(e)Xtend ChemEd X looks outside the resources available at ChemEd X to items of interest to the community throughout the internet.
Xtend includes Picks, which includes a short description of books, articles, journals, magazines, and web items that our contributors and staff find interesting, professional development events, tweets, and news feeds.
Universities, community colleges, and high schools can use MOOCs to create an environment to enhance student learning. Last fall a professor at San Jose State used recorded MOOC lectures in an introductory electrical engineering course to create a flipped classroom. Students passed at a much higher rate than usual—91%, compared with 59% and 55% in two other, more traditional sections of the s
One could argue that the technological triumphs embodied in our robotic explorations of Mars far exceed those that put men on the moon. Missing, however, is the drama of putting human life at risk, and the ease with which our imagination can put us in the shoes of the explorer. That is not to say that there is not a human element.
Universities should be and are expected to be sources of truthful and unbiased information about controversial subjects, especially in the sciences. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
Peter Hoffman is a physicist and materials scientist, and he brings those perspectives and sensibilities to the description of how life converts chemical energy into order and motion. The "Ratchet" in the title is Feynman's Ratchet, a gedanken experiment described in Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" and reminiscent of Maxwell's Demon.
Gas Laws HD Lite is a free iOS app that allows students to discover the relationship of Boyle’s Law and Charles Law.
iGasLaw is a free iOS app that provides useful tools for studying properties of gases and gas laws.
Samuel Arbesman, a mathematician and network scientist, uses the idea a half-life as an analogy for the changes in human knowledge that science brings. He discusses both the changing rate at which new science is done and the speed at which old results are replaced by newer ones. The analogy is far from perfect, but it emphasizes some critically important aspects of the processes of science.
The respected education reformer Diane Ravitch, previously one of the major architects and proponents of No Child Left Behind, has not only taken a new tack, but reversed course. With her 2011 book, she became a leading voice critical of the Obama-Duncan version, Race to the Top. This essay by David Denby describes her evolution.
New York Times blogger Nate Silver demonstrates how probability and statistical thinking can be used to analyze practical problems in our society. A lively, practical, and informative book!
This is a lively collection of essays about some of the great (mostly English, but not entirely so) chemists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brings to life many great names of our science.