I love a witty riposte, and this one certainly hit my humour bone.  As always scienceblogs provided me with amusement this morning.  Thanks ERV ...

WARNING: This post is just a rant against a review article Im too impatient to deal with today. Its really just a rant. heh.

Hey, you know whats even better than having 'science reporters' use the term 'junk DNA' in their pop-science articles?

A 'real' scientist using the term 'junk DNA' in their review on LINES/SINES/ERVs.
Retrotransposons Revisited: The Restraint and Rehabilitation of Parasites

Following the discovery of transposons in plants and bacteria, the presence of mobile DNA in eukaryotic species gained widespread acceptance. However, the concept of "controlling elements" gave way to disparaging terms such as selfish DNA and "junk DNA." Nevertheless, the notion of transposable elements as merely molecular parasites, benign at best and powerful mutagens at worst, that hijack cellular mechanisms for their own selfish propagation, seemed incomplete to some biologists. Given that evolution tends to dispose of that which is useless and harmful for a species, it was curious that the genome should be cluttered with so much "junk." Now we understand that genomes have coevolved with their transposable elements, devising strategies to prevent them from running amok while coopting function from their presence. Repetitive DNA, and retrotransposons in particular, can drive genome evolution and alter gene expression. Evolution has been adept at turning some "junk" into treasure.

Really?

Really??

...

DUH! 1972, man, 1972. 1972 scientist figured that 'junk DNA' could be co-opted for 'treasure'. Shit!

And the fact that we have evolved ways of co-opting (Im sorry, 'restraining' and 'rehabilitating') genomic parasites doesnt mean they arent genomic parasites.

This quote is classic!

Dude, if I totally stripped all epigenetic modifications from your cells right now, any mobile element that retained the ability to replicate would. Its selfish DNA.

And whats up with conflating 'useless' and 'harmful'?? Its called 'drift', man! Doesnt he read Genomicron or Sandwalk?? UGH!

The rest of the review is fine... its just like every other review of LINES/SINES/ERVs, going over pros/cons, evolutionary significance, etc. Other reviews also written by Kazazian 4.5 years ago.

*sigh* The review is fine. Its fine. I just dont have patience to deal with this intro this morning.

Well being moderator of Psychology myspace is always an education.  We can have the most profound discussions, quite heated at times, but then we can have the most silly ones too.  Of course with a large social networking site like myspace, and a group like Psychology, you never know what kind of people are in there posting.  It is a large group of 17,500+ members but regular posters probably number in the region of 10 to 30. 

So usual morning...log onto myspace...go check out the board for a couple of minutes.  A routine task.  A post from someone on evolution was a classic.  Made me laugh so much.

I always suspected this. In fact the theory of human evolution through a gradual decent from trees causing our brains to evolve from the extra proteins of meat relatively makes less sense then aliens modifying our chimp brains. There are so many references in the bible about U.F.O’s.

http://www.bibleufo.com/index.htm

In fact I believe all great messiahs (Jesus, moses, allah...) they were all aliens. Human ignorance failed to interpret the extraterrestrials for what they really are so we made up categories for what we didn’t understand(Religion).

I was going to go online and post a large scientific rebuttle, gently guide the person with some seminal pieces of work like Selfish Gene.  That is the teacher in me, but where on Earth!! (forgive the pun) do you start with someone who has such views.  So I decided to sit and laugh instead. 

So this is what delighted me about this post....

• The irony that someone would rather believe we descended from Aliens than the facts of evolution is fantastic. 
  
• Also I really like the thoughtful addition of the bible and ufo website for the rest of the members to look up for themselves this theory of life.
• The 'gradual descent from trees' classic quote, in fact I can see that quote becoming one of my talking points when I teach evolution this year to my classes.  In fact I may take the post in its entirety and get my students to disect the whole thing themselves and write their own counter post....I could set up a fake myspace forum just based around that post.  Hours of fun with my kids.
  
• I thought the education system in the UK was bad and that kids in this country did not have a good scientific basis to their education.  Well it seems, anecdotally that there are individuals in the US where scientific basics have past them by.

Well I was so happy with this post I posted a thank you comment at the bottom of the discussion thread.  What a biologists dream, I can do so much with this one little snippet of someone's mind.

And there's more.....the reply to my comment is below....

Well Joanne I haven’t even read your theory on evolution, I mean you do have 1 right? Offcurse it pains me to see that you probably doubt your so well cherished evolutionary theory, that you’re scared to deviate and admit to other posibilities for human evolution. Please tell me more about this selfish gene. And yes everybody knows that meteorites are probably the answer to how bacteria generated on earth, but what does that have to do how we went from monkeys to humans.

First to clarify...I had mentioned that I had read  the theories of meteorites and the recent ideas around alien life coming from the cosmos.  It seems if there is anyway of being taken out of context on myspace it is jumped on..... the classic quote has to be though...

'what does that have to do how we went from monkeys to humans.' 

Beautiful!!! From trees....to monkeys...to humans....

16/08/08 When the story first broke on my iGoogle feeder I was amazed.....my brain went into overdrive.  I was imagining the first observed neural learning networks.  The consequences of the work would have been seminal.  In many ways it could have been viewed as a true robot/biological interface.  The work by the University of Reading

A multidisciplinary team at the University of Reading has developed a robot which is controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons. This cutting edge research is the first step to examine how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data. The key aim is that eventually this will lead to a better understanding of development and of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, stoke and brain injury.

My excitement was profound.  I was going to get on here straight away and start blogging....but like everything in the new world of information feed.....nothing is at it first seems.  I waited, yes I know the old cynic in me, but there has been so much debate over in Sciencblogs about this new world of information sharing.  Unpublished, peer reviewed materials appearing and the science behind the stories doesn't add up.  Well I am glad I waited it out.  It seems that once again we have the potential of misinterpretation.  More than surprised that the actual story reached New Scientist and it was published.

Well on Neurophilosophy Steve Potter has left a comment that gives the claims more contextual understanding.

I am disappointed to see Kevin Warwick again overstating things, but am especially bothered when it is about things we are also doing in my lab. He said there's no computer in the loop which is clearly not true, and if you listen to Ben Whalley at the end of the interview, he even says the neural recording "...goes through fairly complex processing steps..." before it controls the robot. It has to. Robots and neural cultures don't speak the same language and something has to do the translation. The difficulty with this type of work (and the fun, sometimes) is that we can only make educated guesses at the neural "language" since we don't understand it yet.
I see nothing new here beyond what we and others (e.g. Sergio Martinoia and Suguru Kudoh) have been doing for the past 5 years. Believe what you read in peer reviewed papers.

Made me think.

I was sitting at my desk today and a new employee at school came rushing into my office. He was wafting in front of me a piece of blue paper and looking quite frantic. I asked him what the problem was, he told me that the bloke from the Post Graduate teaching course had come in to see him and given him this ’test’ to do. I said...ok..let me look. I looked at it and was quite intrigued by the question that had been asked concerning Vygotsky and it has got me thinking.

This was the question asked below:

When small children are playing, they often keep up a running commentary on what
is happening: “And now the train’s going round the tower, and it’s banging in to the
tower, and – oh no – the tower’s toppling down…”. Vygotsky calls this an external
monologue. As time goes on, the external monologue is internalized as thought.
The speech structures mastered by children therefore become the basic structures
of their thinking. This means that the development of thought is to a great extent
determined by the linguistic ability of the child. What does education have to learn from this work by Vygotsky?

My initial thoughts were that this was pretty straight forward, however I thought about it some more and realised that Vygotsky is in some respects working outside the linguistics work of Chomsky in that he does not recognise the innate linguistic structures we are born with. In 21st Century psychology we must not forget the work of the past from leaders like Vygotsky but I think that using Vygotsky in education needs rethinking considerably. The premise that the linguistic ability of a child determines the development of thought is fundamentally inaccurate.  In fact I will explore these thoughts a little more over the next few weeks.  I have scribd the Vygotsky document. 

To conclude this little preamble I will say that I thought the question asked about Vygotsky was quite annoying. Without a good understanding of psychology the question would have given  a naive introspection about the ideas around the external monologue.  The part of the question I  found particularly objectionable was the part that linked the linguistic ability of a child directly to their ability to think.  I will not blame this on Vygotsky (I am sure he will now be happy in his grave) or the  author of the document above, the blame should be firmly placed with the University department who put together such a cack handed question.

Thank you Stephen (don't know why I am saying that, very unlikely he will drop by my website and leave a comment).  Ohhh well it is the polite thing to do. 

I will be using Stephen's interviews with staff for training purposes.

I noticed this story today in The Times, and it fascinated me that we would be so surprised that we could not identify a certain type of bug.  Even if the Natural History Museum has 28 million specimens there would always be bugs about they had not classified taxonomically.  I have increasingly noticed over the past months that the world of taxonomy has changed significantly from the days when I used to classify.  Now we are moving into the realms of DNA and quite substantial work is being completed in the scientific community.  A few weeks ago a noteworthy piece of work had been done on the classification of birds, and of course the dear Platypus.  All of these changes to taxonomy have opened up the wonderment of man's need to organise, collect, file away, understand etc..  The taxonomy of the animal and plant kingdom has had a resurgence in science education with the New National Curriculum at Key Stage 4.  It always amazes me how interested the kids are in taxonomy, even when they reach the more cynical ages of 15/16 and their classification of their world revolves around films, girls, games and all the other things teenage boys like to classify in the modern world.  Lack of understanding of taxonomy is a worrying trend in science, maybe because it sort of fell out of fashion and became a footnote in syllabi.  It became worryingly obvious to me whilst working in my capacity has an External Verifier of Applied Science that this lack of understanding did not only extend to young people, errors were also being made by science teachers.

I had to verify the marking procedures of a piece of work that had been assessed using an assignment against the following criteria.

1. Construct simple identification keys and describe the main characteristics within the major classification groups.

2. Explain the need to classify organisms.

3. Discuss the characteristics which are used to distinguish the major groups

The above three assessment critria may seem pretty straight forward and has scientists we can think how we would expect 15/16 year old students to present this kind of information.  The assignment designed to meet these criteria was unfortunately constructed in such a way that the students became quite confused.  The part of the assignment that caused tremendous problems was a section that asked the students to do the following:

A gardner uses a classification key to identify the difference between a millipede and centipede.  The gardner wants to keep the centipedes in the garden because they eat other bugs.  Why does the gardner need to know the difference between a millipede and centipede?

An innocent enough looking assessment question.  I had a feeling of dread when I read it before reading the learners' work.  I found what I expected various explanations by students about biological control and food chain construction in the garden.  No mention of the taxonomic classification of millipede and centipede.  This was not the fault of the learners and I had to telephone the science department of the school to discuss the problem.  Whilst on the telephone I realised that there was a general lack of understanding about what the grade criteria was asking and what taxonomy actually is.  Quite surprising really given that this is basic biology.  I have spent many summer days pond dipping, using pooters, quadrats, tree beating etc.. Students love using taxonomic keys, drawing and classifying insects and living organisms.  Sadly this part of the curriculum has increasingly shrunk and getting students outside doing practical biology is becoming increasingly less common.  The problem is that our young people (and anecdotally it seems science teachers) are not being exposed to the world around them and given opportunities to understand the innate complexity of habitats along with how the various organisms within habitats are related (or not) to one another.

Well it has been a quest.  Being part of the Building School for the Future programme we are having a brand new spanking vle and learning platform built for us.  It will be based on the Fronter platform.  The start date for this platform is 2009, with possible early release in August? maybe if we are lucky.  I have had my toes dipped into the murky waters of learning platforms when my school was part of a pilot project called Assimilate.  What a total unmitigated disaster that was.  As a professional I had to try and tap into the mind of some IT web developer to work out how I was going to put resources, register classes, share and use different functions.  We had training until it came out of our ears, more training when the first training didn't work.  Failure when the classes we set up didn't communicate correctly with the resources.  A time consumming disaster.  Teachers and students were often blamed for not making it work.

The past two years we have been involved with the Moodle revolution.  Again, more training and more training and the roll out across school in Gravesham has not been a success.  What is the resistance to these technologies?  It seems that a lot of staff need lots of hand holding and help with vle's and to be honest the platforms are sometimes not the easiest thing to use.  Convoluted and messy, requiring lots of IT support.

However, time has been quickly approaching and my hand has been forced by the introduction of the New Diplomas.  Being the line lead for Engineering and the diverse numbers of schools and practitioners I am involved with, along with the immense overload of information from the QIA (Quality Improvement Agency); SSAT (Specialst Schools Academic Trust); NAA (National Assessment Agency); Exam Boards; Sector Skill Councils; LSC (Learning Skills Council) ...(uncle Tom Cobbly and All..including his dog)...I am folding beneath the information and how best to collaborate.

So....here was my dilemma... traditional email systems were not working and of course you can't share.  What about setting up a collaborative wiki....?  Yes, great idea but a wiki is not allowed on the various school networks and is potentially banned.  I have searched for a way forward and then found Edu2.0  A truly amazing FREE vle.  Based around good web2.0 technologies it is an easy interface and NO IT technical support is needed and staff very quickly can be up and running on it.  Virtual schools can be set up, collaboration tools like wiki are embedded, blogs, flickr compatability, googledocs compatability....

At last I have found a way forward and I have been introducing the package over the past two days whilst delivering Adavanced Diploma Training to the team.  I am amazed how quickly we are moving forward. The added bonus of QUALITY ASSURANCE because of the consistent approach to Scheme of Work construction, Lesson Construction and resources means that delivery partners from a number of organisations will be producing materials I can track, monitor and observe in a transparent way.

One final note of praise for Graham Glass the founder.  An inspirational man who has provided a truly excellent resource for us all (if somewhat in the fledgling stage....).  I know I have high demands in terms of technology and my expectations are becoming more so as time moves on.  The thing about Edu2.0 is the dialogue and feedback that is listened to and you really do feel that you are part of a quiet revolution in terms of Learning Platform delivery.

When you look down upon the Earth from space, all you see is land, and water, and clouds, or if looking down upon the night side, the lights of cities. There are no lines on this globe to divide us. There are no divisions on this globe that say, "on this side lies Us, and on that side, lies Them." There is only land, and water, and humanity.

Thanks Badtux