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Oxford Union speech
In February this year I had the privilege of speaking at the Oxford Union, a well known debating society run by students of my alma mater. I was invited to oppose the motion “This House Would Populate Mars” in an evening debate. I opposed the motion for three reasons: the extreme unpleasantness of human life…
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Leadership Styles in Higher Education
As part of my studies towards a formal qualification in “academic practice”, I was required to compose “a personal reflection on leadership styles and approaches to leadership in higher education”. The following screed resulted. There must be such a thing as leadership style, since anybody in a position of leadership (whatever that means) is going…
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New collaboration: an Ediacaran mass extinction?
Large organisms whose fossils can reasonably be interpreted as animals did not evolve until late in the Ediacaran period, more than four billion years after the Earth formed. It’s sometimes claimed that these represented the first “complex life” but there’s really nothing simple about bacteria, archaea, algae or fungi, which were already well established and hugely…
Sean McMahon 