Science
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Thoughts on Exam Questions
I was on the team that analysed UK GCSE Science questions from Summer 2008. It was a depressing experience – and our findings made for sorry stories in the media. In practice, the outcome should have surprised no-one; the Royal Society of Chemistry have been making warning noises for some time. One of my colleagues…
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I’m a Scientist… / XKCD strikes again
Another wonderful cartoon from XKCD
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A peek at the future: Google Flu Trends
This sort of thing is seriously smart. And a real indication of where Google can go by using the “Wisdom of the Crowds” as evidenced by activity passing through its own search engines.Google Flu Trends. Google have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends can use aggregated Google…
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Not just football. Now we’re dropping out of Science as well…
This is an extraordinary story about the decline of British Education. But let me start on the subject of football. Because there are some interesting parallels. Last week the various UK soccer sides all fell out of Euro 2008. Only 14 teams were able to qualify – and not one of our national sides made…
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How Critical Thinking Works…
from Wellington Grey via David at Preoccupations
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Human metabolism recreated in lab
Software models become more and more sophisticated. The significance of this development is not simply that “real” tissue is no longer required but that the computational techniques now available allow for very fast analysis (faster than “real” time) and also “Darwinian” approaches which home in on “best” solutions by using evolutionary methods. US researchers say…
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Sentient Developments: Must know terms for today’s intelligentsia
I fell upon this quote from Carl Sagan whilst browsing Sentient Developments: “The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.” Which particularly struck me as I had only just finished listening to the latest podcast from the UK thinktank Demos.…
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Blinded by the Light
1997 saw the battle cry of Education, Education, Education. Well, here we are nearly 10 years later and things haven’t got much further than the “vision thing” that Bill Gates once advocated. In 1963, a previous Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, called for a new Britain to be “forged in the white heat of this…
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Unreasonable? Moi?
My wife has alerted me to the fact that if you type “unreasonable” into Google then this WebLog comes up as the top hit… She is, she happily tells her friends, married to the most unreasonable person in the world – and she has Google to prove it. She is gaining a lot of sympathy…