Month: August 2020

Research: intelligence is the ability to adapt to the environment

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Ever since psychologists started measuring intelligence, including the academic skills measured by IQ tests and their proxies, they have known that intelligence is not really your ability to solve obscure multiple-choice problems with largely trivial content that will have no impact on your future life whatsoever. Instead, intelligence is the ability to adapt to the environment: adaptive intelligence.

Organisms that don’t adapt die.

Intelligence is not just about an inert ability to take tests; it is about the active deployment of that ability to solve problems of life.

In my in-press book, Adaptive Intelligence, I argue that all us, including colleges and universities, ought to focus not on producing test takers who are content to see the world go to hell in a handbasket so long as they get their degrees and make their money. Look around us. It’s not working! Instead, we need to develop and assess students’ adaptive skills in and willingness to make the world a better place. If not now, when?

Source: COVID-19 Has Taught Us What Intelligence Really Is (Inside Higher Ed)

Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades

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Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

..in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.

Source: ArsTechnica

Dr. Anderson Receives NSF Funds for Online Field Ecology and Data Science

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The National Science Foundation is awarding Ohio Wesleyan University a one-year, $86,735 grant to oversee the creation of online teaching tools that advance field ecology and data science.

Laurel J. Anderson, Ph.D., OWU’s Morris Family Professor of Natural Sciences, is the principal investigator on the federal grant. She also is president of the Board of Directors for the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), a consortium of colleges and universities that will work together to create the new teaching tools. Dr. Anderson will partner with Dr. Tim McCay from Colgate University to administer the project.

“The pandemic has created an urgent need to reimagine our teaching of field ecology, which is usually done with in-person field trips,” said Dr. Anderson, who helped to found EREN in 2010.

“However, field ecologists also use computer technology extensively to explore natural patterns at large scales,” she continued. “These projects allow us to meet our need to socially distance and have students collecting data wherever they happen to be. Then, we use online tools and datasets to see how their data fits into large-scale patterns.”

More: PRESS RELEASE: Advancing Science

Coral Reef Restoration Tiles

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In a world first, University of Hong Kong marine institute scientists lay clay tiles in marine park where coral was wiped out in twin ecological catastrophes

Seeded with living corals, the tiles quickly increased biodiversity. If found to work, they could transform reefs damaged by pollution, fishing and bleaching

Source: Tiles to restore corals, designed and 3D printed in Hong Kong, may be key to saving the world’s threatened reefs (South China Morning Post)