Tag: science

Going Deep with David Rees

Today on the blog: a TV show recommendation. Season 2 of Going Deep with David Rees started last week and I think it’s a really good show. The basic idea of each episode is that David is trying to figure out how to do something. Something simple, like how to make an ice cube, because it turns out that even simple things are actually really complex and interesting when you break them down. While that premise is immediately interesting to me, one of the things I like best about the show is its warm sense of humor and an open and sincere quest for knowledge of everyday life. It’s this same sense of wonder and propensity for questioning things around me that initially made me want to be a scientist (and now, study how people learn science).

David Rees is a well-known artisanal pencil sharpener. Ok, maybe not well-known to a large number of people, but still, if you send him a pencil he will sharpen it by hand for you. He wrote a book on How To Sharpen Pencils, so he probably knows what he’s talking about. He is probably actually more well-known for being the person responsible for the political cartoon Get Your War On which, at least for me, made the post-9/11 George W Bush years slightly more bearable.

Season 1 of GDDR focused on important questions like How to Open a Door, How to Flip a Coin, How to Shake Hands, and How to Dig a Hole. Those might sound like silly topics for a show, and they are to a certain extent, but that’s not really what episode is totally about.

Sadly, season 1 is not available to stream anywhere at the moment, but it’s not too late to get on the bandwagon for season 2. The first episode was about How to Pet a Dog and tonight’s second episode was about How to Eavesdrop. Tonight’s episode was a really good example of how they can take a simple question and expand it into a really interesting and engaging sciencey show.

How to Eavesdrop is not really about eavesdropping perse. It is about sound. Which is one of my favorite physics topics. As David says in the episode, “how do sound waves get turned into something my brain recognizes as sound?”. Even though he talks to a former CIA spy about actual eavesdropping, the heart of the episode (to me, at least) is talking to the audiologist and learning how the ear works and talking to the cognitive scientist about how we interpret sound waves to understand speech. They even talked about the McGurk illusion which is fascinating and is also something I wrote about on this very blog about four years ago. And, to make my little academic heart even happier, GDDR popped up a citation to the McGurk et al. paper when they talked about it!

If you’re looking for a fun and engaging bit of science on your TV (or computer), you should definitely check this show out.

I am thankful for the public funding of science

Today I am thankful for my friends and family and being born into a middle class family in a first world country and all of that normal Thanksgiving stuff. But there is something else that I am thankful for that I want to call attention to. I am thankful for the public funding of science.
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What is evidence? Thinking about Serial and science

What is evidence? In science, usually we think of evidence as a collection of the observations, measurements, and results of data analysis from an investigation of a phenomenon. But I think evidence isn’t just a set of these measurements. In order for it to be evidence and not just data, there also needs to be information about its relevance and appropriateness to answering a question or a claim. You can think of good evidence (data that was collected in a careful and thoughtful way and that supports your claim) or bad evidence (sloppily collected data, incomplete data, and/or data that doesn’t support your claim).

The podcast Serial came up during one of my research meetings today. We were talking through a transcript of a middle school science classroom and debating whether or not to apply one of codes to a particular utterance the teacher made. The topic of evidence was brought up and it made me think of Serial and how evidence is discussed on the show and how it is similar in a lot of ways to how we want students to talk about evidence in their science classes.
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some thoughts on Interstellar

So I went to go see Interstellar tonight. Oh, SPOILERS throughout, so only read on if you don’t plan on seeing it or don’t care too much about that kind of thing. I normally hate spoilers, but I went into this with the main conceit spoiled and I don’t think it really ruined it, per se. In general, I have really mixed feelings about the movie. There were parts I liked and parts that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at. And it was really long.
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Don’t believe everything you hear

Yesterday I saw this BBC video about the McGurk effect. Basically, it’s a phenomenon where your brain interprets sounds differently based on what you are seeing. It’s a really amazing and robust effect, especially since it is not dependent on you not knowing about it.

This reminds me a lot of when I was teaching undergraduate physics labs and we would do the famous ball drop experiment where you would release two balls (same size but different mass) from the same height and see which one hits the ground first. The majority of these intro students would usually predict that the more massive ball would hit the ground first (a common intuition to have). The interesting thing was that a few of these students would still think this after we had done the experiment.

I remember asking some of them why they still thought that the more massive ball hit the ground first. And inevitably, some of them would say, “I heard it hit first.” At the time, this seemed kind of crazy to me because I had been there and heard the two balls hit at the same time and other people in their group had also heard them hit together. But they insisted that they heard a separation.

Later when I started studying science education I learned the name for this phenomenon: theory-laden observations. The students thought that the more massive ball would hit first and this influenced how they took in information and therefore their observation confirmed this idea. However, it seems possible that it might be even more complicated than that. Although the McGurk effect seems primarily to be focused on hearing different phonemes and sounds based on lip movements, it’s possible that the parts of the brain being confused in that area are the same as the ball-drop phenomenon. Students *think* they see the massive ball hit first and therefore *hear* it hit first.

 

(via kottke)