Run over and donate before midnight tonight if you want to see what Jen has to say about a topic you choose, if you pitch in some serious change, of course.

Though this year I’ll start a new incentive: The people who make the top ten largest donations before 12:01am on Friday the 22nd will get to request a topic they want me to write about.

I’m assuming that the cutoff point for this will be PST, since Jen is enjoying Seattle’s weather, which I am certain is better than Lexington’s right now, so you may still have some time. And if you donate five dollars or more , you will be put in a raffle for one of eight autographed copies of Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain. I don’t know when the cutoff for that raffle will be.

I first became aware of the SSA a few years ago when one of my favorite science bloggers, PZ Myers of Pharyngula was going to be speaking at their yearly conference. Since Columbus Ohio was the closest he would be to central Kentucky that year, I decided to go hear one of my favorite evo devo writers. It was clear that these students were working to make their campuses a better place on multiple levels, not all of which were immediately obvious.

So, why is the SSA a good organization? Non-theists don’t exactly get a lot of good press. Why should colleges, universities and even high schools not only welcome but hope to have a secular student group on their campus?

Let’s start with a look at this from the point of view of the administration.

First, students are a revenue stream for any school, and of American students, those listing themselves as having a religious preference of “none” makes up between 10 and 20 percent, depending on which poll you read. Some of the Nones just don’t care about religion, some are “spiritual, but not religious” and these probably won’t be the demographic that this group targets, but some sizable portion of this group falls into some variation of agnostic or atheist.

A school that supports religious (or non-religious) minority groups is automatically more welcoming to these Nones. Recruiting said students becomes a little easier, while even more importantly, retaining these students becomes infinitely simpler.

Since you can’t tell who is a non-theist by sight, assume that the Nones can’t either. This minority often becomes withdrawn and finds campus life more difficult. The presence of a secular group helps to bring these students together, letting them know that even as a small minority, they aren’t alone. If you belonged to a religious student group, you know that this peer group was an important safety net and part of your day to day life. Making this opportunity available for every student falls into the “good things” category. Don’t forget that happy students are more likely to become happy future donors.

One of my most promising students in the last few years came to me one day, asking for a letter of recommendation. This is normally a good thing, as the student is moving on to bigger and better things, employment, graduate school, etc. This wasn’t quite so good. He was in the process of transferring to another school. A top rate student left because he couldn’t find anybody that shared his beliefs or even was welcome to hearing them without it being an invitation to proselytize him. I am certain that he was not alone, but without a chance to meet other non-religious students, a school that had absolutely everything that he wanted but social interaction with people like himself… it was just not good enough.

Second, for students that are struggling with their faith, the chance to meet others that have faced or are facing the same questions is important. Coming to terms with their emotions and thoughts helps to make one of the most stressful times of a person’s life, their school years, much better. Some students will decide that they believe, while others don’t. A school with a religious mission or affiliation should encourage spiritual growth, even if it isn’t in the direction that they prefer. Free will is after all, free, barring toxoplasmosis.

Third, without any real effort on your part, you can increase conversation between religious groups on campus. As long as things stay reasonably respectful, the students will do everything on their own. One’s years as a student are a time to be exposed to people different from what you are comfortable with, to widen one’s life experiences and prepare a student for the workplace, where discrimination will get you fired. Think of it this way, exposure to those that hold views and beliefs that are not your own as actual people can help you learn to respond positively, if not at least neutrally to those people. This will make your graduates much better person to work with or for.

At the end of the day, students learn from each other as much as they do from their professors. A Catholic student and a Baptist student may learn that they differ a bit here and there, but probably won’t learn why such things as Pascal’s wager are bad arguments. If they offer Pascal’s wager to a None, you can be sure that they will get a challenging and enlightening conversation (of course, some of the more philosophical or critically minded students will also tear it apart, believer or not). They will come to understand their faith and religion better through this discussion.

Here is the rough part for administrators. If you are a public institution, you can’t say no without shutting every other campus group down. Discriminating against any student group that focuses on religious discussion is a case you can’t win in court and such a fight will only drain you of funds that could actually be used for education. Private institutions are relatively free to discriminate on such matters, but that can lead to bad publicity and hurt feelings among your faculty and staff. Weigh the costs and benefits carefully.

From a professor’s point of view, when a student comes to you asking for advice on things that are troubling them, you now have a peer group to refer your student to. An open and supportive campus and classroom environment makes the teaching process much easier. Students that have a supportive campus life will be better prepared to learn when they come to the classroom. You can’t ask for more than that.

If you are religious, why should you support a group that so plainly disagrees with your core beliefs? For the same reasons that straight people should support LGBT rights, or why one religious group should support another’s First Amendment rights. Helping students, helping people is the decent thing to do.

I can’t remember the names of students for the life of me, and taking role is a pain in the tuchus.

I have tried a variety of means of matching faces and names, but it usually comes down to which students catch my attention. Excellent students who are involved in class, I learn their names fast. Students who annoy me via distraction, not following directions, etc, they also make the cut for my memory.

Next up, I usually take role by putting out an attendance sheet for students to sign in on. That works most of the time for most of the students, but some students forget to sign in, and I have to keep printing up new sheets.

Enter the iphone app Attendance. (iTunes store link $4.99) Thanks to one of my colleagues for suggesting the app and to the Chronicle for reviewing the app (and featuring it a second time). Their recommendations were key to my purchasing the app.

With this app, I can scroll through the class roster, with pictures and through this, I have managed to learn the names of most of my 80+ students in my three biology courses in a few short weeks, and I notice not only when a student is absent, I know the student’s name!

Other users have found the “random student” feature is useful for students who want to quiz themselves. I haven’t used that function very often as I found that I was learning student names at an acceptable pace without it.

Setup takes moderate knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet program, and depending on the nature of your school’s bank of ID photos, adding pictures can take a while. I had to download each individual image and upload them to my iPhone in a folder. Since many of my students have changed their appearance since their freshman year when photos are taken, replacing ones that don’t match up is a good idea. This is very easy to do, as you can just take a picture with the iphone’s camera.

It requires a couple of modest tweaks after installation to be useful in courses that meet multiple times in a single day (lecture/lab) and to show the student pictures. Under the main settings tab, scroll down to Attendance, and switch on the “Show Picture” tab and the “Multiple times per day” tab, and you are set.

One of the most useful features, though is that you can sync and backup your roster, log and pictures to dropbox.com. (If you don’t have a dropbox account, get one, and feel free to use my referral link. You will never have to carry a thumb drive again.)

I have also found it useful to record class lectures with the HT Professional Recorder app ($4.99). It is relatively common for me to have at least one student that would be helped by having access to a recorded lectures. This app does a very decent job of capturing the lecture as a wav file, and a recent update lets me use the iTunes interface to sync the recorded files to a folder on my desktop. It is then a simple manner to use a free MP3 converter to condense the wav files to MP3s and then upload them to the class website for anybody to download. This also is a big help to students who have to miss classes due to illness, family emergency, etc. They don’t get the entire experience of being in the class, but at least they don’t miss everything.

Neither of these iPhone apps is free, but they have been well worth the price I paid for them. To my knowledge, they are are not available for other smartphone OSs.

Have you found any apps that are useful for the  classroom? Please share.

Be like Ava. Recycle yourself.

http://ping.fm/T9Dh7

I was right about the animal’s species. It was a raccoon, but the reason for hair loss was not the scabies mite. It is unknown what caused the hair loss.

There are people spinning hypotheses, and the one I like most is the one that there is some kind of disease causing organism being spread among the regional population of raccoons, perhaps even by some parasite intermediate like ticks. This hair loss pattern is limited to the eastern part of North America, and may be becoming more common in Kentucky.

Surveillance (the term for monitoring a population for diseases and disorders) of raccoons, probably through trap and release will be important to solving this problem. Unless it causes disease in humans, though, grant money will probably be non-existent.

————

Kentucky has its very own Chupacabra! From WLKY (out of Louisville, KY),

Chupacabra Found In Kentucky? – Video – WLKY Louisville.

“I just happened to walk out on the porch and saw something moving in the field and it just looked unusual,” said Mark Cothern.

That strange creature moved closer along Cothern’s farmhouse, causing him to look through binoculars. He even called his wife to look as well. But the more they looked, the more unusual it appeared.

“Well, it’s something strange, so I got my rifle to shoot it, get a closer look. And I’m glad I did, ’cause I don’t know what it is,” he said.

The news story goes on to mention that the Nelson County animal control officer was immediately on the right track in identifying this sad little critter as a raccoon with mange. Call Mulder and Scully… and tell them to cancel their flight.

Let’s take a look at the evidence, shall we?

Looks scary right? Scabrous skin, protruding canine…

The key to easy identification of what animal this really is comes down to the front paws. It is most likely a raccoon based on the above photo.

Those long, rather finger-like front toes are pretty good evidence, but let’s take a look at the head.

From this live specimen with a severe case of sarcoptic mange, also called scabies, (obviously not as severe as the Kentucky specimen) shows us what a near hairless raccoon would look like. Not exactly the bandit-masked trouble maker we are all familiar with. The ears are a good match as well. I am willing to call this a raccoon and not a cryptid. I’ll be looking forward to seeing what the the KY Fish and Wildlife agency has to say once they complete the DNA analysis.

Like many parasites, the burrowing mite (Sarcoptes scabiei canis) that causes this form of mange can cause disease of different severity in different animals. In domesticated dogs, the disease is typically not severe, but in wild canids it can be severe enough that it can be a cause of death (primarily through encouraging other diseases). This mite can also infect a variety of other mammals including our raccoons, and as anybody who has seen the pictures of shaved animals (or naturally hairless varieties) can attest, it really does make an animal look odd.

Once again, the real monster is S. scabiei, and not the candelabra, I mean chilupa, wait, no, chupacabra.

Further reading:

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/chupacabra-mystery-monster-101029.html

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/how_global_warming_creates_monsters/

http://alibi.com/index.php?story=33547&scn=news

http://www.skepdic.com/chupa.html

Also listen to the Sept 15, 2010 episode of the MonsterTalk podcast. http://www.skeptic.com/podcasts/monstertalk/episodes2010.html

Primary literature for use in biology classroom:

http://www.jwildlifedis.org/cgi/reprint/40/2/347.pdf

Final thought: Many people commenting on this story have said that the farmer was wrong to shoot something that he was unfamiliar with. As someone who grew up farming, I have to say I actually come down on the side of the farmer. If you have livestock and you see a sick unknown animal in one of your fields, for your livelihood, it is in your best interest to kill it (nature is after all, red in tooth and claw). This parasite can be transmitted to horses, sheep, and other livestock. Furthermore, if you have horses, any potentially burrowing animal is your enemy. Having a horse step in a groundhog hole can be an easy way to lose a very valuable animal.

For the full comic, go to Tree Lobsters. The same goes for evolution.

Science (and any scientific theory, for that matter) are tools that help us understand the world around us. You don’t worship science any more than you worship a hammer. Science helps us understand how humans fit into the world, now we interact with nature. It is the “poetry of reality.”

I wonder if there are any funk musicians out there that like coelacanths. (I just had to stick in a link to my good friend George Hrab. You are a good friend if you are on facebook, right?)

This is the first post in a series of three on lion fish.

Since I got such a great response from the Copperhead post, I decided I needed to get some pictures of poisonous critters that make for good teaching examples. And so, I pulled up some photos from the last time I went to the Newport Aquarium, just south of Cincinnati Ohio. It was much better than the Creation “Museum” that I blogged about last year, but I knew that going in. I try to go at least once a year, and my trusty camera always goes with me.

Lion fish are some of the most beautiful fish in the sea, and have a nasty reputation for being extremely poisonous. Extremely is an overstatement, as I think about sea snakes as being extremely poisonous. Lion fish will give you a nasty sting, very painful, but not as bad as many people think.

This critter is particularly important to me as a toxicologist, but is is very serious threat to the reefs of the Atlantic. As a (beginning) scuba diver, the thought of losing so many beautiful reef ecosystems would be a terrible thing.

Pterois volitans is native to the South Pacific, as are all other lion fish, where it is kept in check by natural predators and parasites and is sought after as a food item. All lion fish make for very popular aquarium fish (pics of other species can be found there as well as care directions), and they were probably accidentally released into the Atlantic from an aquarium.

Lion fish were first found in Florida in 1985, and the population was entrenched by 2000 to the point that sightings have become commonplace. They are most common in the Bahamas and Caribbean, but have been sighted Belize and Venezuela and north to New York and the Bermudas. How could these become so spread out so quickly?

The Gulf Stream runs north along the east coast of the US and larva stage fish and egg packets get picked up and borne along by it. It may come as a surprise, but young tropical fish are commonly sighted off the coast of New York in the warmer months. Lion fish that end up near Long Island won’t make it through the winter, but any of their little brothers and sisters that managed to get off the Gulf Stream by, say North Carolina, will be able to make it, even if mom and dad live in the Bahamas. Think about that for a minute. From the point of spawning north, a single reproductive event can spread baby lion fish all along the coast. By the way, if you don’t read any of the other links, read the previous one. Actually, here it is again. Go for the pictures of the juvenile lion fish, stay for the engrossing description of how one minor discovery by a graduate student can become incredibly important to current research.

Lion fish are voracious predators

That gorgeous coloration tells predators to back off and at the end of some of those fins is a nasty venom delivery system. The tissue on their dorsal, pelvic and anal spines can all be pushed back, causing their venom gland to release a lovely cocktail of toxins into the unlucky recipient of the sting.

Interestingly, the poisons are protein based, and are are broken down by heat, which is why running hot water over a sting or putting a hot towel over the sting site makes for good first aid. Its sort of like frying an egg.

Lionfish anatomy from Essential Image Source Foundation

You really have to see these guys swimming to get an idea of how beautiful they are. They are simply one of the most gorgeous fish in the sea, but they don’t belong in the Atlantic at the cost of the already fragile reef system.

I usually won’t moderate comments, except if those comments are:

• Spam
• Hateful, abusive, or threatening
• Trolling or thread derailing
• Evangelizing or godbotting
• Mindbogglingly stupid

With the exception of spam and threats, I only ban repeat offenders.

So far, I have only had close to a thousand spam comments, which have all been caught by Askimet.

Does this mean that people expressing religious beliefs will find their comments unwelcome? Obviously not. But if you post a string of verses from your personal holy book without commentary, you will find your comment deleted. Express yourself, show that you can pass the Turing Test, and I’ll likely even respond. If asked for scientific evidence, don’t respond with a verse.

If I ask you to restate your comment, it is probably because you are on the edge of mindbogglingly stupid territory. If I respond with a link to talkorigins.org, do yourself a favor and read what I have linked to. Show some intellectual curiosity.

Your students.

One of my students came to me on Monday and asked if I would read a draft of her term paper and see if I had any comments. The thing was, it wasn’t a paper for my class, but for an English composition class. She had chosen a biology/medical topic and wanted to make sure that her information was not only correct, but aldo for any suggestions that might be helpful. I told her to email it to me and I worked the time in to read it.

It was a persuasive piece on a topic that I am passionate about. But it was arguing a position that I disagreed with. How would you respond?

Remember that in many classes that teach rhetoric and persuasion, students are asked to pick a topic, outline their personal position, and then formulate an argument against it. I have no idea what my student’s position really is, but I also don’t know the particulars of the assignment.

I have to admit, that while I wasn’t swayed, her piece was very persuasive. It approached the topic from a pragmatic angle, which I like, and to some extent was accommodationist  towards one of the sides of the debate, which in this case, I don’t like. In the end, it was enjoyable to read and it felt especially good to be trusted enough by a student to be asked for help. A heartfelt “Thank you,” is one of the greatest rewards that a professor or teacher in any field can get.

I read through the paper, pointed out parts that were factually incorrect, places where her argument was weak, and offered suggestions on ways to improve her piece, but not change it to my view. I also pointed her towards a wikipedia page that would be useful, and told her to take a look at the sources cited by the wiki, but not to cite the wiki itself. Wikipedia is just like any piece of literature a step or two removed from the source, it may not be presented properly, it may be misunderstood, and it may not even be relevant.

Again, this is a couple of days before a final, and asking a student to examine a whole new area of research for an assignment that isn’t even part of my class would be kind of rude, so this showed her a new way to use a resource to gather information quickly.

If your school has a writing across the curriculum program, then you are helping out. If it doesn’t, guess what, you are now the writing across the curriculum program! If your writing center is good at helping with scientific or technical pieces, you can always refer a student to them that is in need of grammatical or structural help, but you can still help with fact checking.

One of the goals of small liberal arts schools is to provide “that one on one” teacher student relationship. For this to work, you need to be part of that pair.

Teach on.

These guys are likely to be in the news in the next several days due to a find in Texas the by Houston Museum of Natural Science of a nearly complete articulated skeleton of Dimetrodon giganhomogenes.

Crikey, but he’s a pretty fellow! (artist’s conception, credit DiBgd)

Keep in mind that complete skeletons are themselves rare, but being able to observe articulation is especially neat, as we can actually see how the joints fit against each other.

You can see just how excited Dr. Bakker is at this discovery in this video. What a great addition to the collection at HMNS.

Rare, Nearly Complete Dimetrodon Found! [HMNS Paleontology] from HMNS on Vimeo.

Ideas for lessons?

Elementary school: Lots of kids will know what a Dimetrodon is immediately, but many won’t know that they weren’t dinosaurs. You can talk about why these aren’t quite dinosaurs. Synapsids have a hole in their skull just behind their eye socket that a jaw muscle goes through. You can ask your students if they knew that they had the same feature. Synapsids also have teeth with different shapes, while reptiles including dinosaurs typically have teeth that are fairly similar throughout. Again, your students have this feature, too, with incisors, molars and canine teeth. Finally, synapsids have legs that are perpendicular to their bodies, like crocodiles, while dinosaurs have legs that are in line with their bodies. We don’t share all of the features of Dimetrodon, but these details can further interest children in learning about science. There are other differences, but this should be enough to get you started on a very fun lesson.

You can pick up a plastic model of one of these anywhere plastic dinos are sold, so a visual aid won’t set you back too badly.

Another exercise would be to ask the students to draw what they think scientists look like. Dr. Bakker is an example of a working scientist that isn’t wearing a lab coat, doesn’t have white hair going in every direction, etc. Make sure that you include some other scientists, and don’t leave out women scientists!

High school: This makes for a good science in the news moment, and again, a plastic toy makes a good visual aid. This also fits into lessons on the history of the earth as an example of life in the Permian period, and if you are in an area of the country that encourages teaching evolution as part of the science standards, these are early ancestors to mammals, even though they are very reptile like.

College: I often start class with an organism of the day, and even though it takes a few minutes out of every lecture, it helps students understand that science is an ongoing process and that we are learning more about life every day.

Furthermore, this can be an examination of cladistics and common ancestry. Review the wikipedia page here, and you can take your class beyond your textbook to examine these topics. Pictures of Dimetrodon and human skulls would be useful in comparing cranial features.

Have fun, and teach on.