Chance And Design

Alan Hodgkin believes that - contrary to popular conviction - chance plays quite as large a role as design in scientific discovery. This engaging autobiography charts the balance of the two in his own life. Beginning starts with an account of his childhood in an extended Quaker family. Not a great success at school, he nevertheless won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and he writes informatively of the climate of university opinion in the thirties when he was an undergraduate and came to abandon the pacifist ideals of his upbringing. A chance observation on frog nerve led to a Trinity Fellowship and a year at the Rockefeller Institute in New York (where he met his future wife), to the Nobel Prize in 1963, and ultimately to the Presidency of the Royal Society. His experiments on nerve conduction seemed almost at the point of success when everything had to be abandoned on the outbreak of war in 1939, and for six years Hodgkin worked on the concept and design of airborne radar, described in the central section of the book as Flight Trials and Tribulations. The account of his return to civilian life and the resumption of experimentation includes two chapters of solid detail of Starting Again - for this is a book for any reader interested in the origin and development of a dedicated scientist.

This book presents a reliable method for detecting intelligent causes: the design inference.The design inference uncovers intelligent causes by isolating the key trademark of intelligent causes: specified events of small probability. Design inferences can be found in a range of scientific pursuits from forensic science to research into the origins of life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This challenging and provocative book shows how incomplete undirected causes are for science and breathes new life into classical design arguments. It will be read with particular interest by philosophers of science and religion, other philosophers concerned with epistemology and logic, probability and complexity theorists, and statisticians.

Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time at Black Mountain College: Harry Callahan, Merce Cunningham, Walter Gropius, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly - the list goes on and on. Yet scholars have tended to view these artists' time at the college as little more than prologue, a step on their way to greatness. With The Experimenters, Eva Diaz reveals the influence of Black Mountain College - and especially of three key instructors, Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller - to be much greater than that. Diaz's focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. The resulting projects not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design - they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations. Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative minds of the twentieth century, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.

As a student in Cambridge, Alan Hodgkin first became interested in the basis of nerve conduction, using single nerve fibers from a shore crab in his experiments. In 1963, he won the Nobel prize for his work on nerve conduction, and in 1970 became President of the Royal Society. Chance and Design is a fascinating chronicle of Hodgkin's life, providing a glimpse into the world of Cambridge undergraduates in the thirties, the motivation behind his research into nerve conduction, his work on centimeter radar during World War II, and his life as a Cambridge academic after the war. The book concludes with an account of the Nobel prize ceremony in 1963. This highly readable autobiography gives an insight into the working patterns and private life of an eminent scientist, and will appeal not only to scientists, but also to those interested in gaining an understanding of what inspires scientific research.

A practical and systematic approach to deepening student engagement, promoting a growth mindset, and building a classroom culture that truly supports thinking and learning. Every student deserves access to deep and rigorous learning. Still, some persistent myths about rigor can get in the way—such as the belief that it means more or harder work for everyone, rather than challenging and advancing students' thinking. So how can teachers get more clarity on rigor and foster more meaningful learning in their classrooms In Rigor by Design, Not Chance, veteran educator Karin Hess offers not only a clear vision of what makes learning deep and rigorous but also a systematic and equitable approach for engaging students of all ages in rich learning tasks. To that end, she outlines five essential teacher moves that foster thinking and learning: 1. Ask a series of probing questions of increasing complexity. 2. Build schemas in each content area. 3. Consider ways to strategically scaffold learning. 4. Design complex tasks that emphasize transfer and evidence-based solutions. 5. Engage students in metacognition and reflection throughout the learning process. From there, Hess details how to create an "actionable" assessment cycle that will drive learning forward in any classroom. This book offers a treasure trove of strategies, student "look-for" behaviors, and templates to guide teachers in their work as well as an array of rich performance-based assessments to engage and challenge students. School leaders and instructional coaches can also benefit from the variety of teacher-friendly supports to foster rigorous learning in their schools. Ultimately, Rigor by Design, Not Chance helps educators empower students to take greater ownership of their own learning.