The common names of many Australian plants are the same as those in Britain. Yet these plants have no taxonomic relationship to their namesakes from Britain. Landing in the southwest of Australia in April 2018 for a month reminded me of the time that I arrived in Capetown, South Africa. Everything ecological was different. While […]

Continue reading

The common names of many Australian plants are the same as those in Britain. Yet these plants have no taxonomic relationship to their namesakes from Britain. Landing in the southwest of Australia in April 2018 for a month reminded me of the time that I arrived in Capetown, South Africa. Everything ecological was different. While […]

Continue reading

There truly is nothing like a well-planned and structured sabbatical for giving professors the intellectual and emotional space to reflect on and crystallize what their previous five to six years of long days and hard work has been most fundamentally about. This is why, in my view, where they still exist, the sabbatical should be […]

Continue reading

I have been in Delhi, and in one of its many surrounding suburbs (Greater Noida), this past week, with YorkU colleague, Dr. Nivedita Das Kundu, networking and building CIPRI (Canada-India Project for Research and Innovation) connections for the York Centre for Asian Research. Nivedita, a political scientist and International Relations scholar, lived, studied and worked in […]

Continue reading

When Wikipedia was launched in 2001, my students soon discovered and started citing its articles. In the early 2000s, when I began to use TurnitIn to analyze student essays and lab. reports, I would sometimes find entire paragraphs lifted from Wikipedia pages. Plagiarism aside, most professors, including me, immediately banned Wikipedia from being cited as a reference. This […]

Continue reading

Before leaving Toronto for 4 months, I worked pretty solidly over Christmas and New Year to finish as much paperwork as possible. It's still not all done. My preparations also included buying a new laptop, because the excellent MacBook Air that I bought in 2011, was clearly approaching the end of its life. Sometimes it […]

Continue reading

In 2009, Annette Dubreuil and I obtained observer status from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This not only allowed members of the pan-university organized research unit, the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability (2004-2015), but any and all York University members interested in climate change-related research, education and administration to attend […]

Continue reading

Talking Art at the Toronto-York Subway Extension Opening The opening day celebrations for the Toronto-York Spadina Line subway extension were not only a chance to take in exciting new architecture, but also live music and art. The City of Vaughan's Dreamweaver 150 interactive art installation was at the Vaughan Metro Centre station (above & below). […]

Continue reading

A week or so ago, Glen Wright's very funny book, Academic Obscura, finally arrived in the mail. I learned about Glen from his twitter account, and donated in support of his book quite some time ago. Everyone who has ever done research should read Glen's book! I'm incredibly grateful to the people that reached unexpectedly […]

Continue reading

I arrived at York University in 1990, to start a job as an assistant professor in Biology. I had just spent six years in England, at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, doing my doctoral research, and holding a couple of junior research fellowships (post-docs). I was excited to join a modern, new university, because […]

Continue reading