I don’t read many psychology research papers – maybe it is some sort of bias of natural scientists like me have against social scientists. But the classic paper by Dunning and Kruger, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessment, is just great.
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One of my many jobs is that I am the academic library rep for the Department. In this capacity I attended a meeting on Friday with the person in the University’s library who is in charge of Physics, and two sales representatives from one of the big publishers in scientific publishing. The reps were nice […]
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The above is a quote from 1955, from a guy called Alex Lewyt, who was then president of a vacuum cleaner company. Fifty-five years later I still have to plug mine into the mains. It is one of a number of predictions about future technologies that have proven over optimistic. I came across this while I […]
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In British Universities the all-important Research Excellence Framework (REF) is coming up. It is all important as how well a University does will determine how much money they get from the government. If we are assessed and found to be really good, we should get a bit more money from the government, but if we are […]
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Ponytails in space would be pretty unmanageable. Or at least that is my prediction based on a paper I have just read. The paper has just come out in the prestigious physics journal Physical Review Letters, and is titled: Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles. First off, I should say that […]
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This was the title of a full page ad that appeared in many American newspapers one day in 1954. It was paid for the tobacco industry. This was at a time when there was already convincing evidence that smoking caused lung cancer, and public health authorities were waking up to the problem of lung cancer […]
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