The Modern Nature Editor

It is good to see the Henry Gee getting back to his usual self again after that nonsense of writing his blog in iambic pentameter:

I am the very model of a modern Nature editor
I am the man to whom no scientist is more indebteder
I know the names of all the geological orogenies
And can tell you lots about the reconstruction of phylogenies

Read the rest here. 

(This would never have been allowed in the days of John Maddox.)

Me, my Mother, and Muscovy Ducks

 

Another photo from the family archives.  Me and my mother (Clare Brelstaff) in a park in Barrow-in-Furness in December 1959. We lived in Barrow from 1959 to 1962, before we moved to my father's home town of Guisborough.

I had assumed that my first recorded sighting of a muscovy duck (Cairina moschata) was this one from 2004.  However, if you look in the background of the above photo you will see that my first sighting must have been 45 years earlier.

Runescape trumps Software Engineering

I was chatting with some boys in a science lesson yesterday.  They seemed distinctly more impressed by the fact that my daughter used to run a Runescape clan and got to level 99 woodcutting, than the fact that I used to write software for aircraft.  Sigh.

Computer Hindered Learning

Some thoughts on computers in the classroom, based on my first three weeks as teaching assistant:

I have long hated flashing screensavers.  They are totally unnecessary.  All they do is provide a distraction for every eye in the room.  Teaching in front of a row of monitors all merrily flashing and rotating a logo is like trying talk in front of a row of waving idiots.  Teachers would not tolerate this behaviour from students, they should not tolerate it from computers.

Screensavers which activate in the middle of demonstrations cause the teacher to have to jump across the room to restore the display, and maybe even log in again. This is a completely unnecessary interruption to the flow of the lesson and a waste of time.  For this to be happening 3 or 4 times in a lesson is totally unacceptable.

If a screensaver has to be used for security reasons then it should have a static display and the time before activation should be at least the length of a lesson.

When the students are working at the computers, it is difficult to get their attention away from the screen so you can address them as a group.  There are nearly always some students who will keep surreptitiously clicking away, with one eye on the teacher and one on the screen.  I did see one teacher demand that all his students switch off their monitors before he addressed them.  This I think is a very good idea, and I will make a point of using it when I become a teacher.

Update on Thu 2009-01-29 by Tristram Brelstaff

The default screensaver on most computers in schools is, in effect, an unpaid advertisement for Microsoft.  It would seem, therefore, doubly dubious that it is present in classrooms.

Walter Dack Brelstaff

From the family archives: a photo of my paternal grandfather, Walter Dack Brelstaff (1903 - 2000).  This was probably taken at his wedding to Emily Elizabeth Mercer in 1929. For more on Walter see here and here.