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The JREF awards grants to educators who are inspiring a new generation of critical thinkers. These grants help pay for developing and improving programs that teach critical thinking and scientific skepticism in the classroom and beyond.

We award grants to educators of children grades K-12 for projects that promote critical thinking through the examination of the paranormal and pseudoscience. Grants are not limited to traditional classroom teachers and those from museums, camps, community centers, and other informal educational institutions are encouraged to apply.

We're accepting proposals for 2011 grants until July 1st, so please apply or share this information with a deserving educator you know. Here are the 2011 grant application forms and additional details.

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A student of mine was recently making up some lab work, and the lab was a simple analysis of the variables that affected the motion of a pendulum bob as it oscillated back and forth. In this inquiry-based lab, the student was to gather data on how the pendulum bob mass, the amplitude of oscillation, and the length of the pendulum affected the amount of time it took the pendulum to oscillate. They were to use these data to come to conclusions about how an oscillating pendulum behaved. 

As usual many students come to this lab work with a certain pre-conceived notion (what I like to call “intellectual baggage”) of how they think the pendulum is supposed to behave – most think that all three variables (mass, amplitude, and length) will affect the pendulum period (time for a complete oscillation) pretty much equally. Imagine their surprise when they end up discovering, assuming they are true to the process and not “tweaking” the data, that the mass and amplitude have relatively little or no effect on the pendulum motion – a fact that might also surprise the reader of this article!

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Spend Memorial Day weekend in Northern California and attend the SkeptiCal conference in Berkeley on May 29. Speakers this year will include Dr. Eugenie Scott of the NCSE, Dr. Bob Carroll, creator of the Skeptic's Dictionary, Skeptologists Yau-Man Chan and Mark Edward, Susan Gerbic of CFI's Independent Investigation Group (IIG), Skepchick Amy Davis Roth (aka Surly Amy), UC Santa Cruz Professor of Psychology Dr. Anthony Pratkanis, Darwin Awards website founder Wendy Northcutt, Pacific Institute President Dr. Peter Gleick, Deputy Director of NCSE Glenn Branch, and Thoughts From Kansas blogger Joshua Rosenau.

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This week: great coverage of Randi at Neuromagic 2011, the magic and neuroscience conference in Vigo, Spain, on San Simon Island, what is referred to as "The Island of Thought." Other JREF press hits after the jump.

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My 4-year-old has taught me a little rhyme they sing at her daycare whenever it rains. It goes something like this:

Rain, rain go away,

Come again another day

It seems to me that if you replace “rain” with any of the vaccine-preventable diseases names, that first line captures the science-based, pro-health position quite well. We want these killer diseases to go away. It also seems to me that the second line captures the anti-vaxer’s position quite well too: they seem to want these vaccine-preventable diseases to come back. According to them these diseases are “harmless”, “rites of passage”, and they “go away on their own”. Some of them even have little parties where they intentionally try to infect their children with a vaccine-preventable disease by exposing them to other sick children, in order to build “natural immunity” which they perceive to be a better thing than the “unnatural” vaccine-induced one.  

  1. Faith Healers released on iBooks, Flim-Flam! on Kindle
  2. Last Week at Science-Based Medicine
  3. Pharmacist Calls on Council to Pull Accreditation of Homeopathic Course
  4. Weekly Media Roundup, April 29, 2011