By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Reading from a textbook and writing down answers on a test are all well and good, but at Red Bank Middle School, they’re just two ways to acquaint students hands-on with concepts in math, science and more.

That’s where Project Lead the Way, a national initiative to spark “ingenuity, creativity and innovation” within students, comes in.

“It’s really trying to mold and influence this generation and fill a gap that’s been left in America,” said Chris Ippolito, one of two teachers involved in the program. “This is like a supplement to math, science, engineering, et cetera.”

The middle school is one of a few in New Jersey chosen to implement the program, which focuses on real-life scenarios and has students work together, through projects, to find solutions to problems. During a recent class, Ippolito spent a few minutes at a whiteboard writing down more than a dozen suggestions from students on how to make the school more environmentally friendly, as part of a national challenge to solve a problem in the community or school, superintendent Laura Morana said.

Most of the time in the classroom was spent on the computer, with students researching ways to implement their ideas.

“It’s amazing. They’re so involved,” Ippolito said.

Morana said the program has re-energized students, while also putting the school in closer alignment with Red Bank Regional, which is also associated with Project Lead the Way.

“As they go into the high school, they are so much better prepared than they were before,” she said.

The trick, however, is to maintain funding. It’s currently funded through various grants, Morana said, but eventually it may be built into the school budget.

“This kind of curriculum, that will be the norm,” she said. “It’s not going away. It’s just the beginning.”

Today’s Asbury Park Press reports that Riverview Medical Center had a streak going this autumn: a spate of twin births.

From the article:

In an eight-week period from September to late October, 11 sets of twins were delivered at the Red Bank hospital.

As chairwoman of obstetrics and gynecology at Riverview, Dr. Marilyn Loh-Collado oversaw the arrival of these multiple bundles of joy into this world.

“There was no rhyme or reason to it,” Loh-Collado said. “It was just kind of strange.”

Six sets of twins were born in September, Collado tells Press reporter Michael Riley: three sets of males, two sets of females and one set of a boy and a girl.

Five more pairs arrived in October: three sets of male and female and two sets of baby girls. All were born healthy.

While only three percent of live births involve multiples, eighty percent of multiple births involve some sort of artificial reproductive aid, such as ovulation agents, Collado says. Some of those treatments are covered by health plans under New Jersey law.

The baby boomlet kept the hospital ob-gyn staff busy.

”Dr. Eugene Kaskiw, for example, delivered three sets of these twins in the span of one week — on Sept. 15, Sept. 20 and Sept. 22.

“It was a busy week,” Kaskiw said. “You can’t help but be excited. These births represent all the good in our field.”

But Dr. Robert Penney, who “did his part” during the recent streak, tells the Press that it’s not all that unusual.

“We’ve had this kind of thing happen before,” Penney said. “I remember two or three years ago, I delivered 10 babies in one 24-hour period: three sets of twins and three single babies. That was a busy day. But the great thing is that the hospital is prepared for this kind of thing.”

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In honor of international Darwin Day, the Red Bank Humanists hosted a lecture yesterday by Julian Paul Keenan, Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Montclair State University on what he called “the evolutionary connection between religion and deception.”

Keenan , whose work involves the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, said research has shown that the same region of the brain responsible for both the sense of self and of self-deception is the locus of religious beliefs.

“Religion serves specific cognitive needs,” he told the audience of about 40. In terms of survival, “having the ability to be deceived is a good thing, and religion really takes advantage of that.”

Keenan’s address mixed cutting-edge science and humor. Touching on the the phenomenon in which the face of Jesus is believed to appear unexpectedly in common objects, Keenan asked, “Why are people seeing Jesus in their toast instead of Kurt Cobain? Is there a Lynyrd Skynyrd toast? A Bill Clinton toast?”

The Red Bank Humanists espouse a secular philosophy in which science and critical inquiry are used to understand existence.

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You will be forgiven, in a secular sense at least, for not knowing that there’s something called ‘Darwin Day.’

A dozen years ago, there was only one known celebration of Charles Darwin’s birthday — Feb 12, 1809. Now, if we may be so droll, the event has evolved into something with global reach. Some 850 events are said to have been held last year. And somehow, you missed every last one of them.

Well, here’s your invite to this year’s. On Sunday, Feb. 10, the Red Bank Humanists will host a Darwin program featuring a lecture by Julian Paul Keenan, Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Montclair State University. He’ll take up the topic, “Exploring the Evolutionary Connection Between Religion and Deception.”

A Q&A and, yep, birthday cake will follow.

The Red Bank Humanists say they “seek to understand the universe through science and critical thinking, and represent an overall objective of developing a more humane society… RBH, a non-profit, educational organization, is an affiliate of the American Humanist Association, the Council for Secular Humanism, Institute of Humanist Studies, and the New Jersey Humanist Network.”

From a press release issued by the Red Bank group:

“Darwin Day promotes understanding of evolution and the scientific method,” said Matt Cherry, executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies, which promotes the Darwin Day celebration. “This celebration expresses gratitude for the enormous benefit that scientific knowledge has contributed to the advancement of humanity.”

The event will be held at 10:30a at the Red Bank Charter School, 58 Oakland Street. The event is free and open to the public.

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Middletown North graduate Julia Pryde was remembered by people who knew her as a carefree individualist who loved to swim competitively and cultivated a strong interest in ecology and water quality issues, according to a story about her in today’s Asbury Park Press.

Pryde was among the 32 students and faculty members slain by a student gunman Monday morning at Virginia Tech, where she was in a graduate science program.

“She was always having a good time,” said [friend and neighbor Nicole] Malone, 20, now a student at La Salle University in Philadelphia. “She was never really upset about anything; she never had a frown on her face.”

From the article:

Pryde graduated last spring with a bachelor’s degree in biological systems engineering, said Mary Leigh Wolfe, a professor of biological systems at Virginia Tech and Pryde’s adviser for the past four years.

Pryde was sitting in her advanced hydrology class when the gunman entered, Wolfe said. Many of the class’ students and its professor, G.V. Loganathan, died, Wolfe said.

“She always tried to make a difference herself rather than try to ask someone else to do something,” said Wolfe, who traveled with Pryde last year to study water systems in Ecuador.

Wolfe met Tuesday with Pryde’s parents, whom she described as grief-stricken but trying to remain strong.

“They’re very strong people,” Wolfe said.

The Star-Ledger also has an article about Pryde.

As an undergraduate at Tech, she had participated in a nonprofit group founded by fellow students to teach ecology to schoolchildren.

And last summer she took a weeklong field trip with her faculty adviser, Mary Wolfe, to study watersheds in Peru and Ecuador.

“She was an idealist, but she was practical as well,” said Brian Benham, an assistant professor in the biological systems engineering department. “I used to tease her about having an old soul.”

More:

Friends called her easygoing and a good listener, with an untroubled, fun-loving nature. Last spring she decided impulsively to cut off the dreadlocks she had worn for some time.

“Julia was fun, she was sincere, she was thoughtful, she was very genuine,” Benham said.

In a short item, the New York Times reports that Pryde “wrote a proposal to have the school cafeteria stop throwing waste in a landfill and start recycling it as compost.”

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Eighteen-year-old Daniel Handlin of Lincroft finished eighth in the Intel Science Talent Search competition completed yesterday in Washington.

For his work developing a cheap-yet-accurate way of tracking satellites, Handlin — a senior at the High Technology High School, also in Lincroft — won a $20,000 scholarship.

From the Star-Ledger:

Handlin, the son of Assemblywoman Amy Handlin (R-Monmouth), said being a “Star Trek” fan led to an interest in space from an early age. His sophomore year, he began researching ways to track satellites with a commercially available night-vision scope, a camera and two low-power telescopes.

After figuring out the math involved, he set up a network of amateur astronomers in New Mexico and Washington state to feed him data. His calculations on this position of orbiting satellites were nearly identical to those being generated by huge, government-owned radar arrays.

“Daniel’s project is extremely relevant for national and international security,” [top judge Andy] Yaeger said. “It was an incredible innovation. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to remind yourself that you’re looking at projects produced by high school students.”

The overall winner was a 17-year-old girl from Oklahoma who built a cheap-yet-accurate version of a spectrograph, a molecule-identifying device that normally markets for $100,000; hers cost a few hundred bucks.

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Sunday’s Star-Ledger has a terrific profile of Fair Haven’s Bob Lucky, head of the Fort Monmouth re-use panel and an engineer whose seminal work led to the creation of the Internet.

The article, by Wayne Wolley, begins:

Bob Lucky earned his status as an information-age pioneer while idling at a stop light in Red Bank.

The year was 1964, and Lucky was a 28-year-old Bell Labs electrical engineer who had been wrestling for months to create a way to transmit electronic data over telephone lines. The final piece eluding him was finding a way to eliminate distortions in the signal. The eureka moment came as Lucky mentally rewrote a portion of a mathematical equation that ran for several pages.

“I waited up all night to get back to the office to see if it would work,” Lucky says.

The invention, the adaptive equalizer, ended up becoming more than U.S. Patent No. 3,414,819. It became the starting point for every high-speed modem in use today.

In addition to being the husband of Two River Times photographer Joan Lucky, Lucky is also the 1987 winner of the Marconi Prize and a member of the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.

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