When did the British professoriate become a nest of dimwits?

Professor: Bedtime reading puts other children at disadvantage

Dimwit British professor figures this out, loses his mind.

Mild takedown after the break.

"In a radio interview, Adam Swift, professor at the University of Warwick in England, said familial bonds are the chief factor that enables one child to succeed over another. And one of the ways parents reinforce familial bonds is by reading to their children.

“Bedtimes stories are more advantage transmitting than elite private schools," Swift said.

Should parents stop doing that in order to make life fairer for other people’s children?

“I don’t think parents … should constantly have in their minds the way they are unfairly advantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.'"

Sparky McProfessorpants and the horrors of bedtime reading by a loving parent will not be a best seller. Hey smarty pants professor, if you ever wonder why the average bloke thinks of you as a dimwit, this might be a good place to start. 

The cure for underachieving is not to "Harrison Bergeron" the achieving, and the overachieving, it is to make it clear to the underachieving what happened, and in cases like this point out how easy it is to rectify. 

On both sides of the pond, the Academe has totally failed. After the correction let's try to make sure the professoriate has some real life experiences. No more dim imbeciles who know everything about Proust, and nothing about anything important. This will likely require a division between research and teaching colleges. 

There is not much left of research anymore.

How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals

"In recent years, the field of academic publishing has ballooned to an estimated 30,000 peer-reviewed journals churning out some 2 million articles per year. While this growth has led to more scientific scholarship, critics argue that it has also spurred increasing numbers of low-quality "predatory publishers" who spam researchers with weekly "calls for papers" and charge steep fees for articles that they often don't even read before accepting.

Ten years ago, a few students at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) had noticed such unscrupulous practices, and set out to have some mischievous fun with it. Jeremy Stripling MS '05 PhD '09, Dan Aguayo '01 MEng '02 and Max Krohn PhD '08 spent a week or two between class projects to develop "SCIgen," a program that randomly generates nonsensical computer-science papers, complete with realistic-looking graphs, figures, and citations."

It will never work, scientist are too smart for that! Oh, wait . . . 

"The program was crude, but it did the trick: In April of 2005 the team's submission, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy," was accepted as a non-reviewed paper to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), a conference that Krohn says is known for "being spammy and having loose standards.'"

Fun, but it seems at an end, how much farther could they go with this?

"In the wake of the international media attention, WMSCI withdrew the team's invitation to attend. Not to be deterred, the students raised $2,500 to travel to Orlando, Florida, where they rented out a room inside the conference space to hold their own "session" of randomly-generated talks, outfitted with fake names, fake business cards, and fake mustaches."

Maddog is a bit surprised they did not go full Monty Python, with old timey dresses, bad old lady wigs, and mustaches, 

And note that all of the social science papers outside of Economics are nothing but word salad dressed with Bullshite. 

It would seem the Academe, even the science side has been hoisted on its own petard. Maddog must note, however, that the pool of dullwittery is deepest in the social sciences, and shallowest in the hard sciences, maths, computer sciences. Regardless, the value of an education supplied by the Academe is becoming more difficult to discern. 

Read to your children, encourage others to do so as well, the solution for the underachievers is to read to their children, not listen to kvetchy professor whinging about others doing so. Harrison Bergeron was a cautionary tale, not guidance.