Somewhere around 2002, acupuncture expert Professor Jongbae Jay Park, KMD, PhD, Lac (now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, US) developed the Park Sham Device (PSD) – a telescoping faux needle, or acu-non-puncture needle [pictured]. It was subsequently evaluated by a research team from The University of Exeter and […]
Tag: fake
Evaluating a fake teacher (à la a fake babe on a dating site)
Two medical educators injected a fake teacher into an evaluate-your-teachers survey, in a medical school. Ivan Oransky, writing in MedPage Today, describes the study and the incident that motivated those two medical educators: Dear medical school faculty members, here’s a question that may come to mind as the new academic year gets underway: What if […]
Fake impact factor factories
We’ve all heard about nefarious corporations employing linkfarms (or cyber-robots) to artificially bump-up their Facebook ‘likes’ – or nogoodnik book publishers who pay fake reviewers to positively puff up their online book reviews – but surely the earnest and scholarly world of academic journal publishing is above that sort of thing? Maybe think again. A […]
Viewing Works of Art (authentic and not), an fMRI study
The field of ‘neuro-esthetics’ a.k.a. ‘neuroaesthetics’ can perhaps be loosely described as ‘the search for a neuronal interpretation of creativity’. Nowadays, neuro-estheticists (a.k.a. neuroaestheticians) have powerful scientific instruments at their disposal in the form of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines. For an example of fMRI-based neuroaesthetic research, which is unique in the fact that […]