I first came across the term “Expressive behaviour” in my latest self-help book, The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research.
There is a review of this book here. The authors, Dr Marian Petre and Dr Gordon Rugg, introduce expressive behaviour and its counterpart, instrumental behaviour:
Continue reading
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent
Eleanor Roosevelt
I, like many others, think Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the premier inspirational women. She was an amazing lady, the first First Lady who actually did something with that role besides throw dinner parties. There are a plethora of things to admire about her, foremost amon Continue reading
This week I found myself standing on the platform at Ely, changing trains there on a day when the trains were actually behaving for once. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and staring out at the green fields across from the station made one feel somewhere in the neighbourhood there must have been the ‘sweet sound of willow hitting leather’, as w Continue reading
If time travel is supposedly impossible now, how did a podcast just send me back in time by more than a decade?
I listen to various music podcasts at work, and this morning I selected a 2009 episode of “Y-Pod: The Y-Rock on XPN” that featured an interview and three live songs by Travis, an old favourite band of mine from the late nineti Continue reading
Ever see those amazing deaf-defying (thank you, Grant!) death-defying feats and the announcer at the end says: “Do not attempt to do this at home?”
Well, do not attempt to do this in your lab.
Continue readingKindergarten teachers would find Crox Minor (then aged 4) an exasperating child. The reason was her habit of ignoring any instruction or direction but running around in mad circles with her arms stretched out and screaming “I’m Archaeopteryx! The First Bird!” When Mrs Crox collected our little feathered theropod manqué from school Continue reading
This newspaper advertisement kindly sent in by our correspondent Professor Trellis of North Wales, to whom we offer thanks in the customary fashion.
Sometimes I can go an entire day without seeing most of my fellow lab mates. I’ve been stuck at the computer in my office recently; various other colleagues are holed up in faraway microscope rooms or sequestered in the Fly Room or writing in their own offices. For this reason, the annual Lab Day Out has become a much-needed social reconnection for Continue reading
Recently the Sutton Trust published an analysis of the relative successes different schools had in getting students into different universities: Oxbridge, the broader cohort of ‘top’ universities referred to as the Sutton 30, and universities overall. One of the schools identified in the group that sent the largest numbers of students to Oxbridge Continue reading
Supermarkets are confusing places these days. There are two-for-one offers (BOGOF – buy one get one free) and variations thereon (buy two get one half price, etc etc), combo offers (buy three similar products together for a cheaper price than buying them separately) and all kinds of ways of persuading you to spend more than you had planned t Continue reading
