EcoHealthNet is an awesome program for anyone who is interested in learning more skills to use in the infectious disease research field, or to get involved with some super interesting projects around the work. I was lucky enough to become involved with planning for this program through work, and I also got to participate in our workshop in June (which was held at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD)!
This is the group that was at the workshop, including student participants from the Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Ethiopia, Peru, Spain, USA, Vietnam, as well as lecturers from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, University of Wisconsin, and EcoHealth Alliance (where I work!).
So what does infectious disease research mean? This is a cutting-edge field that brings together ecologists, veterinarians, geographers, medical professionals, policy makers, and more. Participants at the workshop learned about disease mapping/spatial analysis and mathematical disease modeling, and people who went on the research exchange contributed to projects like Nipah virus surveillance in Bangladesh to developing primers for avian influenza viruses in China to wildlife surveillance in Brazil to White Nose Syndrome in the United States
The next opportunity to apply for EcoHealthNet 2012 will be this fall. Applications will be accepted starting in October 2011! Check out the website here: http:// www.ecohealthalliance.org/health/29-ecohealthnet
Have you ever wished that you could glow in the dark? If you have, attempting to imitate marine species by acquiring bioluminescent bacteria is not the way to do it.
A journal article published in Emerging Infectious Diseases details 2 cases of Australians who had soft tissue infections from the Photorhabdus species.
There have been a total of 12 human cases of infection, but there is no clear understanding of how these people got the bacteria, with the only clue being that they somehow got it while taking part in some outdoor activity. It is likely that they got the bacteria from a terrestrial invertebrate (a nematode or arthropod).
The 17th International Sustainable Development Research Conference is being held at Columbia University on May 8-10, 2011.
The main topic of the conference is “Moving Toward a Sustainable Future: Opportunities and Challenges,” and one of the things I’m interested in seeing is if there are any researchers who will present work that is based more in biology than you would typically expect at a sustainable development conference.
I’m submitting an abstract soon for this conference, and I hope that it gets accepted because it would be great to bring a different perspective to this discussion. As of today, they have received 330 abstract submissions! I hope to present an analysis that will really open up new possibilities for future research!
Check out the website for more info on topics covered in the conference. They include:
- pressures on earth’s natural and socioeconomic systems,
- limits for future development,
- solutions to problems created by development,
- adequacy of governing structures to implement policy,
- and assessment of pilot programs.
In an interesting contrast of perspectives on governments’ takes on environmental issues, these two videos highlight air pollution in Hong Kong and electronic waste in Toronto.
The first is a comedic public service announcement (PSA) put out by the Clean Air Network (CAN), which is a nonprofit advocating for more action to control air pollution in Hong Kong. I first saw this as part of an entry at the Green blog at New York Times that I saw yesterday.
Basically, air quality is a big mess because of industrial activity and roadside pollution. Instead of the usual “shockvertising” and serious ad campaigns, CAN decided to change their approach with this light, but poignant piece. Check it out:
For the Cantonese version, click here. The wording in this version is a little bit different, but the ideas are the same. (Interestingly, instead of the horse scent, there is man’s scent. Probably geared towards the fans of the main actor, Daniel Wu, because that is him in the image, I believe. I wonder why they chose to make it a horse scent and not anything else.)
The second is also an entertaining PSA but this time put out by a government agency. The City of Toronto wants your electronics, and they make it quite clear here:
I also saw this yesterday, at the blog Green as a Thistle. This video is quite funny, almost to the point where you don’t believe the City are the ones who actually released it. It is more in the style of a cheesy mattress commercial.
It seemed like a strange twist of fate that I came across these two videos on the same day, each with its own purpose in a common mission to incite environmental action, but coming from different perspectives. As I see it, there is one government attempting to stimulate action, and one government needing to be stimulated into action. It really gives you something to think about!
Instead of reading mediocre to bad fiction in your spare time, how about some classics? For free?
I might be defining my opinion about Twilight by this entry, but, really, what happened to reading good literature? After leaving high school where many of us had required reading, how many continue to pay tribute to the oldies (English majors not included)? There are plenty of classics in similar genres to what is available today.
Many classics have been freely available for while, since works enter the public domain after copyright expires. Project Gutenberg has been making available public domain books since 1971 and is the largest collection of free ebooks around. It is a pretty huge collection, and a great source of reading material especially if you own an ebook reader.
Something new on the rise, however, is Read Print, which is a website that also puts out books, but in more modern Web format complete with Facebook, Twitter, and extensive chat capabilities (Meebo, Facebook, AIM, MySpace IM, Google Talk). It was recently named one of TIME’s 50 best websites. I would still use Gutenberg for getting ebooks to read on my Sony Reader, but being able to read online is an attractive function of Read Print.
It would be interesting to try to have a virtual book club meeting through Read Print. It would be quite easy to communicate and the readers would not have to be worried about buying the same edition of a book to keep track of page numbers. It would be possible to even try to schedule our reading sessions to be synchronous so that we can chat as we read. That might be more distracting than helpful, but it would more closely emulate watching a TV show or a movie together.
Check out the Read Print collection. You can browse for books by title or by author, here are a few:
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Or if you are a science nerd like me, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Shakespeare
- Charles Dickens
- George Orwell
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Adam Bly on science education and scientific literacy [Updated with my response]
August 25, 2010
Features, Science, Society, Some Comments
1 comment
[Originally posted May, 15, 2009]
(This semester our class had the opportunity to have Adam Bly of Seed Media Group as a guest speaker. I asked him his opinion on the role of education in scientific literacy, specifically for the piece I wrote and posted here earlier. The following is the response he sent me. Thanks Adam!)
At the heart of how I feel about science education is the idea that science should be used as a lens through which to look at the world, not just a subject to be taught. And further; science education goes on forever and should be available to everyone.
We live in a world where we now produce more information in a year than in all prior human history combined. Graduating college no longer means you know the essentials of your field. Fields merge and change with new data. Walls between scientific disciplines are torn down. Education must run parallel with any successful pursuit of a profession. We now see universities cater to this new reality. Many universities offer their course material for free. It’s a great model. What the universities can still offer exclusively to their paying students, is valuable access to professors and a network of other students.
But the bigger picture in my view of science education is a scientifically literate nation. That’s the goal. To have a population that understands scientific concepts and processes is more crucial to the progress of our country, than churning out a certain number of scientists and engineers.
In order to translate this ideal to the classrooms, teachers and anyone else in charge of shaping curriculums, must acknowledge science as a prime driving force in society. The teaching of natural sciences should be as actively connected to and engaged in current events and advancements as the social sciences are. Science education needs to be connected to science news.
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