The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 39

From the US Census Bureau's Statistics in Schools (SIS) program comes this collection of classroom math activities designed to "engage students by using real-life data." Here, readers will find detailed, well-developed activity plans for K-12 students, each focused on a specific topic. Activities are broadly grouped into grade-level appropriate subjects: elementary grades (e.g. "Using Fractions to Compare Amusements Parks By States"), middle school (e.g. "What is a Statistical Question?"), and high school (e.g. "Applying Correlation Coefficients - Educational Attainment and Unemployment"). Individual activities indicate the specific grade level(s) they are intended for. The webpage for each activity gives a description, states the time and materials required, and also provides a list of learning objectives and a Bloom's Taxonomy teacher's note. Each lesson also includes attractively designed and downloadable PDFs of a teacher and student version of the activity. The SIS Math Activities were created by "eight content teams comprising of teachers, subject matter experts, and standards experts in K-12 education and curriculum design," and they are designed to reflect Common Core standards. [JDC]

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While the English poet John Keats is best known for his romantic poetry such as "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," he was also a prolific correspondent who wrote dozens of letters to family and friends before his tragically early death from tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25. Today, the Keats Letters Project explores the poet's epistolary legacy by publishing each of his letters 200 years after the day it was written, along with "a critical commentary [and] a short dissertation, aiming to shed new light on the letters, reconceiving received ideas and offering reevaluations." Launched in 2015, this ongoing project was founded by six scholars at universities around the US and includes guest commentaries on the letters from professors, scholars, and Keats fans. In its founders' words, the Keats Letters Project "hopes to offer its readers a unique connection to Keats's epistolary oeuvre, and by extension to Keats himself." [JDC]

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The JOIDES Resolution is an oceangoing research vessel that explores the geology below the seafloor by drilling core samples and collecting oceanographic measurements. Visitors to its website can take a virtual tour of the ship and read its blog. Educators may appreciate the many classroom activities available, including lesson plans, digital interactives (some of which require Flash), and posters on topics such as plate tectonics and microbiology. These resources cover grade levels from kindergarten through undergraduate, and lesson plans specify the National Science Education Content and Next Generation Science Standards they correspond with. Part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, the JOIDES Resolution is named after the eighteenth century HMS Resolution famously commanded by Captain James Cook, with JOIDES being the acronym for the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling, "the original partnership of universities that sought to explore the geology beneath the ocean floor." The ship's outreach and education department is part of the International Ocean Discovery Program at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. [JDC]

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Scholars of British history and culture may enjoy The Acts and Monuments Online (TAMO). After nearly twenty years of work, the team behind this digital project produced a definitive edition of what is commonly known as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, originally published in 1563. Here, readers will find unabridged texts of all four editions (with marginalia) that were published in Foxe's lifetime, as well as transcriptions in modern English "that keep as close as possible to the original texts." This resource allows keyword searches and provides page indices for each edition, and it also offers facsimiles of all the woodcut illustrations and translations of "significant passages in Latin and Greek." Additionally, TAMO provides an extensive Critical Apparatus, which contains commentaries on the texts, glosses, and woodcuts, textual transpositions and variations, a lengthy biographical essay on Foxe, and more. Begun in 1992 and completed in 2011, TAMO is a project of the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield and was directed by Mark Greengrass, Professor Emeritus of Early Modern History at the University of Sheffield, and the late David Loades, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wales. [JDC]

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University College Dublin's (UCD) Digital Library has much to offer its visitors, with content that appeals to researchers as well as general viewers. Its myriad collections include gems such as the Beranger Watercolors, which are a lovely set of "18th century watercolours of Irish antiquities, done by or for Gabriel Beranger;" a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century historic maps of Dublin and Ireland; and photographs of religious artifacts, such as chalices in the collection Material Culture of the Mendicant Orders in Ireland. To make these and other collections available online, the UCD Digital Library works closely with many other repositories of archival materials, including the UCD Irish Dialect Archive, the UCD School of Art History & Cultural Policy, and the Urban Modelling Group. Collections and items in the UCD Digital Library are accompanied by detailed descriptions and extensive metadata, and many document images can also be downloaded as PDFs. [JDC]

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Henry William Ravenel was a South Carolina field botanist, mycologist, naturalist, and author who lived during the Antebellum period and became "one of the most prominent botanists of the 19th century," with the fungi genus ravenelii bearing his name. He was also a prolific journal-keeper and correspondent, and today his journals can be read and searched online at Plants & Planter, a project hosted by the University of South Carolina's Center for Digital Humanities. In addition to Ravenel's journals, visitors to Plants & Planter will find hundreds of letters between Ravenel and other naturalists, images of plant specimens from his voluminous herbarium, and maps depicting Ravenel's travels, correspondence, and plant collections. This project also showcases all five volumes of Ravenel's book Fungi of Carolina, as well as his personal album of portraits. Launched in 2016, Plants & Planter was created in partnership between the University of South Carolina, Clemson University Libraries, Converse College, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the A.C. Moore Herbarium, and it was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. [JDC]

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Penny bloods, which came to be called penny dreadfuls after 1860, were cheap, sensational, and inordinately popular novels (frequently adapted, translated, or plagiarized from authors such as Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas) that were published as low-priced weekly serials for working-class British audiences. This early Victorian literary phenomenon is the subject of Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860. Launched in 2010 and peer-reviewed by NINES, Price One Penny is the creation of Marie Leger-St-Jean, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. Here, readers will find a database containing (as of this writing) over 500 different works from 65 publishers written by more than 70 "identified penny authors." The database can be searched by title and also browsed by works, authors (both penny authors and those whose work served as inspiration for the penny bloods), publishers, periodical, and libraries, with the latter referring to the libraries holding physical copies of penny bloods in their collections. New visitors may wish to start by checking out "How to Use" in the Database section, and there is also some helpful background information on penny bloods under the About POP section. [JDC]

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The Journal of Problem Solving is an open-access online journal that focuses on "empirical and theoretical papers on mental mechanisms involved in problem-solving." Currently in its eleventh volume and generally publishing one issue each year, this multidisciplinary journal publishes original research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, mathematics, and operations research. Examples of its most popular papers include "What Are the Odds? A Practical Guide to Computing and Reporting Bayes Factors" by Andrew F. Jarosz and Jennifer Wiley from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and "The Role of the Goal in Solving Hard Computational Problems: Do People Really Optimize?" by Sarah Carruthers, Ulrike Stege, and Michael E. J. Masson from the University of Victoria. Published by Purdue University Press, The Journal of Problem Solving has Zygmunt Pizlo, Professor and Endowed Chair in Cognitive Sciences at the University of California-Irvine, as its editor-in-chief, with a multidisciplinary editorial board from across North America and Europe. [JDC]

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Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) released their 2018 "Global status report on alcohol and health," a study that is conducted every four years. This comprehensive study found that in 2016 about 3 million deaths per year worldwide (or approximately 5.3 percent of all deaths) are due to "harmful use of alcohol," which is a decrease from their 2012 finding of 5.9 percent and that over "three-quarters of these deaths were among men." WHO also found that about 5.1 percent of the overall disease and injury burden worldwide can be attributed to alcohol. In addition to its findings, this report "gives detailed information on the consumption of alcohol in populations" and describes at the national level what countries are doing to further reduce alcohol's negative effects. Readers interested in learning more may download a PDF of the full 450-page report, which was edited by Vladimir Poznyak and Dag Rekve. WHO also provides their press release, fact sheets, and an infographic which summarizes the report's key findings. [JDC]

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The American White Pelican is a large, distinctive waterbird with a huge pouched bill, black primary wing feathers, and a wingspan of 8-10 feet. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is an important breeding habitat for these migratory birds and to help track and study their movements, beginning in 2014 the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) outfitted several dozen pelicans with solar-powered GPS transmitters. Interested readers can see the results of this effort at PeliTrack, a web-based map the Utah DWR created to visualize the pelicans' location data. This map updates automatically every few days, and viewers can filter the data to see the tracks of specific pelicans by banding year, sex, name (the pelicans all have names like "Elmer" and "Tabitha"), and date range. Upon initially accessing the map (and also after clicking "Info" in the bottom right), visitors are also presented with a link to a DWR blog post explaining how wildlife biologists attached the transmitters to the pelicans. PeliTrack provides data to "help biologists conserve Utah's pelican population and better understand their interactions with humans, fish, and other wildlife." [JDC]

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Launched in 2014, This Anthro Life is a podcast whose vision is "crowdsourcing the human condition to inspire communication, foster wonder, and generate empathy." Hosted and produced by recent anthropology PhDs Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins, this podcast features conversations on a wide range of topics concerning and relating to the human condition. New listeners will find a "New? Start Here" page under the series tab, highlighting episodes such as "Are Emojis and Hieroglyphs Universal Language?" and "Turns Out, Beer Is Pretty Important to Human History." Each of their approximately one hundred episodes, which range in length from twenty minutes to about an hour, is accompanied by a corresponding page with show notes that include links to "sources and detailed information about the authors, ideas, theories, and issues [covered] in the podcast." This Anthro Life is an official collaborator with two professional organizations, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology, and also with the digital anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Listeners may subscribe and download episodes on the podcast's website or via iTunes, Google, Stitcher, and other platforms. [JDC]

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Natural history collections hold enormous scientific and cultural value, but their true significance may not be fully realized until decades after the specimens land in a museum's archives. WeDigBio (short for Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections) is an initiative that aims to mitigate this problem. Describing itself as "a global data campaign, virtual science festival, and local outreach opportunity, all rolled into one," WeDigBio holds a four-day event each October that "mobilizes participants to create digital data about biodiversity specimens." Visitors to their website will find ample information on getting involved, including how to find ways to participate both online and in-person. Under the resources tab, educators will find links to classroom exercises, and those interested in hosting an event will find a number of games and event planning tips. First launched in 2015, WeDigBio was started by representatives from Florida State University, the University of Florida, and the Smithsonian Institution, among other organizations. [JDC]

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Beyond Curie is an award-winning digital design project highlighting the careers and accomplishments of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Here, readers will find striking visual imagery combined with short biographies of each featured woman, such as Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize in 1983 for discovering genetic transposition, and Mary Golda Ross, who was the first Native American female engineer and whose 30-year career at Lockheed Martin is still largely classified. Launched in 2017, Beyond Curie was created by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, a graphic designer with a background in neuroscience who works at the intersection of science and visual design. Phingbodhipakkiya has given a TED talk about the project, and she also turned six of the forty designs featured in Beyond Curie into downloadable posters for the March for Science. For an Augmented Reality (AR) experience, visitors can download a free app (available for iOS and Android devices) that will enable them to view 3D animations on Beyond Curie's ten AR-enabled images. [JDC]

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Readers interested in coin collecting may enjoy the website of the Edward C. Rochette Money Museum, which is operated by the American Numismatic Association (ANA) and bills itself as "America's largest museum dedicated to numismatics." The museum is located in Colorado Springs, CO, but readers who cannot visit in person can take a 360-degree virtual reality tour, which integrates a number of virtual exhibits that allow viewers to explore the museum's displays and "view both sides of the pieces and see detail that is not visible in person." These interactive virtual exhibits currently include displays such as "The Continental Dollar of 1776" and "Trenches to Treaties: World War I in Remembrance," a large exhibit showcasing coins and other artifacts from combatant nations. Interested readers may also appreciate the museum's blog, Tales from the Vault, which features "interesting and informative stories about individual objects or groups of objects that do not often (or ever) get to see the light of day," such as War of 1812 treasury notes. [JDC]

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The Recipes Project is an "international group of scholars interested in the history of recipes, ranging from magical charms to veterinary remedies." The group is dedicated to exploring the past through recipes, which are presented via blog posts and images. For example, a recent post discusses the use of eighteenth-century recipes while working with apprentices in Historic Foodways, an immersive program at Colonial Williamsburg. Apprentices learn about eighteenth-century ingredients and tools, but the most challenging part of the program is learning to read, understand, and execute eighteenth-century recipes, which are written in a wholly different style than their twenty-first-century counterparts. The blog can be a bit hard to navigate since categories are tagged with specific subjects, such as author names. One large and helpful category is transcription, which contains posts on transcribing old recipes and "Transcribathons" organized by the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. There are a number of thematic groupings such as art technology, beauty recipes, Russian recipes, and Dutch medicines. Visitors can also browse blog archives by date. [DS]

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Rclone is a file synchronization tool that features built-in support for several dozen cloud storage providers. These include both large providers like Amazon S3 and Microsoft OneDrive, as well as self-hosted solutions like ownCloud and NextCloud. Rclone can operate in one of three modes. In copy mode, any new or changed files are uploaded. In sync mode, Rclone makes a destination folder identical to a source folder, deleting files if necessary to do so. Finally, in check mode, Rclone will report the differences between two folders. Rclone is able to operate entirely over the network, without the need for a local folder. For example, it can synchronize an Amazon S3 bucket with a Box.com folder. The optional crypt plugin allows users to transparently encrypt data before uploading it and can be used as part of an encrypted offsite backup strategy. Extensive usage information is available on the docs section of the Rclone website. Rclone executables can be downloaded for Windows, macOS, Linux, and several other types of UNIX. Rclone is free software, distributed under the MIT license, with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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Drawpile is a network-enabled drawing program that allows multiple users to simultaneously edit the same image. In the servers section, users can find a list of active public sessions and may create their own drawing sessions (either fully open or password protected) on the public Drawpile server. The Drawpile application also includes a built-in server that can host collaborative drawing sessions that are accessible to other users on the same network. A number of functions for managing sessions are provided (for example, kicking/banning problematic users); the full list is described in Collaboration and User Management in the about section of Drawpile's website. Drawpile can also create animations, either by recording a whole drawing session as a video file or by using image layers as frames. Images are exported in OpenRaster format, which can be imported by applications like MyPaint, Krita, or GIMP. Drawpile executables can be downloaded for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Drawpile is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3, with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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Originally featured in the Scout Report on 9-23-2016, How We Get to Next has since launched two new article series, A Visual History of the Future and One Last Thing, a "collection of weekly mini-essays."

How We Get to Next, created by popular author Steven Johnson with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lemelson Foundation, is dedicated to sharing "inspiring stories about the people and places that are building our future." PBS viewers may be familiar with Steven Johnson's 2014 multi-part documentary How We Got to Now, which explored the stories behind a number of key inventions and breakthroughs in our daily life - including refrigeration, glass, and modern sanitation. How We Get to Next focuses its lens on contemporary innovations, providing stories about developments in fashion, space, and health, among other areas. On the site's homepage, visitors can check out recently featured articles. One highlight of the website is its reading list, where visitors can check out links to articles, books, and videos related to a single theme. Podcast fans will also want to check out the Wonderland Podcast, which explores the role of play in creativity and innovation.

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