I noticed an intriguing headline in Saturday’s Waikato Times: "Quake forecast a horoscope." On reading further I found it led to an article based on a prediction by Ken Ring, who claims to be able to use the Moon’s position relative to Earth to predict the weather, that there would be an earthquake somewhere in the […]
Continue readingYear: 2011
there are some questions that google can’t answer…
… and I’m afraid that Facebook isn’t the place to go looking either. I was happily reading Pharyngula while eating lunch (& trying to avoid dropping crumbs into my keyboard), and decided that as a good pharyngulite I should perhaps pharyngulate a poll for once. (I was not at all surprised to find that ‘pharyngulate’ is now a word […]
Continue readingwhere do you find the ideas for your posts?
"Where do you find the ideas for your posts?" It’s a question I get asked reasonably often, by both colleagues & students. They probably think I bang on a bit in my answer, but it’s not as simple as a straightforward list 🙂
Continue readinghappy darwin day
This being the 202nd anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, I thought I’d share this little gem. (Hat tip to Ken over at Open Parachute – I thought I’d post it here as well in case you don’t also frequent Sciblogs NZ.) I bet PZ likes the squid! Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman […]
Continue readinghelping students think like scientists
Today I was involved in a session on ‘large-group teaching’, run by our Teaching Development Unit. (Secondary teachers can probably skip this post as most likely what I’m going to talk about is pretty much routine for you.) Why? Well, there’s a fairly common perception that ‘the’ model to use in large first-year science classes […]
Continue readingquirks of human anatomy
I’ve just started browsing through a book with the promising title, Quirks of human anatomy: an evo-devo look at the human body. (Held, 2009). (The Science librarian does a great job of sifting through new titles & running them past the various departments in our Faculty to see what people would like to see added to […]
Continue readingwhy do people blog?
A while ago now I gave a seminar at work called something like The joys of science blogging. (Well, I enjoy it!) It was basically a case for the benefits to scientists and the community of having researchers who also blog about their science from time to time. Don’t think I made any converts at the time […]
Continue readingattitudes towards teaching evolution in the (US) classroom
A little while back I wrote a post on the fact that so-called ‘intelligent design’ is simply creationism by another name, a name intended to obscure the link & to get around the US prohibition on teaching religion in science classes. When this was posted on the NZ Sciblogs site, one commenter said, Firstly, there […]
Continue readingthe improbability of an eye
Because I seem to have very little time on my hands at the moment, I thought I would re-post something I wrote very early on in my blogging career – it hasn’t dated & in fact is quite relevant to a more recent post on ‘intelligent design’ creationism The camera-type eye of humans (& in […]
Continue readingchanging the culture of science education at research universities
That’s the attention-grabbing title of a new paper in Science magazine’s ‘education forum’ section (Anderson et al. 2011). Most readers will know that science education is a subject dear to my heart, & a topic that Marcus & I write on from time to time (here & here, for example). The authors are all professors at the […]
Continue reading