Monday, June 11, 2007

Newsweak

Spa billboard (right) called racy and all wrong. (Chicago Tribune link requires free registration: Consumerist link doesn't.)

How I got out of writing an essay on H.G. Well's The Time Machine. "A humanities course should not be required for my B.Sc degree in Physics." (Wells' name and missing period after abbreviation as in original document.)

Origin of deja vu pinpointed.

Britons lose an amazing 885,000 mobile phone handsets each year - by accidentally dropping them into the toilet and flushing them away.

Audio compression is evil. (video)

HP: Digital cameras for fat people. (Remember Friends? Monica excuses her prom-era weight with "Well, you know, the camera adds ten pounds," and Chandler responds "How many did you have on you?")

Winnie Cooper is my hero. (Main page.)

A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China.

With Powerpoint comes great responsibility. (video)

A physics teacher begs for his subject back. "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics."

Origin of deja vu pinpointed.

3 comments:

Grey said...

Thank you for linking to my site.

-Grey

Anonymous said...

About the change of physics teaching in the UK. I am torn between the words unbelievable and predictable. Perhaps both will do.

I see this as the future trend in all education -- even science ed: more politics, less math. After all, math is so hard to control.

Anonymous said...

While we are on the subject, you should take a look at the Georgia (USA) science standards for elementary school students. (They are on the web. google Georgia performance standards) They are not bad, but they are vague and extremely "hands on". Basically we let the students experiment and then we expect them to construct the theories and explanations that took folks like Newton and Einstein years.

If you have a gifted, dedicated teacher who is also a science nerd, these are great. Unfortunately, in my school there is one (count them) one teacher I trust to use the standards to teach science the way the state wants teachers to.

There are, fortunately, several teachers who intend to keep teaching science the way they have always taught it. The rest ... tend to avoid the subject and that is not a bad thing since most of what they know is ...not especially correct.