Two kinds of attractions we enjoy visiting are the animal sanctuary, where rescued animals are protected and cared for, and the plant collection, where endangered species are preserved against extinction. Some of the places we have visited in recent years are sanctuaries for rescued monkeys, seals and parrots. Although I do not like the idea of zoos, it is clearly not possible to release many of these animals into the wild.

Given the need to care for these animals, the sanctuaries open to the public to raise funds for their work. Not only for entertainment, as they are an excellent opportunity to educate people about the animals and the science of biology that helps us understand them.

I have noticed that in many of these places the explanations are very disappointing. They often do not communicate information about the exhibits well, and too many of the signs are neglected.

Conservators and scientists at their best can communicate their passion for their subjects, but sometimes they use jargon that is not explained. Some labels are written in dense technical prose that is not easy to follow, as if written for other specialists. Others are not clear because of badly phrased text.

Although there is usually a recommended route around the grounds, the ideas are not always developed in sequence in a way that would aid understanding.

Many signs contain spelling and grammatical errors. This is not good, especially as so many of the readers are schoolchildren.

One sanctuary we visited had an excellent display on evolution. Disappointingly, other places do not take advantage of the learning experience they offer to explain evolution, the most important idea in biology, the idea that brings everything together, but an idea that is so often misunderstood.

Wise Words would be happy to help animal and plant conservation charities by offering free advice (within our limited resources) on their signs and educational materials. We can improve the wording and presentation of descriptive labels and we can advise on making the visit more informative. If you think we can help, please contact us!

It is a two-dimensional version of a barcode, which holds my contact details.

QR codes were invented by a Toyota company for use in car manufacturing, but are now found widely over the web. A common use is as a quick link for downloading application software for mobile phones.

Barcode apps are available for all kinds of smart phones, including the Android phone that I use. When you run the app it opens the phone’s camera, focuses it on the QR code when you have pointed the camera at the code, takes a picture and decodes the information.

The app will then save the information to any relevant apps on the phone, typically, to your contact book (in the case of contact information) or to the download manager (in the case of software download details).

There are various websites where you can encode information and download the resulting QR codes as graphics files.

The Wikipedia article on QR codes is here.

The site has gone through several versions since then. The first one was coded simply in HTML, and it was kept simple for some years so that older browsers could still read it.

The Wayback Machine first archived the site in late 1996. This was at a time when sites were being produced full of gimmicks that severely taxed the browsers and computers of the day, and irritated many users (including myself).

Many companies did not yet use email (fax was still the medium for sending documents quickly) and you could not assume that people would have web access in their offices. I used an early idea of viral marketing which was to make documents available through the web and encourage people to print them out and pass them on to their colleagues and friends.