Lab Out Loud

Lab Out Loud

By Dale Basler and Brian BartelScienceEducation
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Lab Out Loud episodes

  • Episode 16 - Building Connections in Science Education
    For this episode, we chatted with Dr. Karen Harpp, Associate Professor in Geology
    at Colgate University in New York.  Dr. Harpp talked with us about
    her research, science outreach and creating connections between science
    teachers and researchers.
    • Colgate Geology
    • Karen Harpp's Homepage
    • Volcanoes in the Classroom: A Simulation of an Eruption Column
    • Dive and Discover: Interview with Geochemist Karen Harpp
    • Polar Palooza
    • Underwater Volcanoes of the Northern Hawaiian Islands Crew
      • Mt. St. Helens Volcano Cams
      • Mt Etna Volcano Cams
      • List of Volcano Cams
      • West Bend, WI
      • SeisMac
        • Science Friday Live Broadcast in Milwaukee, WI
          • May 16:, 2008: Great Lakes Water Issues and The Science of Brewing
          • Pictures from Science Friday Broadcast
          • Cory Doctorow's Craphound.com
          • Little Brother Book Tour
          • Little Brother on Amazon.com
            • 43 min
          • Episode 15 - Expelled Exposed
            In response to the movie Expelled:
            No Intelligence Allowed, we decided to talk with someone who
            has invested her life defending evolution.  Dr.
            Eugenie Scott, Director for the National
            Center for Science Education, talks to us about the movie,
            the NCSE response, and the place of evolution in science education.
            • National
            Center for Science Education
          • Expelled
            • Exposed: Flunked, Not Expelled - What Ben Stein isn't telling you about
            Intelligent Design
          • Ben Stein: "Science Leads you to Killing People"
          • Doonesbury Comic regarding medicine and Intelligent Design
          • The Post-Crescent: It's Your Call
            • PZ Myers (Pharyngula) gets expelled from Expelled
            • Boston Globe: No Intelligence Allowed in 'Expelled'
            • Scientific American: Expelled Explained
            • Expelled Producers Accused of Copyright Infringement
            32 min
          • Episode 14 - Bill Nye Talks About Energy and More

            For our contribution to Earth Day, we had the opportunity to

            chat with Bill Nye about his new show on the new Planet Green channel called Stuff Happens.

            Preview from the Show:

            I’m

            doing this other thing called “Stuff Happens? for the
            Discovery Channel. 
            It’s strictly for a new channel Discovery is re-purposing –
            they’re calling it "Planet Green".  So all the programming
            is green, or about environmental
            issues and stuff.  And so this show is about consumer choices that
            you can
            make to live a more environmentally responsible life.

            I

            am a serious hobbyist.  I have four kilowatts of solar panels and I have a
            solar water heating system that I, if you will, designed – along with a guy
            who’s worked in solar in southern California
            for many, many years…I hired him, and two very good plumbers, and these guys
            who were good with gas mains, and we re-rigged the whole house.  So now I
            have solar hot water that pre-heats the water before it runs through two
            tankless hot water heaters.  So my gas bill in the summer is less than
            $10.

            There’s

            an old supply chain from the South
            American Western
            Coast to North American
            farmers.  And what is supplied is fish feed made from anchovies.  So,
            American bacon pigs are fed fish from South American oceans.  And so many
            fish are fished so aggressively that penguins are going out of business. 
            The penguin ecosystem has been devastated, and penguin populations have been
            decimated by this practice.  So we encourage you – the listener, the
            viewer – to buy…organic, grain-fed bacon.  That’s what we want you to do
            to reduce the market for this anchovy feed.  And it’s just something that
            humans are kind of doing by accident, but on such an enormous scale that’s it’s
            screwing up an entire ecosystem in the south western Pacific.

            The

            baby steps are important.  The hardest thing for everyone to understand
            about the environment is that every single thing you do affects everybody in
            the whole world.  And the reason, nominally, is that we only have one
            atmosphere.  We can only breath from one source of air – we all share the
            air.  So this is a fundamental idea that’s hard to get; it just doesn’t
            seem possible.  I throw out this magazine and instead of recycling it, yeah –
            you’re lowering the quality of life of everyone on earth.

            So

            you go to the store and you buy one [compact fluorescent light bulb].  Ok,
            but if you replace every lamp in your house, or every lamp in the main rooms…
            Replace every one of those lamps, and you will see your power bill go down… Now
            there are some whining, unbelievable-freakin’ whiners out there who tell you
            that we can’t change to compact fluorescents because of the mercury - "there’s no
            way to get rid of the mercury that’s in those lights and it’s gonna kill
            everybody."  So let’s keep in mind that it was the year 1951 when American
            industry went to buying more fluorescent lamps than incandescent lamps. 
            That is to say, if you work at any sort of factory anywhere, they have fluorescent
            lights – ‘cuz it’s so much cheaper.  And so those lights are required by
            law to be recycled and the mercury recovered.  And there are services that
            recover the lights and recover the mercury.  So we just gotta do the same
            thing for domestic consumers – for people that buy ‘em for their houses. 
            For cryin’ out loud – this is not, if I may, rocket surgery.  This is
            actually a little more complicated that: trying to motivate everyone to do the
            right thing with regard to their old lamps.  And of course it can be done;
            it’s a metal.  Who doesn’t want to recover a metal?  It’s valuable,
            it’s shiny, you can see it – of course you can do it.

            Politically,

            [a scientific debate] is an unsophisticated idea.  None of the three
            candidates remaining would ever consent to a science debate.  None of them
            are scientists.  None of them would admit to being experts in any way
            about anything about science.  So of course they're going to say no; they
            have to say no.  This pursuit of science debate is an exercise in futility.
             Instead, we need to rephrase it - in my opinion.  My best idea so
            far, is to rename it something else - the "nondependence on foreign
            oil" debate, the "health" debate, the "energy" debate,
            the "competitiveness" debate - that's pretty good...  But naming
            this thing the "science" debate sabotages it from the get-go.
             And of course I support the idea, but the best correction I can think of
            it to rename it.  The "competitiveness" debate - yes.

            Links:

            • Planet Green
            • Bill Nye the Science Guy
            • Nye Labs
            • Eyes of Nye
            • Bill Nye on Wikipedia
            • Greener Pastures from the New York Times
            • The Science Channel: 100 Greatest Discoveries
            28 min
          • Episode 13 - Who and What of the WhyFiles
            This week we talk to Terry Devitt from WhyFiles.org.

            Preview from the Show:

            Our primary mission is to look at what is going on in the world every
            week and find some corner of the scientific enterprise that lends
            itself to a public conversation about science, and then we drill down
            into that, to contact the best experts that we can find to try to shed
            light on those dark corners of science - the places and things that
            people don't know about, and to provide more than what you're going to
            get in a straight-up treatment of science than one routinely encounters
            in popular media.  I think it's safe to say that after we complete
            our formal educations, most people only encounter science through
            popular media, and so a big part of the Why Files mission is to help
            people come to grips with science - what it is,  why it's
            important, why it makes a difference in our lives on a daily basis.
            It's really essential that people in
            a democracy have some understanding of how we generate knowledge,
            because it impacts our lives in important ways every day.  
            Links:
            Why Files Educator Page
            Why Files Classroom Materials
            The Why Files Archives
            Baseball Spring Training
            The Science of Polling
            CSI's: Cool Science Images

            Subscribe to The Why Files with their RSS Feed

            25 min
          • Episode 12 - Skepticism and The Bad Astronomer
            Today's guest calls himself the Bad Astronomer.  Phil Plait is an astronomer, an author, and a well-known blogger at www.badastronomy.com.  Phil talks to us about myths and skepticism in the science classroom.
            Special Announcement: Don't miss Lab Out Loud's Conference Coverage live from the NSTA conference in Boston!
            Preview from the show:
            Plait: I
            am in fact a skeptic.  In the public mind - if you ask somebody "what's
            a skeptic" - most people think it's a cynic or a denier, somebody who
            just doesn't believe in anything.  And that's not strictly true.  All a skeptic is, is someone who demands evidence for a claim.  If you come
            up to me and say the sky is pink, I'm going to say "what is your
            evidence for this?".  Or I'll say, "that's an interesting claim, but
            here's the evidence against it."  It's someone who applies critical
            thinking, logic, evidence, observation, the scientific method to any
            sort of claim.
            Science is all about skepticism.  They are
            hardly different - I mean skepticism is a tool of science.  Richard
            Feynman (the physicist) said "science is a way of not fooling
            ourselves. It's a way of figuring what's out what's really going on".  
            And skepticism is just a way of looking at things.  It's making sure
            that if you're thinking about something, if there's a claim that's
            being made - whether it's by a person or even yourself, there's a way
            of examining it so that you can test its reality or not. And the
            problem is, it's not something we teach our kids.  In fact, we teach
            them exactly the opposite.  We teach them to believe in Santa Claus and
            the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.  We go to movies where the skeptic
            is always a jerk, and the end is always the supenatural cause or trust
            in humanity or whatever."
            Plait:
            Scooby Doo was a great cartoon because
            in the end, it really wasn't a ghost or whatever, it was always old man
            Marley wearing a mask, who didn't want the developers to come in and
            destroy his farm or whatever."
            Plait:
            When you're teaching kids to the
            test, and you're saying "here's how you do the math" without explaining
            why, "here's what you're supposed to get in the results in the lab"
            without explaining why, we're not teaching our kids science.  We're
            teaching them nothing, we're teaching them belief, faith - and that's
            not what science is about.  Science is not about belief, science is
            about evidence.
            Follow the Bad Astronomer:
            • Bad Astronomy Blog
            • Contact Info
            • Twitter
            • Facebook Group
            Posts from badastronomy.com discussed on the show:
            • Standing an Egg on End on the Spring Equinox
            • Are Apollo Moon Photos Fake?
            • Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax"
            Books:
            • Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax"
              • read NSTA's recommendation of the book
          • Death From the Skies (pre-order from Amazon.com)
            • Skepticism on the Internet:
            • The Skeptics Dictionary
            • James Randi Educational Foundation
            • PZ Myers: Pharyngula Blog
            • Point of Inquiry Podcast
            • Skeptical Inquirer Magazine
            • Skeptoid Podcast
            • Skepticality
            • Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
            25 min
          • Episode 11 - Death of the Chemistry Sets
            This week we talk with Steve Silberman, contributing editor for Wired Magazine. Steve talks to us about the demise of the chemistry set  (as related to his article Don't Try this at Home) and what that might mean for the future of scientific curiosity in our children.
            Preview from the Show:
            In the last few years, a kind of perfect
            storm of concerns and legislation has arisen that has had the unintended effect of discouraging amateur chemistry.
            Kids
            really want to fall in love with science.  And I know how much the
            teachers really want to communicate their own enthusiasm about science
            to their kids.  But with fears of liability, and these restrictive
            laws, and just a kind of general paranoia, instead what's being
            transmitted to kids is some kind of combination of boredom and fear.
            I
            would say that one of the reasons that I became a science writer was
            that I had a well stocked chemistry set when I was in elementary
            school, that contained many things that I am sure are now illegal.
            If
            we're cutting off the possibility of future generations of being
            interested in science - at the same time that the performance of
            American kids in science starts to go down around 12th grade, the
            number of science and technology related jobs in the world are going
            continually up - so we're creating a gap here where we need people in
            science and technology, but we're no longer giving them the access to
            the things that could help them become interested in the subject.
            Links:
            • Articles by Steve Silberman from Wired Magazine
            • United Nuclear
              • see them on Wired Science in Dangerous Science
          • Federal Hazardous Substances Act
          • Thames and Kosmos C500 Chemistry Set
          • 12 Angry Men: "Endangered Species - the Chemistry Set
          • NYPD Seeks an Air Monitor Crackdown for New Yorkers
          • Books
            • The Boy Scientist
            • Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
          • Julius B. Cohen’s 1910 Practical Organic Chemistry
          • sciencemadness.org
          • TED Talks Video
            • 5 Dangerous Things Things You Should Let Your Kids Do
            26 min

          About Lab Out Loud

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          Lab Out Loud is a show about science teaching in the classroom and beyond. Lab Out Loud seeks to explore science education through discussions with educators, researchers, leading scientists, science…