The Love Competition
A wonderful experiment, set up as a competition: Six people subject themselves to a brainscan while they think of someone they love. As they concentrate fully, the dopamine, the serotonin and the oxytosin wash through their brain, showing up in the scan. This is not only a beautiful study on kinds of love, it’s also […]
Agenda-setting at a teachers’ association
Exciting times for me: I’m honored to be the events coordinator for ELTABB, the teachers’ association for Berlin-Brandenburg. I was only able to volunteer for this job because I can draw on wonderful teacher networks that have grown over the years. At the moment I am a classic “fast follower”, looking at what other associations […]
Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks
In her great analysis of famous speeches, presentation guru Nancy Duarte (www.duarte.com) says that the most effective talks, the ones that make people change the way they think, move back and forth between what is and what could be. She analyzes Steve Job’s introduction of the iPhone speech and shows that the way he marvels […]
Online tools and resources for scientific writing
I’m still struggling to teach scientific writing to a diverse group of PhD candidates that I only see occasionally. My latest attempt is to give them a set of online tools to analyze their genre of target texts (published works and their own work in progress), and to tell me how they like what the […]