Summer vacation, it turns out, is an opportunity for me to reflect on how close we are to global catastrophe. Over the past few of years, as some of my exasperated friends and colleagues will testify, I’ve taken to asking myself and others, on a regular basis, whether we are in 1936 or in 1939.…
This week, a comic by Andrew Greenstone (Beyond Belief: Exhausted by the unknown at the cryptozoology conference), allowed me to crystalize two of the principles that I think are at the heart of pseudoscience’s appeal, not only to the public, but to scientists as well. The comic is about cryptozoology, but its lessons are highly…
I was surprised to see this morning that CBC and The Nature of Things are back with new coverage of Ice Bridge, a documentary that deals with the Solutrean Hypothesis (SH). The SH proposes that the first people to enter the Americas came from Western Europe 20 000 years ago. To the best of our knowledge, however,…
On Monday, Bob Wolf died. He was my first Department Chair. When I arrived at Eastern Connecticut State University in August 1999, he welcomed me warmly. I learned a lot from Bob in the brief two years that I knew him. They were formative years, and he was an important part of them. Eastern is…
The revised Principles and Implementation document for Plan S remains overall quite friendly to big commercial publishers, with one glaring exception. With its principle 10, Coalition S takes a bold stand: “The Funders commit that when assessing research outputs during funding decisions they will value the intrinsic merit of the work and not consider the…
