Friends rang us in great excitement this morning to ask if we were following the news about the big earthquake in Chile, and of tsunami alerts that had been issued for coastal areas around NZ. (The answer was actually ‘no’; I’d just got in from a walk with the puppy & hadn’t turned the radio […]
Continue readingMonth: February 2010
the oversized naughty bits of female spotted hyenas
When I visited Pharyngula today I saw that PZ had posted a video about spotted hyenas. Female spotted hyenas. And that reminded me of one of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful essays on the same subject. (Gould remains one of my favourite science writers -although, having said that, I do find some of his later […]
Continue readinghow i became a science teacher
I’ve been reflecting on my teaching career lately, partly because I have to write a teaching portfolio. It occurred to me that talking about how I came to be where I am now might perhaps be interesting to some of you who are thinking about your future. In my experience, at least, things don’t always go […]
Continue reading$60 a time
In the Dean’s office we’ve spent the last few weeks working on enrolments. As always, there’ve been students who – for whatever reason – haven’t met our re-entry requirements, & so the registrar & I have to interview them before admission. And as always, there’s a subgroup of those students who attribute their poor results […]
Continue readingmeta-analyses – testing relationships
One of the nice things about working at a university is that there is almost always an interesting talk to go to (supposing you have the time…). Yesterday I managed to go to a fascinating discussion of the use of meta-analyses by a Waikato graduate, Shinichi Nakagawa. (I suspect that Grant knows much more about […]
Continue readingan update on facilitated communication
A while ago now I wrote about Rom Houben, who’d been in a vegetative state for 23 years but who, it was claimed, was really conscious inside an immobile body & now able to communicate via something known as ‘facilitated communication’. I and many others were sceptical of this claim – it looked too much […]
Continue readingarmed and dangerous…
… the intriguing title of a brief news item in the latest edition of Science. The story (anon, 2010) outlines some of the most serious plant & fungal threats to agricultural production. One of them is the potato blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans. The leaves & stems of an infected plant blacken & fall, & the tubers […]
Continue readinghappy darwin day!
And for a bit of vaguely scientific fun, you might like to try ‘devolving’ yourself here (found this one via a commenter on the Young Australian Skeptics – whence also came the image above).
Continue readingbreadth vs depth
One of the conflicts faced by probably every classroom teacher is the one between the amount of material one has to teach (& the students to learn about) and the time available. I face it myself: huge (though also very good) textbook, requests from my colleagues to make sure that the first-year course adequately prepares […]
Continue readingbut it does no harm…
Over on Code for Life, Grant’s recently put up some posts concerning homeopathy (here & here, for example). He’s also suggested that homeopathic (& other) remedies should carry disclaimers to do with their active ingredients (or lack thereof) and what they can & can’t do. Anyway, one of the common responses to articles critical of homeopathy […]
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