.

Unfortunately, putting these ideas into practice through a complete reworking of the educational system isn’t practical. There may be a backdoor though. Through different science funding strands it is possible to get money for education that is related directly to a research projects. The NASA ROSES programs, HST observing programs, and many NSF grants all offer these educational supplants. This funding can be used to create teacher professional development programs, classroom curricula, and after school programs that work to create the needed materials, and change education one classroom at a time.

The exact amount of money available for education fluctuates over time. With NASA ROSES grants, you can request $10k per year per grant. Many NASA missions spend a couple percent of the mission budget on education and public outreach. NSF is more varied, where money can come in the form of a student intern (an REU student) or an educational supplement) and amounts can vary greatly.

What worries me is the future of this funding. As budgets get tighter, something has to give. In the past, NASA has reduced the budget spent on EPO more than once. I don’t know if NSF has done the same, but in the funding-restricted future, the temptation has got to be there. Both these agencies are STEM funding agencies, not STEM education funding agencies. But in a way, by funding STEM education we are funding future science by creating the people who are prepared to do science in the future. The Department of Education has its hands full with all the other parts of education, and current developments under NCLB make it clear science is not their priority. If we want to protect STEM, it is the people in the STEM fields who need to do that protecting.

I’m listening to my iPod while typing and the song I’m listening to just had the lyric “I wish it were simple but we give up easily, you’re close enough to see that.”(4)  I think everyone reading this is close enough to know that we all wish fixing education was easy, but we do give up easily. We gave up under NCLB, and rather than fighting a harmful piece of educational legislation, we have lived with it and simply complained while trying to help out in small corners, in random classrooms where we could. In this moment, as congress works to define what comes after NCLB, we need to fight for something better. Today, as NSF and other agencies work to fit their programs into narrowing budgets, we need to fight convince them that the money they spend on education is money they should continue to spend on education. We need to find a way to reform education so that graduates in the future are STEM curious problem solvers who are also statistically literate and driven to always ask, “How do you know that?”

Can we work to fund and build that future?

(1) STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

(2) This is because under NCLB schools only require “science assessments to be administered at least once during grades 3-5; grades 6-9; and grades 10-12.” (http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/ayp/testing-faq.html)

(3) I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t make since to reduce the amount of geometry and trigonometry taught in school and introduce statistics. While students going into STEM careers need as much calculus as they can get, I’m really not sure who, other than math majors, needs to know how to do a geometric or trigonometric proof, and to perhaps say something scandalous, I’d nix most of the prof writing from both those classes and combine them into one year to make space for a course on statistics.

(4) KT Tunstall “Otherside of the World” from Eye to the Telescope

Currently I’m in Nantes, France attending the joint Division of Planetary Sciences meeting ( DPS is a part of the American Astronomical Society) and the European Planetary Science Conference. As part of this week-long science extravaganza, there was a session on educational programs that make a global impact. I talked about citizen science (1, 2), and otherwise got to sit back and hear about other projects, many of which are children of the International Year of Astronomy that were able to grow and continue to thrive.

From TWAN: Starry Sky of an Alien Lake by Wally Pacholka

The session started with Mike Simmons of Astronomers without Borders. While Mike and his network date back to before IYA, they really came into their own during IYA with the coordination of 100 Hours of Astronomy. During a few brief spring (North) or fall (South) days, his team succeeded in brining together the world’s population in one global star party. IYA taught all of us that trying to engage the entire planet in one 100-hour span is hard work, and some people are guaranteed to be busy, so in recent years the program has transformed into the Global Astronomy Month, which invites everyone to look up during April. Different weeks and weekends have different themes. Beyond this amazing project, Astronomers without Borders also maintains The World at Night (photo project) and is planning global events for this June’s Transit of Venus. Poor Mike did all he could to pack it all into his 10-minute time slot, but it was to no avail. He was chased off the podium 3-minutes over. Honestly, his programs needed 55 minutes to do them any justice at all.

From Mike it passed to Roger Ferlet and Hand on Universe – EU. This project takes many of the best online / digital astronomy ideas of the past 15 years and does them using real NASA data processed using an interface called SalsaJ. Imagine, instead of using a simulator like CLEA to study the motion of Jupiter’s moons or the pulsations of a star you just looked at Jupiter’s moons and an actual pulsating star. SalsaJ is now on my list of things to learn sooner rather than later, and I’m hoping that if any of you are classroom teachers using SalsaJ, you’ll leave a comment about how you like it.
I went third and then passed the stage off to Connie Walker of the Dark Skies Awareness initiative (They do regular 365 Days of Astronomy shows!). These are the folks that every year bring you Globe at Night, a global data gathering project to measure how light pollution is impacting our ability to see the stars (and galaxies, etc) in the sky above us. In the past, this has been a once a year event involving getting everyone around the globe to look at the equator riding constellation Orion. Students and members of the public turn in information on how many of his stars they could see compared to a series of images, and we get a global reading of the sky. The thing is, lots of weird things can effect light pollution. Snow for instance. If you have a lot of street lights politely pointed down onto grass in parks, that isn’t too horribly bad, but if those same lights point onto snow… Well, that’s a nice mirror of light reflected into the sky. This year, to look at variations, and to see who can participate when, they’re introducing 4 different Globe at Nights events: January 14-23, February 12-21, March 13-22, and April 11-20 (that’s 2012).

With a line up of special events defined for us, the podium (or lack of podium) was handed over to Rosa Doren, a woman who is a force of nature bent on improving teacher preparation on a global level. Working on a budget of sofa change and sidewalk dimes, she has shown us what it means to leverage existing resources. As head of the IYA’s Galileo Teacher Training Program (which is still going strong!), she has brought together a global collaboration of people who are doing teacher training and providing teachers astronomy certification (at a variety of levels) by engaging them in a collections of activities in different content areas. The thing that consistently impresses me about this project is it realizes that schools aren’t all the same in terms of resources, but the same concepts of wanting to engage people rather then lecture at people apply. Don’t have a computer? That’s ok – they have a plan. Have a telescope and the most modern of technologies? That’s fine too. The sets of possible things teachers can do is varied enough to recognize the vast diversity of classroom needs, allowing teachers to learn concepts through tasks matched to their resources. Are you a teacher? Want to get the leg up on your astronomy content in a way that is relevant to the classroom you have instead of the classroom you wish you had? Check out the global listing of teacher workshops on their website.

Algol, the Demon of the Sky by EU-UNAWE Spain

The final talk I listened to well was on a classroom project I know I’ve mentioned before: Universal Awareness (UNAWE). Lead by Pedro Russo (formerly lead by Carolina Odman who’s no doing different awesomeness), and presented by a nice younger fellow whose name I didn’t catch, this program is designed to get little kids to love and learn space science through story telling. On their resources page they have a myriad of activities (including signing activities and telescope activities!), artwork from stories telling sky-lore from many different cultures, and all the teacher resources you might want (as a non-teacher, I like to download and print the art). Editions are available in multiple languages. The story that I heard (not told today, sadly) that most made me love this project was actually a story on it’s cultural impact. Through one set of activities, they get the kids telling their stories to a visiting outer space alien (a doll sewn by one of the community parents), and the alien in turn tells the kids stories about space through this curriculum. One teacher reported that after doing UNAWE in her class, an transfer student from a foreign country was seen as an interesting new thing – a source of potential stories and friendship. This was in contrast to how her kids normally treated transfer kids, as well, aliens in the not so warm and fuzzy story telling sense.

So the reason I said “listen well” is today I also learned I’m not really all that compatible with French food. I’m fine, but for a while, sitting a bit dehydrated (beverages are primarily expresso and wine here), and way overheated (no or limited AC and in the 80s), I just decided that rather than listening closely, I’d turn a color that caused a worried friend to ask if I was ok. After the session, I grabbed a couple cans of soda (failing to find hot tea, which I now have), and got to feeling better slowly but surely. I’m now fine, but during a few of the talks I wasn’t listening as much as I was doing a mental inventory of things like water bottles and tea bags I will hence forth always a) bring, and b) not leave on the plane (as I did with my water bottle on Saturday).

Unfortunately, this means the best I can do is offer you a link to the program for the rest of the session. No fear though, Thursday is another education session, and next week I’ll be at an astronomy communications meeting in Beijing (where I am compatible with the food). I’ll report what I hear. And tomorrow (room space willing) I’ll try and get you some science. So far, I fear to say, I’ve been thwarted by rooms with more people than space. Ah well, Emily Lakdawalla is early to arrive and easy to fit into small spaces and keeps managing to fit nicely into all the coolest sessions. Follow her on twitter and the Planetary Society Blog for all the best science this meeting has to offer.

Coming up on October 8, 2011 (and on TBD dates in future years) is the International Observe the Moon Night. This special event invites the world to look up and learn about the moon. This may seem like a “Yada yada yada, whatever…” kind of event, but it’s surprising how many new discoveries about the moon don’t make it into the heads of Joe six-pack and his kids. Since the 1990s, so many spacecraft have visited the moon from so many nations that I have given up keeping track of them! Yet, despite the wealth of new info, researcher Emily CoBabe-Ammann found that no available public school book contains lunar science results that come from modern exploration – everything is based on Apollo! Well, Apollo was before I was born and it’s time to change what people know about the moon.

Lunar Phase Calendar by Dimitre Lima

I personally can’t change the US school system, but, with your help, I might be able to get some curiosity arousing materials into school teachers’ hands and onto cubical and household walls. Here is where you come in: Inspired by the amazing Lunar phase data visualization shown at right, we’ve decided at Astrosphere (parent non-profit of Astronomy Cast, 365 Days of Astronomy, and several other projects) that we are going to hold a lunar phase visualization contest. (And if Dimitri opted to enter, I’d love to see what he does with 2012!)

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create a calendar for 2012 that communicates the phases of the moon in a way that is interesting, beautiful, and true. Our intention is that we will print the winning poster for distribution. (We are assuming we’ll get awesome submissions, but failing that, we reserve the right to only post the winning entry online.) on the back of each material will be a fact sheet on the moon that uses modern data and images.

Complete contest rules and guidelines here: Visualize-the-Moon Poster Contest

Now, we know some of you aren’t exactly artistic, but may want to help support getting awesomeness into the hands of teacher. That’s cool, there are ways for you to help to! 1. The big thing you can do today is help get the word out. Let people know via twitter, Facebook, your blog, you sig, write it on your classroom chalkboard, and, heck, write it on your forehead (ok, maybe not that). Whatever you do, anything you can do to help get the creative people in your life engaged would be awesome. 2. Donate to Astrosphere to help pay for teaching materials to get mailed to teaches. 100% of proceeds will go to printing, postage, and admittedly paying the poor person who will stuff the audience (but he works quickly and effectively). Using your funding we will send teaches requested posters and other educational materials from Astrogear.org. And finally, 3. Start thinking about planning or attend an Intenational Observe the Moon Night event on October 8.

So… Get engaged in the moon.

This donation link is specifically to donate to buy materials for teachers:

*For reasons I’ll never understand, in conference center speak, ballrooms are the large rooms that can contain the most chairs. While there may very occasionally be an actually ball in said ballrooms, their primary function is numbing butts while brains get filled.

Watch the Stars – Light the Night [buy tickets here]

When: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Emory Math & Science Center, 400 Dowman Dr., Atlanta, GA 30322
Proceeds to go to Light the Night – the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Dragon*Con [buy tickets here]

When: Friday, September 3 through Monday, September  6, 2010
Where: Atlanta Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, AND Sheraton
NB I have yet to attend a Dragon*Con where my schedule exactly matched what I got the week before the con, so be prepared for changes!
Don’t forget to check out our fan table in the Hilton! We’ll have T-Shirts for sale!

• Title: Space Trivia!
  Description: Do you know a lot about space & astronomy? Are you good with trivia? Think you know more than our experts? Here’s where you can test your knowledge!
  Time: Fri 07:00 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Mystery of Hanny’s Voorwerp
  Description: Who’s Hanny? What’s a Voorwerp? How’s Hubble involved? See the World Release of the webcomic that explains it all & the 1st Hubble images.
  Time: Fri 10:00 pm Location: Crystal Ballroom – Hilton (Length: until we’re done )
• Title: The 2010 Parsec Awards
  Description: The Parsec Award is available for original Sci-Fi & Fantasy & Speculative Fiction within the new frontiers of Portable Media.
  Time: Sat 04:00 pm Location: Regency V – Hyatt (Length: 2.5 Hours)
• Title: Astronomy Cast Live!
  Description: Take a facts-based journey through the cosmos with Dr. Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain
  Time: Sun 01:00 pm Location: 204 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Skepticism and Education
  Description: JREF now has a Director of Educational Programs – what else is being done out there and how can skeptics help educate the next generation?
  Time: Sun 04:00 pm Location: 207 / 206 / 205 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Your Daughter Can Too
  Description: These women have successful careers in engineering & science.  They can tell you how to help your daughters do the same.
  Time: Mon 10:00 am Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

Help me? (© Veronika Vasilyuk | Dreamstime.com)

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. I generally just make the excuses, “I’ve been busy” or say “I don’t make money on my blog and need to focus on paid jobs.” These are just excuses though. I can always find time to write. The truth is, I just can’t find it in me to write positively about science and academia when I look around and see so many things that hurt. This has been a rough year for our community. Colleges in California and Arizona have been shutting down a few days a month here and there (euphemistically referred to as furloughing staff). In the UK, 25% of the fellowships and student grants for PhD students and PostDocs are being removed. Everywhere, universities have cut journal subscriptions, travel and seminar budgets have been zeroed, and even chalk is being cut back on. The situation in academia has gotten demoralizing to the point where somedays the only proper response seems to be crying at my keyboard. Astronomy is a field that should be inspiring to the public, but our economically downtrodden public just don’t have the money needed to live, yet alone the money needed to fund astronomy through taxes. I get it. There are too many people too close to me without jobs to not understand the problem.

Today I saw something that made me decide I needed to talk about what has been bothering me all these months. A local high school teacher came into campus to return some equipment she’d borrowed from the center I work in. As she talked to one of the other women, she blinked back tears as she said (as best as I can remember) “They cut everything. They cut all my programs. It’s all gone.” She went on to detail some of the amazing things she’d been doing. If I mention them, she’ll be identifiable, so let me just say this woman was what everyone who loves science wishes for in a science teacher. She was. And she still could be. But science is getting removed from schools.

To graduate from high school in Illinois, you are required two years of science. That’s it: two years. Some students take earth science and bio, and move on with life, never looking back. Sometimes they want to take physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so much more, and their school says “Take earth science and bio and move on with life – that’s all we’ll teach.” It costs money to teach science, and it is devalued in our national standard. While the “No Child Left Behind” program tests math and reading skills on a yearly basis through grade 8 (and at least once between grades 10-12), science is only examined three times in all 12 years of a student’s education. Since the entire nation is tested the same years, and students in bins of grades all get the same test, what reason do schools even have to teach science in years when exams aren’t being given? At all levels cuts are being made. Math too suffers. Here in Illinois, only two years of math are required to graduate. And foreign languages aren’t even required.

This is a devastating problem. Last semester I taught Physics Concepts, a class for non-science majors. Many had never had math above basic geometry. Chemistry and Physics weren’t even offered in many of their schools. These are students from small towns with high schools of under 100 students per class. With no budget due to the problem of no tax dollars (because unemployment is high and people just can’t pay taxes), these schools just can’t afford to teach math and science. But college entrance requirements don’t match what the high schools teach. Here at SIUE, I regularly have students in my classes who are as smart as the students I’ve worked with at MIT and Harvard, but in many cases their high schools simply didn’t offer the classes needed for them to get into an outstanding university.

MIT, a school whose undergrads I hold in the highest regard, suggests 1 year each of physics, chemistry and biology, math through (and including) calculus, and 2 years of a foreign language. My Alma Mater, MSU, as a public school is less demanding, but it still expects 3 years of math and prefers 4, looks for 2 years of foreign language, and 2 of science. And University of Illinois recommends 4 years of math, science and foreign language. This is what floors me, in some cases high schools in Illinois aren’t even making it possible for their students to attend the flagship state university.

Part of the reason I want to stay at SIUE is I know I can offer our students chances they wouldn’t otherwise have. I have outstanding colleagues in other departments who feel the same. We are here to be the difference we want to see in the world. I have NASA-funded programs that allow students to be part of research programs rather then still working at Starbucks, Home Depot, or Radio Shack. These students are in many cases the hardest working I’ve ever dealt with, and not once has someone complained to me that they deserved a better test grade because of how much tuition they paid or who their daddy is (Things I’ve heard at more than 1 other university). I love my students (even in the moments I want to kill them). But every day things are making it harder to function. First it was the journals. We don’t have 1 astronomy journal at SIUE, so I personally subscribe where I can, and where I can’t I beg PDFs from colleagues at what my students call “Real Universities” (do you know how much that hurts to hear from a student?) Then it was the discount chalk – dusty c*** that breaks easily and covers everything in white while not adhering to the board. Then it was zeroing of all travel budgets – even for student travel. Now it is the Illinois legislated hiring freezes. Our university has departments with no secretary, and now department chairs – PhD academics – are struggling to process payroll sheets, inventory orders, and even class evaluation forms all on top of their teaching, and research, and committee assignments and the too many other duties that are the normal, overly busy life of a chair. Departments aren’t thriving, and depression rules.

And it’s only going to get worse. The state of Illinois is $130 MILLION behind in paying their bills. This is $25,000 in debt per household in a state where the average annual household income is only $56,000 (and if you remove Chicago and its surroundings, this number drops significantly). Here is the southern half of the state, this debt is well over half the typical household’s yearly income.

There simply is no money.

For the past several months, about every 6 weeks we have gotten notice from our university president that says (total total paraphrase) “We now know we can pay salary this month, but we don’t know about next month, but if everyone tightens their belt we hope to make it.” In February, after all the students had paid their tuition, we still didn’t know if the university would be able to stay open all semester. Do you know how hard it is to have a student ask, “But what happens if SIUE shuts down? Will we have to give back our student loans? I already paid my tuition on my loan. What can I do?” I didn’t have answers, and all I could say was, “I’m sorry. Let’s hope Illinois comes through.”

And it’s simply going to get worse.

Illinois still hasn’t passed a budget for 2010-2011. A state bill was passed allowing the university to borrow money. We don’t know if the hiring freeze will end. But we know we can’t make life harder on our students: SIUE has frozen tuition and fees at their 2009-2010 level. Our students will not suffer financially for the failures of Illinois. But I worry about academics. The only way SIUE and our sister school SIUC will be able to survive is by increasing enrollment. We are also cutting faculty lines, reducing the number of non-tenure/tenure track professors (I’m not scheduled to teach in the fall, but hope something may still change), and cutting support staff. This means more students with fewer people contributing to their education. We’ll have larger classes, more multiple choice tests, and more digital homework sets. Students will still get a good education, but the one-on-one moments that matter, all those times when a prof and a student just talk in an office, all the times a real learning problem is identified by a prof going over a hand-written homework assignment, all the things that make good profs great professors are going to go away in the face of too much work and no free time.

Providing a great education is difficult with limited resources and too high a teaching load. It is only possible when faculty make personal sacrifices for the good of their students. Most of us will do that, but we are at our breaking point. We love our students. We will fight to give them a solid education. But somedays I don’t know how much longer we can go on fighting.

Today, a high school teacher fought back tears in the hallway. Her programs are gone.

Without education, there is no future. I understand her tears, and for her and all the students who are having doors closed to their future, I too simply want to cry.

An economic earthquake has shaken our state and our nation. There are some buildings still standing, but I’m afraid everyone has been hurt.

Looking around the room, I see PhD astronomers, journalists, educators, amateur astronomers, and business managers, all involved in making people look up and learn. That we are all here – let to travel by our departments and funded through our grants and institutions – is a demonstration that times are changing and what we are doing is valued at some level.

When I was a graduate student, in the 6.5 years I was in Texas, two different astronomy education researchers come and give colloquium talks. On a third occasion, three of us in the department gave a talk. In all three instances, people came out of the woodwork (or at least up from the physics department) to heckle the speakers, making it clear they didn’t think statistical results from education research could be valid because they always knew some example that was an exception to the average. This was horrible logic. According to their logic, I can say that the average 1st grader (6 year old) can’t do algebra based on research, but because I know one first graders who can do algebra, all my research is invalid. This is horrible logic! But, when your goal is to invalidate someone, logic doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be good enough to caste doubt in an audience. And that’s what these people wanted to do – discredit and side line astronomy education research (heck, even Sagan was mocked for spending time communication astronomy).

This sidelining of education and communication conveys a horrible message: It tells young scientists with a passion and an ability to communicate and/or teach that they are wasting their time when they do anything other than research on astronomical objects. I’ve heard it said, those who can’t do research teach.

The only way I know to change this attitude is to raise the professionalism of our field. We need to demonstrate that communicating astronomy online isn’t just playing online. We need to demonstrate that teaching based on educational theory and prepared interactive class plans actually has a better impact than the traditional lecture from notes (I remember being told to keep all my college notes because they would form the core of my future lecture teaching notes). At the end of the day, we as a field of astronomy educators and communicators have to demonstrate that what we learn from our work matters and that we are changing lives.

This is what I do. When I first started podcasting back in 2005, I dealt with a lot of “Your wasting your time” comments. And I heard a lot of “Having fun playing online?” comments. Since then, I’ve been working one paper at a time to show that while yes, I am playing online, what I’m doing matters. And I’m just one of many people working to do this. In recent years, two new journals, the Astronomy Education Review journal, and the Communicating Astronomy to the Public journal, have been created for the group of us working to demonstrate the results of our work. Yes, I’m a trained variable star astronomer and galaxy researcher (and I’ve promised myself to publish papers on each this year to clean out my data backload). But while I’m a astronomy object researcher, I’m also working to become an astronomy communications researcher.

As the population of us doing this work has been growing and gaining momentum, we’ve been taking on larger and larger projects, from becoming the voices for space missions (or twitter feeds), to recruiting and training citizen scientists, to all the things in Caroline Odman’s talk (which will go online soon and get linked to here), we are doing more and studying the impact of everything we do as we go.

In someways, the International Year of Astronomy was our two new fields’ opportunity to shine. We were given a chance to go out and play with the entire planet and make a difference, and this week we are reporting back about our successes, and we are planning how to make the best of what we’ve done last beyond 2010.

I have to admit, I have been too jet lagged to keep up with the numbers and graphs that have gone flying past. All the talks from this meeting will go online (including my jet lagged talk). Rather then do a poor job summarizing things here, I’d encourage you to look at the twitter messages under hash tag #CAP2010 and watch for the results to be posted. Read the journals. Get things first hand.

I know a lot of science communicators – journalists, amateur observers, spacetweeps, teachers, and others – read this blog. You too are part of changing this field. The journals I named above to not require a PhD to publish results. As we build our new field, I would challenge all of you to evaluate what you do, track outcomes, learn what triggers people going from passively paying attention to astronomy that randomly appears in front of them (go go guerrilla sidewalk astronomers) to actively seeking astronomy content (and maybe even becoming sidewalk astronomers themselves).

Be part of the dialogue. Together, we are astronomers.

Earlier this evening I got an IM from a friend alerting me that this afternoon there had been a shooting at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Details are sketchy, but it looks like a faculty member who was recently denied tenure went into the biology faculty meeting and shot 6 people, killing 3 of the 6.

On twitter I’ve seen people express mystification at how this could happen.

Like I said a few years ago, about another school shooting, what really surprises me is how rarely it happens.

Academia as a system is deeply flawed in a lot of ways. One of the ways it is flawed is how the tenure system gets employed. For those of you who don’t know what it means to have tenure, it means you are a God. You can never again be fired without really significant cause (felony criminal charges, embezzling from a grant, cheating on your wife with an undergrad who gets pregnant, etc). Faculty with tenure often abuse their power, assigning junior faculty the largest classes, the worst committee tasks, and the hardest/most time consuming service assignments (like running outreach events). These young faculty, under the weight of these assignments, are required to spend 3 to 6 years demonstrating they are excellent researchers, excellent teachers, and solid community members. People do crack. But rather than take the time off to take care of themselves, they push on, because if only they can get tenure, they will never have to worry about finding a job ever again.

And we are all taught early on that we are failures if we don’t get tenure.

I don’t have tenure. (But then, I haven’t really looked for it)

A few years ago I was attending a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I was giving workshops on doing real science in the classroom, and giving talks on other research I’d done. I was trying to liveblog what I could in the midst of all this. All the presentations went well, the blogging went well, but I spent each night of the conference in my room in tears. Over and over the same thing happened – I’d give a great talk/workshop/etc and then some gray haired males (and it was always gray haired males) would come up to me to talk about my work, and then ask “So, when did you get tenure?” I’d explain I’m just an assistant prof. They’d say, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do fine when you go up for tenure!” But I’m not tenure track. And when they heard this, they always asked – what did you do wrong? who did you piss off? – or some version of that same question.

It was always assumed that there is something wrong with me that I didn’t have tenure. I’d only had my PhD 5 years at that point. I’d only applied once for a tenure-track position and I didn’t get that one position. But because I wasn’t inline to join them as Gods in the top of the Ivory Tower, I was (and I guess I still am) a failure. It is this type of “What is wrong with you?” attitude, that breaks people. I simply went back to my room and cried myself out at the end of every day. I can see where someone less emotionally stable would on day 2 or 3 of the meeting start punching people or worse.

I wish this was a one off attitude problem, but as someone without tenure I know it’s not.

The people I know who’ve been denied tenure have generally had to completely start over or mostly start over at a new university. This means facing a second 3 to 6 years of being hazed, of working too hard and never sleeping. It means facing a second 3 to 6 years of postponing children and telling your spouse, “I’m sorry,” over and over and over again as you crawl into bed too late because of the grant deadlines, and then again as you accidently wake them as you get out of bed at 5am to grade, because 5am is the only hour left empty in the day. It means another 3-6 years of knowing you can have everything taken away at any moment yet again.

I’m not sure this means anything to someone outside of academia. People loose jobs all the time and it is no big deal. But academics are essentially self-employed. We design our own research. We raise our own money through grants and donations to do that research. But all that money goes through the university. We are like small business owners who can get kicked out of our own business at any moment. If someone is denied tenure they loose all their equipment they raised money to purchase. They loose all their computers, software, money for staff, and everything else. They may not even get to keep the grants they’ve been awarded that still extend years into the future. It’s terrifying.

Academia is a field that eats its young. It is too often the regurgitated, half digested mass of a human that is left when it is over that gets tenure.

We need to revise the system. “Well, I survived” can no longer be the phrase of the day. There are too many brilliant people crying when they should be working to make our world better.

It shouldn’t take a broken woman shooting people to recognize the problems.

sorrow

Three Dreamers

I know a set of men who had a dream. They wanted to see every child in the world have access to a high-quality low-cost telescope. They wanted something that would show the rings of Saturn, survive a tumble down the stairs, and just keep revealing the sky night after night after night. This is a good dream; a dream inspired by the one laptop per child project. It is a dream that could be a reality, but it needs help. These men need you to dream with them and help their dream become a reality.

Moon thru a Galileoscope (by Andreas O. Jaunsen)

The Concept is Born
The Galileoscope project was launched about the time everyone realized the 2009 International Year of Astronomy idea was about to become a UN endorsed reality. Lead by Doug Arion, Rick Fienberg, and Steve Pompea, the Galileoscope telescope team gave themselves a goal of $10 per scope and set out to design. Like the original One Laptop Per Child goal of $100 per computer, they overshot a little bit. In this case, they came in at $20 per scope + shipping (or $15 to donate). Still not bad. See that image to the right? That was taken through a Galileoscope. These are systems with excellent optics.

The Problem
There is only 1 problem with the Galileoscope: No one can get one in a timely fashion unless, well, you go bid on this or this auction. Here’s the reason for the problem: No one ever provided the start up money needed to produce that first batch of Galileoscopes. We are literally collecting money until we have enough to run a batch out of the factories, producing and shipping that batch, and collecting money for the next batch. At a minimum, we just needed one rich soul to come forward with $200k to turn the factories on and start producing scopes while we collected a round of orders. Ideally, we need just $500k to get a stock pile of scopes we can sell with 24-hour shipping, while incoming money goes to the next round of orders. But that large donation never came. That donor, that sponsor, that dreamer never stepped forward. So these men with a dream, they put in their own money to get this started, and they asked the world – Will you buy a scope? We’re sorry, but it could take 6-months to get it. But will you buy a scope please?

Looking in the box

Originally, we’d all imagined millions of orders – both personal purchases and donations for kids everywhere in the world. Just like the original One Laptop Per Child, we have the option to Buy-One-Give-One. These scopes are the price of a double-CD. Why not think they’d sell like the latest top 40 hit? With orders like that, we projected we could turn on more assembly lines, speed up the rate of production, and keep maybe not ahead, but at least keep up. But those millions of orders never came. Everyone it seemed was waiting to see one, touch one, and play with one (or to at least have overnight delivery). But without those millions, that one touchable one never came to the vast majority of people who were thinking “Maybe I’d buy one. I just want to see one first.” They are coming to those who order, one by one a few hundred thousand scattered across the world at a time. They are coming. You may have yours (comment if you do?), and I know mine are coming soon.

A Solution
The one thing this project needs to overcome the delivery problem is funding. Galileoscope itself isn’t a non-profit company (simply because they didn’t spend all the extra money to become a not-for-profit. It costs almost $1000 in fees to set up a not-for-profit for something like Galileoscope!), so they either need help from other organizations or help from someone who doesn’t care about tax deductions. Bottom line – they need finacial help, and while I haven’t found that couple hundred thousand dollar donor, I’m hoping to find maybe a couple thousand dollars of help.

Felicia Day

This is where you, the casts of Battlestar Galactica and Ghost Hunters International, as well as the wonderful Felicia Day and the new non-profit Astrosphere New Media all come into play. At Dragon*Con in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend, I got pictures of a few famous people (and a few cool costumes) with a Galileoscope. When (thanks to the great Phil Plait!) I asked Felicia Day for her photo, she just signed the box. w00t! An idea was born! We’d get signatures and give someone the chance to have the ultimate geek gift of SyFy geekery. Our wonderful volunteer Laura S. took a box, and I took a box, and between us we cornered the cast of Ghost Hunters International and Battlestar Galactica. Two Galileoscopes. Two sets of different signatures. Two possibilities to make scopes for kids a reality.  The proceeds from this scope will buy scopes for needy kids, and with each scope purchased we are a little closer to a production run.

An eBay Auction
Right now on eBay we have (through Astrosphere New Media Association) two charity auctions. All proceeds are tax deductible and Astrosphere will use the proceeds to buy scopes for needy kids. The auctions are open until October 1st around 7am Pacific / 10am Eastern / 3pm London. You now have the chance to have your own scope, your own geek signatures, and to do a good thing all at once.

Now, I know there is the potential for the winning bid to not be divisible evenly by the $15 a scope costs, so I’m going to step forward and say I’ll personally round the bid amount up to buy that last telescope (I’m just a state university professor, so I can’t do anything cool like match the winning bids, but I would if I could, and if you can, would you please?) Right now, the two scopes are at

• 

  Felicia Day + Battlestar Galactica Cast signed Galileoscope

  Scope 1: Signed by Felicia Day, Michael Hogan, Kandyse McClure, Alessandro Juliani, Mary McDonnell, Michael Trucco, Kate Vernon, Luciano Carro, Richard Hatch, and the BSG Science Advisor Kevin Grazier (see picture). Current Bid: $152!

• 

  Ghost Hunters Galileoscope

  Scope 2: Signed by Ghost Hunters International Joe Chin, JC Howell, Dustin Pari, Dave Tango, and 2 more (see picture). Current Bid: $66!

This means if the bidding ended right now there would be 15 scopes for kids who may never have seen the sky with anything other than their eyes. That’s awesome.

But can’t we do better?

Here is my challenge: Fandoms – Ghost Hunter Fans, The Guild / Dr Horrible Fans + Battlestar Galactica Fans – which of you can get the most scopes into the hands of the most kids? Show your fandom colors by bidding high and lending a helping hand.

Please?

We have 9 days left. Spread the word. Spread this post. Help gets scopes for kids. Help a dream.

Kate Vernon (Ellen Tigh) Cool Costumed People Adam Savage and Phil Plait Gil Gerard (Buck Rogers) Galiloscope in Surly Amy's Scientific Jewelry Richard Hatch (The ORIGINAL Apollo) Steam Punk Boba Fett

Remember: The Universe is Yours to Discover.

Jose Antonio Sânchez Reyes | Dreamstime.com

This is a piece on gender inequity and sexual discrimination (not sexual harassment, which is a different and emotionally more devastating thing). I´m writing this at this time not because of any one thing that´s happened, but because of a culmination of things. Sometimes it just seems like a topic is in the air, building momentum, and this topic has finally found a voice in me.

This post had three different triggers. The first was a bad moment I had last semester, when I found out a student in my Physics for Engineers class was making sexually harassing comments on a regular basis. The second trigger came from confronting numbers and statistics on women in physics and astronomy for a pair of talks at Dragon*Con. And the third trigger was this little gem posted by Rebecca Watson on Twitter under the heading “Sexual Assault Prevention Tips (A must-read! Pls RT and save someone from being raped)”

Sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and rape all share one rather awful thing in common: They occur when one person or group is able to act in a hurtful way to another person or group without anyone stopping what´s going on. This does not have to be men against women: I´ve seen barns filled with middle-aged women swarm on the lone equestrian male, doing everything from landing the friendly slap on the ass, to cat calling him in his riding attire. It also doesn’t have to be purposely hurtful: I´ve watched as male grad students, at the beginning of the semester and before social groups have formed, thoughtlessly walk around asking all the other men if they want to head out [for lunch / to go to the gym /to get a drink] while they left the women behind. Sometimes people in power don´t even realize what´s going on as they do it, the sexual discrimination that happened to women at MIT is an example of this. Over years women weren’t given the same job advantages as men, and it was entirely without thought. When the problem was pointed out, measures were taken to fix the problem. (This study is mentioned in the forthcoming National Academies report, “Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty.” )

And here is where I´m going to ask all of you to listen to me really closely: Anytime anyone with the power to help is aware of any form of discrimination and they do nothing to fix it, they are just as much to blame as the perpetrators.

Throughout my adult life I have over and over had some well-meaning man watch me get frustrated in some work situation or academic situation, and they´ve said with the intention of comforting me: “It’s not you, he´s an [expletive] to all women.” Okay, nice try. I appreciate the attempt, but – Could you maybe offer a girl a little help?

I want to be clear: If you are in a position of power, and you see a problem, telling the victim they are being victimized is not a solution. Finding a way to stop the perpetrator is the only a solution.

This is not a matter of men against women. This can be in either direction with gender. It can be racial. It can be religious in nature. And in academia it can even take the form of Large Prestigious University Researchers discriminating against small college researchers.

Let me return to those 3 triggers above as talking points.

Trigger 1: Male student making sexually harassing comments I have never been so angry in my life, and as the professor of the class I grabbed my syllabus, found the line that says, “Loud and disruptive students are not welcome. If you disturb your classmates, you will be kicked out!” and made it clear that I would wield that line of my syllabus if even one word of sexually loaded speech was uttered, and that the student – any student with harassing language – would not only be kicked out of my class for the rest of the semester and fail, but I´d report them to the dean of students.  Then I moved back onto discussing physics. The students behaved (all the way through the end of the semester in fact!), but at the end of class a tough as nails, takes no shit from anyone, women came up and commended me for what I had done, but then she said it´s all kind of useless as long as there are professors making sexually explicit jokes in single gender dominated classes. All I could do was say, I´m sorry, I can´t help you, that prof has tenure and I´m just someone living grant to grant. All I can say is you need to report it on your evaluations or go to a chair or dean. Every university has its 1 or more faculty member who say the wrong things, crossing the wrong lines, sometimes just to get a laugh. But as long as that 1 (or more) person exists, the problem exists.

And here, I have to be very careful what I say because I know this is a dangerous post to write. The people I work with now I may have to work with for the rest of my life – academia is a very small culture, and with our very limited resources, emotions run high and grudges are held for decades. But I want to say this nonetheless: We as a field need a better way for addressing these problems so junior faculty like me don’t have to tell students – “I’m sorry, I can’t help you” because I’m too afraid for my own job. I have known about problems at every institution I´ve been at and I haven´t felt comfortable reporting them because I know that if I reported every problem a student reports to me it would put my situation in jeopardy. We need a better way to report problems.

Right now, a student must report the problem to a person in power (all men in my areas of expertise – I don’t count as someone with power. If they report it to me, I can report it to the chair or dean, but then have to produce the student), and if it is another student victimizing them, they may have to confront that student face-to-face in the university judicial system. If it is a faculty member, it is likely half the university will know who reported what very rapidly (never trust an academic with a secret). We’re all told everything is in confidence, but we’ve also all had that one gossipy tenured senior person (often from another department) let us in on the past 10 years of sexual misdeeds. This means the accuser – the victim – will face extensive scrutiny and the potential of becoming the bunt of lunch time laughter (a form of additional harassment) while they wait and hope for the academic judicial system to help them out.

We need a better way to handle problems and keep people safe. I don’t know what the solution is. I wish I did. I just know we need something better.

Trigger 2: The depressing numbers Let´s face it, the situation is bleak. Go read the two reports I summarize here. These numbers tell me one simple thing: A lot of women are leaving science for a lot of undocumented reasons. People only go into things like physics and astronomy for 1 reason: Love. They love the field or they love the challenge. They weren´t seeking fame or fortune. Like the impoverished poet, they self-selected to bleed themselves into their work. Both men and women with into physics/astronomy out of love, but women have preferentially left behind the field or challenge for undocumented reasons. I know I personally left the field once out of frustration, and one element of that frustration was knowing I’d never be part of the old boys club (which I then learned also existed in other fields).

Trigger 3: The one certain way to prevent rape is to get rid of the rapers – The topic of this post isn´t rape, but the idea still applies. In the case of gender discrimination by men on women, I as a woman can do all I want to try and avoid harassment, but at the end of the day, I can be as cautious and uncontroversial as I want (or don’t want), but the choice to be discriminated against based on my gender isn´t a choice I get to make – it is a decision made by others. The only thing that can stop men from harassing women is for men to step forward and say enough is enough. (The same is true if you reverse the genders, or change this to a case of religious, race, or other discrimination.) Always, it must be other members of the group in power who step forward and stand up for the people being victimized. This was true during the civil rights movement, for instance.

And here is the challenge I want to put out there: If you are a man and ever feel the need to pull a woman aside and say “It´s not you, it´s because you´re a woman,” I want you to act on that need, and then I want you to report to the proper authorities what is going on. Be an advocate. Stand up for someone who may not be able to stand up for themselves. You have the power to change things.

And if anyone ever tells you, “It’s not you, they are like that to all [women / minorities / Christians / Jews / gays / etc],” look at that person and tell them, “If I fight this, I could lose my job and be labeled a trouble maker. If you report this, they’ll listen. Will you help? Will you report what you’ve witnessed to the appropriate authorities and prevent this from happening again? Will you help me?”

Be safe. Be good. And if you have power, help someone without it.

In the opening session, Craig Mundie demonstrated an office of the future that brought together a pair of digital white boards, a MS Surface (so totally want), webcams for video meetings, and more. It was a fully realized holo-office for immersive design.

Imagine if you will, a fully integrated system that combines all the best features of Adobe Connect Now (desktop sharing with WebCam), Google Docs (for collaborative document editing), Smart Boards (for putting your white board notes into your computer), and add all the gestures you use on your iPhone to the white board and your desktop screen (which is literally your desktop). Then make all the software work together fluidly.

I saw this and saw a system that would facilitate remote collaboration in a way I have dreamed of and tried to kludge together using the above software. The thing is, while video conferencing and Google Docs are things I can generally get my collaborators to adopt, they generally roll their eyes at me if I try to add any additional levels of complexity.

But what I saw this morning was a demo of a future fully integrated system and it is something I would love to work with and build for.

But I’m at a university that can’t afford this type of toy, and I wilted a bit as I saw my dream platform and realized this is not something I can without significant sponsorship replicate in my office, my lab, my cross campus collaborator’s office, and the offices of my cross country and cross ocean collaborators.

Here’s the problem: Federal grants specifically say in one way or another “Thou shalt not request office equipment.” Grants ask what are you researching? What questions that are new and exciting are you answering? They don’t ask, “what toys do you need to improve your already functional work flow?” The professors with the coolest toys either designed the toys or have non-Federal grants or funding from their university to purchase the technology. While at Harvard, several of the faculty wowed me with their digital work spaces. Same with MIT. To a lesser degree same with U-Texas.

I currently teach at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The students I work with are the hardest working students I’ve ever encountered and I’m there for them. The best of them are as good as the students I worked with at MIT and Harvard. They are there for a variety of reasons, ranging from High Schools that didn’t prepare them for Ivy League to just not wanting to move too far from home, to just not knowing how good they are. I love my students. They are bright and shiny and the ones I work with on my research team are building great things.

That said, my university sometimes exhausts me. We just don’t have the funding to do all the cool shiny things I want to do. And this isn’t just SIUE. Talking to colleagues, the problems we’re facing are common across state universities everywhere. As tax revenue falls, education funding falls with it. We reached a point last semester when there was no longer funding for office supplies. When there isn’t money for white board markers and the secretaries start keeping hidden caches of chalk, it is hard to say “Hey – can I have a few ‘K’ to better facilitate communications with my collaborators in the UK?”

One of the benefits that students at places like Harvard and MIT enjoy is the ability to immerse themselves in the latest technologies in the labs they work in and in the teaching labs they learn in. Their high tuition pays (in part) for these facilities, and endowments, corporate sponsorships, and donations pay the rest. The students who get into these schools aren’t all rich, but they all benefited from a high quality back ground (whether it be a private school or an inner city school) opened the door for a high quality higher education.

There is a digital divide in America. Looking through studies at the Pew Internet and American Life website, you can see that the poor, the rural, the minorities, the immigrants and the elderly aren’t online. They aren’t getting prepared in ways that require online and digital content consumption.

There is a digital divide between universities. My upper division students don’t all know how to use Excel. They don’t all know how to use a word processor. They don’t even all know how to use a mouse in a coherent manner. And I don’t have a way to wow them into being inspired that a George Jetson Holo-Office future is coming and they need to get with the digital now. The best I can do is invite them to wave at a colleague in Skype now and then. I, who live a virtual life, have a normal office with a normal laptop and a normal sized monitor living a normal, not particularly wow-ing life.

I want to take the next steps. I want to improve my work flow, to improve my communications with collaborators, to improve my way of interacting with data, and to improve how I distribute my results to the public. I want to adopt the technologies I’m seeing here.

And I will ask MS for help.

But looking around at the Ivy League, the Big State, the top school, the private school, and the generally prestigious school name tags, I wonder how many others from underserved universities are here to ask, “MS, will you collaborate with me and help me learn how to work better?”

I’m going to go for lunch, fund my students, and see what I can find.

My grades are posted.

My students have received their grades.

I am 3 forms (paperwork will kill me) from starting my summer.

And I plan to play a bit, write a lot, travel too much, and try and remember how to jump horses over itty bitty fences designed to restrain dachunds.

w00t

His talk focused on who planets are defined and classified. As we gear up for this summer’s IAU General Assembly, many folks are wondering if (hoping really) they will clarify what is and is not a planet.

As a starting point he explained that the discussion originated from the IAU trying to sort our who had the responsibility of naming Michael Brown’s then new discovery of an object that is bigger than Pluto. Should the small body committee name it? Should the planet committee name it? Or…? Well, clearly someone had to decide what a planet is and is not.

The criteria that was landed on and voted on, however, aren’t the most sensible. Here they are:
1) A celestial body that is in orbit around the Sun (but this precludes exosolar planets from being “planets”)
2) Has sufficient mass so that it assumes a round hydrostatic equilibrium configuration (this means it’s bigger than the asteroid Juno, and most Moons count)
3) It has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit (Ummmm – there is random stuff in the orbits of *all* the planets.)

Let’s look at this last criteria a bit more closely within our modern understanding of the solar system. Prior to 1992 we didn’t have evidence there was a Kuiper Belt and we didn’t have evidence of other planets. Our understanding of planets was based on our own 8 planets + Pluto. Once we started realizing the dynamic range of planets (and stars) are very different, we needed to reconsider everything.

Mass is an easy criteria to consider. Can an object know it is large? The answer is simply yes. Once an object gets large enough gravity makes it round. Period. This is a good starting criteria for “Could be a planet.” Keep lumping on mass and eventually they start burning stuff in their cores. That would define the “Could be a star” boundary.

But mass does not effect the other criteria. An object of a given mass doesn’t always orbit the Sun (look at Ganymede and Titan – both very planet-like moons).

What it takes to clear an orbit via either scattering or accretion also depends on the size of the star and how far an object is from the object it orbits. In our solar system, if you stuck the Earth out at 40 AU (Pluto’s mean distance) it could not clear its orbit! It would fail the “What’s a planet?” criteria for the exact same reason as Pluto! In general, as the mass of the star goes up, planets must grow, and as planets move further from the star, they must be bigger to clear their orbits. (For those into the numbers, for a planet to clear it’s orbit it must have a mass where M_planet > ~G^(-3/4)T_system M_star^(1/4) a_planet^(9/4) )

Why is it do hard to define a planet? Well, the problem comes with finding a starting point and finding consensus. Today’s criteria aren’t really based on anything that describes the geophysics of the object. A brown dwarf star could get classified as a planet! As we rethink our definitions, Stern encourages us to each find our own way of looking at this problem and to look at intrinsic characteristics that distinguish planets based on their physical properties. If you look out at the largest Kuiper Belt objects (Pluto and its roughly same size friends, all of which are over 800 km in diameter) you find a set of objects that are all like the terrestrial worlds in terms of similar formation, sometimes have atmospheres, sometimes having moons, and otherwise looking and acting very different from their asteroidal cousins.

People tried very hard to get Stern to make a recommendation on what should and should not be a planet. He gave us two bits of advice: Make up our own minds, and do not let the “Well if there are too many planets my kid won’t remember all their names” issue bias us (after all, we have more than 12 states in the union).

So go forth and think. And tell your local IAU representative what you think should make a planet.

About a year ago I went to the UK for the first time and along with attending an AAVSO meeting, I also spend a couple days at Oxford, where I was hosted by Galaxy Zoo PI Chris Lintott. We got to talking, got to brainstorming, and came up with some ideas to add new features to the Galaxy Zoo website. (See here for some hints of what’s to come). He came and visited me at SIUE a few months later, we wrote some grants, we then got some grants (w00t), and now I find my life delightfully consumed not only by the International Year of Astronomy (which you likely knew), but also by Galaxy Zoo. I can’t wait to reveal things to you over the next few months.

Between IYA and Galaxy Zoo, the past few months have become a tangle of teaching, travel, programming, and working on research papers. Four months in, my dogs now know what suitcases mean, my office is a mass of paper (in some places centimeters deep), and life is good.

In the following months, here are things you can expect:

• April 3-4 MARAC: Live near Kansas City? Come hear me give a talk at the Mid-America Regional Astrophysics Conference
• April 18-19 NEAF: I’ll be talking at the NorthEast Astronomy Forum , but the real reason I’ll be there is to steal views through the diversity of scopes guaranteed to be in attendance.
• May 18-21 AAVSO: This years AAVSO spring meeting is being held jointly with the Society for Astronomical Sciences at Big Bear Lake, CA. It is a beautiful location and the workshops look as good as the scenery.
• June 7-11 AAS: We’ll be revealing a bit of what is to come with Galaxy Zoo and talking a lot about New Media and Citizen Science. Come and see?
• July 2-5 CONvergence(here I admit I need to follow up more with organizers): Mostly I’m going to have fun
• July 16-24 Eclipse of the Century Cruise: I’ve never seen a full eclipse, and I’m really looking forward to the many minute totality.
• August IAU: The last time IAU held a General Assembly Pluto was stripped of its position as a planet. What ever madness ensues this time, I’ll be there to take it in.

And here I stop, because at this point I just can’t think beyond IAU. Life is good. It’s just busy.

This week I’m down in Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference. More on that in its own post in just a couple minutes.

The chaotic moments in the quad are one of the things I love about state schools. There is room to spread and make noise and attract attention without making anyone feel they are running a gauntlet. At Harvard, students crammed into the narrow area in front of the Science Center, and I had to “No Thank You Grrr” my way into the building every good weather day as I was attacked with handouts and people asking for donations. At SIUE, the students sprawl their happy little tables over a couple acres of cement and grass, and we can move freely and approach or not approach at will. I love seeing my students be civically minded, and I feel morally obligated to buy baked goods from the science clubs, but I like to see them at a distance when I’m running for lunch.

Along with the life in the quad, the End of the Semester also brings student panic (and professor panic), as we all realize OMG OMG OMG I only have how long to finish all my assignments (grading)?!? On Tuesday, I actually made the classroom announcement, “There will be no panicing. Panicing about grades is not allowed today.” This doesn’t really help – I teach physical sciences for elementary ed majors this semester, and this is one of the last classes they take before applying to get into the highly competitive elementary education program. While my class isn’t intrinsically hard, everything seems 10 times harder when you know your grade will significantly determine if you get the future you want. As an instructor, one of the hardest things I have to do is fail a student. I never want this to happen, and I try hard to keep students abreast of their projected final grade. The problem is, there are times when a C in a class is really an F, and a B in a class really is worth crying over.

It is hard, and it is something my colleagues and I talk about a lot. Sure, 1 C in college (or even 1 C and 1 D, as I received) probably won’t lock you out of your future, but every bad grade has to be balanced with something else that makes a student special in a good way. For instance, if I’m reviewing applications for a summer internship, I will pull into my short list students with A/B averages (3.5 on the 4 point scale) who have experience and are noted as being creative independent thinkers in their rec letters, and I’ll pull out the 4.0 students whose rec letters say “Student works full time and could really use this break.” I know that it isn’t possible for most people to balance a job, extracurricular activities, and academic excellence. Something has to give, and often it’s sleep that gets lost in the shuffle, and a grade gets dropped here or there, or the extracurriculars get thrown out the window as students strive to earn rent money, gas money, food money, and, well, tuition money. Unfortunately, when faced with an A/B student who doesn’t have that “This kid has this amazing wow factor” mentioned in their rec letter, I just don’t know what to do. And as the prof who sometimes has to give a B or D or worse to the student who is working 40 hours a week, going to school full time, and trying to raise two kids (this is at least 10% of my students), I know that my grade has consequences, and it hurts. As the prof who sometimes has to write rec letters for these students, I struggle to find the way to say, “This student worked so hard, they tried so hard, and there just weren’t enough hours in the day for this student to be competitive against someone else who doesn’t work and doesn’t have a family.” I’d never phrase it that way. I know the right words for rec letters, but that is what my heart is saying.

The academic system really is designed for 18-22 year old students who are single and either affluent enough or who have enough loan/scholarship/grant money that they don’t have to work. These students can fully embrace unpaid research opportunities, be leaders in the student community, and still have time to study, go out drinking with friends, and run home for special events. These students can attend guest lectures, and go to plays and musicals. As a professor, I know our system works against the students who work and have families, but I don’t know how to fix the system.

And now, at T-6 class days and counting, I see in my classroom a mix. There are the happy, family-free 18-22 year olds, panicy about grades, but able to pull all nighters at will to get things done. Then there are the students counting the days until classes are over and they can spend more time with their daughters and sons. There are the parents and spouses worried they won’t make it into the next step, and that all the money going into tuition won’t help to raise the family’s future income. And then there is me, looking at the grades, wanting all the kids to be above average, but knowing sometimes, someone has to fail.

It is spring. The flowers are out. The students are sprawled across the quad dancing and proselytizing people to join their favorite causes. The trees are leafing out, and some of the students are quietly freaking out. Meanwhile, the profs are in their offices thinking, How can I be fair to everyone and guarantee everyone has a fair chance to succeed?

One of the great things about being part of the dynamic team that is building IYA is getting to see this project grow and evolve. Today IYA announced the hiring of their  core staff, and guess what: I’m part of it. In a press release issued by the IYA co-chairs, Doug Isbell and Susana Deustua, the United States IYA program announced the hiring of Steve Pompae as the US Program Director and the Andrea Schweitzer and Kristina Harding as the Project Manager and her assistant (think super hero side kick). I’ll be the IYA Web Developer (like you couldn’t have guessed that).

In addition to these staff hirers (which don’t really effect your day to day lives), people are gearing up their activities in preparation for the big kick off. In some cases, this includes lots of paperwork flying around as projects are defined. In other cases, this  includes tools getting upgraded and updated.

One such tool is FITsLiberator.  Back in the old days, I used to go to terrible pains to try and take my nice science images and turn them into pretty pictures (I’m on the wrong computer to share). It required getting everything just so in IRAF and then printing to file, and then layering in Photoshop, and much ftping between my Sun SparcStation and my Windows PC (these were the press OS X days). Then NRAO came out with FITSview, and I could at least get things from FITS to photoshop all using 1 computer. (WOOT!) But… But it was still a serious pain. Until one magical day when the ESO announced the creation of FITS Liberator, a plug-in for Photoshop that allows images to be directly imported into Photoshop. That’s right – process your images on the system of your choice, and you can go from FITS to pretty image in one software package.

The problem is, if you are like me and use an Intel Mac, FITS Liberator didn’t quite work unless you use Rosetta mode. I have to admit that rather then figure out what that is or how to access whatever it is, I’ve been pulling out my old PowerBook G4 laptop (the one I own, versus the ones my grants provide) whenever I need to make pretty images. This week, however, my need to pull out my old CPU has been shelved.  The wonderful team from NASA/ESA/ESO have released version 2.2 with a universal binary!

In addition to happily running on my MacBookPro (and Vista), this software also includes support for the new VAMP metadata. This new, but very little known, fledgling metadata for images is something that will hopefully make it possible to quickly and easily find images of specific wavelengths, sizes, and qualities. The IYA Cornerstone Project, “The Portal to the Universe,” will even let you index your images using their website and this metadata. Getting VAMP metadata into FITSliberator is a first step. It is an important step. And it is a step that makes my MacBookPro feel a bit more complete.

One tool at a time, IYA is becoming real.

If you don’t already subscribe, hit up their RSS Feed over here.

“Give me a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough and I’ll move the world” -Archimedes

No doubt both of you guys have heard the quote. My question is just how long of a lever would be needed, and where would the fulcrum need to be placed for an average human to lift the weight of the earth. If we assume that the weight of the Earth were being pulled on by a gravity equal to that of the earths gravity.

This is actually a really good question, and was way harder to work through than I had originally anticipated and requires a number of assumptions along the way.

First off, if the Earth is being pulled on by another Earth, where is that other Earth located? For instance, if another Earth where located 1 Earth diameter away (such that there is 1 Earth diameter between the two surfaces, and 2 Earth diameters between the two world’s centers), the Earth would be attracted to the second Earth as follows:

Placed on a gignormous balance, the Earth would weigh 8.3 x 10^23 pounds! Now lets say I can exert 100 pounds of force (~450 N) with my arms, I just need a lever that translates my 100 pounds of force into 8.3×10^23 pounds of output force. This is a torque problem:

The only problem is, I don’t know how long either the long end or the short end of the lever is. That’s two unknowns and 1 equation. I’m going to make the assumption that if the end of the lever is just touching the Earth and is tangential to the surface, the closest the pivot could be is the visible horizon (about 5km from the surface).

WOW! (Note: I’m assuming I’m pushing perpendicular and the other planet’s pull is pulling the planet perpendicular to the lever, and that I’m moving the Earth over such a small angle that I can ignore any change in angle of the force).

I’d known it was going to be a big number, but…

WOW! This means that if I move my end of the lever 1m, the Earth won’t have moved a meaningful distance. Let’s say I pushed my end of the lever 20 km/hr, 24 hours a day, totaling 240 km/day, I’d have to push my end for 9.3×10^13 years (way longer than the age of the universe!) to move the Earth 1 meter!

Now, part of the problem is, I have to over come not only the inertia of the Earth, but also the force that other planet is exerting on it. What if we remove that other pulling planet?

Now, I have to admit, that when I first thought about this several days ago, I figured I’d also real fast calculate this new number – the force needed to move the Earth assuming the universe consisted of nothing but me and the Earth, and a lever of negligible (but amazingly strong!) mass. I’ll stick the lever and the fulcrum in the same place. The only problem is, I don’t know either the force on the Earth from the fulcrum (I can make it anything!), or the length of the lever (again – two unknowns).

Well, I’m going to use basic rollar coaster 101 to solve this. Let’s speed things up, and assume that in my magical imaginary universe I have a space craft that will move my feet such that I keep up with the moving lever and always exert my 450 lbs of force on the lever (this is like pulling someone on rollar skates with your hands while you  (don’t ever do this!) sit in the back of a pickup. You have to exert a certain force to pull them, but you don’t have to run or exert force to accelerate yourself. In my crazy imaginary universe, I’m going to say that as I slowly accelerate the Earth from rest and get it into motion, my acceleration can’t exceed 9gs (9 times the pull of gravity on Earth). At more than 9gs, people tend to pass out. This specific acceleration comes from my circular motion.

Which is a whole lot more reasonable, but still very silly.

Now here is where I ask you to be skeptical. Check my math. Look for bad assumptions. Look for things I missed. It’s late on a Sunday night and I’m doing math while watching Ghostbusters on Spike, which is showing a hilarious commercial with lizards doing the dance from Thriller (and some chick who really wasn’t necessary).  I know myself well enough to know I likely enough I made a mistake. So – find it if it’s there

My students are so glad I’m not teaching a high lever class this semester (I’m teaching science foundations for education majors). In a class that covered gravity and circular motion, this would so totally be on the final…

In late October or early November of last year, eons in academic life, one of our graduate students introduced me to something that I think is going to have a dramatic impact on teaching physics and on how we interact with computers, especially in the classroom. Why do I think this is going to be so important? It’s cool, it’s powerful and flexible, it’s cheap, and a fair number of our students already have or want one. The gadget I’m referring to is the remote for the Wii gaming platform, sometimes called the Wiimote. The Wiimote measures acceleration and position in three dimensions. Better still, it communicates with the world using the Bluetooth protocol which most recent computers also use. What this means is that the Wiimote can be used for a lot more than playing video games. To get an idea of what kinds of things, take a look at Johnny Chung Lee’s videos: tablet computer / smart board, virtual reality, finger tracking. As far as classrooms are concerned, I think the smart board application is going to have the most impact: it’s easy to use and, to be terribly mundane, the price is definitely right.

Wiimote tracking acceleration (green spikes) of a cart on an air-track as the cart rebounds off a stretched rubber band.

If you have a Wiimote handy, or can extract one briefly from a nearby teenager’s hands, take a look at DarwiinRemote (on Macs) or WiinRemote (on PCs) to get an idea of how the Wiimote might be useful for teaching physics. Being a Mac user, DarwiinRemote is the only software I have any first-hand experience with for the Wiimote. In fact, I spent most of fall break in the middle of my parents’ living room floor with family and in-laws carefully avoiding me while I muttered imprecations and obscure incantations as I tried to learn Xcode and Eclipse (free software to make programming easier), Objective C and OpenGL (programming languages), and Subversion (a way of letting a bunch of people work on the same program without driving all and sundry completely crazy) just so I could make DarwiinRemote a better platform for teaching physics. I haven’t finished yet, but will get back to it eventually – maybe spring break. The Wiimote tracks position by tracking the locations of up to four infrared light sources with a camera in one end of the Wiimote. (The camera is reported (see Sensing) to be made by PixArt and works by triangulation.) I haven’t set up my light sources yet, so I’ll have to write about that some other time. The Wiimote tracks acceleration through a tiny mass suspended on even tinier springs in three directions. What the Wiimote reads is how much the springs are stretched. Since the mass is suspended within the body of the Wiimote, dropping the Wiimote reproduces the condition of astronauts in orbit – free-fall. (The so called “vomit comet” also reproduces free-fall and some roller coasters at least come close by having parabolic arcs in their tracks.) This means that if you drop the Wiimote, all three axes will report no acceleration while if you set the Wiimote on a flat surface, at least one axis, depending on orientation, will report an acceleration of magnitude g. So what can you do with this? Swing it in a circle around your head and see how high the acceleration will go (the Wiimote can’t measure more than 5g unfortunately). Attach the Wiimote to a long string. Why do two or three of the traces show periodic accelerations and not just one? Strap the Wiimote to the catcher in a ballistic pendulum experiment and see how long it takes the collision to occur. Walk around and see how you accelerate and decelerate with each step. Try to match a particular pattern of acceleration and deceleration. Imagine athletes strapping a Wiimote to an arm or leg or head to monitor how they move – the next step from video analysis. (The catch here is staying within Bluetooth range, roughly 10m, of your laptop.)

There are a few things I’d like to develop that don’t exist yet. One, which has some implementation but, as far as I’m aware, for Macs, is tracking two Wiimotes with the same computer. Then students could see, in real time, the accelerations of two carts as they collided with each other. For ergonomics, particularly in sports, it would be nice to have a small data recorder light enough and rugged enough to be carried with the athlete so that the Bluetooth range wouldn’t be an issue. There is software using the Wiimote to teach drumming technique (p20).

Motion sensors aren’t really new in teaching labs, so why did this one get me so wound up I’d spend a whole vacation teaching myself new stuff just so I could play with it? One thing is that it’s three axes and not just one. Another is that it’s relatively small and light – designed to be held and swung instead of rigidly mounted. A third is that it’s cheap enough to buy as a toy and the software is open source so I can fix it if it doesn’t do what I want – which I’ve already done some of. Lastly is the fact that the Wiimote wasn’t designed for a specific experiment, it was designed to do more or less everything and it’s up to us to find cool things to do with it.

Finally, I’m very excited that I have four of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville computer science students whose senior assignment to write a cross-platform piece of software specifically focussed on using Wiimotes to teach physics.

For more on open source software for the Wiimote on all operating systems, go to the Wiili site.

I really want to see this, but its just above freezing here

EDIT: Steve sent me the most amazing photo. It is strangely beautiful. I’ve included it big for you to enjoy!

• How many students have the opportunity to take astronomy?
• And of those students, how many students take astronomy? and
• How many take it from someone who has actually studied astronomy themselves?

These questions and more were answered by almost-Dr. Lawrence Krumenaker who will be defending his PhD in the next few months. In a very brief talk he ran through all the numbers, and I have to admit that I walked away depressed. Here are the basics:

In the United States, population 330 million, there are about 4000 astronomy classes being taught in 2500 schools to 80,000 students. Roughly 800 of these classes have less than 10 students. This is a 3-4% increase from earlier work by Phil Sadler in 1986.

This means only 3.5% of all high school students take an astronomy class (1 semester long course or longer).

The teachers who teach these classes are largely to be commended. They work in isolation with 68% of them being the only person who teaches astronomy in their school, despite typically being at schools with several thousand students (and many many classes and teachers). 55% of instructors teach just one astronomy class and they spend the rest of their day teaching other classes. While most instructors (65%) have science or science education degrees, 19% are teaching completely out of their field (this would be the history majors teaching science), and 28% never actually took astronomy themselves. This means these folks are relying on workshops, online resources, their book, magazines, and other online and paper resources to get them through the classes they teach.

Imagine learning French from someone whose never studied French.

In today’s educational environment, there isn’t always room to fit in astronomy. There are no states in these United States that have astronomy education certifications. Astronomy is an extra. When something needs cut, it is one of the first programs to go.

But isn’t astronomy vast enough (encompassing the whole universe and all that) that it can be used to teach other things? When I was in middle school I took part in a curriculum called “Project STAR” (where I met Phil Sadler). The STAR is in all caps because it stands for “Scientific Teaching Through its Astronomical Roots.” This program sought to teach math, and physics, and much much more, while teaching astronomy.

Is it too much to wish that 10%, or any other double digit number, of students were able to take astronomy in high school from teachers who have taken a university level course in astronomy?

Sadly, yes, that is too much to ask.