Category Archives: aid

Donors Choose And ROCK!

Posted on by
Reply

The 2011 Science Bloggers for Students online charity challenge was once again a smashing success thanks to all of you who donated. The overall drive brought in more than $51,000 from 698 people. Ocean and Geobloggers brought in around $3100 of that money to which you guys contributed $585 $645!

In order of donation date, thanks and high-fives go to:

  1. The Donors Choose team
  2. Anne J.
  3. Anita C.
  4. Julie H.
  5. Anonymous Donor Fairy (who gave $100 – yeah!)
  6. Janet S.
  7. Chris R.
  8. my very own D
  9. Craig C.
  10. Rusty H.
  11. Anne J. (again!)
  12. Elizabeth B.
  13. Lynn C. and
  14. Cynthia D.

The fourteen of you reached 519 students, got four earth science classroom projects fully funded and helped four others get started! I want to take this opportunity to thank Janet Stemwedel as well, for once again organizing us science bloggers into doing something tremendously useful.

A note to those of you who donated during the last three days of the drive: Gift codes will arive via e-mail. How the match is calculated and issued to you is detailed here. As gerty-z says, “THIS IS FREE MONEY, folks. Let’s make sure the kids see every last penny.” Just because the Science Bloggers drive is over doesn’t mean individual classroom projects have expired as well. I highly encourage you to donate to one or more of these four projects:

An interesting observation about the projects that did get fully funded before October 22nd: They all have ROCK in the title. Keep On ROCKing In The Free World, Rock Stars, Rock Out and Science ROCKS! Tuck that idea away for next year, earth science teachers.

Thanks again to all of you who gave. I’m making *sparkly eyes* at you.

Status

Reply

ATTENTION SCIENCE LOVERS OF EARTH Today is the FINAL day to donate to the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers For Students online charity challenge that helps high-poverty science and mathematics classrooms in need. Please donate via my giving page. Science rocks! Don’t take it for granite! Regular posts continue below.

Please Give To Science In Classrooms!

Posted on by
2

Yes, it’s that time of year again when I beseech you, dear readers, to donate to the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers For Students online charity challenge that helps high-poverty science and mathematics classrooms in need. There is a lot less fanfare and competition between us science bloggers this year, but classrooms are more underfunded than ever. The challenge runs from October 2nd to 22nd this year.

Last year, this blog raised around $500 with a dollar-for-dollar match by HP. At the conclusion of the last challenge, I said, “A simple $1.50 per child living in poverty can make the difference towards a better and slightly more equipped science education.” This is still true. Also read some of the thank-you letters from teachers whose classrooms benefited from your donations through this very page last year. One from a teacher in Illinois puts it all in perspective:

… In addition to increasing the modes of instruction in my classroom, the projector has been an invaluable resource due to the limited budget and high poverty experienced at my school. Several students at my school cannot afford necessary eyeglasses and struggle seeing writing on whiteboards when sitting in the front row. With the new projector, I can zoom in on text to allow all students to read important information. Additionally, my school is struggling to afford paper and toner for the copy machine. We have gone weeks at a time without being able to make copies. The projector allows me to display the required instructions, problems, graphs, and tables so the students can learn and practice new skills.

Please peruse the projects on my 2011 GIVING PAGE and please, please, PLEASE consider giving even $5 to a project of your choice. Let’s support American science education even if (and especially because) the government and private sector couldn’t care less!

Thank You, Donors Choose Participants!

Posted on by
2

As you can tell from the sidebar, the 2010 Science Bloggers For Students fundraising campaign is officially over. Anna Doherty of Donors Choose sent us some wonderful news today:

I wanted to send out a HUGE THANK YOU for all the awesome work that went into making Science Bloggers for Students a success.  472 citizen philanthropists contributed more than $36,000 to help more than 23,500 students – yippee!

Ocean & Geo Bloggers readers contributed $3918 and YOU, my reader philanthropists, raised about $500 of that admirable amount. It simply amazes me how good we can be and that a simple $1.50 per child living in poverty can make the difference towards a better and slightly more equipped science education. All it takes is each of us pushing, giving, loving just a tiny little bit.

Wait, there’s more! Don’t forget the HP match and your gift cards. Anna continues:

The HP [dollar-for-dollar] match will be distributed shortly.  You’ll see the impact stats on the Science Bloggers for Students Motherboard take a big leap, and every donor who gave through the challenge will receive a unique philanthropic gift code to redeem on a DonorsChoose.org project of their choice.  I hope you’ll encourage your readers to use that code so the funds don’t go unused!

Your work is not done, rock stars. (Our work is never done.) And, after that, please continue to visit Donors Choose through your new accounts to give to any classroom of your choice.

Awesome science-loving friends and readers. I have them!

DonorsChoose Blog | Science bloggers helped oh-so-many students!

The Science Of Football

Posted on by
Reply

Tomorrow is the final day of the Science Bloggers for Students fundraising challenge at Donors Choose. Thank you, guys, for helping me raise $461 which will hopefully be doubled by HP some time this week! One of the projects, Rockin Earth, has only $176 left to go! Please, VatulBlog readers, let’s be responsible for the kids of Jacksonville, North Carolina acquiring a decent mineral testing kit. Just one more day and a beleaguered teacher will thank you from the bottom of her heart.

Why should you help kids learn science? So that they appreciate football, of course! Scientific American reports:

In partnership with the National Science Foundation and the National Football League, NBC Learn has created 10 videos that explore several concepts:

* Newton’s three laws of motion
* The Pythagorean theorem
* Projectile motion
* Vectors
* Geometric shapes
* Kinematics
*  Torque
*  Hydration and nutrition

All this week, we’ll be providing additional stories that take the concepts explored in the video further.

Remember those awful word problems in which a dude has to swim across a river flowing at a certain velocity, so how far upstream does said dude have to start, given his own speed, in order to reach a specific point on the opposite bank? In What Are Vectors, and How Are They Used? “you see that quarterbacks must account for their own motion when throwing a pass.” Explains Jay Cutler. Sorry, was that out loud?

And yet, I don’t think angular momentum and torque can explain the big blond FABUlousness that is my very own defensive linebacker, Clay Matthews. Especially against the Cowboys.

The Sack Of John Kitna (Credit: Tom Lynn)

Hey, any excuse to talk Packer football raise money for science.

Tomas Hits Haiti

Posted on by
Reply

Remember back when I told you we conducted a study that showed that approximately 80% of Haiti is susceptible to landslides because the ground beneath them is weathered volcanic rock and heavily deforested for charcoal?

Enter Hurricane Tomas. It’s a Category 1, measly by southern Louisiana standards, but torrential rain is the last thing earthquake-broken, landslide-prone, cholera-striken Haiti needs right now.

As you prepare for the holidays, please keep Haiti in your thoughts.

Update: More about the hurricane and associated landslides at Dave’s Landslide Blog.

“You’re Telling Me That’s In The First Amendment?”

Posted on by
1

Do you know what politicians and priests are? Middlemen. Do you know what really efficient organizations do? Get rid of middlemen or give them a chance to do real work. For us, that would mean reading our social contracts and holy books and figuring out their contents ourselves without the aid of some phony who offers to advocate on our behalf. That would be real revolution, with the minimum requirements of honesty and basic reading comprehension.

Please donate to my DonorsChoose campaign to raise funds for low-income science classrooms. Please help keep critical thinking and real revolution alive. A hearty Thank You to all who have given so far.

Science Friday

Posted on by
Reply

It’s still Earth Science Week, folks!

In my attempts to raise $money$ for science classrooms, I completely neglected to inform you that the public radio show Science Friday may go off the air for lack of funding.

We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying they love what we do, we are sorely needed, but it’s not their job to fund us. At the same time, NPR has said the same thing, telling us that if we want to stay on the air, etc, we now have to raise all our own money. Despite what listeners may think, NPR only gives us about 10 percent of our funding.

If it isn’t the National Science Foundation’s job to fund a radio show that promotes science, then what is? The scientists of tomorrow will simply spring forth from the ether and flat earth with no nurturing along the way. Between this and hearing that the local, nationally-acclaimed high school now allegedly employs a biology teacher who believes in intelligent design, I can only hope that the FSM‘s noodly appendage strikes me unconscious.

Only you can prevent mass brain implosion. You know what to do here and here. Following is some food for along the way:

* Why Science Matters: A Scientist’s Apology. I agreed with some parts of this article and disagreed with others. What’s fascinating to me as a technologist is the language and discussion surrounding science as pure discovery versus invention/engineering and the ethical consequences of this distinction.

* Carbon sequestration could help to neutralize Hungary’s red bauxite sludge. Is there anything industrial waste cannot do?

* Xavier University of New Orleans celebrates the opening of the College of Pharmacy’s new Qatar Pavilion. “This provides a good antidote to a couple of pernicious myths. The first myth is that the USA doesn’t receive foreign aid. Yes, we do. I recall after Katrina even poor nations like Jamaica and Bangladesh were helping us out. The second myth is, of course, the idea that Islam is at war with Christianity. I’d just like to point out that Qatar is a Muslim country and our school is Catholic. ‘Nuff said.”

Earth Science Week Off To A Good Start

Posted on by
1

It’s Earth Science Week!

Today in 2010, we have the ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, controversy over hydro-fracturing to extract hydrocarbons, coalmine explosions, poor economies and infrastructure placing our nuclear future at risk, water resources drying up and countless other resource issues that relate immediately to understanding the earth and our interaction with it. It’s quite apropos then that this year’s Earth Science Week theme is Exploring Energy. There are Events In Your Area and resources at the US Geological Survey’s website to help edumacate yourself on this elephant in the room topic. I don’t know if I’d get in a car with Bud Tuminous (Har Har) The Mascot ™, though. Apparently the USGS hasn’t heard of the dangers of PedoBear.

Blunt, I mean Bud

Earth Science Week is especially a great opportunity for teachers and parents to talk to young minds about where the gasoline in the car or schoolbus and gas, electric current and drinking water at home come from. To be fair to the kids, most adults think God puts gasoline in the station’s pump and that slabs of meat miraculously appear at the grocery store. The point here is that it’s going to be the next generation who will find the sustainable, renewable and affordable energy sources of the future. Even if you want them to Drill Baby Drill, think about it: there are lots fewer critical-thinking, inter-disciplinary and creative engineers and scientists coming out of our school system that are qualified to work in increasingly challenging oil and gas environments.

You can help. And write it off on your taxes, even. Please support my efforts and those of other awesome earth science blogs in the Science Bloggers for Students challenge. Whatever you give, HP will match up to $50,000. Check out the leaderboard, guys! Highly Allochthonous and Gam just shot past me. Help!

Science Bloggers For Students Challenge!

Posted on by
1

It starts with education. We’re not inspiring children. Somewhere down the line we forgot that science and engineering were creative, exciting, and rewarding—that they could achieve the impossible and change the world. We need to look at how we teach, test, and challenge children. I can see why No Child Left Behind is increasingly coming under fire. While its intentions are admirable, standardized tests dampen enthusiasm for education, curb creativity, and put people off science and engineering.

– James “he of the Bagless Vacuum Cleaner and Bladeless Fan” Dyson on America’s School Science Crisis

This is a request for support for my efforts in the Science Bloggers for Students challenge, a friendly month-long competition (10/10/2010 through 11/9/2010) between science blogs to see which can do the most to help low-income American classrooms on DonorsChoose.org. Pick a classroom project at MY GIVING PAGE to support. And help me beat the other bloggers! Whatever little bit you give helps.

Public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit, to violins for a school recital, to microscope slides for a biology class. DonorsChoose.org is a 501(c)3 charity incorporated in the State of New York. You will receive a gift receipt via email that can be used for your tax records.

Not surprisingly, I have signed up to help students in the area of Science and Mathematics. As Dyson points out above, it is pretty sad that our nation’s piddly education budget goes to propping up the administration of a glorified standardized testing system, a “one size fits all approach [which] is convenient but lazy.” This is not a substitute for actual teaching with proper resources on the part of qualified teachers and hands-on experimentation and creativity by students. Our future scientists and new ideas will not come from memorizing useless facts (and factoids) and sharpening #2 pencils for another standardized test, but from thinking free and taking risks under expert guidance.

Furthermore, it is beyond disheartening that teachers have to take the time out from teaching and their own personal lives to go online and reach out to us, i.e. neither the Department of Education nor parents of children in those specific schools, to beg for the most basic of teaching materials. I can’t tell you how mad I get when a state or local government’s first and immediate response to the threat of hard economic times is to slash school and library budgets, to the point of shutting these buildings down altogether. While that is a fight for another time, if you are as disgusted and worried as I am about America’s plummeting science rankings, please help out these kids. Please.

Here’s more incentive: HP has agreed to match all donations to “Science Bloggers for Students” up to $50,000. That’s right – every donation to my Giving Page will be doubled! And I won’t say anything bad about our HP color laser printer for a good long while!

So, what are you waiting for? Go HERE and give! And big ups to all those who have given already; thanks to you, Team Maitri has raised $316 (make that $316 x 2 = $632) before the official challenge has even begun. You rock!