Preference for OA research by income group
Two researchers from Rwanda performed a “systematic computational analysis of the biomedical literature” and concluded in their paper that: … papers with authors based in sub-Saharan Africa, papers w…
Op-eds
182 posts
When deGrasse Tyson pulled a Pinker
Since this post was published, an upward-edited version has been republished on The Wire. Twitter is, among other things, that place on the internet where people fight over the tips of icebergs. Ther…
Epstein's friends from the 'Reality Club'
New York magazine has published an alphabetised list of the names of people that find mention in Jeffrey Epstein's 'black book', a log book of sorts in which he kept track of the people he…
Prestige journals and their prestigious mistakes
On June 24, the journal Nature Scientific Reports published a paper claiming that Earth's surface was warming by more than what non-anthropogenic sources could account for because it was simply mo…
The usefulness of good grammar
Why is good grammar important? In the Indian mainstream media at least, it appears that readers won’t penalise reporters and editors for imperfect use of grammar and punctuation. To be clear, they wi…
Why are we going to the Moon again?
At 2:51 am on July 15, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch its Chandrayaan 2 mission on board a GSLV Mk III rocket from its spaceport in Sriharikota. The rocket will place its pa…
Fanning the flames
https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1146773174975156224 This is the second tweet I'm seeing phrased like this. It lacks context and is provocative, perhaps deliberately? It seems to encourage de…
Assuming you speak Hindi…
I can't use the terms 'Gaganyaan' and 'Vyomanaut' or 'Gaganaut' in place of 'Indian human spaceflight mission' and 'Indian astronauts' because of the bad ta…
Solutions looking for problems
There’s been a glut of ‘science projects’ that seem to be divorced from their non-technical aspects even when the latter are equally, if not more, important – or maybe it is just a case of these probl…
The 'could've, should've, would've' of R&D
ISRO's Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that's how long the lithium-ion cells it's…
A religious environmentalism
June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled 'Hindu roots of modern 'ecology'' was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016.…
A Q&A with blinders
The following comment grates on multiple levels: https://twitter.com/ainvvy/status/1135155570309120000 Here's Mohandas Pai, a Hindutva fanatic known to have a pH of 1, issuing a ridiculous comme…