Forensic professor news: Piano-sentence and Poker/Rock/Scissors

El Espagnol reports “The rocambolesque story of the psychiatrist who ‘scammed’ the US and was sentenced to play the piano“. The news article begins [here machine-translated from Spanish to English]: An American psychiatrist has recently been reprimanded by the US Government Office of Integrity in Research, after having already been convicted. His crime: steal several […]

High-achieving professors’ brains – are they different (to low-achieving professors’)?

A new (and possibly unique) research project has performed detailed examinations of the physical structure of the brains of high-achieving university professors. More specifically, Chinese high-achieving university professors. Or, to be precise, male Chinese high-achieving university professors. Inspired (in part) by a 1999 study entitled ‘The exceptional brain of Albert Einstein’ (in: The Lancet, vol. 353, […]

“Creativity is worth a thousand words”, and professors of Creativity

Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has recently arranged for advertising billboards to appear in their (and our) neighborhood, featuring the slogan “Creativity is worth a thousand words“. Passersby must be creative in discerning the meaning, if any, of that slogan. Here’s a photo of one of the billboards (atop a building in Porter Square, Cambridge): Creativity At Lesley The […]

George Parrott the Snacker, and George Parrot the Shoes

George Parrott is in the news. George Parrot has been out of the news for a while. In the news (specifically, in the Sacramento Bee): Sac State students don’t have to bring snacks for professor Students of Sacramento State professor George Parrott won’t have to supply snacks anymore in order to be taught psychology. The […]

Faculty action figures

Very few universities have had realistic ‘action figures’ made of their faculties and staff. One exception is the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas, where Dr. Jesse Weiss (Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies) has produced a collection of them. The professor hatched the idea via his hobby of customizing action figure models from […]

Professorial Product Placement

“Viewing the latest Lady Gaga video, with its ten product placements, I’m inspired by the thought: Why don’t professors do product placements, too?” wonders Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside. There are, according to the professor, many potentially lucrative and as-yet-untapped opportunities – for example to promote products such as […]