Peer review comes in for a lot of criticism, and University College London is trialling a different system. But historical precedents, going back to the early days of the Royal Society, suggest that it is unlikely to work.
Ayn Rand despised most educators, but at least she thought that children should be educated. Some of her erstwhile followers went much further. For Murray Rothbard, education was something that prevented children from fulfilling their proper roles, as productive economic units.
Despite its remote location on the island of Rawak north of Waigeo, which is in turn north of the Bird’s Head of New Guinea, the place Louis de Freycinet chose for his ‘equatorial’ pendulum observations was, for the time and area, already remarkably well mapped. It was also known to have a good source of water nearby.
A recent paper by Brandon Shuck and colleagues has presented detailed information from seismic reflection lines in the vicinity of the northernmost segment of the Macquarie Ridge Complex. For the regional picture, gravity maps are hard to beat, but they must be used with care.
When the Uranie was approaching Rio de Janeiro, it had on board a very unhappy Rose de Freycinet. That changed soon after they had landed, because in Rio she found two new friends.
One thing I didn’t anticipate when I decided to look at the role played by a railway in Atlas Shrugged was that only a few weeks later the UK would be facing something of a rail crisis of its own. But at least our rail companies have not taken the Ayn Rand option, and blamed the passengers.