I don't like SpongeBob SquarePants.  I generally regard any parent who does like SpongeBob SquarePants with suspicion and derision; they probably watch "Real Housewives of Fresno" or whatever city that show is down to now.

So when I see an article claiming SpongeBob is bad for kids and I may have a reason to ban that porifera from the house, it has a certain truthiness to it and so I let my confirmation bias run free.

A group of people are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to discover whether their 'collective intention' can bring peace to the world.

What does that even mean?  The 9/11 Intention Experiment is the latest of 23 Web-based experiments carried out by author Lynne McTaggart to try and test the power of thought to change the physical world.

Yes, you read that right - telekinesis. Or mind control.  I'm not sure.  She doesn't look like that lady in "V" but it sounds like kind of the same approach - make the world a better place by controlling what people do. Except in a nicer way, we hope.

Once upon a time, journals were horribly expensive to produce and to read.  Your research might only be read by 200 people but those 200 people knew the work was vetted by reviewers.   It had a quality standard.

Open access publishing is a blessing and a curse in some ways.   Some very popular journals are not peer-reviewed, they are instead looked over by an editor who may or may not be qualified to determined its technical validity - but since they are taking money from scientists to publish the article, rather than relying on subscriptions, the concern is that the researcher is now the customer rather than the science.

Despite the self-loathing of progressives in American science academia, America is a pretty good place to be, even after 15 years of onerous visa restrictions that have made it difficult to hire the best people and forces immigrants educated here to return home because they aren't allowed to work.

Well, legal immigrants anyway.  Illegal immigrants even get cheaper tuition in California.

Can we get three cheers for psychology?  The bulk of the quality researchers in the field have consistently been under fire because of researchers like Satoshi Kanazawa and Marc Hauser but have started taking their discipline back.

Circling the wagons around researchers was never a good idea but, well, things happen and psychologists are people too.  Yet over the last year they have begun clearing out the ranks and now Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who runs the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research, has been sacked.