The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 11

The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 11
March 16, 2018
Volume 24, Number 11

Research and Education

General Interest

Network Tools

Revisited

In the News

If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution to support The Scout Report and the work of Internet Scout, please visit our donation page.

Research and Education

Back to Top
Photographs from the World War I Memoir of Margaret Hall
Social studies

Born in Massachusetts, Margaret Hall joined the American Red Cross during World War I and served in the town of Chalons, France. While in France, Hall documented her experiences on the Western Front through dozens of photographs and letters. The Massachusetts Historical Society offers this digital exhibit containing 245 of Hall's photographs, alongside 29 other images. Visitors can browse this collection chronologically or conduct a text search. Suggested searches include place names (such as Chalons, Paris, Verdun) and other frequent keywords (including Red Cross, trench, soldier). This powerful collection of images includes photographs of Red Cross workers offering soldiers coffee and cigarettes, images of Red Cross workers beside the graves of soldiers who died in battle, and a particularly poignant photograph of a civilian walking alone through a street that has been badly destroyed by the war. This online collection accompanies a book of the same title - visitors may explore short excerpts of this book in the publication section of the website. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Women Who Shape History: Education Resources
Social studies

In honor of Women's History Month, the Smithsonian Institution compiled this collection of 37 "lessons, activities, exhibitions, videos and tools that can be used to teach students about women's history in America." These resources were designed by staff at a number of Smithsonian museums and institutions, including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Museum of American History, and the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. Visitors can browse this collection by title, provider, and grade level. The collection includes a short video from the National Portrait Gallery about artist Amy Sherald (who recently painted Michelle Obama's portrait); a collection of profiles of women scientists, courtesy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and an extensive resource list of books about Native American women, compiled by the National Museum of the American Indian. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science: Vaccines, Social Media, and the Public Health
Health

From the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science comes this lesson plan that is designed to help students identify misinformation and pseudoscience regarding vaccinations. This lesson plan was authored by Kim R. Finer, a biologist at Kent State University, and is designed specifically for college undergraduates who are not science majors. This lesson may also be adapted for high school-level students. In this lesson, students are introduced to the scientific method while also learning about common characteristics of pseudoscience. Students also learn about the science behind vaccinations and the importance of herd immunity. Interested educators can download this lesson plan and accompanying notes in PDF format. Due to its focus on social media literacy, this lesson may also appeal to librarians and social studies instructors in addition to science instructors. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

de Young Museum: Curriculum Resources for Educators
Social studies

The de Young Museum in San Francisco offers this collection of resources for art educators. While some of these items are designed to accompany a visit to the de Young Museum, many of these resources may be adapted and used in art and social studies classrooms across the globe. These resources are divided into three categories. In Get Smart with Art, teachers will find a collection of slideshows that connect items in the de Young Museum with a variety of social studies topics. For instance, the slideshow, "Site in Sight: How Location Shapes Perspectives," highlights a number of artworks that demonstrate "the individual voice of each artist examining his or her unique perspective of a concept, place, time, or idea." Meanwhile, the Art & Science section features a number of interdisciplinary materials, including lesson plans, developed by the de Young Museum in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences. Finally, the Teacher's Guide section contains additional information about items in the de Young Museum. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

U.S. News Map
Social studies

The Georgia Tech Research Institute in collaboration with eHistory.org at the University of Georgia, have created the U.S. News Map: a tool that allows students and researchers to explore historic American newspapers with ease. In addition, the News Map allows users to identify geographic and chronological patterns in the history of journalism. The News Map features newspapers that are part of the Library of Congress's Chronicling America Historic Newspapers collection that were published between 1789 and 1922. To use the News Map, visitors can search for any keyword and select start and end dates. From here, visitors can see and explore the frequency of the selected search term over time (via a timeline) and across geography (via pins on a map). When users select one of the map pins, they can see the year and publication where the term appeared. From here, users have the option of exploring the newspaper in PDF format. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

The Academic Family Tree
Science

For researchers of all stripes, the Academic Family Tree is "a nonprofit, user-content-driven web database that aims to accurately document and publicly share the academic genealogy of current and historical researchers across all fields of academia." The project emerged from Neurotree.org: a project that sought to map out neuroscience research around the globe. Since Neurotree.org launched in 2005, scholars in other disciplines began to develop their own "academic genealogies." Today, the Academic Family Tree contains nearly 700,000 researchers from dozens of disciplines, including education, linguistics, sociology, biology, law, history, and much more. Visitors may search the Academic Family Tree by research institution and individual. From here, visitors can view how individual researchers are connected to one another (e.g. advisors and graduate students). In addition, users can search for connections between researchers. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Look Out Honey, Because I'm Using Technology
Language Arts

"Look Out Honey, 'Cause I'm Using Technology," is a line in a 1973 song by Iggy Pop and the Stooges. It's also the title of a delightful blog by Jenny Arch, a public librarian who has worked in both adult services and youth services. Arch's blog will appeal to two audiences. First, fellow librarians will enjoy her thoughtful reflections about her work, which includes a recent post about providing services for patrons with low vision or hearing loss and another recent post about what customer service means in a library setting. Second, book lovers (along with parents and teachers of young book lovers) will also enjoy this blog, which is full of thematic book recommendations and short reviews. For instance, Arch recently posted about her favorite books read in 2017, dividing her list into children's/teen books, adult fiction, and adult nonfiction. Arch also recently posted a series of quotes from books that she read in 2017, offering readers a unique way to learn about new books. Other topics addressed in this blog include early childhood literacy and the art of creating a good library display. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation: Coral Reef Ecology Curriculum
Science

The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is a "non-profit environmental science organization and ocean research foundation established to help preserve, protect and restore the world's oceans and aquatic resources through research, education, and outreach." The foundation is based out of Annapolis, Maryland and focuses on coral reef preservation. For science educators, the foundation offers a number of curricular resources designed for high school students. These resources, which align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) include interactive quizzes, short educational videos, and eleven curricular units that address topics such as reef formation, reef organism behavior, and threats to coral reefs. To access these materials, educators will need to create a free account. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

General Interest

Back to Top
Black Broadway on U: Where D.C.'s Cultural Renaissance was born
Arts

In the early twentieth century, Washington, D.C.'s U Street neighborhood was home to a rich intellectual and artistic community. During the years, the historically Black neighborhood was home to numerous pivotal figures including anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, jazz musician Duke Ellington, and singer/actress Pearl Bailey (to name just a few) and hosted a number of Black-owned theaters and nightclubs. Launched in 2014 by Shellee M. Haynesworth, Black Broadway on the U is a "multi-platform story and public history initiative created to amplify, chronicle, preserve and enhance, the under-told story, cultural legacy, local memories and voices of Washington, D.C.'s marginalized Black community along the historic greater U Street community when it was known as 'Black Broadway,' a city within a city." This website is one component of that project. Here, visitors can explore a series of short documentary films that incorporate oral history interviews (in the stories section) and explore an interactive map that highlights over 60 important historic spots in the U-Street neighborhood (in the discover section). Fans of Black Broadway on the U may also want to follow this ongoing project on Twitter. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

NOVA: Prediction by the Numbers
Mathematics

In an era of "big data" and machine learning, statistical predictions are playing an increasingly large role in many facets of our lives - from politics to medicine, to weather forecasts. How do people use statistics to make predictions and how much can we trust these predictions? This recent episode of PBS's NOVA series, which aired on February 28, 2018, explores the history of statistics and probability and investigates how professionals (including meteorologists, political pundits, and those on rescue missions) use statistics in order to make informed predictions today. This episode features interviews with a number of mathematics scholars (including Talithia Williams of Harvey Mudd College and Jordan Ellenberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and discusses concepts including the wisdom of crowds and the law of large numbers. The episode also provides a helpful explanation (with the aid of visuals) of what the term "statistically significant" really means. Visitors may watch this episode in its entirety via the above link. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

The Pudding: How Music Taste Evolved
Arts

In August of 1958, the song "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu" by Italian musician and actor Domenico Modugno was the number one song on the U.S. Billboard Chart. Exactly ten years later, that honor went to the song "People Got to Be Free" by The Rascals. Exactly 50 years after that, in August 2008, Rihanna's "Disturbia" took the top Billboard slot. Visual journalist Matt Daniels of The Pudding, in collaboration with the Los Angeles-based design studio Use All Five, has created this highly enjoyable multimedia feature that allows visitors to explore all songs that entered the Billboard Top Five from August 1958 through October 2015. When visitors enter this website, they will initially be introduced to music from the year 1997. From here, visitors can change the year and month via a timeline that appears at the bottom of the screen. Once visitors select a start month and hit play, they will hear a clip of the song that was #1 at that time. Visitors will also see the four songs that accompanied that song in the Billboard's top five. As time passes, visitors will see new songs enter and leave the top five and hear a (sometimes disjointed) medley of songs that hit the #1 position over time. Users may also search for specific artists on a sidebar. This option reveals, for instance, that Diana Ross was in the top five a total of ten times in her career: first, in 1967 for The Supremes' "Reflections" and, most recently, in 1981 for "Endless Love." Collectively, this tool offers a fun way to rediscover songs and explore how popular music has evolved over time. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Professor Buzzkill #127: Computer Dating
Social studies

Computers play a central role in modern-day matchmaking, from dating apps to websites like OkCupid and Match.com. However, the history of computer dating is much older than many people realize. Professor Buzzkill is a podcast hosted by historian Joseph Cohill that features discussions about a wide variety of historical topics. On this recent episode of Professor Buzzkill (released, appropriately, on Valentine's Day 2018), technology historian Marie Hicks discusses the roots of computer dating. As Hicks explains, one of the earliest instances of computer matchmaking emerged in mid-twentieth century Great Britain. In 1961, a 27-year-old East Londoner named Joan Ball founded the Saint James Friendship Bureau, which was designed to help people find marriage partners. By 1964, Ball had renamed her organization the Saint James Computing Matching and was using technology to help individuals find compatible matches. To learn more about Ball's work and the fascinating history of computer dating, check out the full episode, available via the link above. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

YouTube: Art Explainer
Arts

The Art Institute of Chicago recently launched Art Explainer - a YouTube series that uses works from the institute's collection to engage the general public with art history and art criticism. For instance, the first episode, "The Power to Look," uses Grant Wood's American Gothic and the photography of Cindy Sherman, among other works, to examine the relationship between the artist and the viewer. Meanwhile, the second episode, "Surface and Depth" explores Nicolas Poussin's painting Landscape with Saint John on Patmos and William Michael Harnett's still lives. Each episode of Art Explainer is accompanied by links to featured artworks in the Art Institute's digital collection. As of this write-up, there are just three episodes of this new series, so stay tuned. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Overlooked
Social studies

When Amisha Padnani became an obituary writer for The New York Times in 2017, she noticed that a number of important women throughout history had not received obituaries in the paper. Padnani decided to team up with Jessica Bennett, a gender editor at the Times to launch Overlooked: an initiative to provide obituaries for some of the women that Padnani couldn't locate in the paper's archives. On International Women's Day (March 8, 2018), the Times published this collection of fifteen obituaries of artists, activists, writers, athletes, and other important women that the Times overlooked in their obituary section throughout the years. In one obituary, Sewell Chan writes about the life of Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender activist who played a key role in the 1969 Stonewall uprising and, posthumously, was the subject of David France's 2017 film The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. In another obituary, Aisha Khan writes about Bollywood star Madhubala, who appeared in dozens of films from the 1940s and 1950s before her premature death in 1969. Other women featured in this series include Ida B. Wells, Ada Lovelace, and Henrietta Lacks. The Times plans to add additional overdue obituaries each week, and readers are invited to nominate historical women to be featured in the series. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Literary Disco
Language Arts

Literary Disco is a podcast hosted by book lovers Julia Pistell, Tod Goldberg, and Rider Strong. As the trio note on this website, "We're writers, but we've always been readers first and foremost." In keeping with this sentiment, Literary Disco is dedicated to discussing and reviewing books of all genres, including popular fiction, young adult literature, non-fiction, memories, genre fiction, and more. Pistell, Goldberg, and Strong launched this podcast in 2012, and continue to release new episodes once or twice a month. The three hosts often disagree with each other about books, leading to lively debates and discussions. Visitors can check out and listen to all current and past episodes of Literary Disco on this website. Recent episodes have explored Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Conscientious Photography Magazine
Arts

Conscientious Photography Magazine is published and edited by Joerg Colberg and is the follow-up to his award-winning photography website Conscientious that went online in 2002. Photobooks are a major topic on Conscientious Photography Magazine: a recent post from March 5, 2018, discusses exhibition catalogs as a photobook genre. There are regular reviews of new photobooks, singly and in small groups, that are titled as reviews and dated by the week of the year in which they appeared. For example, W43/2017 reviews two books that utilize images selected from archives. Palladium contains archival photographs of Latvian Soviet-era movie theaters, edited by Andrejs Strokins and I loved my wife by Dieter de Lathauwer contains photographs from 16 Austrian psychiatric institutions that functioned as concentration camps for the mentally ill, where thousands of patients, many of them children, were executed during the Second World War. There are interviews and conversations with close to 150 individual photographers, dating back to 2002. The topical index also covers Colberg's writing on both Conscientious (2002-2013) and Conscientious Photography Magazine (2013 - ) and is intended to help readers compare older content with new. [DS]

Comment on or rate this resource

Network Tools

Back to Top
Cappuccino
Educational Technology

Keeping current with updates from all over the web can present a challenge. Cappuccino is an RSS reader that can help manage that challenge. It uses a three column layout that will be familiar to users of Apple Mail. New stories are presented in a unified inbox. Individual feeds are displayed like email folders. Displayed stories can be filtered based on currency, read status, or only to show stories from starred feeds. Update frequency and notification settings can be customized for each feed. Cappuccino is available for macOS and iOS. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

Smartify
Arts

Smartify is an app designed to enrich the experience of visiting a museum or gallery. At participating venues, users can photograph a work to access detailed contextual information on the work and the artist who created it. The Smartify website describes the goal of this approach: "to re-frame the use of smartphones as engagement rather than a distraction," and to, "help people make meaningful connections with art." Users can add art to their own personal gallery in the app to revisit and further explore. A list of participating venues can be found on the Smartify website, along with information for venues on how they can participate. Smartify is available for iOS and Android devices. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

Revisited

Back to Top
Edge Effects
Science

Last featured in the 07-01-2016 Scout Report, Edge Effects continues to publish information that is both engaging and educational.

In the field of ecology, "edge effects" refers to the special characteristics that can be observed on the edges of two adjacent habitats, an area that often supports a richer variety of foliage and animal life due to the merging of each habitat. Fittingly, Edge Effects is a digital magazine created and run by graduate students at UW-Madison's Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) dedicated to fostering richer discussion about environmental studies through promoting multi-disciplinary voices. Contributors include scholars of geography, history, English, art history, and zoology, among other disciplines. Edge Effects publications are divided into five categories: long-form essays; commentary on recent news items; reviews (contributors review not only books, but also music, movies, and children's literature); exhibits (including a photography exhibit of the Mississippi River, map collections, and poetry); field notes (which include notes on teaching and conferences); and checklists (thematic lists that make for delightful quick reads). Readers can browse through these categories or browse the most recent entries on the site's homepage.

Comment on or rate this resource

In the News

Back to Top
Remembering Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking, science's brightest star, dies at age 76
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-professor-dies-aged-76

Stephen Hawking Dies at 76; His Mind Roamed the Cosmos
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/stephen-hawking-dead.html

Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis becomes freely available online, letting anyone see the essay that started it all
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-phd-thesis-access-essay-online-access-cambridge-university-a8014836.html

BBC: Hawking radiation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6srN4idq1E

Stephen Hawking: Questioning the universe
https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe

Stephen Hawking Lecture: How to Escape Out of a Black Hole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_d7O9JGo_s

On Tuesday, March 14, physicist Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge, England at the age of 76. Throughout his career, Hawking used quantum physics to illuminate one of the most enigmatic parts of the cosmos: black holes. Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942. He attended University College, Oxford (where he later claimed that he studied only about an hour a day) and then attended Cambridge to pursue graduate studies. In 1963, at the age of 21, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and was told that he had, at best, three years to live. Hawking later reported that his diagnosis sparked his determination to pursue his research. "When you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realize that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to do," he said. In 1970, Hawking collaborated with Roger Penrose to publish an article explaining how the universe emerged from a singularity. In 1974, Hawking published a paper demonstrating that black holes emit radiation (now called "Hawking Radiations"). In 1988 Hawking wrote the best-selling A Brief History of Time, which garnered critical acclaim for making complex scientific ideas accessible the general public. [MMB]

The first link takes readers to an obituary of Stephen Hawking by Ian Sample at The Guardian. This obituary includes a link to a second Guardian obituary for Hawking authored by his colleague Roger Penrose. The second link takes readers to Dennis Overbye's obituary of Hawking for The New York Times. Moving along, the third link takes readers to an October 2017 Independent report that Hawking's Ph.D. thesis is now available online through Cambridge's Apollo system. (The article includes a link for those interested in exploring the thesis). The fourth link takes readers to a short documentary film clip, courtesy of the BBC, that explains Hawking radiation. Finally, the last two links take readers to video recordings of two lectures by Hawking: his 2008 TED Talk, "Questioning the universe" and a 2015 lecture presented at the University of Southern California entitled "How to Get Out of a Black Hole."