So I have posted a couple of times via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ about the new website that Carley designed for me. What I tried to do with the site is make my work a little bit more accessible.
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Category: Science
LEGO Friends: toy or tool of the mysognists?
It’s Saturday, my first day with nothing to do for about three weeks and how do I decide to spend it? Writing a literature review of sex-specific play behaviour in humans…
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International variation in IQ – the role of parasites
I co-authored a paper with Tom Sherratt at Carleton University a few months ago and we have received a bit of attention in the press (Washington Post blog, Scientific American, the Ottawa Sun, the heady heights of the Carleton University newspaper…). As pretty much everyone has offered their views on the paper based on the press coverage (which has been pretty good but not perfect…), I had better set the record straight!
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Odonate of the week: Ischnura elegans
For this odonate of the week, we are going to be a (fairly easy) game of spot the difference:
Mantids!
So our lab ordered some mantids from Home Depot (which don’t seem to be available so I presume it’s a seasonal product) for predation experiments. I was under the impression that they needed specific conditions to hatch that wouldn’t be met until next June. Then someone noticed one crawling over a desk. Sure enough, there were a few dozen wandering aimlessly about, migrating away from the egg case that was sitting in a corner of the lab. I think we got most of them, but those that we didn’t catch should take care of our fruitfly problem!
Nail him to the nearest tree
[I wasn’t in a very good mood when I wrote this… Does it show…?]
The Vancouver Sun has published a story on the result of an FOI request into academic misconduct in Canada. Apparently a Canadian professor was awarded an NSERC (National Science and Engineering Research Council) grant on the basis of an application in which he knowingly included made-up publications. This makes me angry.
The value of scientific hoaxes
It came to my attention recently that some of my friends were not aware of the Sokal Hoax. I recommend that you check out the Wikipedia article on it as this provides not only an extensive discussion of the event itself, but also a look at the subsequent discussion that the hoax generated, but I’ll quickly summarise what happened here.
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Odonate of the week: Anax imperator
This week’s odonate of the week is a big girl…
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Climate relicts
Carl Zimmer wrote an interesting piece recently on “hardy relicts”. “Relict” species or populations are those that are left behind as all the other populations or individuals of a species die off.
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Debunking the drug store: Oscillococcinum and Homeocoksinum
For those of you who have been following the past couple of posts, I am currently working my way through part of a shelf in Shoppers Drug Mart and critically evaluating some of their products. I’ve already covered Boiron’s “Stodal” cough syrup and found it to be a combination of folk remedies and wishful-thinking. However, their big product is the flu-remedy Oscillcoccinum. This is among the top ten over-the-counter medicines sold in France (not surprising given their love of homeopathy), so it isn’t a “fringe” alternative medicine by any means. Oscillococcinum (“Oscillo” for short) and Homeocoksinum (its Canadian cousin) are the same medicine marketed by two different companies, so I’m going to deal with them together.
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Katatrepsis 