Self-plagiariasm is big news these days. A short while ago, former ACS president Ron Breslow had an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society pulled - not because he claimed dinosaurs might be ruling other planets, but because he re-used work from other articles he wrote without crediting himself. read...
read moreAlmost all scientists claim citizen science is a good thing. Hey, doctors all claim that patients who can Google and ask a lot of questions about diseases and treatements are a good thing also. But not all really feel that way.Climate scientists certainly wish there was less citizen science. If they wanted to shut up climate deniers (and skeptics) about data, they would do what...
read moreProgressives and liberals delight in any sort of pseudoscience that implicates the right wing, especially if it can claim their political opposition has a brain defect or some sort of 'control' fetish.They don't like it at all when anything psychological makes them look less moral. And they really don't like Jonathan Haidt - because he is a liberal, atheist social psychologist and therefore...
read moreIs it possible to lose at Rochambeau, the millenia-old game of Rock, Paper, Sissors, every single time?It shouldn't be but a new Janken robot (Janken is the Japanese name for Rock, Paper, Scissors - why is the West stuck with a French name for an ancient Egyptian game? It's a mystery of linguistics) can win against humans without fail. Is it psychic? Are humans that predictable?...
read moreOn June 23rd, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a contest at Bletchley Park, where Turing was key in cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, saw Eugene Goostman win the biggest Turing test ever staged.Except Eugene is not a person, it is a chatbot with the 'personality' of a 13-year-old boy in the Ukraine.The Turing test is what Turing considered a threshold for...
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