Only 0.5 percent see housework as a woman’s business and do not consider helping with it. The rest tidy up, wield a vacuum cleaner, mow the lawn and find a clean toilet very important. HellPerspectives on Psychological Science has sketched a Dantean vision of hell. Nine appropriate punishments to fit nine deadly scientific sins. The worst: inventing data. A la Diederik Stapel. The punishment: to be frozen in a block of ice staring at a paper that convincingly proves that water cannot freeze at this location. Alas, the data were invented.
Impact
The impact of the top journals is going down, Canadian research has shown. In 1990, almost half of the 5 percent most cited articles appeared in top journals (the 5 percent of journals with the highest impact factor. That proportion has now dropped to one third. The reason: search engines find it anyway. And that is true. The Canadian study was in a journal with an impact factor of 2.
Ouch
A fear of maths can create a response in the brain comparable to the experience of physical pain, according to a study published in PLoS ONE. The striking thing in this case is that the pain comes before the sum is tackled, not while doing it. The thought of maths is enough to cause pain. Could this apply in other areas too? We get a stomach ache at the thought of a diet, for instance.