We knew it was bad here, but not this bad. An international survey of adults’ acceptance of evolution places the US near the bottom of the barrel, just above Turkey and far, far below Japan and most of Western Europe. It’s yet more evidence that the US of A is a pretty benighted, or at least confused, nation.

The survey, conducted by two US and one Japanese researchers in 2005, asked adults in 34 countries their responses to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The responders were asked to state whether the statement was true or false, or to state they were not sure.

The results for the US group: true, 40%, not sure, 21%, and false, 39%. Only Muslim Turkey, with an acceptance rate of about 23%, scored lower than the States. Meanwhile, more than 75% of the participants in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan and the UK judged the survey statement as being true, and relatively few were fencesitters. Most of the other Western European countries were not far behind.

The US shared the bottom rankings with Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus and Turkey. I leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about that group.

The researchers were Jon D. Miller, Hannah Professor of Integrative Studies at Michigan State University, Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and Shinji Okamoto of Kobe University, Japan. They published their results in the Aug. 11 issue of Science. A summary of the article just came in today’s mail in my copy of NSTA Reports, a publication of the National Science Teachers Association.

October 11th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools, Science | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

So, if I have a MySpace page, it seems only natural that I join the Facebook crowd, too. And in just a short few days, I have concluded all on my own that Facebook is light years ahead of MySpace in terms of form and function.

Form: None of the MySpace DIY webpage formatting that creates graphic abominations. True, Facebook pages are boringly identical in layout, but you CAN READ THEM! SInce they are easily read and navigated, it seems to be a lot easier to find people and for them to find you in Facebook than MySpace.

Function: Aside from the clear navigational aids, I was most impressed by Facebook’s “import a blog” feature, which I immediately enabled on my page there. It’s not a particularly complex feature, so I wonder why MySpace can’t do it, too. Blogs have feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), so you give Facebook your feed URL and you get to post in two places at once. Result: wider audience and more traffic to your site (perhaps).

That being said, I feel like somewhat of an interloper on both sites. The vast majority of Facebook and MySpace users are less than half my age! So I definitely stand out in those friends lists. (Actually, on MySpace, Sir Sean Connery is standing in for me. ) Then there is the fact that many of my students use either or both sites, which is probably kind of weird from both our perspectives. People tend to be remarkably frank on these sites, so I see a side of my students (and former students) that I don’t usually see at school. My own sites are kind of bare right now, so the sharing is a tad lopsided. Give me some time, kids!

October 6th, 2006 | Tags: Technology, The media | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

Sorry, no sex acts or nudity in these vids. You can find those elsewhere. Check out Anousheh Ansari as she demonstrates some zero-g effects while chatting with her husband, Hamid, from the International Space Station.

Ansari is by no means the first to perform somersaults in orbit or show how to spin an apple in zero-g, but of all the private citizens to have gone into space, she has done more in two weeks to humanize space exploration than all the world’s space agencies have done in 50 years. Read her blog posts. They are eloquent, heartfelt and at times darn poetic. Pretty good for an engineer!

Also, check her flightsuit, which features both the US and the Iranian flags. Rumors were flying before her launch that NASA had nixed her displaying the Iranian flag on her suit. If they were true, then Ansari effectively told NASA to go stick it. After all, it’s not like NASA could send her home.

September 30th, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It’s old news, since Tericka Dye lost her job last spring, but it’s a fitting counterpoint to Sydney McGee’s situation.

Dye is a popular, award-winning science teacher and volleyball coach at Reidland High School in McCracken County. When word got out that she had performed in adult films as Rikki Andersin 11 years ago, Dye got the old heave-ho. Despite legal and administrative efforts to regain her job, Dye remains unemployed as a teacher.

As Dye and her lawyer tell it, she was a broke 23-year-old with children to feed. She discovered, as many women have, that any halfway attractive female can make some big bucks quickly if she is willing to strip, move suggestively, and/or perform sex acts on camera. In Dye’s case, she worked as a stripper and was enticed to go to Los Angeles to film oral and anal sex scenes, which appeared in several XXX movies.

Unlike some adult film actresses, Dye did not stay in the business, despite a tidy $3,000 paycheck. She joined the army, went to college, got a degree and ended up as a science teacher in western Kentucky, land of God-fearing, forgiving Christian folk.

Despite shows of support from parents, students and local churches, and sympathetic coverage by Louisville’s The Southeast Outlook, the McCracken County school board decided that her previous occupation as an adult film actress would be “too distracting,” rendering her unfit to be a teacher.

September 30th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

In yet another example of bluenoses running amuck in the heartland, a Dallas art teacher has lost her job after taking her fifth graders to the Dallas Museum of Art. One of the pieces of art the kids saw was this funerary figure of an athlete cut down in the prime of his youth, ca. 330 BCE.

You will note that, with the exception of his missing head and left arm, the boy is anatomically correct. The children saw other nudes at the museum, as well. Apparently, one of the children complained to a parent, who complained to Sydney McGee’s boss, who suspended her pending administrative review.

One doubts the parent or administrator took the time to actually view the piece in question, which has not been named.

McGee, 51, is an award-winning, popular teacher at her school, The Wilma Fisher Elementary School north of Dallas. While she has apparently had some minor run-ins with her principal, McGee seems to be a responsible, dedicated teacher who wants to expose (no pun intended!) her students to our rich cultural heritage.

It’s a heritage that includes accurate depictions of the nude human figure, which Greek sculptors celebrated in countless examples, and which Roman and Renaissance sculptors, among others, imitated.

According to this New York Times article, the children also saw Auguste Rodin’s tormented nude, Shade, at right, and Aristide Maillol’s alluring Flora, at left.

Here’s my re-creation of the conversation between parent and 10-year-old child that may have started this incredible story.

September 30th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Commentary | Comments (5)

Yes, dear readers, ’tis true. I have joined the MySpace generation, after months of excoriating it as a graphic trainwreck and web navigation disaster. I have a modest, graphically simple (thank you) MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/wheatdogg. Why? Because, like nature, I abhor a vacuum.

Some months ago, while writing about Brittany McComb, the Nevada valedictorian whose overly Christian message alarmed school officials, I tried to contact her. McComb’s only presence on the internet was her MySpace page, and you cannot contact a MySpacer without having a MySpace account yourself. She never replied to my questions, but there I was, stuck with a MySpace page with nothing on it. Rather than request the sitemasters to delete it, I decided to use it as a way to direct people to this, my real blog.

In short order, I joined a couple of groups, including that of the high school where I teach. Before long, students got wind of it. Most were amazed, or at least amused, but I overheard one say to a friend that I was still using the default MySpace layout. Youch! My wounded web developer pride forced me to explore more tasteful (read, less busy and confusing) MySpace layouts. The examples I have seen (some used by my students, in fact) are worse than the default, with backgrounds that hurt your eyes, color schemes that make it hard to read the text, and layouts that spill off the screen. In other words, they suck!

September 25th, 2006 | Tags: Technology, The media | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

Check this photo from Anousheh Ansari at flickr.com. It’s the view from her bedroom window. A more direct link to her blog from space is http://spaceblog.xprize.org/by-anousheh/

September 25th, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

Anousheh Ansari pulls no punches when she describes her trip to the International Space Station in her latest blog entry. She hurled twice, and had to resort to injections to quell her motion sickness.

Now the space agencies tend to de-emphasize the unpleasant aspects of spaceflight, especially if their professional astronauts/cosmonauts toss their cookies up there — which they have. So, Ansari’s honesty is refreshing.

Supposedly, spacesickness temporarily incapacitates only a few space travelers, although everyone should feel a little funny in “zero-g.” Ansari experienced all three symptoms.

• Vertigo and nausea. The semicircular canals in our skulls contain a fluid which helps us maintain our balance. Sloshing that fluid around — in amusement park rides, during tumbling exercises, on boats in rough waters — makes some people dizzy and ill. In orbit, you also lose your sense of down, since there is nothing pulling your body in one direction, while your eyes are telling you where the floor and ceiling are. The visual input and semicircular-canal inputs duke it out in your brain to see which ones win. Meanwhile, you feel green around the gills. Ansari compounded that problem by eagerly leaping out of bed and turning a few somersaults. She says, “As soon as I stopped I realized that what I did was not a good idea! I felt my internal organs doing a cha-cha inside my belly…” Motion sickness medicine and time eventually correct the problems.

September 22nd, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

With all the worry about the Space Shuttle’s return to Earth, the media here in the States have given short shrift to the journey of Anousheh Ansari, one of the Russian space agency’s paying customers. Ansari’s beaming smile should convince anyone that visiting space has gotta be fun.

News reports have played it down, but it seems Ansari, 40, had a little spacesickness on the way up to the International Space Station. But in the videos of her arrival at the ISS today, the grin you see at right is still there. She is one happy customer!

Ansari, who made a boatload of money in the telecommunications business here in the States, was born in Iran and now lives in Texas. She’s the first Muslim woman to go to space, and has become a hero to thousands of Iranians and Muslims worldwide.
I spent some time reading up on her motivations, and have to admire her for her spunk. A fan of Star Trek, Ansari has channeled some of her fortune into the X-Prize, a competition for privately funded space ventures. She has reportedly spent another chunk, some $20 million, to buy a one-week cruise to the ISS. All paying space tourists have to train for six months, and by all reports, Ansari, an engineer by training, was a professional all the way.

September 20th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment