First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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I had wanted (on 07-02) to let Alessia Errico’s stand as the final words on the Tim Hunt affair. It’s not to be. Reporters for The Times[1] have finally done what should have been any responsible journalist’s job in the first place and looked into the facts. They found Prof. Hunt’s words to have been framed as an obvious joke in a self deprecating context embedded in a speech full of praise and appreciation for women in science. The storm had been started by a single activist out of a hall full of laughing and applauding female scientists. Does this society really want to continue letting revered institutions like the University College London be ruled and dominated by Gestapo sneaks with a totalitarian agenda?
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Although Everett & Earp focus on PhD candidates, in the real sciences there has always been more than one thesis to be written to obtain a master’s degree too. In my case there were two somewhat smaller Studienarbeiten before my Diplomarbeit. In the social sciences I all too often see master and even doctoral theses that consist of nothing more than some ill thought out questionnaire filled in by a totally unrepresentative sample of arbitrarily chosen respondents. The results are utterly worthless and do quite the opposite of teaching how to conduct serious research.[2] Replicating a well thought-out and meaningful finding while applying a methodologically clean protocol would be a great step forward, even if ditching the “independent research” strawman. Some of the best theses I ever read were failed replications and the debunking of wildly popular current new theories.
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There is one aspect Donald Holly completely fails to mention. All the pseudoarchaeological books reviewed are (sometimes barely) in the price range you might pick up for a long and boring train ride and they do tend to have some entertainment value. His suggestions on the other hand, Fagan 2006 and Feder 2013 are inordinately expensive. I may pay that money for something right in the centre of my main area of interest but never for the wide border of general interest. If archaeologists deliberately price the interested general public out of the sometimes boring good stuff, they must not complain when those turn to flashy junk instead.
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The strikingly alarming aspect about the IS manifest, exemplified in my short excerpt from Mohagheghi, is that to a greater or lesser extent it represents the central tenet of all religions. Never mind that people starve and land turns into desert, the theocratic is the best of all societies. The common point of all of them is deprecating the material world and a good life in it. Perhaps the one denomination of whom this is least true are the knitted kippah national-orthodox Jews and their interpretation of “tiqqun olam”
, perfecting the world. See also my review on amazon.de.
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4501733.ece
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4478368.ece
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4479101.ece
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- In fact if those students later become Stapels of LaCours, they can rightfully claim to have only been doing exactly what they were taught in their undergraduate and graduate studies. Zurück