- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
RFK Jr. is not a serious person. Don't take him seriously.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
-
What I read 20194 years ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
-
Histological Evidence of Trauma in Dicynodont Tusks5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 21, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Why doesn't all the GTA get taken up?6 years ago in RRResearch
-
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
-
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
Re-Blog: June Was 6th Warmest Globally10 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
iPhone biodiversity app?
In the Phactor's ever expanding universe of things he doesn't need comes sci.spy, an iPhone app for recording biodiversity. So far the web site appears to be a gallery for demonstrating poor iPhone photography. My first reaction was to add this to my ever growing list of things no one needs, but a bit of reflection suggests that if you used properly this app might encourage an interest in natural history among kids, who all seem to have cell phones now. So maybe this app is actually useful. Having let students use digital imagery to record field and lab specimens, it is always instructive to quiz them after having seen one of their images. How many petals did that flower have? Did it have any spots? Was is fuzzy or shiny and smooth? Did it have a fragrance? Don't know, well, you only looked and shot, you didn't observe anything. Delete the image and start over. Yes, delete. Once you know what you want to record, what you need to record, then take the picture, or 3 or 4. The lesson is simple, anything that encourages a superficial approach must be redirected or it is useless. So about sci.spy; use with intelligence or don't use it at all. Why if things keep progressing like this, the Phactor may even have to get a cell phone, or not. Any users care to comment?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment