2nd May 2013, 07:00 PM
Oxbeast Wrote:@ Dinosaur...But you're always saying that your BA was pointless and you didn't learn anything useful
Actually, I have to admit, not fully true - I learnt a healthy contempt for many academics, who use their excessively prolonged education and subsequent churning-out of pointless (and often just plain rubbish) 'research' to avoid joining the rest of us in what is hopefully the real world for as long as possible. There's some absolutely staggering b***ocks published under the heading of archaeology, much of it frequently factually wrong despite having supposedly been peer-reviewed...raises questions about the peers and indeed the whole setup....as a recent example I've had considerable interest in a piece of published university-based research of which the 'scientific' (as in lab-based/chemistry/physics) bit was fine, but unfortunately the conclusions were based on totally unsupportable dating from old excavations where even the publisher of the original sites made it repeatedly quite clear that most of the relevent dating was purely conjectural and unsupported by the excavated evidence (and I've been doing stuff from another angle which kicks even more props out of the original suggested chronology)...errr, why wasn't some of this pointed out pre-publication? These problems were entirely apparent from even a cursory read-through of the original (very well known) publication which was the entire basis of the recent research - had the 'academics' even read it?...
Has 'woman buried with cow' from a while back received academic publication by the way, does anyone know?