At the end of each class period, student teams were asked to list three parts of the Learning Guides they felt were the most useful (“the most vital”). Vocabulary and Lecture Notes received the greatest number of votes.
Thank you for voting.
Just a quick note to thank all of the Digital Academy students who went on the field trip today. You are all such a fantastic group. It’s a pleasure to know all of you.
Students who have completed part I of their final project should upload the files. Your team needs to attach the learning guide and the answer key to the form below.
Sorry, but your project is now late. You had the whole weekend until 5pm on Sunday.
Please bring it to class on a USB stick. There will be a 10% penalty for each day it is late. On Monday, you will have lost 10%, Tuesday 20%, etc.
The Chemistry Book has finally moved to some of the latest technology available on the Internet: social networking streams, activity streams, and improved forums.
What software packages are behind the changes?
The software behind the new features is BuddyPress, a plugin available for WordPress. Complementary plugins include Welcome Pack and Tweetstream. Other plugins are being tested.
What are the benefits?
BuddyPress provides the new forums, groups, and activity streams. Tweetstream allows you (you don’t have to!) sync your tweets with your activity stream here. The Welcome Pack allows me to modify the backend and clean up some of the messages, eg. signup email.
The BuddyPress theme includes a sidebar widget, linking to other sections of the website. Yes! The Learning Guides, Labs, Lecture Notes, etc are now available with a clear link on the right side.
Why do I have to register again?
Yes. It is true. To get these new features you will need to register with the WordPress (WP) portion of this site. Even though WP was installed a year ago, no students were required to register. The WP registration is different from The Chem Book wiki and requires a separate database. During the upgrade, only one student’s information was removed (Sorry Anthony).
Why can’t I upload an avatar?
Avatar upload fails. This is an issue with the current BuddyPress version. Developers expect to have a new release in a few weeks and hopefully this will be fixed. Until then, go to www.gravatar and upload an image. Use the same email address you use on this site – and this site will pickup your gravatar.
Last week, Physical Review Letters accepted an article from Russian and American Scientists regarding the synthesis of ununseptium (literally meaning 117). Colliding calcium (isotope-20) and berkelium (isotope-97), the scientists have managed to synthesize six atoms of element 117.
According to nature,
analysis of the new element suggests theories about these super-heavy elements becoming more stable as they get heavier may be correct. This so-called “island of stability” might mean that some of these elements could hang around long enough to be actually studied, rather than vanishing nearly as soon as they’re created.
The New York Times states:
In recent years, scientists have created several new elements at the Dubna accelerator, called a cyclotron, by smacking calcium into targets containing heavier radioactive elements that are rich in neutrons — a technique developed by Dr. Oganessian.