by Richard Easther | Jan 30, 2015 | Cosmology
The on-again off-again discovery of the “smoking gun of inflation” is now firmly set to “off”. The latest development is an analysis combining data from the Planck spacecraft, the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole (and the source of the original...
by Richard Easther | Jan 29, 2015 | Academia
When I recently wrote and tweeted about the increasing ubiquity of the h-index, almost no-one rose to its defence. It turns out that we all seemed to know that the h-index has only two real purposes. The first is penalising one-hit...
by Richard Easther | Jan 20, 2015 | Academia
The great Russian physicist, Lev Landau used to rank physicists on a scale from 0 to 5. The better you were, the smaller your number. Newton alone was a 0, Einstein scraped in at 0.5, and founders of quantum mechanics like Bohr...
by Richard Easther | Jan 13, 2015 | Bad Science
In the last few years the number of “open access” journals has burgeoned. Open access journals are free to read, which limits their ability to raise money from subscriptions, and they typically charge authors a fee for publication. This may sound a...
