We don’t have a problem with the West, we’re just obsessed with it
How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven’t written to some of them?
January 2018
Dealing with plagiarism? Look at thy neighbour
Four doctors affiliated with Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal are going to be fired because they plagiarised data in two papers. The papers were retracted last year from the Bali Medical Journal, where they had…
On cancers, false balance and the judiciary
Climate change has for long been my go-to example to illustrate how absolute objectivity can sometimes be detrimental to the reliability of a news report. Stating that A said “Climate change is real” and that…
To watch ‘The Post’
I read a few reviews of The Post. Based on what the critics are saying, it seems the film has at least the potential to raise the spirits of many journalists today who could use…
Limitations of the Finkbeiner test
This post was republished on The Wire on January 8, 2018. The Finkbeiner test, named for science writer Ann Finkbeiner, was created to check whether a profile of a female scientist published by a mainstream news…
WordPress’s ineptitude
As some of you might know, I’ve been having some issues with WordPress.com in terms of their UX, their service as well as a few outages. I’ve been on the platform for almost a decade…
‘Mantra sciences’ is just poor fantasy
I don’t know how the author of a piece in the Times of India managed to keep a straight face when introducing a school based on Vedic rituals that would “show the way” to curing…
Happy new year!
2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we…
Politics at SESAME
I’ve been following the story of the SESAME collaboration in the Middle East since I first heard about it seven years ago, and was really thrilled when its synchrotron achieved first light in November 2017.…