Sigma Pi Sigma Congress notes

[cste...@yahoo.com]

Sigma Pi Sigma's Congress titled "Scientific Citizenship, Connecting
Physics & Society" was well produced. They had great speakers, a tour
of Fermilab, great food and best of all great round table discussions
that will hopefully lead to some actions on the part of SPS. My group
and possibly others managed to get a reference in an outreach item
about teaching critical thinking. After all of the voting is tallied,
I will follow up with a post to let you know what was adopted. At
least I was able to help educate some people on the need to get more
problem solving and critical thinking teaching moments into all grade
levels. I distributed at least a dozen of our flyers.

I already sent out a post about a new physics resource that I added to
our resources page. After doing so, as I was going through my notes, I
found three other resources that should be of interest/help to those
inclined to join the fight to keep good science on evolution in our
schools and bad (non) science out. I have added those to our resources
too. We had a very interesting speaker who was part of the Kansas
battle that started in 1999. It is amazing to me to find out how many
physicists have gotten involved compared with biologists. SPS even
adopted a position in 2003.

We had a few speakers that were physicists and elected officials that
stressed the importance for scientists to get involved in politics as
either elected officials, "experts" on science issues or activists for
specific issues. One of them is a current physics professor,
researcher at Fermilab and Illinois State Representative. So look for
opportunities as you network to influence/become involved at this
level too.

Speaking of a specific issue, it was great to hear during the talk on
energy efficiency that the color quality of LEDs has finally surpassed
that of fluorescents for use in general lighting. Now if they can just
get the cost down so that they will be more likely to be purchased
than mercury containing CFLs.

Finally, now that this event is passed, there is nothing on our
calendar. If anyone knows of any event/opportunity, anywhere, that
someone from this group might find useful/interesting, please send me
the name and date of the event, a short description of it and a link
for more information so that I can post it.

Thanks,
cstein