11.15.2011

Welcome to this week’s issue of Science Matters in Wisconsin.  Please share this with a colleague!

-- Professional Development

Webinar: Sustainable Happiness, Hope & Resiliency – Green Teacher

Monday, Dec 5, 2011 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Join Catherine O'Brien and Elin Kelsey for an inspiring conversation about sustainable happiness, hope and resiliency. In the Summer 2011 issue of Green Teacher, Catherine and Elin introduced the concepts of sustainable happiness, hope and resiliency and why it's so important to move beyond "gloom and doom."

In this webinar, they invite you to join them in a lively conversation about how these ideas are catching hold and causing ripples of optimism across the disciplines of environmental and sustainability education, health and well-being and conservation biology, and around the world.

http://eeinwisconsin.org/net/calendar/details.aspx?c=3535073&s=99154.0.0.2209

-- Technology Contest

Your school can win a part of $1,000,000 in technology.  Samsung is dedicated to helping children share the wonder of life, learning, and our planet.  This fall, Samsung is giving public schools nationwide the opportunity to share the wonder of Samsung technology. Samsung and its partners are asking teachers to participate in its contest, which will address a key academic challenge in our country: to increase the pursuit of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. With Samsung and schools joining together, they are looking to foster interest in these subjects among students and illustrate the practical impact applying these subjects can have.  The deadline to enter is March 12, 2012.  Please visit:

https://pages.samsung.com/us/sft/home.htm

-- Science Spotlight

The heat is on: A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming

Marshalled by an astrophysicist, Richard Muller, this group, which calls itself the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, is notable in several ways. When embarking on the project 18 months ago, its members (including Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel prize for physics this month for his work on dark energy) were mostly new to climate science. And Dr Muller, for one, was mildly sceptical of its findings. This was partly, he says, because of “climategate”: the 2009 revelation of e-mails from scientists at CRU which suggested they had sometimes taken steps to disguise their adjustments of inconvenient palaeo-data. With this reputation, the Berkeley Earth team found it unusually easy to attract sponsors, including a donation of $150,000 from the Koch Foundation.

Yet Berkeley Earth’s results, as described in four papers currently undergoing peer review, but which were nonetheless released on October 20th, offer strong support to the existing temperature compilations.

http://www.economist.com/node/21533360

-- Website of the Week

The Science Books and Film Prize finalists for 2012 are out!  Each year, SB&F selects the top book in a variety of categories appropriate for elementary, middle, and high school students.  These are great books to include in your classes. 

http://www.sbfonline.com/Subaru/Pages/Finalists2012.aspx

A few years ago, Tim Gerber (Biology, UW La Crosse) and I started a “Mock Science Books and Film Prize election” to help get pre-service teachers and K-12 students reading high quality science tradebooks.  You can read more about that project here:

http://www.uwlax.edu/murphylibrary/departments/curriculum/stem/mocksb&f.html

-- Video of the Week

Four award-winning multimedia series for educators and students can now be accessed on the NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports

-- Contact

To subscribe to Science Matters in Wisconsin, please visit - http://bap.nsta.org/Content/Home/BecomeAContact/Default.aspx

For questions about Science Matters in Wisconsin, please contact me:

Eric Brunsell, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh  brunsele@uwosh.edu