Consensus in Science
If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Michael Crichton I recently read the quote above by Michael Crichton — and it pretty much sums up my opinion of consensus in...
View ArticleScience and “The Good Cause”
Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so. Excerpt from the Notebooks of...
View ArticleEthics and User Centered Design / User Experience
Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific...
View ArticleEthics between Medicine, Psychology, and Media and Computer Science
I don’t trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him....
View ArticleNeeded Rule for Symposia: The Time-Keeper Speaks Last (and has only the...
My father gave me these hints on speech-making: «Be sincere … be brief … be seated.» James Roosevelt During the past few days I have been thinking quite frequently about negative events of the past....
View ArticleLoving to Solve Problems — like a Cat seeing a Ball of Wool
A problem is a chance for you to do your best. Duke Ellington One of the peaks of working in Academia, and especially with students, are the problems to solve. Not personal ones — I’m not a therapist —...
View ArticleSorcerers vs Wizards
If we imagine a continuum of creative people, at the one end are those who just “happen” to be creative. They see, hear, feel, experience something and express it in a work of art, either immediately...
View ArticlePsychology in a Crisis (and check the sources)
«How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you...
View ArticleScience and the Hard Sciences
«?» he said. «Good Omens» by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman Retraction Watch [here and here] pointed me to an opinion piece that was removed from a high-impact Chemistry journal. Not retracted, but...
View ArticleDanegeld (paid to outrage mobs by academic institutions)
«WARNING. At this university students could be exposed, at any moment, without warning, to ideas, comments, readings, or other materials that they find shocking, offensive, absurd, annoying, racist,...
View ArticleYou show me yours, I’ll show you mine
My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them. Penn Jillett I’m not a fan of the lockdown and the home office rules (at...
View ArticleFinding a Bachelor, Master and perhaps even PhD thesis Topic in Media and...
Be always sure you’re right, then go ahead. Davy Crockett After advising a couple of bachelor and master theses in media and computer science, I’ve created a short document to help students with...
View ArticleWriting a Synopsis for a Bachelor, Master or PhD Thesis in Media and Computer...
The development of ‘Balance Of Power’ reminds me if the use of paratroops in WW2. After much trial and error, the strategists eventually learned that the real value of paratroops lay in their powers to...
View ArticleThesis Template – Media and Computer Science – Medieninformatik [German...
“… and that’s when I went to the fridge to get another beer.” German teacher recounting how he corrected our exams Ah, bachelor and master project reports, ah, bachelor and master’s theses, they could...
View ArticleTake Care of Your Education – Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”
Algebra and plane geometry were all the math our school offered; I went ahead on my own with advanced algebra and solid geometry and trigonometry and might have stopped so far as College Boards were...
View ArticleHow the Internet Times Have Changed
«It’s not to control, but to protect the citizens of Singapore. In our society, you can state your views, but they have to be correct.» [...]
View ArticleThe Mind Parasite has Arrived in the German Student Population
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color [...]
View ArticleRecommendation: Graham’s The Four Quadrants of Conformism
I’m biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, [...]
View ArticleCiting R and RStudio
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research. Wilson Mizner Even though I spend the morning in an futile effort to create a [...]
View ArticleStandards
“Man muss sich nicht mit dem Hässlichen gemein machen.” [roughly translates as: “You don’t need to make yourself common with ugly.”] Unknown One of the [...]
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