Of course, we know how this sort of thing happens – it happens because “everyone knows” who the problems are, but nothing happens to stop them.
Bad Apples
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Education | Personal | Physics
Big Astro
As an astrophysicist, I hope that the TMT will be built – it is an astonishing instrument, big enough to catch the the light from the first generation of stars to be born after the Big Bang, and sharp enough to make images of planets around other suns. However, I also hope that my community can do this without riding roughshod over a people who claim Mauna Kea as their own
Friends Don’t Let Friends Do H
So my resolution for 2015 is this: I am going to go h-free, wherever possible. I won’t use it in recommendations I write, I won’t cite my own h-index in my annual performance appraisals, and I will discourage comparisons of h-indices when considering candidates for promotions, appointments and prizes.
Measurer, Measure Yourself.
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 and Planck were 1s. Landau rated himself a 2.5 which he bumped up to a 2 after winning the Nobel Prize.