Students select dinosaurian models (toys) from a selection of Carnegie, Natural History Museum (London) and other manufacturers (Schleich, Safari, etc). Each student identifies their dinosaur, places it on a cladogram (provided) and determines when it lived. They then measure the dinosaur in three dimensions (length, width, height), compare one or more of these dimensions to "real" dimensions provided (usually the model says what the length was). Dividing "real" by "measured" yields a scale.

Students then determine how much water their model displaces. NOTE: Most textbooks show this happening with a beaker. Beakers are no where near accurate enough to use, and many dinosaurs dont fit in them anyway. You need either extremely large graduated cylinders (unlikely) or else large containers in a sink. What works best is to have students fill a container to overflowing (in the sink, obviously), then gently dunk their dinosaur, causing the vessel to overflow, then retrieve their dinosaur. THEN you can use a graduated cylinder to refill the container and measure the amount of water displaced.

Once students have a scale and a volume, the can cube the former and multiply it by the latter to yield an estimate of the volume of the actual dinosaur. Multiplying this by a density estimate provides an estimated mass. I have them bracket it by taking 0.9kg/L and 1.05kg/L for "light" and "heavy." Feathered theropods are even lighter---I have them use 0.8 g/L for the light estimate. They then record their result (I am trying to generate a spreadsheet of these measurements over the years) and compare it to a published estimate. I should probably base their grade on the ratio of their estimate to the "actual" (if light, reversed if heavy) but generally just try to "police" the work---if they are way off, they need to go back and find what arithmetic error led to the problem.

In the introductory classes this is a simple 1-sheet worksheet (front and back). For the honors students, they take the assignment home and write it up.

PS. I let the anthropology majors play with models of Pleistocene megafauna instead.

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Move the sun, earth, moon and space station to see how it affects their gravitational forces and orbital paths. Visualize the sizes and distances between different heavenly bodies, and turn off gravity to see what would happen without it!

This course introduces fundamentals of radon physics, geology, radiation biology; provides hands on experience of measurement of radon in MIT environments, and discusses current radon research in the fields of geology, environment, building and construction, medicine and health physics.
The course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

This undergraduate level course presents a basic study in geology. It introduces major minerals and rock types, rock-forming processes, and time scales; temperatures, pressures, compositions, structure of the Earth, and measurement techniques; geologic structures and relationships observable in the field; sediment movement and landform development by moving water, wind, and ice; crustal processes and planetary evolution in terms of global plate tectonics with an emphasis on ductile and brittle processes.

How to participate in the process of evidence-based practice

Short Description:
This primer supports social workers in learning the basics of evaluation as it relates to engaging in evidence-based practice at the micro, mezzo and macro levels. It is designed for students who have already had an introductory research methods course who are now engaged in an evaluation project or course.

Long Description:
This primer supports social workers in learning the basics of evaluation as it relates to engaging in evidence-based practice at the micro, mezzo and macro levels. It is designed for students who have already had an introductory research methods course who are now engaged in an evaluation project or course. This primer is designed to support students in understanding the basics of practice evaluation techniques in a language that makes sense to them. Practice evaluation has two parts, the analysis of the efficacy of practice with clients (or client systems, such as groups, or communities) and the critical interpretation of practice evaluation results. Therefore, the book follows this format. The analysis of practice efficacy involves the careful design of evaluation studies and collection of evaluation data. This is followed by the careful analysis of client data (quantitative and/or qualitative). The critical consumption of evaluation results requires ‘fluency’ in interpreting basic statistical data as well as rigorous qualitative data analyses. In order to be ethical practitioners, social work practitioners need to be both practice evaluators and critical consumers of evaluation data. This simple primer presents this process in simple language designed to engage social work practitioners from an evidence-based practice perspective.

Word Count: 30571

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This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Uncovering the links between microbiome profiles and host conditions is critical to understanding the roles microbes play in human health. However, analysis of microbiome profiles with traditional testing frameworks is made difficult by the high-dimensionality and sparsity of the data. Often this is addressed by incorporating information from closely related microbes. This phylogenetic information is added under the assumption that operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from related taxa will tend to behave similarly, but the complexity of microbe interactions can make this assumption invalid. The recently developed tool, Phylogeny-guided microbiome OTU-Specific association Test (POST), addresses this issue. POST determines how much, if any, information to borrow from neighboring OTUs based on phylogenetic distance and outcome-OTU association. This tool is a local collapsing test built under the kernel machine framework to accommodate complex OTU effects..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In this video segment adapted from NOVA scienceNOW, scientists discuss their attempts to grow human body parts in a jar.

In this problem-based learning module, students will be given the chance to plan their idea of the perfect party.  They are given a budget of $2,500, this is the maximum amount of money they can use.  The goal is for students to plan a party that they think people would want to attend and would enjoy being a part of.  The students will need to come up with categories of what their party will need (food/drink, decorations, entertainment, location, etc).  These will then be the stations students will move at their own pace through to complete the party planning.  At each station they will need to identify what they are doing to have/do for the party and how much it will cost.  They will then have to figure out the unit cost (cost per person) for that category. The final station should allow for students to find the total cost of their part and total unit cost per person for the party.  If the total cost exceeds $2,500 students should make adjustments as needed.Students will then create an advertisement (commercial, flyer, poster etc.) to promote their party as the “PARTY OF THE YEAR!”Students will then present these advertisements to school staff, parents, administrators etc. to vote on the party they would want to throw for their own child. They should take into consideration cost per person, entertainment, and enjoyment of the party.

The intent of clarifying statements is to provide additional guidance for educators to communicate the intent of the standard to support the future development of curricular resources and assessments aligned to the 2021 math standards.  Clarifying statements can be in the form of succinct sentences or paragraphs that attend to one of four types of clarifications: (1) Student Experiences; (2) Examples; (3) Boundaries; and (4) Connection to Math Practices.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to use geometric properties to solve problems. In particular, it will help you identify and help students who have difficulty: decomposing complex shapes into simpler ones in order to solve a problem; bringing together several geometric concepts to solve a problem; and finding the relationship between radii of inscribed and circumscribed circles of right triangles.

Second Edition

Short Description:
This textbook is based on materials sourced from different practitioners from the world of research design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The author and her collaborators have also added materials to supplement the available literature.

Long Description:
Increasingly, the concept of marketing research is being replaced with the term ‘customer or consumer insights’. As decision-makers are bombarded with data, it is important to have an Insights Team or Department which can sift through it all and identify those nuggets of information that can meaningfully explain human behaviour. Such insights must translate into an informed business strategy for success. This book has been curated to ensure that the practice of data collection, analysis, and interpretation is presented from an industry perspective.

Word Count: 42069

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Students analyze an assortment of popular inventions to determine whom they are intended to benefit, who has access to them, who might be harmed by them, and who is profiting by them. Then they re-imagine the devices in a way that they believe would do more good for humanity. During the first 90-minute class period, they evaluate and discuss designs in small groups and as a class, examining their decision-making criteria. Collectively, they decide upon a definition of "ethical" that they use going forward. During the second period, students apply their new point-of-view to redesign popular inventions (on paper) and persuasively present them to the class, explaining how they meet the class standards for ethical designs. Two PowerPoint® presentations, a worksheet and grading rubric are provided.

This task assesses a student's ability to use the addition rule to compute a probability and to interpret a probability in context.

This task uses the same situation to explore different concepts of probability theory.

This task completes the line of reasoning of Random Walk III in a situation where the numbers become too large to calculate and so abstract reasoning is required in order to compare the different probabilities. It is intended for instructional purposes only with a goal of understanding how to calculate and compare the combinatorial symbols.

This webinar will introduce the PDBe graph API, which is generated from the PDBe graph database and contains an even richer level of data than our standard API. We will highlight how this API supports our PDBe-KB aggregated views, with specific case studies that demonstrate the possibilities through this API.

This webinar is part of a 6-part PDBe API webinar series, introducing different levels of programmatic access at PDBe.The series will range from basic data retrieval and search using the PDBe API to more advanced features, including access and reuse of PDBe data visualisation components.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is open to anyone who is interested in learning about the programmatic access of PDBe.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Explain the advantage of PDBe Graph API over standard API
Identify the function of PDBe Graph API in supporting PDBe-KB aggregated views

Here is the link to the new Passion-Driven Statistics e-book!

Github book https://bit.ly/PDSe-book

pdf version https://bit.ly/PDSpdf

Passion-Driven Statistics is an NSF-funded, multidisciplinary, project-based curriculum that supports students in conducting data-driven research, asking original questions, and communicating methods and results using the language of statistics. The curriculum supports students to work with existing data covering psychology, health, earth science, government, business, education, biology, ecology and more. From existing data, students are able to pose questions of personal interest and then use statistical software (e.g. SAS, R, Python, Stata, SPSS) to answer them. The e-book is presented in pdf format for ease of use across platforms.

http://bit.ly/EditPDSe-book

For more information, contact Lisa Dierker, ldierker@wesleyan.edu or check out the Passion-Driven Statistics website at https://passiondrivenstatistics.com/

This activity is a classroom investigation where students gather descriptive data on two different plants with a partner, and on other plants during a classroom discussion.They will then interpret their findings, and classify the plants, if applicable, into monocots or dicots.

This unit was developed for a junior level pre-Calculus class to be taught during the first quarter of the 2016-17 school year. The lessons of the unit will culminate in each group of students creating and analyzing a mathematical model to predict the future impacts of climate change in New Hampshire and make a presentation as a group. The texts and historic data source, while specific to New Hampshire, may be of interest to other regions of the country. However, state climate change reports and climate data specific to your location may be available through state universities and meteorological stations.

This open course for Elementary Statistics was created through a Round Ten Textbook Transformation Grant:

https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/mathematics-collections/39/

The open course contains ancillary materials for OpenStax Introductory Statistics:

https://openstax.org/details/books/introductory-statistics

Included in the course are introductions to each lesson, lecture slides, videos, and problem questions. Topics include:

Types of Data
Sampling Techniques
Qualitative Data
Frequency Distributions
Descriptive Statistics
Variation and Position
Confidence Intervals
Hypothesis Testing
Chi-Square Goodness of Fit
Linear Regression
Variance ANOVA