I’ve been playing a lot of Snakes and Ladders these past few days. I know it’s a game of pure chance, but I feel I’ve been getting quite good at it. I find this type of graphic helpful: Basically, it means that you’re always increasingly likely to win the more […]
Education
Embarrassing scenes from science history: Apartheid in ’85 “not all bad”…methodologically speaking
Critics of science regularly suggest that applying empiricism to life serves to deny human beings their true dignity. Very frequently you hear complaints about sociologists, psychologists, and health scientists “treating people like numbers“. Because that’s what we do. We treat you like numbers. You number, you. Take this guy. I think […]
Favourites List (22.11.13)
The week in six bits: 1. What would it feel like to touch a human brain? We’re always told it’s jelly-like and yet, when I held it in my undergrad gross anatomy class, it felt like a cold cooked chicken (it was even wrapped in tin foil, I recall). Well, […]
A long and tedious blog post about scientific publishing
The world of scientific publishing continues to excite. Long-standing readers will recall that I have addressed this topic before. My remarks have even been quoted by The Guardian, no less (well, by The Guardian’s website at any rate). To recap, the controversies here revolve around the funding model used to […]
American Psychological Association promotes pseudotherapies. Again.
As we all know, the old days were the best. You know. Ye olden days. This is what I thought when I received this tweet alert from @ClaireMcCallion earlier today: This screams Pseudoscience at me.. @b_m_hughes? http://t.co/RicRJiMsrW — Claire McCallion (@ClaireMcCallion) April 8, 2013 It links to an article just out […]
Forthcoming: On value systems, science, and psychology
I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are ideally suited to giving another public lecture at the invitation of a student psychological society. This time it’s at the behest of the Psychology Society at my own university, NUI Galway. Ah, how I enjoy […]




