Entries in "observations"
January 29, 2007
The unfortunate need for specialisation
People love to bemoan the extent to which scientists specialise into disciplines and sub-disciplines. There is a real drawback to this—it makes it very easy to miss out on knowing about work that is directly relevant to one's interests but happened to fall into a different 'pigeonhole' to one's own topic—but I think it's important to understand why it happens and may even be unavoidable.
Continue reading "The unfortunate need for specialisation"
March 20, 2005
Maturing field
In a lot of ways my field is really not very mature. We have too many studies that are best described as cute but pointless
, too many studies that are statistically naïve or just avoid mentioning that they report the one successful run out of 1000 failures, and too few universities that really expose undergrads to what we do. At the same time there are some signs that this is changing.