Advocacy Thoughts, g vs d, and Polarization

After last weekend's March for Our Lives in the USA, I've been thinking about how we prepare students for the sort of active engagement that drives democracy. Rifkin (high school) and Daane (university) have been developing units that link physics with social justice. National-level organizations often have advocacy arms, and groups like the Society for Physics Students sometimes have programs that train students in advocacy. I feel like we could do more, and return to Dewey:
Knowledge is humanistic in quality ... because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational (Democracy and Education, p 269)
A new paper in PR:PER looks at two ways to analyze student results: the PER-standard normalized gain (g) and the education-preferred Cohen's d. They conclude that g is biased in favour of populations with higher pretest means, and conclude with:
We recommend that researchers avoid using all forms of normalized gain and instead report Cohen’s d and the descriptive statistics used to calculate it, including the correlation between pretest and post-test scores.
A paper by Logiurato describes many interesting applications of polarization for the physics classroom.

Rebecca Calisi has a great feature in Scientific American about the challenges of being a scientist and a mom. It's an important read.

There's a new study that looks at the impact of class-times that are out of sync with students' regular alertness schedules. Meanwhile, this interesting paper looks at differences in job satisfaction (and attributions thereof) for STEM and non-STEM teachers.

Nick Young, a fellow PER grad student, does excellent biweekly paper analysis at the new(-ish) site PERbites.

Seen on the web:
This video from AWTH Aachen shows why rail wheels are conical (gif).
Trevor Register has a great relative motion activity.
Massimo pointed out this video, showing a rainbow from above.
Max Fagin's video is a good primer on the Tiangong reentry (should be later today!).
Nathan Belcher is dropping magnets through solenoids. He's also published another chapter from his thesis, the Modeling Theory of Cognition.
Lastly, check out Sarah Johnson's fantastic torsion pendulum black box!