Arabella Buckley’s Fairy-Land of Science is used by some homeschoolers for nature studies, and was recommended by Charlotte Mason herself. A little while back an excerpt from the book was offered as a free download from CurrClick. I promised at that time I would post some Arabella Buckley resources. Here they are. Enjoy!

Texts by Arabella Buckey (Free Downloads):

• Extensive collection of e-texts in multiple formats at Internet Archive
• Several formatted texts at the Baldwin Project
• Books by Arabella Buckley at Early Canadiana Online
• Fairy-Land of Science (plain text) at Project Gutenberg
• Fairy-Land of Science (scans of original book) at Google Books Canada
• A Short History of Natural Science (scans of original book) at Google Books Canada
• Wild Life in Woods and Fields (human-read audio) at Librivox

NB: Downloads from Google Books Canada may not work outside the country. If anyone from US or international locations tries to download the books, please let me know whether or not you are successful. Viewing of the entire book should be possible, regardless.

Texts About Arabella Buckley (Free Downloads):

• Engines of Our Ingenuity #943: Fairy-Land of Science (audio, text transcripts, illustrations)
• Engines of Our Ingenuity #1105: Mary Roberts (audio, text transcripts, illustrations) - significant mentions of Buckley
• Engines of Our Ingenuity #2144: Arabella Buckley (audio, text transcripts, illustrations)
• Arabella Buckley entry at Wikipedia

Hard Copies Free or Cheap:

• Books by Arabella Buckley at BookMooch
• Books by Arabella Buckley at ManyBooks.Net
• Books by Arabella Buckley at PaperBackSwap
• Fairy-Land of Science at LuLu - Yesterday’s Classics version, benefits the Baldwin Project

One of my friends is expecting her first child this summer. She just had an ultrasound last month. I assumed it was her first sonogram, because doctors here generally order the first one around 20 weeks. In actual fact it was her third such test! She is being followed at a different hospital than I was for my babies, but if that hospital is anything like mine she spent an awful lot of time waiting around to see the ultrasound technician!

With the new 3D and even 4D ultrasounds now available, I imagine there will be a good demand for the newly trained ultrasound tech. The greying or aging of North America means that health professions of all kinds offer good job potential in the coming years. Patient interest in sonography as a safer alternative to x-rays and other tools is also making ultrasound tech school a popular place to head for career training.

The NOC code for medical sonographers is 3216. Sonographers do often specialize in gynecology and obstetrics, but other areas of specialization include abdominal sonography, neurosonography, opthalmologic sonography and pediatric sonography.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

At one of the sites I visited when I was getting some details to share with you on the various types of paramedics, the National Occupational Classification (NOC) Profile was mentioned. I thought this might be a topic worth including in career education at home.

NOC is a system that allows jobs to be classified according to a number of criteria, with each profession being assigned a numeric code. Job titles may differ from one province to another, and also from employer to employer. Using the code makes it possible to see that an ambulance attendant is probably doing pretty much the same job as an emergency medical technician - both jobs fall under the NOC code 3234.

The codes make job trends easier to measure. They are used by labour economists, human resources personnel, people providing educational or rehabilitative services. Jobs are assigned a code according to the type of skills it uses (e.g. management, sciences, sales, industry, etc.) Another part of the code consists of the skill level and the type of training required. Here, a job that required no training would receive a different code than one that demanded a university degree.

A young person or someone looking for a change in career can also use the codes to find a career that suits them, and then to learn more about the required training or the salary and job prospects in that field. Looking for a job is made easier by plugging the appropriate NOC code into a search engine. Jobs that correspond to that code will come up in the results quickly, whereas using keywords or job titles would be a lot more time consuming and it would be easy to miss opportunities if the individual omitted one or more job titles.

The NOC is based on the Canada census, and is updated using the results of each census. Thus it reflects current job trends and includes actual job titles used today. The first NOC was released in 1992, when it replaced an earlier classification system. It is published by Human Resource and Social Development Canada, in print form and on CD. It is also available on the internet free of charge. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) is a similar classification system, maintained by the Department of Labor in the United States.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

Have you ever known anyone who was a believer in the the whole Colon Cleanse movement? John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of Corn Flakes™ was - if The Road to Wellville is to be believed.

I had a friend in the 80’s who was a nurse, and she went off to a spa where they pampered her with all sorts of beauty treatments while she performed a juice fast designed to detoxify her body. She said it was a really wonderful feeling, and claimed that afterwards it was much easier for her to make healthy food choices.

She drew the line at purging, however a good “spring cleaning” is apparently quite popular in the Caribbean. Classmates from Haiti and from the Anglophone West Indies have told me it is customary for mothers to give their children a good purgative - often containing cascara - in the spring. It is considered good for one’s health to flush the system, so to speak, once in a while.

If you have an interest in herbal treatments such as senna or cascara, or even if you are using psyllium fibre to “stay regular,” it’s a good idea to do your research. I tire of saying it, but herbal treatments and over the counter remedies are not without their side effects. Responsible use of any such product means informed use.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

I saw an educational program some weeks back, featuring Montreal’s very own Joe Schwarcz. It was a tremendously interesting history of cold breakfast cereals, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since. When I sat down to gather up some more resources before I blogged, I realized the information is pretty much all available on the internet. I don’t want to replicate any of a half dozen pages that lay out the exact same sequence of events, so I think I’ll leave the cereal topic unless I find something really new and exciting about it.

But I wonder, do my readers who live outside Montreal know about our “Dr Joe”? He is a great resource for homeschool science - and usually also history. He’s a chemist and teacher by profession, and the director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society - the mission of which is to demystify science. He appears frequently on our local news shows to address a topic of current interest, do a little consumer education, or maybe answer a question submitted by a viewer.

I love to watch the demonstrations he comes up with. When I was a college student I had a chem teacher who did a demo every Friday, and I know from personal experience these are the kinds of things that really hold a student’s attention. They can even be the deciding factor in a young person pursuing a career in science. Where would we all be today, if Einstein had never been shown how a compass works?

Dr Joe has a weekly radio show that airs Sundays at 3:00. In Montreal you can hear him on CJAD 800 AM; alternatively, you can tune into the show on Toronto’s CFRB (Newstalk 1010.) He also had a show called “Science To Go” on Discovery TV, which you may be able to get on DVD or catch as reruns. I believe the cereal show I saw was part of this series, which is apparently all about food.

You can find several books written by Dr Joe, as well. They are:

• An Apple A Day: The Myths, Misconceptions and Truths About the Foods We Eat (2007, ISBN 978-0-00-200764-1)
• Let Them Eat Flax: 70 All-New Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Food & Life (2005, ISBN 1-55022-698-3)
• The Fly in the Ointment: 70 Fascinating Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Life (2004, ISBN 1-55022-621-5)
• That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles: 62 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (2004, ISBN 1-55022-520-0)
• The Genie in the Bottle: 68 All New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (2001, ISBN 1-55022-442-5)
• Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs: 67 Digestible Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (2001, ISBN 0-8050-7407-4)

If you’re not able to access Dr Joe’s books or TV and radio shows, you can find his weekly column archived at the Gazette’s web site, and you can also find the Office for Science and Society online. Joe’s latest column deals with colon cleansing products.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks to the Gazette. Photo courtesy the Office for Science and Society.