Wheat-dogg’s world
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He’s Wes Ramsey (Class of ‘96) who is co-starring in a SciFi Channel movie, Reign of the Gargoyles, at 9 pm EDT. Wes is a really talented guy who has had quite a few parts in TV shows and movies since graduating from Juilliard in 2000, including roles on Guiding Light, Charmed, CSI:Miami and Luis. In 1993 he co-starred in the satire, Latter Days, in which he plays a gay who falls in love with a Mormon missionary visiting his home.

Reign of the Gargoyles does not promise to be the next Star Wars. In fact, before learning Wes was going to be in the flick, I was going to pointedly ignore it, since the promos looked pretty cheesy. But since Wes was a former student of mine, I’ll put up with the cheesiness.

Then when he gets an Oscar or Emmy in years to come, I can say, “I remember when …”

One of our alumnae has in fact won an Emmy. Mary Clay Boland (Class of ‘88) won in 2005 for “Outstanding Achievement in Casting for a Drama Series” for: “As the World Turns”. [Click here for a photo.] She had also been nominated the previous year for the same series.

Mary Clay was also the casting director for the first season of The Sopranos. Her casting agency, Boland/Eggman, is based in NYC.

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Some of Wes’ and Mary Clay’s ouevre:

Spoiled as I am by Linux and Mac OS X, I figured that updating Windows and associated Microsoft products would be as easy as running a script or downloading an update.

As if.

The problem, of course, is that M$ provided such easy solutions for the most current versions of Exchange Server, Windows Server, Office and the desktop OS (aka XP and Vista). At my workplace, we are still using Exchange Server and Windows Server 2000, and most of the client machines run Office XP and Windows 2000 Pro. Silly of me as the tech guy not to spend craploads of money to get the latest versions of all.

So the update solution for those of us stuck in the Stone Age is to download a set of “tools” provided by M$. The process is, to say the least, not intuitively obvious. After some false starts, I managed to get it right, with the help of a very useful (third-party) step-by-step guide here and liberal applications of Google searches.

The complexity results from needing to update the time zone details on the network domain controllers (DCs), the mail server, and the client machines, and then updating the Exchange database on the mail server. This last tool requires either (a) a client machine running either XP SP2 or Vista and Office 2003 or higher or (b) a client machine capable of running Virtual PC 2004 or Virtual Server 2005 to emulate a more modern Windows Server/Exchange environment. This latter is a free download from Microsoft here, although the link is temporarily unavailable at this writing. A virtual-server solution requires a boatload of RAM, which my desktop PC (with 512 MB) did not have, so I used option a..

I have decided that one of hardest jobs is to get all of my students to write decent lab reports. Despite my published guidelines, scoldings and examples, some of them just do not yet know how to write a good lab report.

Grrr!

In their defense, I myself did not know to write a good one until college, when the labs we did in freshman lab were far from the cut-and-dried high school experiments. The college lab was also a bit more, shall we say, competitive, with anxious premeds* bucking for A’s. Still, one would hope that even in high school a student could think a little harder or more critically about the matter at hand.

Here’s the most important stuff that I want to see in a lab report. Comments are invited.

The introduction has to include some background behind the experiment: pertinent concepts  and equations, references to the history of the experiment, clear description of the experiment, clear idea of its purpose and a prediction/hypothesis that the experiment can actually test.

The procedure has to be written in a way that someone unfamiliar with the experiment can understand what the student did. I tell mine that they should be able to write the procedure such that their English teacher could reproduce what they did. Clearly describing the procedure presupposes that the student actually understood the methodology, of course.

Jennifer Ouellette has a great physics blog, Cocktail Party Physics, in which she not only offers interesting drink recipes but also cogent articles on all matters scientific. In January she posted her top ten list of basic physics/science concepts that any layperson should just know. Number one on Jennifer’s list is “the scientific method.”

I’m always surprised by how many non-scientists don’t fully grasp the scientific method, specifically, what is a theory versus what is an hypothesis. I think this is generally pretty well covered on ScienceBlogs from time to time, so perhaps a “basics” post could summarize those arguments in one place, and extend the discussion to incorporate the question of what constitutes scientific evidence. How do we know when something is true, or false? The reason many otherwise well-meaning people often fall for the ID-ists’ fallacious arguments is that they can’t tell the difference between the fake “evidence” cited by, say, The Discovery Institute, and actual scientific data.

Since I’m in the science education biz, I can’t pass up this challenge. It’s my job to teach teenage laypersons, so I’m taking up Jennifer’s challenge, at least for this item.

The key idea behind the “scientific method” is evidence — cold hard facts. You cannot verify or support scientific claims by argument, persuasiveness, personality, appeals to authority (divine or otherwise), bullying, or haranguing. Like Gil Grissom says, scientists “follow the evidence.”