passim in passing

Here follows a repost from the excellent MSU Capblog - check them out here ! Hello MSU! And hello followers of this blog. Since I fall into the former category, it's very cool to be asked to share a little bit about what has become a fairly all-consuming obsession  project: TrowelBlazers . If you don't know us, please come be our friend . Or not, you know, it's cool. The TrowelBlazers project is a born-on-twitter idea that took off from a handful of early career academics (post docs all) who joined in the general academic-internet wide horror at the type of 'inspirational' material produced by major research funders to encourage women to participate in science. If for some reason you missed the utterly patronising travesty that was the European Commision produced 'Science: It's a Girl Thing', please do feel free to watch it now. I'll wait. Squirm inducing, right? I think what as a group we shared was the feeling that there was something...

Hello! This is a crosspost from our TrowelBlazers guest spot over on the British Geological Society's blog . Mary Anning, trowelblazer Thinking geology? Thinking science? Thinking crinolines, bonnets, and muddy skirts? Probably not! However, if you discount the damsels in the discipline, you actually lose quite a bit of history-and that's what our project 'TrowelBlazers' is all about. We're a small collective of researchers who got a bit bored with the hoary old pictures of the great and good in science, and started looking around for some of the unsung (or just amazing) heroines  of the digging fields - archaeology, palaeontology, and, of course, geology . We started the TrowelBlazers site and put out the call for people to nominate  trowelblazing women. After just a few months, we've had 50 posts, many of which were submitted by guest posters who have direct links to the women they are writing about. Official Wikimedian sticker and pin With the ...

For those of you who have somehow found this blog without either being personally shown it with my hand on the mouse, or through my highly serious and infromative twitter feed ( @brennawalks  -- or even @trowelblazers , which is my identity 1/4 of the time), welcome. I always enjoy meeting new spambots. For the rest of you, I'll assume you have an interest in either a) museums b) outreach or c) the life and times of our Human Origins research group. In which case, hurrah! Because that's what I'd like to talk about. Prof Stringer lays down some knowledge Every year, under auspices of the EU 's Framework Programme 7  , museums across europe recieve funds in order to hold a giant Open house. And it is giant, especially for us at the Natural History Museum London - we have hundreds of researchers here, normally safely hidden behind locked doors in the labryinth of cabinetry and slightly past sell-by-date skeletal models of obscure animals that is the 'working...