While the intention of this blog will be to provide useful and insightful commentary about the field of applied psychology (and from time to time, science in general), its main goal is to help me organise my thoughts and notes about the field as I continue my PhD.  PhD's are tricky beasts, and can easily morph off-topic (in computer science terms, feature creep). While I'm studying gender psychology, its very much a cross-disciplinary field with influences from education, cognitive psychology, psychometrics, and cross-cultural studies.

     So sometimes I'll use this blog to write a short piece about these fields, either for my own personal interest or perhaps with vague notions of turning it into a peer-reviewed publication output at some distant point in the future. Us academic types love publication outputs, even if they're in the most obscure and least read journal on the planet. Especially if they're in an obscure and less read journal. Why? because they're usually subject to less scrutiny, making it easier to get some outrageous claim or theory into the body of literature. There's a bias in science literature to accepting anything - even if it is far-fetched, untested, and on occasion indefensible - if its published in a peer-reviewed journal. Because peer-review weeds out anything dodgy, and can then be cited ad infinitum by others. And often by yourself in future publications. Caveat emptor, and all that.