July 2017. An article in the UCL student magazine with some retrospective advice to students.
April 2017. A letter in the TLS on Grant Wood's painting American Gothic
24th Jan 2016. A copy of the original data from the 1985 study of differences in hand performance by Marion Tapley and Phil Bryden study is now available here by kind permission of Phil's wife, Patricia Rowe, and Phil's daughter, Pamela Bryden.
12th Jan 2016, BBC Radio Scotland science programme, Brainwaves, on Handedness
November 2015: A paper in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Artswith Becky Chamberlain, Qona Rankin, Howard Riley and Nicky Brunswick, on personality and other correlates of drawing ability.
October 2015. A paper in BMC Medical Education with Oliver Devine and Andrew Harborne looking at how assessment varies between medical schools and showing that it correlates with postgraduate examination performance.
September 2015. An interview, along with Qona Rankin, Howard Riley, Nicky Brunswick and Becky Chamberlain, in a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled The art of walking through doors about art students with dyslexia and dyspraxia.
September 2015. A new paper with five UCL colleagues, published in the The Psychologist, which looks at selection into health care, including medicine and clinical psychology.
July 2015. A hiatus during which things were being updated but what's new was becoming old... A number of pages, in particular on publications, have now been updated.
19th November 2012: A lecture I gave in March 2012 to the Cardiff Medical Society entitled Early determinants of performance in medical graduates -- nature or nurture? is now available on the internet: click here to view the video.
30th May 2012: An editorial in the Student BMJ on widening participation in medical education and the difficulties of defining under-represented groups.
17th May 2012: Interview on BBC's Material World, about the scientific study of aesthetics. Click here for the podcast.
20th January 2012: An obituary for Peter Richards in the BMJ; click here to find the BMJ obituary, a longer, referenced version, and some images of Peter from Doctors to Be.
12th Jan 2012: Scanned copies of two versions of the Waterloo Handedness Questionnaire have been provided, since these do not seem to be readily available elsewhere.
22nd December 2011: Have just found that a web video is available of my Lord Cohen Lecture at the ASME annual conference in Edinburgh in July, entitled, "In divers manners": Exploring diversity in medical education, is now available; click here to see it.
2nd December 2011:To BSc or not to BSc...? An editorial in the Student BMJ reviewing the benefits of medical students carrying out an intercalated degree.
12th November 2011: A chapter, with Caterina Suitner from Padua, entitled Aesthetic asymmetries, spatial agency, and art history: A social psychological perspective, in Spatial dimensions of social thought, edited by Thomas W Schubert and Anne Maas (De Gruyter Mouton).
3rd November 2011: A chapter entitled 'Beauty is instinctive feeling': Experimenting on aesthetics and art in the new book edited by Elizabeth Schellekens and the late Peter Goldie, The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and psychology (OUP).
19th October 2011: A paper in BMC Medicine which follows up an idea of Sir William Osler's, and shows that doctors' avocations (hobbies and leisure interests) are greater in those with a greater sense of vocation (professional engagement), but are not related to stress and burnout.
7th October 2011: A paper with Phik-Wern Loo, Becky Chamberlain, Howard Riley and Nicola Brunswick on shape constancy and drawing ability in Empirical Studies of the Arts.
5th October 2011: The very sad news, on September 29th, of the death of Peter Richards, with whom I collaborated on so many studies of medical education over more than thirty years. A brief appreciation and a photograph can be found here.
19th March 2011: Participant in the 2011 UK Ignobel tour, with a lecture in Dundee and the irresistible opportunity to give the first modern reading of a newly discovered poem by William McGonagall, reputedly one of the worst poets of all time. Click here for photos.
8th March 2011: A paper in the BMJ, with Katherine Woolf and Henry Potts, with a meta-analysis showing that ethnic minority students and graduates from UK medical schools perform less well in examinations. The reasons are far from clear.
8th January 2011: A very short letter in The Guardian on how the mean and the mode in statistics are not the same thing
3rd January 2011: A paper in Medical Teacher which looks at the recent claim, published in Medical Education, that BMAT is a valid predictor of medical school performance, along with a response by the authors and our reply to the response. Click here for all three documents in one PDF.
26th November 2010: Lecture at the Wellcome Trust on right- and left-handedness for their evening event Hands: Amazing Appendages.
20th August 2010: Interviewed on a BBC Radio 3 interval talk for the Proms, entitled He played it left hand, with Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand being played in the Prom. No longer available to 'listen again', but I have a very large MP3 if you contact me.
4th Mar 2010: A paper in the APA journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts entitled, " Art Students who cannot Draw", describing research carried out in collaboration with the Royal College of Art in London and the Art School of Swansea Metropolitan University. Click here for details.
2nd Mar 2010: The special issue of Laterality entitled The Right Hand and the Left Hand of History has now been published as a hardback edition which libraries or others can purchase separately. Click here for details.
15th Feb 2010: Publication of four historical papers, three on the 1953 BBC TV programme entitled Science in the Making: Right Hand, Left Hand, and the other paper on an early nineteenth century lithograph by John Lewis Marks entitled A left-handed compliment. Click here for details.
17th Jan 2010: The 2009 follow-up of the various cohorts is now closed, and copies of the questionnaires, which are very similar for each cohort, can be found on the pages for each survey (see e.g. the 1991 cohort). The final response rate was 64.2%, and a graph of the response rate against time can be found on the page overviewing the 2009 followups.
8th Jan 2010: Updating of the two spreadsheets on the Statistical Resources page which carry out calculations on Standard Error of Measurement. In particular the spreadsheets now show how to calculate SEM without knowing reliability, and allows SEM to be calculated in the unusual situation in which all candidates have the same score, and hence candidate variance is zero.
31st Dec 2009: A video of my talk on Mondrian at PINC.8 in 2007 can now be seen at the Dutch internet TV channel Het Gesprek, in English with Dutch subtitles (click here for the link).
Close
