flynn002

Guest blogpost by  Ryan McKay, Department of Psychology,  Royal Holloway University of London and Max Coltheart, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University These days it is common for academics to receive invitations from unfamiliar sources to attend conferences, submit papers, or join editorial boards. We began an attack against this practice by not ignoring such invitations – by, instead, replying to them with messages selected from the output of the wonderful Random Surrealism Generator . It generates syntactically correct but surreal sentences such as “Is that a tarantula in your bicycle clip, or are you just gold-trimmed?” (a hint of Mae West there?). This sometimes had the desired effect of generating a bemused response from the inviter; but we decided more was needed. So we used the surrealism generator to craft an absurdist critique of “impaired” publication practices (the title of the piece says as much, albeit obliquely). The first few sentences seem relev...

One day in 2003, I turned on BBC Radio 4 and found myself listening to an interview on the Today Programme with Wynford Dore, the founder of an educational programme that claimed to produce dramatic improvements in children's reading and attentional skills. The impetus for the programme was a press release of a study published in the journal Dyslexia, reporting results from a trial of the programme with primary school-children.   The interview seemed more like an advertisement than a serious analysis, but the consequent publicity led many parents to sign up for the programme, both in the UK and in other countries, notably Australia. The programme involved children doing two 10-minute sessions per day of exercises designed to improve balance and eye-hand co-ordination. These were personalised to the child, so that the specific exercises would be determined by level of progress in particular skills. The logic behind the approach was that these exercises trained the cerebellum, a part...