When I set essays for my first-year students to write during the semester, I try to give them a scientific paper on each topic to start them off. This means that I need to do some extra bedtime reading as I need to select those papers carefully. Today’s post is based on one of those: […]
Continue readingYear: 2010
astrology can help achieve pregnancy? um, really?
Over at Grant’s, a commenter on one of his posts noted that, in its ‘World News’ pages, the Dominion-Post included an article entitled: "Pioneering’ astrology analysis may help women get pregnant after IVF treatment has failed". The commenter said he’d nearly choked on his weetbix when he saw that, & I can sympathise. I’d like […]
Continue reading‘the uncertainty of it all – understanding the nature of science’
With the implementation of the 2007 NZ Curriculum comes the need for teachers to think about how best to help their students to develop an understanding of the nature of science. The Nature of Science is the overarching unifying strand. Through it, students learn what science is and how scientists work. They develop the skills, attitudes, and […]
Continue readingbats and exam questions
The third question in last year’s Schol Bio paper was about bats – specifically, the ecology, behaviour, and evolution of New Zealand’s only two extant native land mammals, the lesser short-tailed bat & the long-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata & Chalinolobus tuberculata respectively). The long-tailed bat is a relatively new immigrant, arriving from Australia ‘just’ a […]
Continue readingmount st helens as a model for the grand canyon? somehow i don’t think so
Recently our local paper ran an article on Mt St Helens, which hit the headlines with a violent eruption back in 1980. The words ‘big bang’ were mentioned in the title. This seems to have struck a chord with one reader…
Continue readinga little exercise in critical thinking
Grant‘s just sent me a piece that a recent Sciblog commenter posted on a US website. (Oh, all right, it was the Huffington Post. Not a place to go for good science coverage, but anyway…) I knew a New Zealand dairy farmer who told me that her 9-year-old daughter had been growing breasts and pubic […]
Continue readingseven signs of bogus science
Over at Sciblogs there’s a lengthy comments thread on vaccination, following an excellent post by Darcy on some myths about vaccines. I hesitate to call the thread a ‘debate’ because, frankly, it’s impossible to actually debate someone who practices what evolutionary biologists would call the ‘Gish gallop’ – firing off so many factoids that you […]
Continue readinghomeopathic ‘vaccines’ and smallpox
in a reversal of normal practice, what follows was first written for the Sciblogs site (usually it’s the other way around) but I thought I’d share it here as well 🙂 Okay, a bit late for ‘vaccination awareness week’ but I have to share this one. Over on Science-Based Medicine, Mark Crislip is talking about […]
Continue readingvaccination & smallpox
One last post for raising-awareness-of-the-science-behind-vaccination week 🙂 On one of Grant’s threads, an antivaccination commenter has posted links to very old images of smallpox victims from a German publication. The commenter implies that these patients acquired the infection as a result of a smallpox vaccination (as I don’t speak or read German I can’t comment […]
Continue readinghomeopathic vaccinations – fail
Since over at SciBlogs many of us are blogging about vaccination, I thought I’d take the opportunity to re-post something I wrote earlier this year, concerning the promotion of homeopathic ‘vaccines’ for a range of serious illnesses. Over on Code for Life, Grant’s put up some posts concerning homeopathy (here & here, for example). He’s also […]
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