Afraid of flying? Maybe there is something to that. Dogs? Okay. But fear of buttons? Puh-leeeze. The phobia business - legitimizing irrational quirks - has become Big Business and life change consultant Mark O'Donoghue of Purple Smarties in Stoke-on-Trent is ready to believe you.In all, he has helped 99 people since he set up his business in 2008, he says. It isn't...
read moreIf the legend is true, Aesop lived during the sixth century B.C. He was born a slave but was given his freedom as a reward for his wit and intelligence. He never wrote anything down but the stories people remembered were so intriguing virtually every moralistic fable before him (and after) got attributed to him. Now Aesop's Fables number in the 600s. One of them, "The Crow and...
read moreIf only there were a field that examines the spiritual, therapeutic and psychological aspects of human-nature relationships, I'd abandon my graduate studies in Theoretical Phys Ed and embrace this new discipline instead.Luckily, there is. For those of you dumb enough to have spent $80,000 for a two-year program in Environmental Journalism at Columbia but now can't (they closed it - even unlimited...
read moreIs psychology a science? Increasingly, the respect of science (and scientists) by the public has been dropping and a part of that reason is because the line of what science is has become fuzzy. If economics calls itself science, well, the public knows they don't know what they are talking about, so maybe it applies to climate science too. Is sociology science? What about...
read moreMost people do not want war in their backyard. In geopolitics, people claim to love their neighbor but they still prepare to fight; Switzerland, the home of neutrality, still has hundreds of forts built into their mountains and young men are required to own a gun(1). read...
read moreErasmus University Rotterdam has announced that Dirk Smeesters, Professor of Consumer and Society at Rotterdam School of Management, has had two papers withdrawn after a report from the Inquiry Committee on Scientific Integrity looked into suspicions that the professor had committed scientific errors. read...
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