Category Archives: Joke

Funny? Laughable? Ridiculous?

www.cell.com/current-biology shows humour

Human emotional expressions, such as laughter, are argued to have their origins in ancestral nonhuman primate displays. To test this hypothesis, the current work examined the acoustics of tickle-induced vocalizations from infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, as well as tickle-induced laughter produced by human infants.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025

The use of Powerpoint has been a disaster

Being asked to give another presentation on whatesoever topic and to deposit my slides on whatsoever intranet, the famous quote of John Sweller came to my point

It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.

So, as I tend to use only slides with cartoons and figures (but no bullet points which are in my notes only) these illustrations are rather useless as a stand-alone file at any Ilias platform. In other words

if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “owerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?

I remember a lecture by my doctoral advisor who came in the lecture room with just 1 glass slide in his shirt pocket … More intelligent comments about that issue at presentationzen.com

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025

FGA

Frequently given answers – an article at Spiegel online has some of the answers you will need when being asked by research administratives or journalists for your work.

  • Everything is possible, we will make progress, future research will show, adds significantly to our understanding – blabla attack
  • Sorry, could you repeat your question (usually when asked to give short! summary) – the noway attack
  • Can I send you some more documents – the flooding attack
  • sorry for having to go now to the kindergarden – the privacy attack
  • no idea – the unpolite attack
  • silence – the ivory tower attack

Please, please, please don’t try on my phone.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025

Clickstreams

An American team believes to describe science activity by web clicks on journal pages.

Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia.

with the conclusion Continue reading Clickstreams

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025