Can the shape of a country determine its economics?

An interesting analysis about how the shapes of countries may affect their historical and economic destinies (and the blog it appears in -- Strange Maps):

It’s Always Chile in Norway: the Five Types of Territorial Morphology

And the blog it appears in, Strange Maps, which includes odd tidbits like...

To teach science (or any complex subject), tell a story

I know some of you have seen this before -- it's a great story in Tyler DeWitt's TED talk, "Hey, science teachers, make it fun!" (full TED talk from beginning here)

Below is a link to the particular story, as he tells it, of the bacteria and the virus -- as a horror story.

Click the image to see just the story itself:

(This also has to be about the best use of PowerPoint I've seen -- using it for what it is really best for -- using images and text to add to and help listeners make sense of a riveting narrative.)

DeWitt also makes a compelling case for teaching versions that are simplified, even at the cost of some precision (the same reason high school students learn the Bohr model first, before the atomic orbital model).

If you want to turn your content into a story, you might start by picking one of the "seven basic plots," a relatively arbitrary but durable set of compelling storylines from myths to movies:

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor: Science, Literacy, and Humor

Want to see if your students really understand the content?  Force them to explain it using only simple words.

Maybe you've seen this text editor -- it's an online tool, created mostly in jest, to force scientists to rewrite their often turgid prose into easier-to-read sections.