Opening a Twitter account has consequences. I’m carefully keeping to scholarly activities, and so the main side effect for me has been an ever expanding list of interesting papers I really need to read. This is mainly a good thing: as a senior researcher and group leader I certainly don’t read enough new papers simply because they are interesting and relevant (as opposed to: because I need to do something with them as I’m either a co-author of, editor for or reviewer of them).
It’s nearly August and I teach in September. My reading list for now is about what I would like to read and think about to update my teaching:
- Special Issue of Animals “Are Animal Models Needed to Discover, Develop and Test Pharmaceutical Drugs for Humans in the 21st Century?”
- Paper by Joanna Makowska and Dan Weary about How to ensure a good life for laboratory rodents? in ILAR Journal
The challenge for me is to find the right balance in helping students to do what they can where they are as researchers using animals, and challenging them to find ways of doing better. Unless I challenge myself, I easily settle too much on the status-quo side!
There’s also Heather Browning’s very recent PhD thesis If I could talk to animals: Measuring subjective welfare, of which I’m very interested in the second part which addresses measuring welfare from a philosophy-of-science perspective. And I want to take Daniel Lakens’ Coursera courses Improving your statistical questions / Improving your statistical interferences.
And then there are a couple of books on my desk…
Animalogues 