CROP CIRCLES - WHAT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE DO WE HAVE FOR A NON-ANTHROPOGENIC ORIGIN?

Hi Everyone

This is a message for the Pretoria group (NISL-EI learners) ONLY. I would like you to review at least some of the video material on Crop Circles, you are lucky that the Cape Town students have done this assignment (they started the course a little bit earlier), and I have to say they have really shown good insight and they are well prepared. I have sent up the marks for your Power Point projects with some comments, please ask for them if you have not got your marks. I got an external outsider to mark them. Some of the marks were not very good, mostly due to failure to read instructions, test your hyperlinks and to work accurately, or to put enough effort into doing the exercise. This is about the last chance to show that can do these things BETTER. You need to find some peer-reviewed material – have a look at the library chapter – CSIR subscribes to EbscoHost – I think (please tell me by way of comments which library databases CSIR subscribes to). To ensure that this last exercise is a bit more rigorous I have put up some 25 PDF document describing research on individual crop circles that have been investigated. They are not great but a least they are not just Wikipedia. Please find more material than Wikipedia

http://planet.uwc.ac.za/nisl/Scientific_methods/Circles/


Please check your URLs – this morning when we started assessing your biodiversity answers we found lots of careless mistakes, and almost none of the URLs worked. Please remember 20% of all marks will be allocated to proper referencing and having enough referencing. OK so give it a go and try and get it correct. This assignment must be submitted using you Blogger accounts under you own name with your Signature files with working links!

PLEASE VERY VERY IMPORTANT – EVERYONE CHECK THAT YOUR EMAIL AND WEBLOG ADDRESS ARE CORRECT IN YOUR SIGNATURE FILES–SOME PEOPLE HAVE THIS WRONG. WHEN YOU SUBMIT YOUR POSTING CHECK THE LINKS AND SEE WHETHER THEY WORK! YOU CAN EDIT YOUR POSTING USING YOUR BLOGGER ACCOUNT! WE WILL CHECK THAT YOUR SIGNATURE FILE LINKS WORK AND IF THEY DO NOT ONE-THIRD OF MARKS WILL BE DEDUCTED.


Resources

This is show of aerial photographs of Crop Circles all fairly short - media designed by an Italian guy interested in the phenomena

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5459855608811578319&q=Crop+circles

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4069600773978744460&pl=true


Here is this Italian Chap's Weblog - afraid it is in Italian
http://terradeisogni.blogspot.com/


Star Dreams - The Crop Circles (trailer for a video material)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=966639197455233571&q=Crop+circles


Crop Circles: Quest for Truth (almost an hour) it starts of with a bit of "Science?"the last third of the video is a bit loopy and in desperate need of editing.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=974931714241227503&q=crop+circles


Good Luck in this exercise and please confirm that you understand the contents of this posting by adding a comment.

Cheers

Rich


Dr Richard Knight
Co-ordinator: National Information Society Learnerships - Ecological Informatics
Department of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology
University of the Western Cape
Private Bag X17
Bellville 7535
Phone 27 + 21 + 959 3940
Fax 27 + 21 + 959 1237

Email Rknight@uwc.ac.za


Web http://nisl.uwc.ac.za