“Before 1992, the names ‘Hillary’ and ‘Hilary’ had been increasing in popularity for several decades. After 1992, however, their popularity dropped suddenly 10-fold.” – explains Stefano Ghirlanda who is Professor of Psychology, Biology, and Anthropology, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Founder and fellow, Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University. With this in mind, […]
“All these papers were deliberately bad”
“All these papers were deliberately bad. They were created with the purpose of exposing exploitative publishing practices. That is, the works collected here were sting operations on predatory journals.” So says the introduction to the book Stinging the Predators: A collection of papers that should never have been published, assembled by Zen Faulkes. Falkes is a […]
“Ingredients in Victoria’s Secret Bombshell and Ivanka Trump eaux de parfums that repel mosquitoes” [research study]
Humanity’s war against mosquitoes still rages, after the failure of another new strategy. This study gives details of the failure: “Ingredients in Victoria’s Secret Bombshell and Ivanka Trump eaux de parfums that repel mosquitoes,” Fangfang Zeng, Pingxi Xu, Kaiming Tan, Paulo Zarbin, Walter Leal, BioRxiv, August 3, 2017, doi.org/10.1101/172304. The authors, at the University of California Davis and Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil, report: “We […]
Do Interruptions Affect Quality of Work? (study)
Dr. Cyrus K. Foroughi (U.S. Naval Research Lab) is, amongst other things, an expert on interruptions. In 2014, working with Nicole E. Werner, Erik T. Nelson and Deborah A. Boehm-Davis he was able to experimentally demonstrate that interruptions can affect the quality of work – in a negative way. Thus it’s suggested that the answer […]