The Strange Maps blog (a very interesting browse, if you like peculiar maps) has a map illustrating the state of US evolution education in 2002. It’s not surprising; the Fordham Foundation regularly publishes detailed summaries of state science standards, and you can take a look at the data for 2005 and 2006, if you don’t mind getting a bit depressed. Now what we need to do, though, is reassess state standards and get everyone up to A+ performance. Florida is about to go through that wringer, under the thumb of the odious Cheri Yecke, who tainted our standards process here in Minnesota last time around. Minnesota is going to be going through a standards re-evaluation soon, too, without Yecke … maybe we can bring our standards up a bit more, too.
One other interesting feature of that link: most of the Strange Maps articles seem to get on the order of 10 comments. The evolution education map has over 400, with a painful number of loonies babbling against evolution. That’s another measure of our science education problem.
On a completely different note, another map at that blog caught my eye: a cartogram of the world’s population. It puts those Canadians and Australians in their place with respect to the U.S., but what’s that strange, huge mass bulging up in Europe and Asia? How dare they dwarf us!
That’s really interesting. I had no idea how big Nigeria and Ukraine’s population are.
-jcr
For some reason, I couldn’t click on the direct link to the evolution map (probably the dashes in the middle).
There seems to be an internet bug in the mississippi alabama item.
We Australians like our population small. It lets us call people “mate” with some sense of truth.
On a more serious note, although Australia is quite large in terms of a landmass/country, only the coastal regions are truly arable or livable, so 20-30 Million is about the sweet spot. Some studies have proposed more (up to 50 Million I think – 30 Million more than now), but with climate change and water shortages etc, we have an impending problem.
I see they decided to count the large alien-plant-being population of Antarctica, but completely left out all those yetis in the Himalayas. I call foul!
(the link is not correct for “2005”)
something on pharyngula is crashing my internet explorer this morning. Anyone else having a problem?
I second sailor’s comment. My browser crashed this morning on Pharyngula too.
Ditto (tritto?) I crashed and finally changed over to Firefox. That worked.
something on pharyngula is crashing my internet explorer this morning. Anyone else having a problem?
Me too (using IE). It was something on the front page, some older articles opened OK.
I see they decided to count the large alien-plant-being population of Antarctica
Maybe it’s the penguins :) And who populates the oceans?
Hmmm. Yes, I’ve gotten a few email complaints. I don’t know what could have changed; I checked the code for the last few posts, and there’s nothing funny there. I’ll try and dig a little deeper.
This is my favorite map from that site:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2006/12/03/44-the-world-according-to-dubya/
My browser crashed 5 or 6 times in a row on Pharyngula, so I switched computers. My other computer is having the same problem. It took several tries to finally get here.
It’s just the “Minnesota, Alabama” post that crashes for me. Now that it’s no longer the first post on the list, I don’t crash until I try to scroll down to it. Fascinating!
Windy’s right. It’s the “Minnesota, Alabama” post. As soon as I scroll down to it, my browser crashes. And if I click on it from the “recent posts” feature on the left side of this page, same thing happens. Same on the other computer. I’ve been staying off the main page, just doing all my navigating from this page, and there’s been no problems.
I wonder what it is about that post? Strange and interesting little mystery!
O.K., as an educator in Illinois, I have to admit I’m surprised to see evolution education in our state listed as “an embarrassment”.
Maybe I need to actually try to do something about what is dumped into my students’ heads (if anything) before they arrive at my university, rather than try to fix it once they get here?
Wow, maybe the educational system in Indiana isn’t as horrible as I thought.
I grew up in Indiana, and don’t recall my science education being all that horrible. Still, given the attitude of the majority of the state’s residents, I’m surprised at that assessment. And, IN got straight As from the Fordham Foundation. Who knew?
I know that around WWII, Ukraine provided at least 1/4 of the USSR’s population, food supplies, etc. When the Nazis took it over, the Soviet economy went to hell.
Weird. It’s a little surprising that Hawaii gets such a favourable mark, considering that education in general is simply horrid there. (The site also has a general education map, and Hawaii gets an F in the overall rankings.)
It’s easily possibly, I guess, that there could be a discrepancy between the quality of the standards and the quality of the actual teaching. I went to private school, so I can’t really comment knowledgeably on this. My little brother did go through public school, but he’s not, err, representative of an average student.
commissarjs,
The Indiana state standards are pretty solid, but meeting those standards is a stretch for many school systems, especially the poorer ones. I’m sure many of the problems that Indiana schools face, such as lack of parental interest in education and large annual turnovers of student populations, are common throughout the country, but the ongoing deterioration of the state’s industrial economy seems to exacerbate the situation.
Disclaimer: I am a resident of Indiana and spent a few years visiting schools and working with faculty and administrators, in an attempt to help them effectively incorporate the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning.
Here’s a working link to the Evolution map.
(My browser has been crashing too.)
I am also a resident of Indiana. I grew up in one of the small cities that you described. The economy was effectively ruined when the factories shut their doors. So the school system I attended didn’t have much funding.
I guess I shouldn’t assume the whole state is as bad off as the district I attended.
PZ, I clicked on your “Title Changed” post from the Most Active box… promptly crashed my browser. Tried getting in there repeatedly, each time ending quickly with a solid crash.
But every other post seems to be working fine. Whatever you got on that page must not be IE friendly….
Mississippi Alabama still crashes
Ukraine was and is the breadbasket of central Europe. The flag, simple as it is, represents vast blue skies over vast golden fields of grain. Soviet abuse of this asset was at the root of the Holomodor.
Population estimate as of 2005 was over 46 million, placing it 27th in the world. It is 44th in land area. Russia, by contrast, has nearly 100 million more people, but the land area is so vast (Siberia alone is larger than than Canada) the density is quite low, hence the squishing to make room for the giants to the south.
These kinds of maps fascinate me, thanks “Dr. Z” (and I hope you lay off the evolution paste, it’s bad for you.)
:-)
Ukraine was and is the breadbasket of central Europe. The flag, simple as it is, represents vast blue skies over vast golden fields of grain. Soviet abuse of this asset was at the root of the Holomodor.
Population estimate as of 2005 was over 46 million, placing it 27th in the world. It is 44th in land area. Russia, by contrast, has nearly 100 million more people, but the land area is so vast (Siberia alone is larger than than Canada) the density is quite low, hence the squishing to make room for the giants to the south.
These kinds of maps fascinate me, thanks “Dr. Z” (and I hope you lay off the evolution paste, it’s bad for you.)
:-)
I’m going to see if I can get my hands on a biology text from my high school. I don’t remember bio being “marred by creationist jargon” but I wasn’t nearly as attuned to that stuff a few years ago as I am now. Of course, the jargon probably isn’t in the text, it’s in the presentation. Hmmm.
It’s interesting to see Indiana and the Carolinas come in with such high marks. Indiana was recently the site of a hot Pharyngula topic. Was that where the kids “had sex” in shop class? Or was it where the girls got suspended for the Vagina Monologues thing? Add in the strong evolution education, and Indiana is clearly going to hell. Go, Indiana!
Having grown up in northern Indiana, I assumed that my excellent high school biology teacher was a rare exception in the state. I just took it for granted that creationism was probably being taught south of the Wabash, but perhaps not. On top of that, Indiana Democrats managed to defeat the gay hate amendment to the state constitution. Perhaps there is hope for the state after all.
Just remember… if you are one in a million, there are more than six thousand of you, and a couple thousand of you live in China and India.
Apropos Ukraine: Kseniya, what’s your opinion of the current political goings-on?
Windy, I wish I could reply at length, but I don’t have time right now. In a nutshell: I was thrilled by The Orange Revolution, but now? I’m worried. I still believe in Yushchenko and in the idea that, for Ukraine, leaning west is better than leaning east (a policy that might even have long-term benefits for Russian, the EU, and the USA as well) but if Yushchenko falls out of power in Kiev, I think we can kiss all that goodbye for a while.
Re: the Ukraine–I recently finished reading the novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which touches on Nazi/Soviet-era Ukrainian history. (The central characters are Ukrainian immigrants to England.) I had very little idea of the history of this area, and the book spurred me to learn more. Kseniya et al., I’m looking forward to whatever you have to say on the subject.
(History is like science in that it’s simultaneously fascinating and depressing to study–the more one learns, the more one realizes is lurking out there just below one’s radar, and that a single lifetime is far too short even to scratch the surface… so one may be forgiven for chucking it all aside and spending the evening watching Dresden Files instead.)
speedwell – Being one in a million as I am, all I can say is – poor bastards.
Bob
Cool maps.
Interesting in that most of my schooling was in the green states; PA, CA, and NJ. I had a brief stay in MA but that was grade school. Considering that I lived in Cambridge and went to public schools one might think that this was a really good environment for learning… being nestled in with Harvard, Radcliffe, and MIT. For public schools it wasn’t… there was little or no “trickle down” from those great universities. Most all university faculty’s kids went to private schools. NONE of the teachers in the public schools in Cambridge, MA were graduates from Harvard or MIT. I mention this because of the contrast between Cambridge MA public schools and Berkeley CA public schools.
In Berkeley CA (where I went ot high school) most all the teachers were the husbands or wives of Berkeley professors and/or were UC Berkeley graduates.
At some time in the 1970s the Pilot school started in Cambridge. It was a joint venture with Cambridge public school system and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
-DU-…etc…
That’s a great blog, thanks for the link.
I suppose the schools are the best chance, but what about getting good books about science into the libraries, community centres? Hell, cartoons. What we really need is a good comic strip that teaches evolutionary principles…
I’m pretty sure my Grade 9 biology didn’t mention evolution: it was more of a menagerie, with one chapter about fish, one chapter about birds, etc. But I didn’t notice because I went to the library every week and was reading books at home, including “The Evolution of Mankind” or some such, complete with Piltdown Man. My parents never tried to disprove scientific concepts. Just lucky.
Not to be a bigot or anything but isn´t this particular crash a good reason to make the jump to Mozilla ? :D
Instead of alien-plant beings, I think that they just counted one Shoggoth in Antarctica, hence it’s vast bulk.
RedMolly, yes! That is SO true.
Whew. That represents a tiny, tiny slice of time in the long history of Kyiv Rus and the Ukraine, but it’s a monumental slice.
I’m in kind of a hurry, so I’m going to do this from memory, so forgive me if I omit some detail or get a few things wrong, but here’s the basic story.
Much of Ukrainian history is tragic and bloody. Millions of Ukrainians died during the Holomodor, and millions more during WWII, many opposition to the Third Reich. Nonetheless, there is still some hatred felt towards Ukrainians by other Eastern Europeans who feel Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis and assisted in the persecution and slaughter of countless Ukrainian Jews.
This feeling was not without some justification, for when the Germans first marched into Kiev they were seen as liberators! (The battle for the Ukrainian soul has a long and torturous history, and there was always a conflict between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian/Soviet imperialism.) But once the Nazi occupation began, many Ukrainians began to see that what they had originally viewed as liberation from the Soviets was turning into a nightmare. Some were either afraid to resist, believed the Nazis would win the war regardless, or agreed with the policies of the Third Reich.
For whatever reasons, there WERE collaborators.
There were at that point three militarized organizations in Ukraine. One group was made up of Nazi collaborators. The other two were Resistance, and one of these was the OUN – the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – led by a man named Stepan Banderas.
This is where an ugly story gets uglier. After the war, Banderas – who I believe was a great and brave man – was the target of Soviet propaganda that attempted to rewrite the history of the OUN. To make a long story short, Banderas came to be seen as a significant Ukrainian Nazi collaborator!
If you do not think this is possible, then how is it there are POLITBOROS + KGBS?
No, seriously now. We can imagine how relentless a Soviet disinformation campaign could be. Ukrainian nationalism has long been a target of Russian/Soviet imperialism. Long, and I mean LONG. After the war, the Soviets had to beat back a surge of Ukrainian nationalism and, in a rather brilliant move, decided to reinvent and defame Banderas. And it worked.
Here’s another, more recent example: I recently met a man who teaches history, whose focus is Russian History and Ukrainian Studies. When he was an undergrad studying Russian language and history, before the breakup of the USSR, he found himself touring Kiev. He noticed that many of the signs he saw all around the city expressed some words he didn’t recognize, and were written in a Cyrillic that was slightly different from the form used in Russia. When he inquired about this, his Soviet guides told him that it was “an obscure dialect of Russian” and assured him that it would “die out” in another decade or two.
Of course, the language he was seeing was no obscure dialect – it was Ukrainian! And in fact Ukrainian was, at the time, considered an “endangered language” – meaning, likely to fall into disuse within 20 years. Amazing, isn’t it? But after Ukraine claimed its independence from the USSR, it reinstated Ukrainian as the State language. Wheee!
And yet…
This struggle continues, and is reflected in the current situation in Kiev. Ukraine is in some ways two nations. I can imagine a civil war there. There are Ukrainian Ukrainians, and Russian Ukrainians. To the west, on the Carpathian mountain side, Ukraine is mostly ethnic Ukrainians. Yushchenko is popular there. To the east, they are mostly ethnic Russians. Eastern Ukraine tends to be pro-Russian. Yushchenko has few supporters there.
You can learn a lot more than I could possibly tell you, and in less time, by researching Stepan Banderas and the OUN and the Holomodor and whatever aspects of Ukrainian history interest you.
I’d like to say this, though. I’ve learned that the average American doesn’t really know much about what went on (and goes on) in the part of the world between Japan and East Germany. That’s a big chunk of real estate. I have a friend from Novosibirsk, whose family ties go as far into Siberia as Magadan and Chita, and to the average American she looks “Chinese, or something” and might as well be from Neptune, so I shouldn’t complain. But I will. Contrary to popular belief, Ukraine is more than horilka-swilling grunts, dull stocky women, and ruined nuclear power plants. Oh yeah, and the image of Ukrainians as terror-tech exporters (as seen on “24”) is… exaggerated.
What is now called the Ukraine – and more to the point, its most important city, Kiev – has long been a crossroads (and, for a long time, a protected gateway) between East and West. Kiev, a beautiful and historic city that was once the crown jewel of eastern Europe, was a major administrative, cultural and economic capital hundreds of years before Moscow was anything more than a collection of dirt paths and chicken-legged huts. Its importance has diminished over the centuries, yes, but the political struggles within, and the political manipulations from without (by the US and EU on one side, and Russia on the other) bear testament to its continuing strategic and material value. (You dont’ think Yushchenko’s infamous poisoning was due to his eating a bad oyster, do you?)
Am I anti-Russia? No! Russian history and culture is rich and beautiful, and my Russian friends are lovely, soulful people. I met a Ukrainian teenager last year who was critical, even bitter, about “Russians”… I urged him not to confuse the soul of the people with the actions of the government.
Hey, that’s what I tell people about America, too.
Hmm, I wrote way too much, while perhaps doing the topic a disservice by writing WAY too little. Sigh. RedMolly was right. I beg the forgiveness of the Pharyngulaic Community for hijacking the thread. But I can’t turn back now. :-)
Kseniya, thank you so much for the primer–I’m anxious to learn more. (Any good books you could recommend? I have a Powell’s gift card burning a hole in my pocket.)
And extra thanks for this:
Much appreciated, though the coffee snarf still burns.
LOL @ “snarf” … sorry! :-)
Apologies also to any Muskovites who might be tuned in. I don’t mean to imply that precivilized Moscow was literally full of aging witches who were prone to eating wayward children.
Heh.
Molly, I don’t have any specific book recommendations to make off the top of my head. I’ll get back to you on that. My advice? Seek, and you will find.
I have a personal story to add.
A couple of years ago I met a Polish woman. Not Polish-American. Polish. Poland and Ukraine share a border and, as you might imagine, a long, tangled, and sometimes contentious history. This history had nothing to do with her or me, of course, and we joked about it as we talked about music and other things.
But when I told her my grandparents were actually from Kiev, and had been there during WWII, her whole attitude changed. She bitterly accused them of being Nazis. I assured her that wasn’t the case, that my grandfather had fought against the Nazis, but she couldn’t hear that, much less believe it. She couldn’t have been more than 10 years older than me, so her personal stake in this had to be second- or third-hand. Her vehemence was shocking. She practically spat in my face. I was stunned.
I guess a “All Ukrainians were Nazi collaborators” meme still expresses itself in some populations…