Monday July 02, 2007 A Community of Mr. Wizards
Sadly Mr Wizard, Don Herbert, passed away last month. I remember watching Mr. Wizard's World religiously as a kid. I learned everything from how to force a hard-boiled egg into a small mouthed bottle to how to pre-cut a banana before opening or cutting the peel (drop by and I'll show you how).
So what to do now that Mr. Wizard is gone? Well, there's Bill Nye the Science Guy, or the modern devious alter-egos of Mr. Wizard, the MythBusters. But never fear, Web 2.0 is here to save the day.
The folks at ScienceHack have made a search engine for science related demonstrations and presentations that are on video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe, and others. The added bonus they give you is all of their indexed videos have been peer reviewed by scientists. So far I've learned what super-cooled water looks like when being poured out of a bottle and also how energy is produced in cells.
Mr. Wizard isn't really gone...his spirit lives on...and now it's indexed.
Greg
Posted by gdkraus ( Jul 02 2007, 03:49:11 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]Comments are closed for this entry.
Cool, I could have used this during planning for the Summer Institute... ah, there's always next year to prep for. I just watched the evolution of the eye (http://sciencehack.com/videos/category/7 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stb9pQc9Kq0) - it's nice that, like YouTube, they give you the embed html and a direct link url. I don't see any reviews though, is it just peer-screened?
-Charlie
Posted by Charlie on July 03, 2007 at 10:25 AM EDT #
I did a bit more digging and found this statement from Sciencehack's blog:
"Every video is screened by a scientist (a university student or a university graduate with a major in a science related field, examples: applied science in physics and electrical engineering)"
So at least now we have an idea of the criteria they use in peer selection.
Also, thinking about it some more, it might be better to call the videos peer screened.
-Greg
Posted by Greg on July 03, 2007 at 10:55 AM EDT #