Matt Wilkins

@mattwilkins.galacticpolymath.com

642 Followers 390 Following

Biologist, Founder of @galacticpolymath.com (GP). We help scientists do outreach in K-12 #SciComm #EduSky When not doing that I like doing silly voices & juggling 🧪Hire Us bit.ly/3NiUzdn 🍎Get free lessons https://bit.ly/GPlessons

a caterpillar on a leaf
Figure 2. A figure showing a systems view of how STEM professionals connect to students as a circular puzzle. STEM professionals are the outer ring, with students in the center. Separating these are teachers, which are the primary conduit to students, and another layer that connects to teachers. There are very few connections between STEM professionals and teachers, making it very difficult to mobilize knowledge to Students. Original caption: Figure 2. The primary scalable infrastructure for mobilizing knowledge from STEM professionals into formal (i.e., not afterschool) K-12 classrooms. Individual efforts of STEM professionals to connect with individual teachers or students are not included, as this figure illustrates the knowledge mobilization infrastructure for classroom outreach. Critically, teachers are the conduit through which resources must flow to reach the target audience of students. Tabs on the puzzle pieces indicate the direction of knowledge flow. Yellow outlines indicate bidirectional flow of knowledge with teachers. The dashed line around “Scholar-Educator Alliances” signifies the fragmented and often transient nature of platforms like NSF’s defunct GK-12 and NIH’s ongoing SEPA program, that provide scalable training and resources for supporting formal classroom outreach.
Figure 1. (a conceptual figure showing a brick wall rising to the right, with points labeling types of outreach, with K-12 required classes being flat ground and scientific journal articles.) STEM identity is a barrier for certain types of outreach. This hypothetical curve represents the minimum level of STEM engagement required for audience members to seek out and/or benefit from a particular outreach effort. The Y-Axis represents STEM identity as the amount of overlap a person sees between themselves and STEM (McDonald et al., 2019). The X-Axis represents audience selectivity, maximized at the far right, as only highly STEM-engaged individuals (with complete overlap between how they perceive “Me” and “STEM”) will seek out, read, and understand scientific articles. At the far left, K-12 STEM required classes (e.g., general science) have broad audiences, including students who do not see STEM as relevant in their lives at all. In between are a variety of outreach approaches requiring intermediate levels of interest and prior knowledge to be effective in improving overall STEM understanding and engagement.
a tiny caterpillar on a milkweed plant. One of the leaves has been seriously munched on
a pumpkin-headed doctor emoji
A bunch of tasks, all marked High priority. Add a reset button for Analyze settings...add persistent controls for Gain and FFT...add navigation arrows to recording if more than 1 recording...and more
Dear Colleagues, The status quo is forcing—not fixing—the public’s growing disengagement with science. Yes, we have watched helplessly as programs, grant panels, and the basic functioning of the US research apparatus have been upended in a matter of days. Yet these events are, in large part, a catastrophic symptom of a much more pervasive problem – a profound lack of public understanding about how federal research dollars improve, enrich, and save American lives. This disconnect far predates the current mass layoffs and disassembly of US scientific institutions, and represents a glaring failure of our current ability to mobilize the knowledge we generate to engage, inform, and influence our fellow Americans.
A walkthrough of how to visualize sounds. Spectrograms are visuals of how frequency changes over time. From left to right, we can see how frequency (i.e. pitch) swoops up and down as a trace on a graph with a dark background. Brighter colors represent louder, sounds. A waveform only shows loudness as an oscillation around a 0 decibel midline. Louder sounds are represented as vertical lines extending far away from the midline in a perpendicular direction. The spectrogram is what's missing in the current landscape of web apps, but it's the key to really understanding a lot of sounds that frequency changes in them.
a perfect avocado sliced in half
hundreds of concerned Minnesotans gather to show solidarity for science
From a baby book called Zoo's Who Toucan The toucan hops, it rarely flies, it's hard you see, with a beak this size! Moving around between the trees, picking fruits and nuts with ease.
A Turkish newspaper: Serik Postasi. image of me recording male barn swallows singing & Hakan looking into distance. Caption in Turkish translated by Google as: Akdeniz University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Biology Department Research Assistant Hakan Karaardıç announced that Ornithologist Matthew Reed Wilkins from Colorado University will also join the project carried out in Bogazkent Bird Paradise as of April 2010
Aang's light is fading as the fire lord's energy is almost overtaking him
a 404 not found error
After three exchanges, which lasted about eight minutes on average, participants rated how strongly they felt about their beliefs again. On average, their ratings dropped by about 20 percent; about a quarter of participants no longer believed the falsehood. The effect also spilled into their attitudes toward other poorly supported theories, making the participants slightly less conspiratorial in general.
A demo of a free bioacoustics editing web app which Galactic Polymath is looking for funding to support.
it's negative 13 degrees in Minneapolis
demo of the shower juggling pattern. it's the one you see in cartoons all the time that follows a circular pattern
Accessibility + readability: why Galactic Polymath Education Studio will be switching to Google Noto font. A visual of how Montserrat (the studio's current font) and most sans-serif fonts do not easily distinguish a capital I from a lower case l. Source Sans 3 font distinguishes a lower case l with a small serif. Noto Sans shows a capital I just like a serif font, and a little l as a straight line. This is the best solution.
imagen showing museo sans renders capital I, lower case l and 1 as very distinct. Also O and 0
0 degrees currently, -5 by 8am
An entry describing an indigo bunting, with a picture of the bird, along with a sound waveform that shows loudness over time and below it a spectrogram showing frequency over time. The spectrogram shows swooping up and down notes (frequency modulation) for different syllables of varying lengths
A graph of CO2 concentration in ppm rising steadily from ~300 to 425 between 1957 and 2024
Highlighted text says "But now, with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, Biden has reverted to the original weaker U.S. position, of allowing nations to voluntarily set their own limits on production. "
a velvet worm riding another one. Velvet worms look like caterpillars, but they're evolutionarily totally different. They also stretch much more than a caterpillar