Narrative in teaching mathematics

Bob has yet another fascinating post over at Heroes Not Zombies, this time explaining how writing about their experience of the disease helped cancer patients to change their thinking of the illness.

In the face of suffering and death, mathematics seems very trivial. But I have noticed that many of the best moments in a lecture [...]

New paper on arXiv

Well, it’s not much of an achievement, but the paper that was recently rejected by a peer-reviewed journal, is no available from the open access preprint archive, arXiv. You can read it for free here.
P.S. The first figure looks awful for some reason, but please don’t hold that against the paper!
P.P.S. I’ve held back from [...]

Nature accused of rejecting science in favour of bias

Scientific American has a surprisingly frank and critical assessment of Nature’s recent decision not to move to a double-blind peer review process. It is hard not to form the conclusion that Nature’s editors are scraping the barrel of barely-rational excuses simply to avoid a bit of hard work implementing such a system. (This is the [...]