When Wikipedia first launched in 2001, students quickly discovered its articles and started citing them in their written work. In the early 2000s, when I began to use TurnitIn to analyze student essays and lab. reports for plagiarism, I would often find entire paragraphs lifted from Wikipedia. Plagiarism aside, most professors, including me, banned Wikipedia from being cited in […]
Public understanding of science
Countering a Science Communications Failure
Point: Counterpoint: The decision of Associate Professor R. A. Pyron to write a perspective piece on extinction and biodiversity, and decision of the The Washington Post's editors, to publish his op-ed together with the rather unfortunate headline, "We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution", have produced something of a rather […]
What Trees Talk About features the excellent research of Canadian ecologists
I'm always thrilled when one of my colleagues contacts me, to alert me to their research hitting the mainstream media. On November 26th, 2017, CBC's Nature of Things, which is introduced by Dr. David Suzuki, broadcast an absolutely fabulous documentary on the ecology of Canada's boreal forest: What Trees Talk About. I loved the programme […]
Biology Graduate Students Bring the Bioblitz to YorkU
My friend and colleague, Guelph professor, Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs (left, with her new son) invited me to give a guest talk in her first year Biology course: Discovering Biodiversity. I introduced the bioblitz concept in my talk, and encouraged students to join in with one, or to even organize a bioblitz of their own. The general […]
Must-read books for scientists: 2. The Invention of Nature
When I launched this lab website in 2013, I had a vague idea that I would write one to two posts a year, in which I urged fellow scientists to read some book that I had found particularly inspiring or educational. My first post in 2013 was about Stephen Clarkson and Stepan Wood's A Perilous Imbalance. Sadly, Stephen Clarkson […]
Science, Art, Policy and Politics at the United Nations Climate Change Meetings
I'll be posting 12 blogs between December 1st and 24th to reach my goal of 24 posts for 2017. I'm behind because my sabbatical has kept me too busy to maintain my blogging schedule! Back in 2009, when I was director of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS), I applied for York […]
In defence of sabbaticals
The 2017-18 Canadian academic school year has begun, and I kicked it off by creating a rather ruthless-sounding auto-reply. Paid sabbaticals, every 7 years, are a huge privilege that allow tenured professors to expand our research skills and knowledge. We're paid a reduced salary to "boldly go where no-one has gone before", or at least do some of […]
Gardening for biodiversity & local food in Carolinian Canada
Two excellent Canadian documentaries, The End of Suburbia (2004) and Escape from Suburbia (2007), discuss the enormous implications of our unsustainable North American car culture, which has spawned sprawling suburbs and gridlock in southwestern Ontario, and the Greater Toronto Area. These films include fascinating conversations with "futurists" about how people will convert their (sub)urban lawns into vegetable patches to grow local […]
More public science: appearing on the ZDF series, Infestation!
I doubted that much could top discovering that my 2013 Skype chat about plant defences got me a movie credit in a science fiction feature film! But, you never can tell where science outreach and engagement will take you. Just a few weeks after hearing about my Botanical Consultant film credit, some of my other Public Science led to just as unexpected an […]
