Category Archives: Education

Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 4: Incorporated Research

Physics laboratory at Brooklyn College This blog tries to deliver on last week’s blog’s promise to look at the broader impacts of research in the Brooklyn College (BC) Strategic Plan. As I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs in this series, universities … Continue reading

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 3: How Do We Evaluate “Broader Impacts” in Research?

The picture above was taken from my favorite T-shirt, which features my favorite quote. It is also the main reason that I chose an academic career: to get a license to experiment. When I wear the shirt, it often triggers … Continue reading

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 1

Last week’s blog focused on the celebration of Earth Day, ending with a promise that this week’s blog would focus on a local effort. The natural local effort for me to address is my place of work: the City University … Continue reading

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Back to Educating in the Anthropocene

(Source: The Lancet) The original caption of this figure reads “The Planetary Health Education Framework.” However, it is similar to the Venn diagram that I discussed in a previous blog (August 4, 2020), which includes climate change, equity, Covid-19, population, … Continue reading

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Campus as a Lab: Part 2

My July 12th blog summarized why laboratory training has been found to be essential in teaching STEM (except for Mathematics) and for that reason, why teaching science is more expensive than teaching other disciplines. I based my arguments there on … Continue reading

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Campus as a Lab: Part 1

Source: Rutgers Living Laboratories Campus as a lab (CAL) is becoming a teaching and organizational tool across campuses. I am including a schematic diagram of the dynamics of the concept, taken from the Rutgers University site, above. If you Google … Continue reading

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What Am I Doing??

Over the last few blogs I cried, together with many others, about the direction in which the country and the world are going. It reached a stage where a friend told me that she didn’t celebrate the 4th of July … Continue reading

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How to Explain Reality

Last week’s blog focused on the name change of Facebook to Meta and on the cherry-picking phenomenon of selectively picking reality to fit our biases and trying to recruit more adherents to our views of reality. The borderlines between virtual, … Continue reading

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Meta (Facebook) and Cherry Picking

A recent announcement from Facebook informed us all that “Connection is evolving so are we … welcome to Meta.” While I was not born there, I grew up in Israel, so Hebrew is my “native” language. In Hebrew, “meta” refers … Continue reading

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First-Principle Chemistry: Carbon Intensity

My last two blogs (May 4th and 11th) dealt with the challenges inherent in a new law that mandates carbon footprint reduction within large buildings in New York City, where I live and work. As with many other laws, there’s … Continue reading

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