[swansont]

Santalum, on 9 February 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

At the Bundoora Children Farm in Victoria Australia, a tour guide informed my daughter's grade 2 class that an emu had a backwards pointing knee.

Have science education standards sunk so low that people cannot even get rudimentary scientific facts right??????

I'm not sure of and valid connection between an anecdote of a single tour guide and a trend in science education standards. I'm confident people make errors in countries with exceedingly high education standards.

[ajb]

swansont, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 PM, said:

I'm confident people make errors in countries with exceedingly high education standards.

We have all made errors and have misconceptions. It is just part of being human.

[Jiggerj]

ajb, on 12 February 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:

We have all made errors and have misconceptions. It is just part of being human.

I want to agree, but there are certain conditions where one shouldn't make mistakes. Imagine a lawyer not knowing a tiny piece of law that could get his client off; a doctor that thinks a stethoscope is a tongue depressor...

If a trained tour guide doesn't know the parts of an emu's anatomy, then what misinformation is giving to children about the other animals? He shouldn't be a tour guide.

[swansont]

Jiggerj, on 12 February 2012 - 09:45 PM, said:

I want to agree, but there are certain conditions where one shouldn't make mistakes. Imagine a lawyer not knowing a tiny piece of law that could get his client off; a doctor that thinks a stethoscope is a tongue depressor...

If a trained tour guide doesn't know the parts of an emu's anatomy, then what misinformation is giving to children about the other animals? He shouldn't be a tour guide.

It depends on the misinformation. Am I giving misinformation when I say that kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2?

[dimreepr]

Jiggerj, on 12 February 2012 - 09:45 PM, said:

I want to agree, but there are certain conditions where one shouldn't make mistakes. Imagine a lawyer not knowing a tiny piece of law that could get his client off; a doctor that thinks a stethoscope is a tongue depressor...

If a trained tour guide doesn't know the parts of an emu's anatomy, then what misinformation is giving to children about the other animals? He shouldn't be a tour guide.

Human fallibility is part of life we cannot understand our own incompetence simply because we don’t know why we don’t understand. Knowledge and understanding are entirely different.

[DrRocket]

swansont, on 12 February 2012 - 09:52 PM, said:

It depends on the misinformation. Am I giving misinformation when I say that kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2?

That in turn depends on the situation (relativistis vs Newtonian physics). In your case one can be reasonably confident that the answer will fit the context.

In the case of a lawyer or MD I have no such confidence.

[ajb]

Jiggerj, on 12 February 2012 - 09:45 PM, said:

I want to agree, but there are certain conditions where one shouldn't make mistakes. Imagine a lawyer not knowing a tiny piece of law that could get his client off; a doctor that thinks a stethoscope is a tongue depressor...

Well, we are all human with a finite capacity to assimilate knowledge and from time to time we will get "caught out". The point should be that elementary mistakes should not be made. But then who defines elementary?

With the emu's knee, in retrospect that looks like an elementary mistake, with the proviso that the person is familiar with avian anatomy.The tour guide should brush up on that, but I would not let that be a guide to educational standards.

I was under the impression that it was the emu's knee that was backwards, it looks like that until you look at it closer. I learnt something new due to this thread

DrRocket, on 13 February 2012 - 02:49 AM, said:

That in turn depends on the situation (relativistis vs Newtonian physics). In your case one can be reasonably confident that the answer will fit the context.

Maybe this is the point. Maybe the tour guide knows the anatomy quite well and was trying to fit the description to the audience of children. I mean it looks like the knee and in essence plays the role of a knee in loose relation to our anatomy. Without asking the person in question we will never know.

[CharonY]

Quote

Maybe this is the point. Maybe the tour guide knows the anatomy quite well and was trying to fit the description to the audience of children. I mean it looks like the knee and in essence plays the role of a knee in loose relation to our anatomy. Without asking the person in question we will never know.

This is a very good point. And if we wanted to critique description of the tour guide in terms of precision one would also have to know the correct wording. Obviously other metrics (i.e. certain statistics) paint a better picture in terms of scientific education. However, without looking at statistics I can think of the movement to teach "alternative theories" to evolution in science classes as detrimental to science education.

[Jiggerj]

ajb, on 13 February 2012 - 10:06 AM, said:

I learnt something new due to this thread

Yeah, me too! It would take me fifty years of intense study to be able to conduct a decent conversation with some of the incredible brains here. Well, I don't have fifty years, so I'll settle for picking up little tidbits of knowledge from this site.

swansont, on 12 February 2012 - 09:52 PM, said:

It depends on the misinformation. Am I giving misinformation when I say that kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2?

Do I need to open a new thread to ask why the ^ in that equation? It's: Kinetic Energy equals half the mass, times velocity squared (which is the 2).

I see a lot of equations like P1 with the 1 being small (subscript?). What's that about?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Jiggerj, on 14 February 2012 - 01:04 AM, said:

Do I need to open a new thread to ask why the ^ in that equation? It's: Kinetic Energy equals half the mass, times velocity squared (which is the 2).

Many programming languages represent exponentiation with the ^ symbol; hence x^2 means "x to the power of 2". In cases where we can't easily write out the nice mathematical notation, it's easy to just use ^.