The other day I was talking with a friend who happens to be a high school bio teacher, & she said that it could be quite difficult for her students to do their research on the ‘contemporary issue’ (AS 90714). Not least because of the difficulty of getting hold of peer-reviewed articles on a student’s […]
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permit me a small piece of pedantry
But I simply couldn’t resist this particular headline from the Royal Society’s news bulletin. (Not the RS’s doing, they simply select science-y headlines & send them round): Museum asks, what is greatest invention? Science Museum in London choses the steam engine, the X-ray machine, the electric telegraph, the DNA double helix, Stephenson’s Rocket train, the Apollo 10 […]
Continue readingfluoridation – another issue that never seems to go away
Back in 2006 Hamilton held a referendum on the issue of whether or not the city’s water supply should continue to be fluoridated. (We even held a Cafe Scientifique about it.) At that time 38% of eligible voters returned voting papers, & 70% of those voters wanted fluoride retained in our water. So I had […]
Continue readinghow well do we teach critical thinking?
Here’s a really interesting quote from Ryan, commenting over on Orac’s blog: Sometime in the 60s, education in America started putting a greater emphasis on skepticism. For the first time, kids were encouraged to question what they were told. This is a good thing, or course. But I wonder – have we been encouraging people […]
Continue readinggender of children affects father’s voting preferences?
In the Herald today (I’m not picking on them! It’s just that this is our morning paper) is a headline: Having sons will turn fathers right-wing, study suggests. The ensuing item is from a UK research project that also suggest that if a man has daughters, his voting preferences will trend to the left. (Presumably someone with […]
Continue readingonly in mice…
Just a quickie & a link: Ben Goldacre’s got an interesting post on the total misreporting of several bits of research, in the UK media. (Having read one of the ‘news’ items, on ‘man-flu’, I have to say that in that case the reporter was pointed in the right direction by the researchers themselves. But […]
Continue readinga wonderful fossil – but not a missing link
You’ve probably already seen the following image, as it’s been splashed all over the media recently: From Franzen et al. (2009) PLoS One 4(5): e5723 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723.g001 NB ‘Plate B’ is the ‘counterplate’ of A; while A is complete & genuine, it seems that B was altered to make it appear more complete (& thus more attractive to […]
Continue readinggreat balls of stone!
In this morning’s Herald there’s an item entitled ‘Call to save hilltop boulders’. According to the people doing the calling, the boulders were placed at the top of what is now an Auckland hillock prior to Maori settlement by a group of fair-skinned people, claimed to be Celtic voyagers. Hmmm. One of those campaigning for the boulders […]
Continue readingan alien star-child?
Last week one of my students wrote to me about something they’d seen on TV: My friend & I saw this on Breakfast this morning. Although we don’t think it is all true, we are still interested because they talked a lot about the skull’s morphology & how they believe it is the offspring from a […]
Continue readingsocial networking & morality
Reading the UK newspaper, the Telegraph, I see that social networking sites can be bad for your moral values. Scientists say so, so it must be true… Only they didn’t, & it’s not. Ben Goldacre has picked up on this story (along with other examples of overblown reporting in the UK press). The paper on which […]
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