Cell and Molecular Biology Animated Textbooks

Have you any thoughts on helping them with that process?

For instance, educational graphics for atomic nuclei, and electron density, are very stereotyped and unrealistic. Some good data exists for both, but it's in these tiny communities. Education content creators have little interest or incentive to pull, and the researchers have no incentive to push, with non-trivial effort, something for which there's no interest.

So I've been wondering, might one facilitate the process? To speed progress. Perhaps say create a free Unity asset, with a set of more realistic atomic nuclei graphics. So the next time an XR content creator is reaching for a graphic, at least there's an easily accessible one that isn't the usual ball of colored marbles.

I agree with the challenge, but suggest parts of the compromise are not being squarely faced.

Have you seen a Jackie Chan action film, where mixed into the ending credits, is a blooper reel of stunt fails and injuries? It serves to correct the reality distortion of the film itself, to reduce viewer injuries from emulation misjudgement. If Hollywood held itself to a similar standard, there would be less paralysis from "we had to move them, before the car exploded", and less drowning with "but... it was so quiet".

A microbiologist writing a young children's picture book, included an errata page. Describing the liberties taken, and at least some of the errors made. And if just maybe, one might uncharitably suggest that maybe it was motivated a bit more by concern for being seen by ones colleges as having made an mistake, and perhaps a bit less for the conceptual integrity of readers, still it served to remind of the latter, and perhaps helped.

Yes, resources are always limited, and engineering and content creation are fundamentally about tradeoffs.

But you know how expense escalates, as one moves from thought to sketch to storyboard to crufty draft to professionally polished prettiness? That means one can always afford to add something crufty, if motivated to do so.

I'd have no problem if people said, "yeah, we could have reduced that misconception, but given our resource limitations, it would have been an unprofessionally hackish job mixed into our otherwise nice work, and we prioritized polish over the misconceptions, which maybe sucks, but it has to be viable as a product".

But I've never heard that. I've never heard "we prioritized polish over student outcomes". But I have heard lots of comments about software limitations, and pedagogical constraints, and so on. But the implicit constraining context, that "pretty" is prioritized as more important than "works", that's usually not looked at straight on.

And sure, part of that is the dysfunctional way that content is created, which in turn results from the way it's funded. I talked with a PBS science creator, who commented, sure, we'd love to try iterative creation and testing, rather than creating a thing, tossing it over the wall into the world, and never being sure how all our efforts and tradeoffs actually worked out... and just as soon as we find someone willing to fund that, we'll try it.

So my suggestion is that if we were more heads up about our choices, and their costs, we might be making different and better choices.

> headsets

I'm looking forward to the 1080p Nreal Light AR glasses early next year. I've found resolution limitations more of a bottleneck than market, but then for me it's merely a hobby for now. Thanks for the 10k link.

The problem isn't that the authors think proteins are actually bright cartoonish colors. Nor that such colorization isn't pedagogically useful. The problem is that many students, unsure which aspects of what they are seeing are real, and which are artistic license, are known to get it wrong. Are known to end up believing that bodies and cells are big empty-ish spaces, and that molecular motion isn't extremely violent.

As here. That stately motion, is artistic license, not reality.

The critique of the authors, is that they are failing to do some things which would reduce the creation and reinforcement of these student misconceptions. They could have for instance, retained the stately motion for its pedagogic value, but added a brief clip of more realistic motion, to inoculate against the misconception. But they failed to do that.

Hmm, as for the cartoon colors, I don't actually know if some students end up believing they are real. I'd expect so. I do know many students believe blood changes from red to blue, based on the colors in a common circulatory system diagram, reinforced by vein color observed through skin.

I've a paper around here, somewhere, on kinesin towing physical dynamics, if that's something you'd care about.

Form reading "The Machinery of Life" by David Goodsell I also got the same impression as the person you are responding to. The brownian motion at the molecular scale is more akin to being in a hurricane than the stately walking this animation shows. It progresses in a herky jerky N steps forward M steps back where N > M manner.

Or alternately, perhaps it's like students struggling with high-school stoichiometry, with atom conservation, because they've managed to remain unclear on the simple core concept that atoms are real objects, are real, physical, little balls.

> think they would be corrected organically

Yeah, that's a widespread impression. That say high-school misconceptions will disappear as students become undergraduate majors, and then graduate students. It's not been well studied, at least the last time I checked. But at a minimum, there are notable exceptions. If your 5-year old wants to know which finger-paint color to use for the Sun, asking a first-tier astronomy graduate student is likely to get them the wrong answer. Misconceptions turn out to be highly resilient. Which is why creating and reinforcing them is not something to do lightly.