The Chronicle of Higher Education “Final Exams or Epic Finales” I like reading articles like this because they are pretty firmly aimed — as in wanting to shoot down — the way I teach. It is always good to hear challenges to your pedagogical methods. There is kind of an Achilles’ heel to this article, Read More
A Minor Post, Assessment Methods, Higher Education, TeachingThis is a wonderful little video that is absolutely packed with great ideas about how evolution works, how human evolution works, and how two different evolutionary pressures pushing in opposite directions reach equilibrium. It also makes wonderful use of infographic techniques, using color and quantity throughout the video to clearly convey numerical and conceptual ideas Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Educational Software and Apps, Evolutionary Modeling, Film, Television, & Video, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation, Quantifying Costs and Benefits, Social NormsBMC Ecology “Commonness and ecology, but not bigger brains, predict urban living in birds” What makes this study smart is that it compares the birds that live successfully in urban areas with the birds that actually have the potential to colonize cities. This makes for a much more meaningful comparison than simply comparing urban species Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Behavior, Birds, Brain size, Coevolution, Cognitive Ability, Commensalism, Conservation Biology, Habitat Destruction, Resilience, Urban EcologyUrban Wildlife Podcast “Bangkok Pythons and Gotham Whales” This is a really interesting podcast that focuses on the wildlife of cities. This episode is about huge animals that manage to live in close proximity to cities, specifically in their waterways. The section on reticulated pythons — which can grow up to 23-25 feet long — Read More
A Minor Post, Cetaceans, Coevolution, Commensalism, Conservation Biology, Public Outreach, Radio & Podcasts, Reptiles, Urban EcologyNational Geographic “Sins of the Aral Sea” National Geographic “Last Rites for the Jade Sea?” These recent National Geographic issues both feature articles on threatened bodies of water and the role that over-exploitation of feeder rivers plays in these threats. In both the case of the Aral Sea, which has already been largely ‘disappeared’ by Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Deserts, Environmental Justice, Freshwater Ecosystems, Habitat Destruction, Marine Ecosystems, Water SupplyChronicle Vitae “Modeling the Behavior We Expect in Class” This is a great little article. I really like the idea of showing one’s own intellectual vulnerability in order to encourage students to be more intellectually courageous. I also agree that getting students to use their power of empathy to ‘take the perspective of a scholar’ Read More
A Minor Post, Higher Education, TeachingI am not much of an arborist (well, really, I am not an arborist at all!), but I do appreciate trees. Urban trees are especially interesting to me because of their ability to deal with the many insults of the urban environment. I thought that this image — taken where the curb had been peeled Read More
A Minor Post, Coevolution, Competition, Urban EcologyWNYC The Leonard Lopate Show “Is Human Overpopulation The Reason for Environmental Destruction?” In my Ecology for Architects class we do an activity (“Perspectives on Becoming Ecologically Sustainable“) that challenges my students to comprehensively consider our large-scale options for becoming sustainable. When we do the activity we have already done some ecological footprinting and discussed Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Carrying Capacity, Climate Change, Habitat Destruction, Population Growth, Population Pressure, SustainabilityBBC News “Climate change: Is the Dutch court ruling ‘a game changer’?” Nature Breaking News “Landmark court ruling tells Dutch government to do more on climate change” The New York Times “Landmark Dutch Ruling: Cut Emissions to Protect Citizens” The Guardian “Dutch government ordered to cut carbon emissions in landmark ruling” There is so much Read More
A Minor Post, Activism, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Climate Change, Environmental Justice, Law, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, SustainabilityThere’s a really interesting article in the upcoming (July 2015) issue of National Geographic entitled “Stalking a Killer“. Using the most recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa as a case study, the article looks at the nature of a variety of unusual and rare diseases caused by filoviruses. Ebola is not a virus that Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Belief, Cultural Evolution, Host-Pathogen Evolution, Parasitism, Predation