March 2014

  • €zillions for the YOUNG at heart

    The EU Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020, has funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020).  It comprises various research areas, one of which is YOUNG-4-2015: The young as a driver of social change. This is how the descriptor...

  • Beautiful and elegant as a theory, and pragmatic and practical in application

    There were two events yesterday competing for my attention; sadly, I could go to neither, but I was able to follow parts of each on Twitter. One was an Ellen MacArthur Foundation conference in Bradford on Rethinking the Future [...

  • Ofsted is eloquently quiet on sustainability in FE

    The 2013 Ofsted annual report on the further education and skills sector (available here)  has little to say about sustainability.  It’s a gloomy, and really rather shocking, read.  This is from the Executive Summary: 2. … there is still too...

  • They do it differently; they do it better; …

    … and they’re doing it now.  Scotland’s Learning for Sustainability implementation group is up and running; its membership and terms of reference are here Learning for Sustainability – the report of the One Planet Schools working group was published in...

  • The blog's on enforced vacation ...

    … and Bath's digital team promise it will be even better when they've finished the upgrade.  I hope that applies to the content as well.

  • When Quality meets the common (wo)man

    Two great stories this week about Quality meeting representatives of the common (wo)man. One such was the Federation of Cumbria Commoners which was holding its AGM at Newton Rigg agricultural college near Penrith, where they encountered environmentalist George Monbiot (Stowe, Brasenose...

  • Confusion in the BBC about balance

    The issue of the BBC and its search for balance on coverage of climate change was explored recently in the Guardian, with this owing at least some debt to skepticalscience.  It seems to me that the BBC’s problem lies in its...

  • Behold the lesser celandine

    As I write this, the first daffodil buds have burst and yellow floods the garden.  Welcome as daffodils are as a sign of advancing spring, I’m no great fan of many of the cultivated varieties we have today – those...

  • School censors science exam papers to remove offensive questions on evolution

    A video report on the BBC, reports extraordinary goings-on in North London, where the tax-payer funded Yesodey Hatorah Girls' School has been removing questions on evolution from GCSE science papers before their students could answer them. The examination board in question,...

  • A 20 20 20 Vision for Solar PV

    I've written before about our own domestic solar pv generation (most recently here), which is now some 33 months into its life.  To put our modest production (an average of around 11 units / day) into perspective, the UK's installed...