Author: Sinead

Perpetually curious, gamer, Science Communication graduate, healthcare admin, too pedantic for my own good.

Review | The Accidental Scientist – Graeme Donald

28 July 2017 / Sinead

I picked up a copy of The Accidental Scientist thanks to its title- one of my favourite scientific topics is how luck has influenced science and medicine, so this book seemed like a good idea.

The Accidental Scientist is a short and fast read which covers the story of various inventions such as Botox, explosives, and telephones. Each 8-12 page chapter starts with one invention as a theme. From this point, single-page subsections handle each link in a chain of discoveries. This book is concise by necessity, as it aims to pack a large collection of trivia in tightly limited space.

As a result, every sentence has a role; either moving the chronological narrative onwards or bringing in a new character or development. Nothing here is padded or wasted. While admirable, the speed and constant progress also results in some individual stories losing their impact and gravity. Given what has been shown here, plenty of the events in single chapters could fill their own book if treated differently. For example, I found the section on nitroglycerin and the Nobel family a little disjointed when compared to other sections- keeping track of the many names, inventions and connections discussed in sequence was difficult.

Academic Update- July (and Graduation)

19 July 2017 / Sinead

As of yesterday, I have graduated from my MSc. So now I’m a … post-post-graduate? a double-graduate? Someone with more degrees than sense? (maybe!).

I found graduation day a little odd, thanks to being in the mildly-uncommon situation of graduating from the same university twice. I experienced a few déjà vu moments as a result. Yet some parts of the day were very different. The biggest difference was size: in 2014 I graduated in a class of 200, in a ceremony dedicated to psychology qualifications. Yesterday I was one of a class of 9 (7 of us were at the ceremony). We shared a ceremony with one standard-sized group – biological sciences – and other tiny, specialist, or interdisciplinary subjects.

Review | The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons- Sam Kean

15 June 2017 / Sinead

I’m revisiting my pop-science book collection, partly to get back into a habit of reading and partly to look at the range of styles available in popular science writing. First on my list is Sam Kean’s The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons.

Duelling Neurosurgeons initally surprised me by not opening with duels or with neurosurgery. Instead, it dives into the world of sleep paralysis, an experience often compared to possession or even alien abduction.

Once the sleep paralysis scene is set, Kean then pulls the rug out from under it by explaining how the near-supernatural experience is caused solely by physical circuits and responses. This unorthodox opening demonstrates his message- that small physical brain events can produce irrational, unexpected, and even spiritual/religious-seeming changes – in an accessible way which makes the idea easier to grasp.

Yu-Gi-Oh! | Deckbuilding + Selling

21 May 2017 / Sinead

When it comes to selling Yu-Gi-Oh! online, selling decks is more complicated than selling singles and playsets. This is because an eBay listing for a deck can mean at least three different things:

1) A high-end competitive deck for tournament play. These decks will have every card needed for advanced combos and strategies used in the archetype and may include “tournament-staple” expensive cards such as Pot of Desires (currently $60 for one). Many are advertised as OTK- (one-turn-kill) decks.

2) A low-end beginner deck for those just starting the game. These range in quality and utility- some may be made solely from cards in the archetype, regardless of how useful those cards are or what other cards could improve it. Some may contain only the archetype’s most common monsters, alongside other generic monsters and spells/traps. As a result, a poor beginner’s deck can lack playability because it may not have the cards necessary to understand the archetype’s key mechanic or it may have only parts of important combos.

3) An awkward middle ground which may sometimes be called “budget competitive”. Decks here can occupy any potential point between 1 and 2. Lower-end ones will be playable, just nowhere near competitive standard. Higher-end ones may have all the commonly-used monsters of an archetype, and one or two copies of higher-priced monsters, without having the Pot of Desires-style overkill cards. They should contain the key mechanic and combo of the deck, but they will probably lack advanced-level setups.

Yu-Gi-Oh! | Maximum Crisis release

17 May 2017 / Sinead

The newest YGO set, Maximum Crisis (MACR), came out recently and, as expected, it’s got more powerful monsters than previous sets. After seeing just how game-breaking this set’s boss monster is, I feel like “Maximum Crisis” also describes Konami’s strategy right now.

MACR seems like the pinnacle of current-format YGO- “peak Yu-Gi-Oh”, if you will. But there’s still two more sets to go before the first Link-format booster box and I have no idea how anything could possibly compete with, let alone defeat, the MACR boss monster.

I obtained one copy of the boss- Supreme King Z-Arc – from a MACR box, so let’s have a look at him.

The first thing I noticed was the unique (for now) purple and green colour combination, which makes Z-Arc both a Fusion and a Pendulum monster. As Synchro-Pendulum and XYZ-Pendulum hybrids were introduced in previous sets from the current series, Fusion-Pendulum wasn’t too surprising.

The numbers are where things start to get interesting, as a base ATK and DEF of 4000 puts Z-Arc comfortably in the strongest 1% of released cards. In theory, Z-Arc can take down a monster-less opponent in two turns.

#OER17

7 April 2017 / Sinead

This week I went to my first academic conference, OER17, to present my MSc research.

Having never been before, I wasn’t sure what to expect- I’d only been told “this is a bunch of people who want to change the world”. That didn’t help me prepare, but it did sound interesting.

After attending, I can fairly confidently say that expression was not hyperbole – everyone was incredibly motivated about their projects, and equally supportive of each others’ projects. While presentations aren’t a comfortable experience for me, the experience was valuable: I’m glad I was encouraged to apply in the first place, and that I listened.

Now, to process the ideas I learned about over the last two days.

Academic Update- February 2017

14 February 2017 / Sinead

November’s deadlines were supposed to mark the unofficial end of my MSc. However, I’m going to be in academic-land for a little longer now, as I’ve been offered two really cool opportunities involving my MSc work. (So these should really just be called academic updates now…).

The first opportunity I’ve been given is presenting my findings at a conference on Open Educational Resources in April. That’s somewhere between awesome and terrifying right now, especially as I’m really not a fan of presentations, and that I wasn’t expecting to be accepted when I applied!

Why “Building Schools for the Future” couldn’t learn from the past.

31 January 2017 / Sinead

In the last 24 hours I’ve discovered two interesting articles in the Guardian, which together show one of the flaws I’ve noticed in education reform attempts.

The first article is a retrospective about how the Merseyside borough of Knowsley was failed by an attempt to innovate educationally and instead developed educational deficits so deep that it had to sacrifice its A-Level education entirely. The second article is an optimistic piece focusing on the XP school in Doncaster, which is adopting a project-based curriculum similar to successful schools in Finland.

The link here is that despite opposing perspectives, these articles are about the same idea; both the “Building Schools for the Future” program used in Knowsley and the project-based curriculum used at XP are repeats of the 1970’s Open Classroom movement (OCM). In the table below the left column describes the Knowsley schools (as told in the Guardian), while the right column describes Open Classrooms and their issues.