I’m going to borrow a line from Dame Anne Salmond, who says it better than I ever could. The Government’s decision to cut humanities and social science research from its major funding stream is both bad policy and scientifically illiterate. That’s from this excellent opinion piece by Dame Anne on newsroom, & I urge you […]
Continue readingTag: nature of science
changes to the Marsden Fund seem very short-sighted
Aotearoa NZ has for many years funded what’s known as “blue-sky” research via the Marsden Fund. This afternoon, social media platform BlueSky¹ is full of posts commenting on the NZ government’s decision to remove social sciences from the funding pool, and to require that 50% of funded projects be of “economic benefit” to the country. […]
Continue readingit’s not on to play one discipline off against another
The topic of an ad for a university not that far to the north of where I live popped up in casual conversation today. It was – IMHO – a pretty awful advert, with the implication that science doesn’t change so do an arts degree if you want to think differently. I mean, yuck. But […]
Continue readingwhat is the “magneto” protein, & why are references to a 2016 paper suddenly in my feed?
A few days back an article in The Guardian popped up in my newsfeed. It was quite old – published in 2016 – but it looked interesting, so I read it & also tracked down the original paper. The article & research paper describe work done to develop and test a potential tool for unpicking […]
Continue readingcovid-19 infection and how the spike protein is involved in doing harm
Just this morning a journalist sent me a link to a press release about a new paper looking at how SARS-Cov-2 affects the vascular system, & asked me to comment on it for a article. If you’d like to read the actual paper you can find it here, but be aware that it does get […]
Continue readingwhy it’s important to check sources
While checking my spam folder (before yeeting the contents permanently) I noticed that I’d been sent a bunch of email ‘newsletters’ from the group “Voices for Freedom.” Out of interest I opened one, just in case the contents were worth a post or two – & indeed they were. The writers of the newsletter state […]
Continue reading“doing my own research” & the scientific method
This evening I was engaging in polite conversation (well, I was polite, anyway) on an RNZ Facebook post about – you guessed it! – the covid19 vaccination program. One of those present offered up a link to a blog post by Joseph Mercola to support a claim he was making about the vaccines. When I […]
Continue readingthose vaccine ingredients again
A year ago I posted an explanation on vaccine “ingredients”, in relation to some wild claims made about the measles vaccine in the context of Samoa’s measles epidemic. From what I’ve seen on recent RNZ comments threads, an update for the time of SARS-Cov-2 is required. So, here’s purple making a statement about the Pfizer […]
Continue readingthoughts on the proposed changes to NCEA
Many readers will probably have read this RNZ article (or heard the related interview), or seen calls for consultation on the Ministry of Education’s suggested changes to the number of subjects – and achievement standards – on offer to year 11 students. I’ve been following (& participating, where I can) all this with colleagues and […]
Continue readingcontroversy? or manufactroversy?
A few days ago, New Zealand’s Minister of Education announced the wider release of a resource on climate change, which was initially trialled at a Christchurch school during 2018. According to the Minister, children will learn about “the role science plays in understanding climate change, aids understanding of both the response to it and its impacts […]
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