Fiona Regarding the general student reaction to the recent industrial action by the University and College Union (which I wholeheartedly endorse and therefore exempt myself from the classification in this post's title, heh) Edward Hall writes in sp!ked: This lack of solidarity within higher education was detrimental to the UCU’s quest for higher pay. The media … Read more
So, mindful of the rather patchy nature of my grasp on anthropological theory, I have been dutifully skimming plowing through the RAT. Ye supernatural figures and diminutive teleosts, this book is a marvel of convoluted and exclamatory verbiage. Using jargon = teh suck. I have found a couple of gems of anti-evolutionary sentiment, though. This … Read more
Because capes aren't just for boys. Girl-Wonder.org is a collection of sites dedicated to females in mainstream comics. Our goals are to foster an attentive, empowered audience community and to encourage respect and high-quality character depiction within the industry. I am extremely proud to know the fabulous people behind this project, and demand that even … Read more
101 bottles of Diet Coke + 526 Mentos = the Bellagio fountain, science-demonstration style. Watch it here.
Today at Culture Club [1] we discussed a recent paper by Eerkens & Lipo [link], where they present a null model of copying errors in cultural transmission. One of the notions they discuss is something I learnt a million years ago in Stage 1 Experimental Psychology: Weber's Fraction, or the Just Noticeable Difference. Interestingly, they … Read more
Unexpected NRY chromosome variation in Northern Island Melanesia Scheinfeldt et al Molecular Biology and Evolution, Advance Access doi:10.1093/molbev/msl028 To investigate the paternal population history of populations in Northern Island Melanesia, 685 paternally unrelated males from 36 populations in this region and New Guinea were analyzed at 14 regionally informative binary markers and seven short-tandem-repeat loci … Read more
Aha! Not Sir William Jones after all, but rather Lord Monboddo, his correspondent, who suggested the following in a letter of 1789. [I]f you can discover that central country from which all those nations, which you have named, have derived their affinity in language, manners and arts, which you observe, it will be a most … Read more
I absolutely reccommend This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson to anyone looking for a juicy and riveting read this summer. It tells the story of Robert Fitzroy's two journeys captaining the Beagle to South America and beyond, the second with Darwin on board. The friendship between the two men, and the testing of that … Read more
My lame attempt to add content to today's post is to report that I went to a workshop on dealing with the media. We didn't actually get to the most useful part of it (mock interviews), but there was some interesting advice from our Media Relations centre here and from the presenters. Myself and the … Read more
Via John Hawks: big words make readers think you're not clever At Edge.org: Jaron Lanier on the aggregating-phenomena of the the web, where he views Wikipedia (for example) as one of many "online fetish site(s) for foolish collectivism". Yeah, exactly. The Jolie-Pitt enterprise and celebrity colonialism. Remind me again what Geri Halliwell does for the … Read more