Month: September 2008
Get Off The Pendulum
Can’t say a huge amount because it’s politically sensitive, but our new 4 year Middle Years of Schooling1 teacher education degree has been changed to meet the requirements of the teacher certifying body in Queensland, the Queensland College of Teachers. We were planning to have minor teaching fields that would allow teachers to concentrate on…
Stephen Fry – How To Be Gorgeous
Affirmation
The pastor at church this week was talking about our value in God’s eyes, and said something about God’s regard for us telling is we’re awesome every day. Then he said something like “How long is it since someone told you you’re awesome?” (my paraphrase). My response (to myself) was “Not that long, actually!” I…
The Indiscretion of Speed Cameras
If a human cop detects someone speeding, using a hand-held or car-mounted radar, he or she has some discretion about what to do. A judgement is made about whether the speeding is dangerous enough to pursue, about whether to issue a fine or a caution, about any mitigating circumstances, and so on. A speed camera…
Evidence-based Practice and Education
It’s a notion that’s been popular in medicine for perhaps a decade, maybe a bit longer: doing what the best available research evidence suggests is the best possible treatment for a particular condition. Sackett and colleagues (1996) wrote that evidence-based practice consists of “integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from…
Alberto Rivera and Unassailable Claims
Alberto Rivera is a guy who came out in the 70s – initially in the (in)famous Jack Chick Christian comics – and claimed that he had been a Jesuit priest (sometimes upgraded to bishop) specifically tasked with infiltrating and destroying Protestant churches. His ‘testimony’ sparked quite the panic among evangelicals, some of whom started finding…
Fundamentally Flawed Numbers
Some of us in the School of Education did an activity last week where we had to look at some statistics about our programs and compose a response to be sent to the Faculty and the University. There were all sorts of stats, on enrolments and attrition (students who start but don’t finish courses), grades,…
New Boots
Awesomeness!
Picked up my bike this morning (the financial stuff did end up all falling into place), and it’s AWESOME!!! So smooth, so powerful, so enjoyable. Only problem is, I also got the letter yesterday that tells me I’ve had a few too many fines and need to be careful lest I lose my license… So…
Arrghh!!
Well, the bike may not get well (yet) after all. Due to a variety of different financial issues, including the continued non-arrival of my tax refund, I may end up not having the cash to get it done. Still running around crazily trying to make it happen, but it’s looking grim.
A Message from the Rest of the World
TwiliteMinotaur on the WGB asked the question “What are you doing to help Obama?” Since I think those of us in the rest of the world have a stake in the outcome of this election, I thought I might try to put up a video on YouTube about that, including messages from as many people…
A Clever Experiment
…and one I doubt I would have thought of. An early electricity researcher wanted to know how fast electricity travelled in a wire. So without telling them why, he lined up 200 monks, 25 feet apart, all holding one long piece of wire. He wanted to know whether, when he turned on the electricity, they…
Wootness – Bike Will Get Well
I’ve been waiting a couple of months to put my bike in for a service. It’s going to be $600-800 for a major service, plus it’s in desperate need of new sprockets and a chain, so I’m looking at $1200 or so in total. I’d hoped to use my tax refund, but that’s taken months…
Large Hadron Collider Panic
Reading the comments on the web and in the media about people freaking out that the starting up of the Large Hadron Collider today will end the world, I have two opposing reactions: Wow, my colleagues and I need to work much harder at science education May as well give up on science education, the…
Breeding Contempt
It happens in lots of places and on lots of issues, but the place I notice it most is in the response letters in the local newspaper, the Courier-Mail. The web-based version of the paper allows people to comment on stories, kind of like blog comments, and a lot of those comments just show that…
Dang, I used to be so polysyllabic
Looked up ‘synchronicity’ in my blog to see whether I’d talked about it before (I had), and found this gem from the very beginning, just a month or so into blogging: http://www.bravus.com.au/blog/?p=34 Well done for sticking with me through that stuff!
Spooky Synchronicity – Part… many
So I got an invitation to a party in Edmonton in my email this morning. But it was odd – I didn’t know the sender, or any of the other recipients. It was a private party and seemed to be a celebration of winning a silver medal in … some form of athletic endeavour with…
Global Thermonuclear War or The Second Coming – what’s the difference?
In terms of outcomes: Global Thermonuclear War – bad guys fry, good guys go to heaven, earth cleared of life Second Coming – bad guys fry, good guys go to heaven, earth cleared of life
Have a nice day
We kind of know that any day on earth could be our last: sickness, accident, or even a lightning or meteor strike, and it’s all over for us. It makes life precarious and precious if we remember it. But in reading and thinking recently, I’ve come up with my Top 10 candidates to end or…
Something true, arrived at via nonsense
Metalheads are gentle