Letters To A Young Scientist

Have you ever been called to give advice to someone just starting their career?

Heck, have you ever considered giving yourself a career checkup?

Letters To A Young Scientist by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edward O. Wilson is a delight. Twenty one “letters” (actually each is more focused than a letter, how about a great blog post?) shows how the author got into the science business, the coming importance of science and technology, how to work constructively, where career growth comes from, and mathematics.

Wilson is concerned that too many pre-scientists are scared off early by math bullies, who convince them they don’t know, can’t know enough math to be professional. He’s not against mathematics, just against using math as an early disqualifying tool.

As he sees it, most of research is data collection. After the data is collected and the hypothesis stated, there is some room for someone with a “math toolbox” to assist. A researcher can call on just about any mathematician to get his math.

However, a mathematician without field data to work on is a theorist, scribbling on the white board.

Then magnanimously, Wilson identifies the scientific fields where theoretical math is most valuable.

I have read and watch enough misused math to know that No Matter How Hard You Do The Wrong Thing, It Never Quite Works.

How to pick a career? Start with your passion. That will make it easier to fill in your education. Ph.D.s without a passion have a hard road.

Don’t be afraid to jump to a new passion when it comes along, usually as part of investigating/developing your current passion. Hit hard every swing. Time’s awastin’

New work comes from what you discover in your current work, enlarging, creating context, joining knowledge, creating new opportunities.

This is a book that builds confidence to quit worrying and start doing.

I wish I belonged to a book club where we could give each letter its own session. This book is that good.

Read Letters To A Young Scientist and then give it to someone you love.

Junior Academy – Source of the Future!

2013 Junior Academy Innovation Leadership Awards

Every Science Fair is different. 

Long term change is difficult, requiring focus, sustained effort, and hopefully building on previous years’ achievements.

The annual Paint Branch High School Science Expo changed half a decade ago. Their problem was, nobody cared. The major reason for their annual science fair was to check off the activity.

The faculty, administration, and student scientists took on a program to make the science fair valuable and memorable for more than the presenters.

They decided to emphasize performance as part of science.

They moved to evening, like an athletic event or school play to get more involvement and support from families and community.

They changed the rules to get more participation. “Everyone does science!”

They went beyond the same old experiments to new, experimenter designed projects. Some worked, some didn’t, just like real science.

And over the years, some that didn’t work in their first year became experiments that paid off, just like real science.

We have seen their annual event turned into a happy, noisy, crowded, excited performance, with original science, competitive events, custom designed and built equipment, matching team uniforms, on-site ice cream making, and this year, a new high school.

The Junior Academy provides Science Awards to the student scientists every year. This year we thought we should also make a special Innovation Leadership Award to the producers and directors of the 2013 Paint Branch High School Science Expo, Pam Leffler and Brian Eichenlaub.

These awards started as an insiders’ acknowledgment, to recognize two people who have held on to a vision since before anyone else could see it. What we saw this year was astounding. The purpose of this post is to show what good is.

Proclamation

Whereas for several years you have been developing a new model of entertaining science fair, and

Whereas, the numbers of enthusiastic student scientists has been rapidly rising every year, becoming triumphantly louder, and

Whereas you have extended the demonstrated practice of science to parents, siblings, team mates, and strangers, while mystifying judges, and

Whereas, said science projects span the breadth of scientific endeavour, from oobleck, to space exploration, to floating bowling balls, tie die, egg drops, rollie bugs, and ice cream,

Be it known that you are hereby awarded the 2013 Junior Academy Innovation Leaderships Awards.

Make Noise!

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Great Science Fairs

Dannielle commented, Curious what do you think makes for a great science fair? Top 5-10 elements.

Really good question. The Junior Academy of the Washington Academy of Sciences provides judges for many school science fairs every year. I started as a judge in the program and succeeded the founder several years ago. I am pro science fair.

...so thank you fer askin!’

The science fair is a social ritual of learning, like sports competitions or the prom. Everybody should get to blow something up, that’s education.

Science fairs allow scientists to use the scientific method. Like many good formal processes (say, knowing how to set the table or how to sit out), practice makes improvement leading to mastery, and repeated practice allows people to use a process to improve their results.

Education has changed

Where once finding information was a rigorous, time consuming process, involving travel (from travail, meaning painful or laborious effort), libraries, and reference books, today finding information is easy. Using information for a specific purpose is the new goal of education. Since information is so available, good education should include making something with your information.

A course without a project is a survey course. Making might mean not all parts of a survey course are studied, but what is learned holds together in a larger, project context. Projects provide an energetic context for learning information as well as practicing social skills for achieving results in groups.

I mean, who really cares about Grendel? I spent more time looking at aspects of Beowulf that are never going to matter. A survey course tries to prepare you for any eventuality, and ends up teaching little of value. However, I needed to learn a lot about Grendel when completing a project on SuperVillains.

I asked Jack what he learned in basic training. He said, “They taught us how to march. Never marched after basic. Wished they had showed us how to shoot a water buffalo. That would have been useful.”

Father Guido Sarducci has a video about the value of survey education, discussing what we remember from survey courses five years after college graduation. He offers to sell you the value of a university survey education, five years later for five dollars. Integrated learning comes from projects.

School science projects are like batting practice. It takes several attempts before you start to get the hang of the process. A good coach can greatly improve your results. Parents and teachers can take your batting practice for you, but you’ll eventually have to start somewhere.

An hypothesis is NOT a conclusion

We start the scientific method with an hypothesis, what we think is going to happen. The hypothesis anchors what we are experimenting. However, the results are what is important, and it’s important not to confuse the two.

I was interviewing a young scientist who had an hypothesis that a certain gene would have an effect on lowering Body Mass Index (BMI). She constructed an elaborate experiment, separating the right type of gene, introduced it in the right type of rat, and SHAZAM the only things that lowered BMI were diet and exercise. She was disappointed her hypothesis didn’t match her results. I thought she had discovered something that is very important to me every morning at 6am.

One of my science teachers, Enrico Fermi said, Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.

Let the results fit the data

A great coach teaches that science is deductive, that conclusions comes from analyzing data, not inductive, starting with a conclusion and then gathering data to support that conclusion.

St. Bumpersticker wrote, Social Science is Neither. However, I think he was commenting on the amount of inductive reasoning done in social science research. That means that someone trying to repeat the experiment is unable to get similar results. I researched this in The Science of Liberty, by Timothy Ferris, while doing research for a project on improving science fairs several years ago.

The social sciences are about us! This is the good stuff! Reading a dedicated deductive social scientist like Charles Murray may show provocative results, you know where he got his data and you can repeat his experiments. He almost got lynched once for insinuating that half of all children are below average.

So what is a good science fair? It’s setting a date for having as many people as possible try to prove something and then honestly report what happened. It’s using your limited learning focus to create something, and we aren’t attached what you create.

If I had my way, young scientists wouldn’t have a science fair every year, they would have them every month or every week! Of course if they spent that much time blowing things up, they would all end up as fluent practicing scientists.

But then again, what would be the problem?

Tips 4 The Big Chair – Perspective 2.0

Practical Science

It’s Science Fair season and judges from the Junior Academy of the Washington Academy of Sciences were evaluating projects at Washington Mathematics Science and Technology Public Charter High School.

What has changed in 2013?
The baseline projects are getting better. There are books and websites for improving science projects and the students are using them. That created a similarity of how the projects looked and headings for communicating the research, but understanding what had to be captured for presenting the experiments, has led to better architecture and execution of the experiments.

Having a more detailed idea of expected outcomes leads to better experiments.

These students are comfortable using the internet. They were using and showing resources from multiple sources, more than I could ever get from a library, which was increasing the precision and understanding of their scientific terminology.

The students know more. My judging partner (President of IEEE USA) and I were treated to an explanation of how one of the students had typed a sample of DNA. I turned to him and said, “We used to do that in High School, didn’t we?” The future is right here in our high schools.

Now that the baseline has been raised because students are mastering so many basic science skills, what else is needed for great experiments?

For me, they are the ones that solve problems that are important to individual students. One scientist was explaining a baby food safety experiment she had imagined, executed, and reported. During her presentation, she offhandedly said, “Babies like cool food.”

I asked her how she knew that. She grinned and said, “I feed my niece and she likes cool better than warm.”

Now that unlimited information is unlocked by the internet, great science is practical science.

Read more at The Junior Academy.