If you ever studied biology in college, or perhaps even high school, you probably had a chance to perform some fruit fly crosses. Fruit flies are great model organisms for studying Mendelian inheritance — they’re easy to grow, they reproduce quickly, and they have many easy-to-identify mutations. Unfortunately, live fruit flies poses problems in your [...]
Browsing Posts published in March, 2009
PDF to Word, recently out of closed beta and now in open beta, touts itself as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter.” There are many PDF to Word conversion utilities, both for pay and for free, available on the web these days, but none of the free tools handled pdf files like PDF to Word does. [...]
It’s time once again for me to harrangue you about Instructify’s comments policy. We moderate all comments, so if your brilliant reply to one of our posts doesn’t show up right away, we’re not ignoring you. We’ll approve comments as fast as we can (FYI, that usually occurs more quickly during business hours). However, once [...]
Every year, there’s an announcement that the dictionary has added new words like “fanboy,” “muggle,” or “air quotes.” Well, to make room for those, they have to drop less-commonly used words like “blateration” (blabber or chatter), “jungible” (that which may be joined) or “jobler” (someone who does small jobs; also, a great name for a [...]
First of all, thank you for your faithful readership. Nothing pleases me more than knowing that you continue to devour every word that I write. I think its time that you and I took things to the next level. Aw, yeah. Time for a change of pace! I’m going to write faster and insert more [...]
America is a nation of immigrants. They’ve hailed from all over the globe, from places like Russia, Mexico, Africa, Europe, and everywhere else except Antarctica (so far). The New York Times has put together an interactive map that chronicles America’s foreign-born population through history at Immigration Explorer. Immigration Explorer breaks down immigration in every county [...]
Do you need some images to use for class, but don’t want to upset the copyright police? Compfight (that’s “comp” as in “complimentary”) lets you search thousands of photos on the photo-sharing site Flickr that are licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use — basically, as long as you credit the photographer and you don’t [...]
This is the second in a series of feature articles about online teaching. Keep checking Instructify every week for a new feature. Click here to read part one, click here Taking the plunge into online teaching — your students. Every educator knows that a significant component of good teaching is good communication, and most of [...]
The North Carolina Science and Engineering Fair needs judges ASAP. The fair happens this Saturday, March 28 at Meredith College in Raleigh. If you’ve an engineering or environmental engineering background, they especially want to hear from you. If you’re interested in volunteering as a judge (or another position — click here for a list of [...]
Hearing the word biotechnology always makes me think of mad scientists and Frankenstein, even though I am an educated person, and a science teacher, and I know better. Biotechnology can lead to some kind of Frankenstein-ish applications like this, but also lots of other valuable endeavors. In North Carolina, we have several options from the [...]
