Copasetic Flow

My week in the education literature continues. Tracing through the references from the article I mentioned yesterday, I wound  up at Social Behaviors and Gender Differences Among Preschoolers: Implications for Science Activities To be fair, I did read through the entire article, but these two gems in the abstract caught my attention immediately: Findings indicate that the social behaviors of boys and girls were stereotypical and During free time, preference for same-gender peer interactions was observed The authors go on to discuss the aggressive, at times violent behavior of boys, and the generally more caring behavior of girls.  Per normal, these assertions run  contrary to my experiences. I believe the institution the kids are being studied in—public schools—can very easily instill these messages. I do not believe, however, that they have to be the norm. My most recent  experience with the concept that institutions can teach stereotypical gender behavior came almo...

March 3rd, 2008 -- A weekly look at science, engineering, and fringe science happenings from the week before! Levitation: Fact or Fiction? Pravda.run ran an interesting article on levitation. It presented a chronological history of accounts of levitation. The initial accounts were more mystically slanted including various swamis, nuns, and saints. As time progressed, the coverage moved towards anecdotal and scientific accounts. These included accounts of levitation by Daniel Douglas Hewm that were verified by people such as Mark Twain and William M. Thackeray . Finally, the article discussed modern 'scientific' example of levitation such as the Meissner effect . Another physical phenomenon that can result in levitation and was not covered in the article is diamagnetism . It was used most spectacularly to levitate a frog in the Netherlands. This experiment was carried out at the Nijmegen High Field Magnet Laboratory. The moon-bound art museum: greg.org reported on ...