My university has a number of interesting claims to fame. And one of the coolest, certainly, is this. Neanderthal Man, remember him? Well, he’s basically an alumnus. Well, to be slightly more accurate, the term ‘Homo neanderthalensis‘ is the alumnus. It was coined at our university by the then Professor of […]
It’s akin to the Sokal hoax of our digital age, with a touch of Frankenstein in there too, and possibly some monkeys with typewriters. Two major publishers, Springer and IEEE, have identified over 120 papers that made it through their peer-review process but which were actually generated using a software package designed to […]
…as did 20,000 other recipients (making their target sample an interesting n = 20,001): Dear Colleague: You have received this survey along with 20,000 other academics globally. This survey is meant to assess the attitude of the scientific community on the issue of university military research. Kindly take a moment […]
Here is the spinning globe atop the University of São Paulo’s international webpage. Tut, tut, tut: I know what you’re thinking: “That’s the wrong direction of rotation! Why, if the Earth rotated in that direction, we’d all be killed!” Or something. Well, as well as messing up time zones so that […]
Blatant Plug Alert follows. ALERT!!! As mentioned elsewhere, my own academic background is in the behavioural and health sciences, specifically psychology. And aside from my research on various biological and physiological aspects of behaviour, one of my key interests is in the scientific and epistemological underpinnings of the field. Hence […]
My three-year old daughter is now doing ‘science’ in pre-school. It’s all neat contrasts: stuff that floats vs. stuff that doesn’t; stuff that is magnetic vs. stuff that isn’t; stuff that is soluble vs. stuff that is “in-soluble, Daddy”. Hopefully one day she will be inspired to be a ‘woman […]
