Dr. Baird is a local veterinarian whose sons go to Turnberry Central. She has read Half Brother and watched Project Nim, so you can make reference to both texts if needed. Dr. Baird will start her talk by giving a brief description of ethics and how it is dealt with in research.  She’ll then spend some time answering your questions. What do you want to know about animal testing in Canada or globally? What do you want to know about veterinary medicine as a career?

I thought that this picture was worth posting and thinking about.

See that blue sphere in the middle of North America?

That is all of the water on earth if it were gathered in one place. It would have approximately a diameter of 1300 kms.

That’s all we’ve got. Look after it. Use it wisely.

I’ve noticed over the last few days that some of them are loading while others are not. There have been a few new groups made lately, but the conversations are not loading and nothing can be posted on them at all.

I might have to blow them all up and redo – which would be sad – because we would probably lose everything that is there –  which would also be sad…..

So before I get to that point and have to do that, can you please let me know if you can get on the groups and forums either at school, at home, using different browsers, etc.

Thanks for your help.

Mr. Fisher

If so, then you probably know all about the different time periods like the Jurassic, Triassic and the Creataceous.

Did you know that the period of time we live in has a name as well?

It’s called the Anthropocene. This name marks the period of time during which people have had a significant impact on the earth’s surface.

This shot short video shows some of that impact. It shows the lights of communities and roads, the shipping lanes across the oceans and the air routes that cover the globe. Beautifully put together, it needs to remind us of how precious our planet is.

‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ Earth Animation from Globaïa on Vimeo.

Now, when you go to your profile page (where you can post updates telling all of us what you’re doing) you should find something that looks like this:

This lets  you choose a mood from the pull down menu or use one of the pictures (or both!) to tell all of us in the Hive how you are feeling.

Let me know if you think you’ll use this.

Summary from NPR article:

In 1973, an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother’s arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment.

The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp — he bit the children in the house and didn’t understand how to behave like a human child. It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years. Sound familiar?

We will be watching this recently released documentary, Project Nim, over two class periods. Afterwards you’ll be asked to write a blog post addressing the following issues:

What similarities and differences do you notice between Half Brother and Project Nim (characters, story line, setting etc.) ? What surprised you most in the documentary? What were you most disturbed about? What were you happiest about? What did you learn from the documentary that you hadn’t thought of before?

TodaysMeet 340-354  Stickies #30

TodaysMeet 354-368   Stickies #31

TodaysMeet 368-end   Stickies #32

TodaysMeet 314-329  Stickies #28

Ms. Roth (former student teacher at Turnberry) tweeted this interesting article,
This is Dan. Dan is a Baboon. Read, Dan, Read
Researchers report in the journal Science that they trained six Guinea baboons to distinguish real, four-letter English words such as “done” and “vast” from non-words such as “dran” and “lons.” The scientists’ best guess as to how the animals were able to identify real words is that they learned “the statistical properties that distinguish words from non-words,” said Grainger. That is, they learned that “sl” and “dr,” say, are found in many words, but “dl” and “sr” are not. 

“When people learn words, and when we learn to distinguish words from non-words, we’re doing statistical pattern recognition, too,” said Duke’s Platt. “The critical finding is that the baboons were able to transfer this learning to words they had never seen before.” Grainger called the baboons’ accuracy remarkable, since the words were so superficially similar to the non-words (not a “sxjayud” in the bunch).

Since chimps are known to be smarter than baboons, where could this have taken Zan?

Caine dreamed of having a bunch of customers come and play the elaborate games he spent hours making.

Watch what happened when the internet got involved.

J.H.K. students will add their questions through this chatroom using TodaysMeet.

#105theHive #Radio4Learning