Success with Authorship in Google Search Results

Over on Google+, I have linked to articles on Google Authorship a couple of times, but the time has come for a full blog post.  This new feature, announced last year, is I think going to be one of the biggest changes to the internet, in that it will change the way people expect to search for content.

So what is it?  When you run a Google search, you expect to see a series of links to content that is relevant to your search.  Google's Authorship initiative is their attempt to connect content on the internet to the creators of that content.  What it looks like is that underneath a link in search results, the picture & name of the content creator will show up.  The identity shown for the author is from the author's profile on Google+.  In other words, a Google search returns not only the links to content you are looking for, but it connects to those links a direct way to the person who wrote the content.


I think it is incredibly valuable to content creators to get in on this early, and start connecting your Google+ profile to the content that you create on the internet.  Blogs are an obvious starting point.  On the user/content creator end, you have to link to the sites you write in your G+ profile by inserting links into your "Contributor To" section.  On the other side of the coin, websites that host your content must do the necessary work to make sure your content is connected back to your G+ profile.  When you have control of both, the connection is fairly easy to make.  There are a number of articles on this topic out there with specifics on how to set this up, and this one is the best I've seen.

I've connected the content I write for this blog to my profile as well as the content I write for our department blog.  It took a little while to start seeing changes in search results, but as of a couple of days ago I'm now seeing my author profile under the links to these two sites when they show up in search results.  Here's an example of how the links to a couple of fairly recent posts I made on this blog now show up in search results:

I really hope this doesn't come across as egotistical!  Rather, imagine what this can do for science - if search results for science content were connected to the creators of that content.  What if author profiles would come connected with search results in Google Scholar.  Search results could not only turn up science links, but connections to the people who created that content.  The problem currently is that many sites don't have the proper set up to connect content to a G+ profile.  I would love to see abstracts from professional meetings, such as the Geological Society of America, to be able to be linked in this fashion, as well as full journal articles.  This could be tremendous for science & science education.  Why?  Because the connection becomes more personal, more human.

If you're interested & want to see what more results for my stuff looks like, type in "Appalachian Field Trip" into a Google Search.  Since Google search is user specific, you may need to force Google search to find my stuff on this topic by adding "Carrigan" to the search terms.

Well, what do you think?  Could this be good for science?  Going to set yours up now?  :-)  I'd love to hear about others' success stories!

Mt. LeConte Hike & EveryTrail.com Website

Last summer, June 2011, I climbed Mt. LeConte with my two brothers-in-law.  We were on our annual big family vacation, that year in Gatlinburg, TN.  It was something I had wanted to do for a while.  I love mountains (always have as long as I can remember) but I've never climbed very many of them.  So at some point, I decided this trip was the one to register this peak.

Mt. LeConte (~6600') is one of the highest peaks in Great Smoky Mtn. Natl. Park, and it is the tallest in eastern TN from immediate base to top.

We decided to go big - there are several trails one can take to get to the top, and we picked one of the longer routes.  One of the longer trails takes you past Rainbow Falls, which is the highest single drop waterfall in the park, and that sounded like a good spot to see.  The Rainbow Falls trail starts out at a small parking area and is about 7.5 miles long at ~10% grade, so it's no small walk in the park.

Hike up Mt. LeConte via Rainbow Falls Trail

We hit the trail at ~8:30 AM.  Rainbow Falls was a bit of a disappointment because there was very little water flowing over it, and it doesn't seem that you can get very close to it.  I'm sure it would be a whole lot nicer if there had been more water.  Near the top of Mt. LeConte there is a lodge, basically a set of very rustic cabins that you can stay in for an arm & a leg for a night (no electricity & no running water).  At ~$120/night, I guess you pay for the experience (and not the service!).  Maybe someday when I've got more money.  Once at the lodge, we ate our lunch & checked out the main general building, which has some old frontier days stuff around that's neat to look at.  But the lodge is not at the peak, so after a bit of rest & food, we headed on up the trail to get to the top.  Just before getting to the peak, there is a spectacular overlook facing to the South.  The peak itself is kind of unusual - there are no great views at this point, it is just a spot off the trail to the right where there is a huge pile of rocks.  I guess you're supposed to bring a small rock with you up the mountain and make it a bit taller.

But other than relaying that story, I also am writing this blog post because I've recently discovered EveryTrail.com, a website that is designed for hiking & other outdoor adventure.  EveryTrail lets you set up an account, fill out a profile, and then start loading up your trips.  Trips basically include a GPS path and a set of geotagged photos, as you can see in the map/slideshow above.  If you don't have a GPS track to upload, you can draw it on a map or just use photos, but obviously the GPS track is the way to go.  While on the hike up LeConte, I had my at the time brand new Droid2Global with me, so I used it to record the track & take pictures as we went.  I recorded the track using the MyTracks app by Google.  The track isn't bad, especially when you consider the amount of tree cover and the fact that the phone was in my pocket much of the time.  However, the track recorded is way too long, over 10 miles supposedly on a 7.5 mi trail.  It overestimates the distance traveled when it doesn't have good GPS signal and the calculated location is not known really precisely.  EveryTrail requires that you upload a "GPS file", which of course is not a specific real thing; I assume it can read most any type of file recorded by the various GPSr makers.  I saved MyTracks data on my phone as a .GPX file format, emailed it to myself, & it loaded up very easily on my home PC.  EveryTrail also offers mobile apps for Android & iPhone, but I've not used it much yet.  I had previously already loaded up the pictures I had taken into a PicasaWeb photo album.  That was fortuitous, because EveryTrail allows you to use your Google login to access your PicasaWeb folders, so importing my photos into the trip was super easy.  It will also allow you to use Flickr or YouTube or direct uploads.  One issue, however, was that when EveryTrail puts together a slideshow of your photos, it determines the order of the photos based on the timestamp.  Since some of my photos I took on the way down, that didn't produce a good slideshow.  There is no easy, obvious way to edit the order of photos in EveryTrail, but the workaround is to open up your photos on the website after you've imported them and change the timestamp to force them into the order that you want.  Supposedly you can add video files too, but it didn't seem to recognize mine as anything other than still shots, so I baleeted them from the final trip. Overall, I think it's a decent site and I'll probably continue to use it to record hiking trips.

Geology with First Graders

Last week, based on an invite from the teacher, I paid a visit to my oldest daughter's first grade class to talk about geology.  I knew they had been learning about sand, so my job was to take it up to 11.  I also knew, based on what my daughter brings home, that they had previously talked about solids, liquids, & gases, but otherwise they don't get a whole lot of science in first grade.

I brought with me some samples; the ONU Geology program has lots of samples of rocks & sands (obviously), so I took some especially relevant ones to show the kids.

The main point I tried to get across to them is this: different kinds of sand come from different kinds of rocks.  I figured for first graders that wasn't a bad place to start.  The idea is to have them connect in their minds that rocks, when eroded, will form sand, and that there is a direct connection between these two kinds of materials. This is, really, their first introduction to the rock cycle.

I took with me 4 samples of sand.  The first one is a typical quartz sand in a jar that had a couple of nice shells in it.  That one I passed around first and had each student rotate the jar of sand until they found the secret prize inside.  Lots of wide eyes and careful looking at this point!









After I had their interest, I then showed them three other sands and three related rocks.  The white sand here is loaded with calcareous material, and the white "rocks" are pieces of some kind of coral from the same beach.

The green sand is olivine rich, with black chunks of basalt and white pieces of crushed coral.   The green rock is dunite.

The black sand is eroded basalt cinder for the most part, and the black rocks is a basalt with obvious pahoehoe texture on the top surface.












I talked about the three different rocks as representing the three major rock types: the dunite as a metamorphic rock, the basalt as igneous, & the corals as sedimentary.  They didn't quite pick up on the differences or the words well (and I didn't expect them to), but they were at least exposed to the terms.  They liked the basalt the best - it is a pahoehoe sample from Hawaii, so we talked about lava & how it is a hot, liquid rock that cooled to form this solid material.  They were really impressed with that!

Granted the olivine rich sand didn't come from the erosion of dunite, but the samples allowed them to see that there are connections between rocks and sediments.

After we looked at those, we ended with this question: what might happen if you took a sand, and squeezed it really really really hard?  You can't do this with your hands, but the Earth is able to squeeze sands hard enough that they turn back into rocks!  At this point I pulled out a couple of sandstones that are easily seen as grains of sand that are all stuck together.  Minds blown!  That was another moment where their eye-brows were all raised.  Again, here they were exposed to another idea from the bigger concept of the rock cycle.

It was a really fun experience.  These students are considerably younger than the ones I'm used to teaching!  And, if I'm totally honest, they are in general a lot more enthusiastic about learning than some college students!  :-)

Absurd Attack on College Professors in Wash. Post

An article in the Washington Post has one of the most ridiculous attacks on college professors I've ever seen.  The argument basically says us college professors don't work hard enough for the money we make.  Which is infuriatingly obtuse.  So let's take a closer look, starting with this quote below:

"An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation."


First off, I don't get the same compensation as people with my same credentials get in the non-academic world.  I could make twice the money I do if I went to work for an oil company, like some of my friends from grad school did.  Good for them!  They made a choice for their life that they wanted, and so did I.  I choose my career as a professor at a small, liberal arts college because I love it, and it is worth more to me personally than the money I would otherwise make.  But let's not pretend there isn't a huge financial difference.  In fact, my first year as a professor I made about ~35-40% of the money that my friends from grad school who went to work for Shell & Exxon/Mobile did.  Yeah, that's right, a bit more than a third.  So this whole "they receive the same compensation" business is simply false, grotesquely false.  

Secondly, suggesting that it is "unlikely" that professors spend an hour prepping & grading for every hour they spend in the classroom is absurd, grotesquely absurd.  This shows a mind-boggling ignorance of what the job requires.  Writing a really good 1 hour lecture can take literally days.  Some of my lectures I've spent literally 20+ hours preparing, and that's just for the first time I give it.  What takes so much time?  To write a good lecture, you must consider the following: 1) What do my students need to know, and how can I boil that down concisely into a few learning goals?  One of the first steps of good teaching is to be able to clearly communicate what the student should expect to learn.  2) What do my students already know, which will serve as knowledge & skills from which to build?  No one learns anything that they cannot connect to something they already know.  This is one of the foundational principals of education theory, that knowledge is constructed by being built upon itself.  In other words, to learn something new, you have to connect it to things you already know.  3) What are the details of everything they need to learn?  If you are going to teach it, you've got to know it really, really well.  It isn't enough to state what they need to know (i.e., the ending point) and know what they already know (the starting point), you have to now fill it all the details of the knowledge & skills you are trying to instill.  4) How should I best organize the main ideas so that the lecture has a logical flow?  In a way, this is like building up a wall.  You have to start with the bottom layer, and work your way up.  You can't add the 5th row of bricks until rows 1-4 are already done.  With the world of ideas, the order of the bricks isn't always obvious - as the instructor, it is your job to figure out in what order the concepts should go.  5) Which figures, tables, images, pictures, graphs, videos, & other multimedia should I use to best convey the concepts visually?  Visual aids are probably the most important part of any lecture.  The pictures must convey the same things that you are going to verbalize.  And not all figures are of equal value, especially in science education.  Are the images clear, in color, labeled correctly?  6) What examples would best clearly communicate the overall ideas?  7) What physical objects might be useful to bring to class as learning aids, and where will I obtain & store these items?  8) What activities could the students do that will ask them to apply their new knowledge in order to solve some problem?  I could go on, but the point I hope is clear: writing a good lecture is a long process!  Now, the good thing is that I can store that lecture material on my computer & bring it out again the next time I teach the course - which in my case, is typically every 2 years.  So let's say I spent 20 hours on a lecture, and then the next time I teach it, I spend zero hours prepping it - that still means it will take 40 years of my life before the total time I spent giving the lecture will equal the time spent prepping it.  And a good teacher doesn't do that - a good teacher reviews his/her own work at a later time with fresh eyes, finds things to change, new information to add, better examples/visuals/activities, etc., that will increase the time spent in the classroom.  A good educator not only get an assessment of how well the students are doing, a good educator also gets an assessment on how well he/she is doing, and based on that makes changes that will improve the experience in the future.  And all of this is just for preparing a lecture - shall we talk about grading now?  :-)  Grading is another experience that takes lots & lots of time if it is going to be done well.  Why?  Because in order for students to learn from their mistakes, they need rich feedback on their performance.  They need more than a score or a percentage, they need explanation & clarification.

Finally, let's also dispel this myth that class prep & grading are the only things that professors do.  Students ask questions, want to spend time with you individually to help them on assignments, ask you for recommendation letters, ask you for advice on jobs, careers, & graduate school, attend their senior exhibition/presentation, and ask you for an opportunity to take an exam or work on a lab at another time.  Suppose you catch some students who have clearly cheated on an assignment.  Clearing that up is going to take some time, if you want to do it the right way, a way that will help the student recognize their mistake, acknowledge it, make it right, and become a better person that this world desperately needs.  You can't do that in an hour.  You also attend faculty meetings where you consider new courses & programs, listen to guest speakers or fellow faculty discuss a topic, and serve on committees for hiring, promotions, academic integrity issues, & policy making.  I could go on, but I think I've made my point.  There is more that could be said about this opinion piece - the part I quoted above is only one small portion of it.  But I've got to get back to grading.

I love my job.  I love working with my students.  I'm right where I want to be in my career.  But it takes a lot of work, and anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong, grotesquely wrong.

Teaching Climate Change II - What effect?

So I've yet to return to this topic after my first opening post, but eventually I'll get back there.  This evening, I came across an article on the USA today website that basically says that politicians drive what Americans think about climate change.  The article is based on a sociological study that looked at various public opinion polls over the last decade on climate science, and then tried to test to see what kinds of things might have caused any shifts in the polls.  The disturbing conclusion of the study is that science journals, science bloggers, science educators, or anything else science related, has little impact on what the U.S. public thinks about climate science.  Instead, the things that drives U.S. public opinion about climate science are the words of politicians.

Sorry I made you shudder there.

It really has me wondering if I should even bother continuing this series of blog postings.  Seriously.  Not that I ever expected to have any sort of national sway with what I write here, but it does seem to minimize the importance of science education on all sorts of levels.  Yikes.  I'll of course keep pressing on & keep believing that being a science educator is a pretty important and good cause to dedicate one's life work to, because I think its the right thing to do, but I guess it makes one wonder how much effect one's work is really going to accomplish.

I'm not so sure what to think about this study (is it valid? biased? carefully done?), but unfortunately my gut is telling me that the conclusion is probably true.  I think a lot of folks have their political associations, and let those societal associations drive a lot of their thinking.  Maybe I should change "their" to "our" and include myself.... Our culture, our surroundings, the messages we get every day, from all the inputs, all the signals, all the noise, it's all in many ways telling us what's right & wrong, what's good & bad, what should be or should not be, what's normal, what's acceptable, and even what's reasonable.  And I tend to think that we humans are pretty highly influenced by those surroundings.

One has to wonder if the same is also true for other issues - how often do we let our opinions on a subject be essentially determined by political affiliation?  Instead of saying you're a Democrat because you're pro-choice, for example, maybe it's the other way around - maybe you're pro-choice because you're a Democrat.  or vice-versa, maybe you're pro-life because you're a Republican, and not the other way around.  I can't imagine anyone would be likely to agree with that, but my social-psychology friends have blown my mind a few times in the past with things I'd have never thought were true.  That is to say, that maybe we take on the values of the group we self-identify with, without even realizing that's what we're doing.  That's a pretty scary thought.  I do doubt it applies really strongly to people who've learned the art of critical thinking, but if you're an educator you know that a whole lot of folks don't do that whole critical thinking thing terribly well.  I bet this is more important in our society that people might initially assume.  And here I am blabbing on about psychology, as if I know something... sheesh...

Glad to be a moderate independent voter.  That means something here, right?  I can only hope.

Accretionary Wedge #42: Countertop Geology

This time around it's volcanoclast sending out the call for posts for this round of the Accretionary Wedge, asking geobloggers about countertop geology.  Because pretty much everyone knows that the best countertops in a kitchen or bathroom are made of granite... or are they?

Although natural stone as countertop or tile is sold as either "granite" or "marble", they are often neither of those.  The divisions "granite" and "marble" generally mean two kinds, the first being hard countertops made of silicate minerals and softer ones made of carbonate minerals.  The term 'granite' is applied very loosely!

And that's the case with mine.  A few years ago, my wife and I bought a house and the kitchen needed a total gutting.  So before we moved in, we spent about a month tearing out the old kitchen and building the new one.  While searching for something to use as a countertop, we came across a pile of "granite" tiles that I HAD TO HAVE.  The stone was a black & white gneiss, a metamorphic rock.  They were on a deep discount so we took home enough to cover the area we had planned for the counter.  I then got to cut the tiles with a tile saw to fit, glued them down to the base we had built, and filled it in with grout.  Cutting the stone tiles was good fun, of course!

The gneiss had large white feldspar clasts and tiny little folds in the foliation, and consequently was loaded with shear sense indicators - and yes, I did have them all going the same direction  :-).  I had my students in structural geology over a time or two for "lab" where they had to find & sketch some of them... and then we made home-made ice cream... you know, for the thermodynamics lesson about enthalpy with mixtures of ice & halite, or something...

We sold that house and moved to another a couple years back, and unfortunately we lost a lot of pictures that I had taken of the countertop.  But, fortunately, some of the pictures of the kids had been backed-up, and I managed to find one of B that shows the countertop in the background.  So if you can manage to look past this adorable blue-eyed blondie who doesn't have all her teeth yet, you'll see the gneiss in the background.

And here's a cropped, zoomed in version.

Teaching About Climate Change, Part 1: Framing the Discussion

Every year, I teach a geoscience course on natural resources & the environment.  It is a general education course that any student can take so long as they've already taken a college science course.  Students come in from a wide variety of backgrounds & interests.  I've had students who are majoring in elementary education, engineering, business, math, geology, chemistry, geography, sociology, exercise science, and many others.  I love teaching this course.

One of the biggest challenges, however, is teaching the subject of climate change.  This subject is so big, broad, integrated, and so complex that it is probably the most difficult subject to teach in the geosciences in my opinion.  Further, the subject isn't just about science, because the issue has become such a hot topic in our society.  Another challenge here in my case is that I'm not a climate scientist in terms of area of specialization.  As a geochemist I can easily relate to a lot of the chemical data in climate science, but my expertise lies in other fields.  These challenges mean that a careful, thoughtful approach to teaching the subject is all the more necessary.

So I'd like to talk about how I teach this subject in the hopes of hearing from others who also teach it.  I plan to share a couple of posts on the topic.  In this first one, I'd like to talk about how I frame the discussion.  I think there is nothing more important than this when teaching a controversial subject.  I pose this in my course as "Asking the right questions about climate change", with four questions:

1) Is the Earth's mean annual surface temperature rising?
2) If so, what is the cause?
3) If so, what effects will it have?
4) What should be done about it?

The first three questions are science questions; they can be answered by data.  The first three questions also gradually increase in uncertainty.  The first question brings with it the least amount of uncertainty because it is the least complex.  It simply involves measuring the same thing, over and over again, in different ways and over long periods of time, and then seeing what the trends are in the data.  The answer to the first question is obviously "yes", since the rest would be moot otherwise.  The second question brings more uncertainty, since it is looking for a cause.  Causation is, as any scientist knows, often difficult to prove.  Often we look for correlations that have strong theoretical reasons to indicate causation, but there is always uncertainty in this.  The third question brings even more uncertainty, because it brings an added dimension of prediction of the future.  Creating models that will correctly predict the future is hard work!  Especially in this field, where the models have so many variables and feedback loops.  But there is good, rational uncertainty, and then there are the smear campaigns that attempt to insert uncertainty into places where it really doesn't exist.

The fourth question is not a question that can be answered by science alone.  Science can and should inform decisions here, and it does so by clearly answering the first three questions.  But this last question is broader than the natural sciences.  That tricky word "should" in question four brings the trouble.  How we answer this last question depends also on perspectives from economics, cost/benefit analysis, morals/values, public policy, political theory, social science, behavioral science, and other fields.  The question cannot be answered by natural science alone, and I think it intellectually prudent to be upfront about this.

I think this framework allows students to begin to separate the science from the politics in their minds, and they need to do that in order to understand the issues.  In our culture, complex issues often get boiled down to bite-sized bumper sticker position statements, and people are generally divided into two general camps - the pros and the cons.  That is, the science and the politics get conflated, and before students can begin to think clearly about the issue and come to an informed opinion, the science and politics need to be distinguished as separate entities in our minds.  I think the absolute wrong question is "are you for or against global warming?"  That's just too vague & too convoluted to be useful in education.

So that's how I approach it.  How do others who teach this subject frame it?