Month: June 2013

One of the benefits of the bike is that the fuel tank is small. Only about 15 L or so. That means it’s pretty much never worth my while to go looking for cheaper fuel: easier just to go to whichever servo I’m riding past. Why? Because if the price difference is 5 cents a…

…more about in The Conversation’s symposium on science and maths education. One arose, not from me, in the Twitter conversation: the fact that many primary teachers are not confident or keen to teach science. The other is the issue of ‘science education for all’. (Disclaimer: I pitched this issue to The Conversation for their series…

Ever since I worked on my Masters in education I’ve been receiving compliments on my writing – clear, allusive, lively and so on. I’ve kind of taken it for granted that, whatever my other weaknesses, I was a good writer. I’m currently working on my lit review, the first chapter of my MPhil thesis to…

Google stops using GPAs to select employees, because their internal data shows effectively no correlation with employee effectiveness. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/06/22/1448228/google-respins-its-hiring-process-for-world-class-employees We’ve been getting more and more grades-driven for a few decades… because the data are there. The data, though, also show that the data are useless for the purpose… So perhaps we can get back to…

(a quick note on the title: various of us, including me, have different beliefs about the existence or otherwise of gods, but what I mean by ‘secular humanist’ here is the beliefs that (a) religion of any kind should have no role in government and no disproportionate power in society and (b) we regard human…

I’m working on a theoretical paper at the moment that takes the idea of ‘weak measurements’ in quantum mechanics and uses it as a metaphor for how we use theories and methods in educational research. ‘Only I can write’ is probably an overstatement: there’s sure to be at least one other person in the world…

I’m posting this mainly for the last part – about helping students learn to think instead of transcribe or regurgitate – but I can also see the point of the scientists. http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/01/carl-zimmer-gets-a-lot-of-email/