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Leeds Big Data Week (big data for conservation biology)
I’m excited to be a part of Big Data Week this year. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon of big data, IBM has a pretty good definition. In essence, we are collecting huge amounts...
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League tables and “Rate Your Lecturer”
Grabbed this before the site started properly! So I had a pretty interesting little exchange with the organisers of a new university lecturer-rating website today… We’re in a peculiar place with...
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Gardens and roofs as nature reserves in cities
I just heard about this brilliant initiative at Sharrow School in Sheffield (less than a mile from the hospital where I was born!). One of the school buildings has a roof garden which was...
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Communicating camouflage and mimicry: chocolate, hover flies and Teddy Roosevelt
In September I gave a Cafe Scientifique talk at the Leeds City Museum on the evolution of mimicry and camouflage. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, Cafe Scientifique offers an...
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PhD opportunities in ecology and evolution
As part of the new NERC Doctoral Training Program at the University of Leeds, I have two PhD projects to advertise that are now (as of 15th November 2013) open to applicants: 1: DragonFlight: Linking...
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I did a map!
I have been playing with R’s capacity to produce interactive maps and (after much trial-and-error) have finally come up with something that shows an interesting pattern. The data plotted below are the...
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Clayton Woods and Woodside Quarry
I’m lucky to live in one of the leafier parts of Leeds, and there is a reasonable amount of green space within an hour’s walk from my home. Yesterday I made my first visit to one such area: Clayton...
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The Science of the Sunday Assembly
[From the outset, it's worth stating that I'm an atheist (in the soft sense), an agnostic (in a firmer sense), but probably best-described as a Humanist] Humanists, skeptics, and atheists like to pride...
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iPad apps for academics (Part 2)
I wrote earlier about a few apps that I had found useful in my first weeks of owning an iPad. Well I’ve been actively pursuing opportunities to learn more about the learning applications for tablets...
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Who would win in a fight between a rhino and a tiger?
I got an email from our university press officer earlier this week asking “whether we have a ‘zoologist who could participate in a light-hearted discussion about who would win in a fight between a...
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Student blogging
I don’t get many readers, but some people do find my blog and that has led to over 70k views for the past few years. I’m quite pleased with that, and it gives me the encouragement to carry on through...
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The impact of environmental warming on Odonata – a review [paper summary]
This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored. This paper, entitled “The impact of environmental warming on Odonata – a review”, was...
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Poor ecological quality of urban ponds in northern England: causes and...
This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored. This paper, entitled “Poor ecological quality of urban ponds in northern England: causes and...
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Ecology and Evolution PhD Opportunities at the University of Leeds
I’m delighted to announce a suite of additional PhD projects in the School of Biology at the University of Leeds (scheme details are here). These are in addition to the dozen or so...
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Pedagogy and a Pint
Academics have many draws on their time: research (grant applications, writing papers, speaking at conferences), teaching (planning lectures and workshops, delivering teaching, marking), and...
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PhD funding for biological research at the University of Leeds
If you are interested in doing a PhD but are struggling to find funding that fits your project or have been unsuccessful in applications to the funding schemes that are scattered around (e.g. the NERC...
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The lost art of foraging
I had a fantastic day out recently at the Great British Food Festival, held at Harewood House in Yorkshire. However, tucked away in the line-up among the hog roasts, cooking demos, and coffee kiosks...
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The man who played with dinosaurs
We had some sad news in the department earlier in the week. We heard from his son that Professor R McNeill Alexander FRS had passed away at the age of 81. I didn’t know Neill very well, but we had...
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One quick trick to increase visibility and citations of research papers
Since I’m “young” (whatever that means) I sometimes get asked to advise on how to disseminate research outputs through new-fangled doohickies like “the social media” (like writing click-baity...
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Overassessment, stress, and university education
On 1st August 2018, I took on a new role as Director of Student Education in my department and that has got me thinking more practically about the higher education teaching stories that I read. Since I...
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