flynn002

I don't do long haul flights much. They wreck my frontal lobe function and leave me not only with a headache, but with a sense of befuddlement that can take a few days to abate. I also find that if I try to while away the time with work, or read a book, it just makes matters worse, so I am reduced to watching the films. And now at 32,000 feet en rpute to New York, I can think of nothing better to pass the time than to write a review of the film I have just seen, Noah. I grew up enjoying epics such as the Ten Commandments (with memorable plague of frogs and parting of Red Sea), Samson and Delilah (where, according to one review "Victor Mature fits neatly into the role of the handsome but dumb hulk of muscle")  and the Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah ( this trailer tells you all you need to know). I expected something similar – an attempt at telling a Biblical story through film, but with use of CGI to create better special effects.  But this was more like a bizarre mix ...

© www.CartoonStock.com Percentages have been much in the news lately. First, we have a PLOS One paper by John Ioannidis and his colleagues which noted that less than one per cent of all publishing scientists in the period from 1996 to 2011 published something in each and every year of this 16-year period. Then there was have a trailer for a wonderfully silly forthcoming film, Lucy , in which Scarlett Johansson suffers from a drug overdose that leads her to learn Chinese in an hour and develop an uncanny ability to make men fall over by merely pouting at them. Morgan Freeman plays a top neuroscientist who explains that whereas the rest of us use a mere ten per cent of our brain capacity, Johansson's character has access to a full hundred per cent of her brain. And today I've just read an opinion piece in Prospect Magazine by the usually clear-thinking philosopher, A. C. Grayling, which states: Neuropsychology tells us that more than ninety per cent of mental computation h...

©CartoonStock.com In my previous post about the university as big business , I wrote about the dangers that arise when an institution focuses only on its finances, and fails to foster its key resource - the academic staff. An obsession with the bottom line can lead to staff being treated as disposable commodities, to be hired and fired as convenient. But if a university wants to become renowned for its stellar teaching and research record, it needs to attract and retain academics who have a sense of loyalty to the institution, and will be proud to act as ambassadors for it. The ethos of the institution as a community of scholars requires that there is some continuity, and that members have a sense of common purpose. That's not going to happen if jobs are insecure and people are judged according to grant income rather than academic excellence. As senior management at King's College London (KCL) may be starting to realise, reputation is all-important and should never be compromis...