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Free teaching tools
Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
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Recent Minor Posts
- Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
- The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
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What I am reading now
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Mirsky on Poop in Space
As an ecologist one of my biggest pet peeves is the way that manned space travel is treated in the mainstream media, both fictional and non-fictional. Without going deeply into the details, suffice it to say that our dependence on … Continue reading
Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
Technically- and traditionally-speaking, an ecology course should not really deal too much with policy. A strict definition of ecology should limit the topic to the study of the interaction between organisms and their environment, and for decades now that has … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Ecological Footprinting, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Ethics, MSCI-270, Ecology, Pollution, Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis, Sustainability, Teaching Tools, Web
Tagged American Public Media, Consumer Consequences, Redefining Progress
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Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
The latest issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment features a great guest editorial by David N. Laband and David B. South entitled “Walking the talk on sustainability”. In this short piece, Laband and South make a point that … Continue reading
Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
On of the things that I like about the Ecological Society of America’s “accessible” journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment is that it always contains an eclectic mix of articles. The November 2010 issue contains an article entitled “Strategic … Continue reading
Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
One of my current Ecology students brought this video, produced by the United Nations, to my attention today: I think what is most fascinating about this video is the premise upon which it is built. Using the video screen to … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Extinction, Film & Television, Invasive Species, Pollution, Public Policy, Sustainability, Urban Ecology
Tagged Convention on Biodiversity, United Nations, YouTube
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Delayed Development and Human Evolution
For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo neanderthalensis was the dominant hominid species of Europe and the Middle East. Then, somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, modern humans (Homo sapiens) expanded out of Africa and came … Continue reading
Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
Back in the early 1990’s, I could be found skateboarding around the campus of Pomona College. As I rolled my way from the dining hall to those eight o’clock classes in Chemistry that served to weed out potential Biology majors … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Music, Radio & Podcasts, Religion, Reviews
Tagged Greg Graffin, hardcorepunk, Public Radio International, Richard Dawkins, The Takeway, WNYC
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Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
Neuroscience represents a sort of “last frontier” in biology: despite decades of research into the nervous systems of a diverse set of organisms, scientific understanding of how the web of neurons we call a brain creates complex emergent patterns of … Continue reading
The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
Today’s version of The Takeaway featured an interesting interview with Kevin Kelly, author of a new book called What Technology Wants. You can listen to the segment here: Although I have not read the book, I am familiar and interested … Continue reading
