In some cases, a professor’s legal testimony can be very valuable. A judge has now stated on the record just how valuable, measured by cash, that can be: “a million dollars or so”. A December 18, 2023 Associated Press report, headlined “Judge criticizes Trump’s expert witness as he again refuses to toss fraud lawsuit“, says: […]
‘Struth, it is, that Struth is a co-author of this essay that deals with strategies for proving truths: “Proof Strategies,” Moller and Georg Struth [pictured here], in the book Modelling Computing Systems, pp. 131-154. Springer, London, 2013. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-84800-322-4_6
ORF radio, in Austria, interviewed me about fact and truth, a couple hours before I gave a 15-minute keynote talk about that on an ORF TV program: Ig-Nobel: Facts and Truth in Science — “Fake News” is a term that is currently under discussion – so also last night at an event in the Radiokulturhaus. […]
Some measure of truth is present in one or both or neither of these studies: “On lie detection ‘wizards‘”, C.F. Bond, A. Uysal, Law and Human Behavior, 31 (2007), pp. 109–115. the authors explain: “M. O’Sullivan and P. Ekman (2004) claim to have discovered 29 wizards of deception detection. The present commentary offers a statistical […]
Fashion news! We’re giving a makeover to the website for the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS) and its conjoined clubs, The Luxuriant Former Hair Club for Scientists™ and The Luxuriant Facial Hair Club for Scientists™. LFHCfS began in 2001 with its first member (psychologist Steven Pinker), and became so popular that it quickly grew beyond the bounds of […]
“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think […]
This is how professor Richard Feynman, BSc., Ph.D. described the process of validating a scientific proposition – which he liked to call “A guess”. “It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it […]
This invention promises to detect lies, a task at which virtually all other lie-detectors prove unreliable. The secret lies partially (but only partially!) in the novel use of the earlobe, as shown in this technical drawing from US patent application 11/734,171, “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR IDENTIFICATION OF FALSE STATEMENTS”, filed in April 1997 by John […]
Brian Stelter profiles two of the Internet’s true heroes: David and Barbara Mikkelson are among those trying to clean the cesspool. The unassuming California couple run Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web. For well over a decade they have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the […]
Musing about how people react to criticism, Theodore Dalrymple, inspired by Richard Dawkins [pictured here, at right], writes about George Bernard Shaw (who reportedly scorned the idea that microbes can cause disease): “I suspect that he had that contrarian mindset that supposes that the truth must be the opposite of what everyone thinks, instead of […]