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Hot! Hot! Hot!
Saturday 17 May will see the final of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which will be the most over-the-top evening of television since, well, the previous Eurovision. Feedback is deeply relieved that Feedback Jr appears not to be interested this year, so we might escape having to sit up and watch the entire thing. While we are deeply supportive of the contest’s kind and welcoming vibe, most of the songs make our ears bleed.
Anyway, who needs it when we have the winners of this year’s Dance Your PhD contest? For readers who may not be familiar, Dance Your PhD encourages researchers to explain their postgraduate research findings through the medium of interpretive dance. It’s been running since 2008, and Feedback thinks that countries struggling to find suitable entrants for Eurovision should take a look.
This year’s winning routine is by Sulo Roukka at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Roukka studies chemesthesis: the sense, distinct from taste and smell, that detects the heat of chillies and the coolness of menthol. The video is set to a walloping song that Feedback didn’t recognise but would describe as “Lady Gaga-adjacent” (there are shouts of “Hot! Hot! Hot!” at key points). It starts with Roukka and his team dancing while seated around a table with lab equipment, before unleashing a cavalcade of costume changes, stunts (at one point Roukka is lifted up, Kylie Minogue-style) and lurid red and green colour schemes to signify the different chemesthetic sensations.
To quote the UK’s Eurovision entry, what the hell just happened?
Truly, the most shocking thing about the routine is that it isn’t already on Eurovision. The only possible snag is that the song was “prompted by Dr Sulo Roukka, Sampo Marjomaa, and AI-Shaman Jami Pietilä”. If that is a reference to using AI, it might run afoul of Eurovision’s organisers.
If Eurovision isn’t an option, Dance Your PhD at least ought to get onto TikTok. Science did post a sample of Roukka’s video to its TikTok account, but the contest is otherwise absent – from the one app that’s basically famous for the song and dance trends it spawns.
Watts going on?
An email arrives from John Harper at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, alerting us to that rare unicorn: a “double dose of nominative determinism”. The country’s minister for energy is one Simon Watts. In this position, Watts naturally spends a lot of his time dealing with the Electricity Retailers’ Association of New Zealand, an industry organisation whose independent chair is one Simon Watt.
“They both know it needs more than 2 watts to keep our lights on,” points out John.
Imagine if their kids got married.
World’s top polymath
Feedback likes to think we have a broad range of interests. Science, sure, but also history, music, cinema, books, video games, ASMR videos as long as they don’t involve chewing noises; it’s a broad mix of stuff in our brain. Of course, this does mean that Feedback isn’t really an expert in anything, apart from dragging out a simple point to fill an entire paragraph without regard for concision or readability.
Nevertheless, Bruce Durie has us outclassed. “I’ve recently discovered that I’m internationally regarded as quite the polymath,” he writes. This was based on him having been invited, in rapid succession, to speak at conferences on subjects as diverse as chemistry, social studies, education, cell biology, cancer research, and two successive events on arts, humanities, social sciences and education.
To be clear, Bruce is rather an accomplished person: he’s a genealogist and heraldist who lectures, writes books and presents on BBC Radio. But quite what he would be doing at conferences on chemistry or cancer research is beyond both him and us.
Yet it doesn’t stop there. His “encyclopaedic eminence” has also led him to be invited to submit papers to a host of journals, which “aspire to disseminate supreme publications from prominent people like you” and describe him as “one of the leading experts in the field” and “similar hyperbolic emollients”.
Bruce actually listed these journals in full. We thought it might be funny to reproduce his entire list, but when we tried there were so many long words it took up most of a column. (Also, the lawyers said we shouldn’t.) Suffice it to say, they ran the gamut from archaeology and family medicine to infrastructure and posthumanism.
Finally, Bruce has been offered yet another academic accolade: “I am ‘highly invited’ to become the editor-in-chief of a new but unnamed journal from the Euro-Asia Academic Alliance. I can even start my own journal – last month alone, 58 scholars successfully did so, we’re told.”
Also spare a thought for molecular biologist Richard Sever, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state. He was sent a “request to accept for the position of ‘editorial board’ for the journal Advances in Behavioral Neuroscience“. As he put it on Bluesky: “Can’t think of anyone less qualified for this than I am – except perhaps the people who run the journal…”
We truly do live in a brave new world, where scientific journals and conferences are promoted in the same way as Nigerian princes and cryptocurrencies.
As Bruce says: “Predatory publishing is one thing, but aren’t predators supposed to be stealthy at the very least?”
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