Aristotle argued that an object needed constant attention from a source of motion in order to keep moving. … In the same fashion, Aristotle suggested, the planets revolved around the earth due to the constant force exerted on them by a “prime mover.” To the medieval monks of Paris [especially Jean Buridan, 1300–58, and Nicholas Oresme, 1323–82], this sounded like nonsense. Specifically, they questioned why God should have to continuously intervene to impart motion to one of the planets when a simple impetus of motion from the start of the cosmos should have been sufficient to last for the duration of the universe. What may seem today to sound like a theological quible actually cleared the cobwebs of Greek preconceptions out of the European mind, allowing a more abstract approach to the theory of motion, so that by the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Copernicus, the idea of inertial motion, imparted by and depending only an initial force, was virtually taken for granted by astronomers.

— John Farrell, The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), pp. 42–43

ReadWriteWeb reported today that the U.S. government has awarded VoloMedia a patent (U.S. Patent 7,568,213) on a “method for providing episodic media content.” Basically, if you’re using any technology that allows you to publish episodic media content over the Internet, you’re using technology to which VoloMedia now holds a patent—even if you’ve never, ever heard of VoloMedia before.

This post offers more content »

The Christian Chronicle‘s online edition reports today:

SEARCY, ARK. – A team of Arkansas researchers has been awarded a $1.5 million grant by NASA to develop a system to search for life on Mars.

The team includes Harding University professor Dr. Edmond Wilson and assistant professor Dr. Constance Meadors.

Wilson and Meadors are members of the Arkansas NASA Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research team, which also includes scientists from University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Arkansas Tech University.

Prospects of finding alien life-forms have fascinated me since I was a toddler watching Star Trek, and while NASA is more likely to find microbes than your typical sci-fi Martians, I still eagerly await every bit of news on this topic.

What theological ramifications, if any, do you think finding microbial life on Mars would have? What about intelligent life?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today:

In a move that puts them at odds with the official stance of the Association of American University Presses, a group of university-press directors yesterday issued a position statement that endorses “the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication.”

Good for them! Read all about it in the Wired Campus report.

Inside Higher Ed reports today on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009), a new book by Derek Bruff, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt. Actually, IHE interviews Bruff about the book’s topic—classroom response systems or “clickers”—instead of presenting a book review.

The interview raised some important questions for teachers and institutions using clickers, such as the matter of standardization. Teaching with Classroom Response Systems just released on February 17, so I haven’t seen the book or had time to read it. Therefore, I won’t pretend to comment on the book itself. Two items within the interview, however, caught my eye and call for a quick response.

When asked about brand standardization, Bruff replied (in part),

Most faculty and staff members with whom I talk about clickers are concerned with the cost to students of the devices. This has led many campuses to adopt particular brands of clickers so that students need not purchase two or three clickers for different courses. Not only does this save students money, but it makes it easier for staff to provide technical and pedagogical support for faculty members using clickers.

I agree with this important concern, but read on. When asked what features he’d like to see added to existing clicker systems, Bruff answered,

Clickers do a great job of collecting and aggregating student responses to multiple-choice questions. Existing technology does not, however, work quite as well with free-response questions. I am hoping to see the development of input devices that allow students to quickly and easily respond with words, phrases, or sentences.

Devices that allow students to quickly and easily respond with words, phrases, or sentences already exist, and most students have already incurred the cost of purchasing these devices before they ever show up for the first day of their first college course:

Having used classroom response systems (clickers) for the past couple of years, I recently abandoned them in favor of a polling and free-response system that students can access online or using SMS. Our institutional research people here at Pepperdine tell me that 95% of our incoming students bring laptops with them to college, and virtually all bring cell phones with text-messaging (SMS) plans. Using these existing tools addresses both of the issues above: students (or more likely their parents) have already purchased these tools, thus addressing the cost issue, and free-response questions are easy to capture, thus addressing the usage issue. Such schemes must always contend with poor cell reception, of course, though an institution that wanted to standardize could always roll an iPhone into the standard entry package, as Abilene Christian University has done (and others have since followed suit). Using laptops assumes that the college or university maintains a reliable wireless network, too, but that assumption should hold good at reputable schools these days. (I mean “should” as a moral claim, not an ontological claim, for those of you keeping score at home.)

Bruff knows about these solutions, of course:

I have spoken with several instructors who have started to use systems that allow students to submit responses via various mobile devices — cell phones, smart phones, and laptops — that make it easier for students to do so. These developments are exciting, but there is a need for tools that will help instructors quickly make sense of responses to open-ended questions. Development of such tools would open up a lot of possibilities for these systems.

No “tool” can substitute for actually reading free-text responses, of course, but some strategies already exist for quick processing, and others are surely coming. Consider, for example, the popular “word cloud.” For this example, I asked my students to supply one word that could complete the sentence, “The Bible is …” They texted their responses to a short code issued by my polling service provider, PollEverywhere. Using PollEverywhere’s tools, I immediately generated a .csv file with a list of student responses. I copied the responses out of the .csv file and pasted them into Wordle, and got the following result (the size of the word indicates the frequency of response):

Naturally, I would prefer a tool where I didn’t have to export, copy, and paste the data, but I imagine that such tools will become widely available before long. And I imagine that Bruff’s book, at 240 pages, includes discussion of “best practices” for clicker use that would apply to any sort of live polling, whether using clickers or text messaging. Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but it seems to me that narrow-band, highly specialized gadgets like clickers are the trailing end of the instructional technology wave, and the future of IT lies in finding new ways to turn students’ existing gadgets from liabilities (distractions) into assets.

While I’m on an advertising kick, have you seen those new commercials for the Blackberry Storm? The one where the Blackberry user is all ga-ga over the touchscreen keyboard? When he asks what “mad genius” came up with the idea of a touchscreen keyboard, he looks up and sees the Verizon network “Can you hear me now?” guy, who waves a little wave at him—as if Verizon (or John McCain) came up with the idea for a touchscreen keyboard.

Hate to break it to you, Blackberry fans, but I and thousands of others have been sending e-mails with our touchscreen keyboards for, oh, eighteen months or so now—over the AT&T network. Can you spell “iPhone”? I knew you could.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is just now figuring this out?

Verizon is currently promoting the new LG Dare phone with the tag line, “Dare to be different.” The primary competition for this phone is, obviously, Apple’s iPhone, which has been on the market for a little over a year now. Here’s an image used prominently in the “Dare to be different” campaign:

Let’s see about those differences, shall we?

Whereas the iPhone uses a hardware button to take users to the home screen, the Dare daringly blazes a new trail by using a small icon representing a house to take users to the home screen.

Whereas the iPhone crams twenty icons onto its launch screens by using square icons laid out in a rigid grid, the Dare daringly settles for nine icons per screen, allowing bold, quasi-random rotations and a greater variety of icon shapes.

Whereas the iPhone uses a white silhouette of a telephone handset on a green background to represent its telephone function, the Dare daringly uses a white sihouette of a telephone handset on a green background to represent its telephone directory.

Whereas the iPhone Settings icon depicts three cogs against a gray perforated background, the Dare daringly streamlines its Settings icon to two cogs against a gray perforated background.

Whereas the iPhone uses a closed envelope icon to activate its e-mail function, the Dare boldly opens the envelope.

Whereas the iPhone uses a silhouette of an iPod to activate its music functions, the Dare challenges all covention by using an icon of a Bose-style CD player instead.

Whereas the iPhone’s web browser, a specialized build of Safari, features a compass rose—with a red-and-white pointer pointing northeast—superimposed on a Mercator projection of the western hemisphere, the Dare breaks with staid tradition by representing its browser by an icon that superimposes the letters “WWW” over a globe with the Pacific Ocean turned toward the viewer. Lest wannabe iPhone owners potential Dare customers feel too left out, however, the Dare daringly repurposes the compass rose, making it the icon for a GPS function—with the pointer headed northeast (straight toward Cupertino?).

Somebody throw me a lifeline, please. I’m drowning in originality.

Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, will receive an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of New Mexico on May 17. I assume this coincides with UNM’s Spring 2008 graduation ceremony. Scott already holds several honorary doctorates as well as an earned Ph.D. in anthropology. Genie, I’m sorry it took me so long to offer these public congratulations … hopefully, late really is better than never.

The National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies recently released Science, Evolution, and Creationism, an 88-page book surveying the topics listed in the title. The publisher’s blurb reads:

How did life evolve on Earth? The answer to this question can help us understand our past and prepare for our future. Although evolution provides credible and reliable answers, polls show that many people turn away from science, seeking other explanations with which they are more comfortable.

In the book Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a group of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine explain the fundamental methods of science, document the overwhelming evidence in support of biological evolution, and evaluate the alternative perspectives offered by advocates of various kinds of creationism, including “intelligent design.” The book explores the many fascinating inquiries being pursued that put the science of evolution to work in preventing and treating human disease, developing new agricultural products, and fostering industrial innovations. The book also presents the scientific and legal reasons for not teaching creationist ideas in public school science classes.

Mindful of school board battles and recent court decisions, Science, Evolution, and Creationism shows that science and religion should be viewed as different ways of understanding the world rather than as frameworks that are in conflict with each other and that the evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith. For educators, students, teachers, community leaders, legislators, policy makers, and parents who seek to understand the basis of evolutionary science, this publication will be an essential resource.

I haven’t yet read the book, and so I remain unable to comment on its content, though those who know my thinking on these issues will instantly perceive my sympathies with the blurb. You can purchase a printed copy of the book from Amazon, or purchase a physical copy or download a (free) PDF from the National Academies. (HT: NCSE)

For another interesting, free resource, visit the Union of Concerned Scientists and read their statement on science, evolution, and intelligent design.