I am totally on holidays right now. I even have a beard. However, I still function at an intellectual level (for all intents and purposes). Here are two minor updates regarding ongoing media coverage of this blog/blogger-with-beard.
Yesterday, The Guardian’s Higher Education Network included my post on paywalls in its list of “useful” links (“from around the web“) concerning open access academic publication. “Let’s not celebrate the Academic Spring just yet,” I am quoted as saying. Click here to go there (to see the link back to here).
Meanwhile, the day before, the Irish Times carried an article on its science page addressing the question of whether sporting heroes are born or made (I’m assuming there’s an implied Olympics angle there). I remember the journalist phoned me up a while back asking me to help him understand the statistical notion of regression toward the mean. As far as I could tell, he actually understood it pretty well before he phoned. Thankfully, it seems my explanations didn’t do too much damage to this prior understanding, because he ended up actually quoting me in his article. See here for same.
I even get the last word, in what must be the dullest philosophical quote of the year: “Everybody will have some good days and some bad days. But you’re most likely to have an average day“. Eat my shorts, Woody Allen.
Now, back to my holiday. I have set aside three days to shave.
Brian Hughes is an academic psychologist and university professor in Galway, Ireland, specialising in stress, health, and the application of psychology to social issues. He writes widely on the psychology of empiricism and of empirically disputable claims, especially as they pertain to science, health, medicine, and politics.