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©CartoonStock.com As someone who works at the interface of child development and neuroscience, I've been struck by the relentless rise of the sub-discipline of 'educational neuroscience'. New imaging technologies have led to a burgeoning of knowledge about the developing brain, and it is natural to want to apply this knowledge to improving children's learning. Centres for educational neuroscience have sprung up all over the place, with support from universities who see them as ticking two important boxes: interdisciplinarity and impact. But at the heart of this enterprise, there seems to be a massive disconnect. Neuroscientists can tell you which brain regions are most involved in particular cognitive activities and how this changes with age or training. But these indicators of learning do not tell you how to achieve learning. Suppose I find out that the left angular gyrus becomes more active as children learn to read. What is a teacher supposed to do with that informat...

As described in my last blogpost , I attended an excellent symposium on waste in research this week. A recurring theme was research that never got published. Rosalind Smyth described her experience of sitting on the funding panel of a medium-sized charity. The panel went to great pains to select the most promising projects, and would end a meeting with a sense of excitement about the great work that they were able to fund. A few years down the line, though, they'd find that many of the funds had been squandered. The work had either not been done, or had been completed but not published. In order to tackle this problem, we need to understand the underlying causes. Sometimes, as Robert Burns noted, the best-laid schemes go wrong. Until you've tried to run a few research projects, it's hard to imagine the myriad different ways in which life can conspire to mess up your plans. The eight laws of psychological research formulated by Hodgson and Rollnick are as true today as they...

  Yesterday I escaped a very soggy Oxford to make it down to London for a symposium on "Increasing value, reducing waste" in Research. The meeting marked the publication of a special issue of the Lancet containing five papers and two commentaries, which can be downloaded here . I was excited by the symposium because, although the focus was on medicine, it raised a number of issues that have much broader relevance for science, including several that I have raised on this blog, including pre-registration of research , criteria used by high-impact journals ,  ethics regulation , academic backlogs , and incentives for researchers . It was impressive to see that major players in the field of medicine are now recognizing that there is a massive problem of waste in research. Better still, they are taking seriously the need to devise ways in which this could be fixed. I hope to blog about more of the issues that came up in the meeting, but for today I'll confine myself to one to...

My relationships with journals are rather like a bad marriage: a mixture of dependency and hatred. Part of the problem is that journal editors and academics often have a rather different view of the process. Scientific journals could not survive without academics. We do the research, often spending several years of our lives to produce a piece of work that is then distilled into one short paper, which the fond author invariably regards as a fascinating contribution to the field. But when we try to place our work in a journal, we find that it's a buyer's market: most journals are overwhelmed with more submitted papers than they can cope with, and rejection rates are high. So there is a total mismatch: we set out naively dreaming of journals leaping at the opportunity to secure our best work, only to be met with coldness and rejection.  As in the best Barbara Cartland novels, for a lucky few, persistence is ultimately rewarded, and the stony-hearted editor is won over. But many p...

from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkHb9q-jpDU Thousands of people in the UK had a truly miserable Christmas, with extreme weather leading to flooding and power cuts . They were shocked and cold, blundering around in the dark, sometimes for as long as three days. When David Cameron went to visit Yalding in Kent on 27th December, he got an earful from local residents, who complained they had been abandoned, and had no help from the council, who had "all decided to go on holiday." Cameron's visit was widely seen as a PR disaster: he was criticised for using the floods as a way of getting cheap publicity, and his government's cuts in spending on flood defences were commented on. On 30th December, we had Owen Paterson, the Energy Secretary stating that energy companies had "let customers down" in their response to the storm . Yesterday we heard that Tim Yeo chairman of the energy select committee, planned to summon bosses of energy companies to explain their ...