What's new...? 

Recent additions/changes to the site

• 4th April 2012. An Ignobel lecture I gave at the Institute of Engineering and Technology is available on video. See the Professional section for details.
  
• 19th November 2012: A paper with Sarah Mackenzie Ross and colleagues carrying out a meta-analysis of the confused literature on organophosphate pesticides, concluding that they do have toxic effects at low levels of exposure.
• 19th November 2012: A lecture I gave in March 2012 to the Cardiff Medical Society entitled Early determinants of performance in medical graduates -- nature or nurture? is now available on the internet: click here to view the video.
• 14th November 2012: A cross-cultural study with Wen Wu looking at the claims of Heinrich Wölfflin that “The Square Is … Bulky, Heavy, Contented, Plain, Good-Natured, Stupid …”, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.
• 31st October 2012: Minor corrections made to the spreadsheet in Statistical Resources for calculating different versions of the Standard Error of Measurement
  
• 5th August 2012:  Is is true that left-handed people are smarter than right-handed people? A brief "Ask the Brains" piece in Scientific American Mind, answering a reader's question.
  
• 13th July 2012: The final version has been published of the paper in BMC Medicine, with Kasia Ludka, on the performance of candidates resitting the MRCP(UK) examination on multiple occasions. For BMC's blog discussing the article, click here.
  
• 13th July 2012: A chapter written with Kath Woolf last year, entitled Predicting and guiding career success in medicine, was inexplicably omitted from the list of publications.
  
• 30th May 2012:  An editorial in the Student BMJ on widening participation in medical education and the difficulties of defining under-represented groups.
  
• 17th May 2012: Interview on BBC's Material World, about the scientific study of aesthetics. Click here for the podcast.
• 20th January 2012: An obituary for Peter Richards in the BMJ; click here to find the BMJ obituary, a longer, referenced version, and some images of Peter from Doctors to Be.
  
• 12th Jan 2012:  Scanned copies of two versions of the Waterloo Handedness Questionnaire have been provided, since these do not seem to be readily available elsewhere.
  
• 11th Jan 2012:  A copy of the paper on drawing that Becky Chamberlain and Howard Riley presented in October in New York at the Columbia conference on Drawing and Cognition.
• 22nd December 2011: Have just found that a web video is available of my Lord Cohen Lecture at the ASME annual conference in Edinburgh in July, entitled, “In divers manners”: Exploring diversity in medical education, is now available; click here to see it.
  
• 6th December 2011:   Not quite as new as it might be, a very brief review of Rik Smit's The Puzzle of Left-handedness.
• 2nd December 2011: To BSc or not to BSc...? An editorial in the Student BMJ reviewing the benefits of medical students carrying out an intercalated degree.
  
• 12th November 2011: A chapter, with Caterina Suitner from Padua, entitled Aesthetic asymmetries, spatial agency, and art history: A social psychological perspective, in Spatial dimensions of social thought, edited by Thomas W Schubert and Anne Maas (De Gruyter Mouton).
• 3rd November 2011:  A chapter entitled 'Beauty is instinctive feeling': Experimenting on aesthetics and art in the new book edited by Elizabeth Schellekens and the late Peter Goldie,  The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and psychology (OUP).
  
• 20th October 2011:  Two long papers with a number of collaborators on the psychology of photography, one studying the process of photographic cropping in expert and non-expert photographers , and the other assessing Arnheim's Gestalt theory of balance, using art photographs, cropped photographs and abstract stimuli.
  
• 19th October 2011: A paper in BMC Medicine which follows up an idea of Sir William Osler's, and shows that doctors' avocations (hobbies and leisure interests) are greater in those with a greater sense of vocation (professional engagement), but are not related to stress and burnout.
  
• 18th October 2011: Two papers in Clinical Medicine and the Annals of the Academy of Medicine of Singapore describing changes in the PACES exam of the MRCP(UK).
• 10th October 2011: Simmetria e Asimmetria in Estetica e nell'Arte, an Italian translation of Symmetry and asymmetry in aesthetics and the arts, has appeared in the online journal Cultor.  
• 7th October 2011: A paper with Phik-Wern Loo, Becky Chamberlain, Howard Riley and Nicola Brunswick on shape constancy and drawing ability in Empirical Studies of the Arts.
  
• 5th October 2011: The very sad news, on September 29th, of the death of Peter Richards, with whom I collaborated on so many studies of medical education over more than thirty years. A brief appreciation and a photograph can be found here.
  
• 1st October 2011:  Appearance on QI talking about the Ignobel prize; click here to watch it (I appear at about 9:10 on the recording).
• 20th April 2011:  Paper with Howard Riley, Qona Rankin, Nicola Brunswick and Rebecca Chamberlain at the Include11 conference on the relationship of drawing ability in art students to mathematical ability.
  
• 19th March 2011: Participant in the 2011 UK Ignobel tour, with a lecture in Dundee and the irresistible opportunity to give the first modern reading of a newly discovered poem by William McGonagall, reputedly one of the worst poets of all time. Click here for photos.
  
• 8th March 2011: A paper in the BMJ, with Katherine Woolf and Henry Potts, with a meta-analysis showing that ethnic minority students and graduates from UK medical schools perform less well in examinations. The reasons are far from clear.
  
• 17th February 2011: A review in Times Higher Education of Daniel Lieberman's wonderful book, The evolution of the human head.
  
• 8th January 2011:  A very short letter in The Guardian on how the mean and the mode in statistics are not the same thing
  
• 3rd January 2011: A paper in Medical Teacher which looks at the recent claim, published in Medical Education, that BMAT is a valid predictor of medical school performance, along with a response by the authors and our reply to the response. Click here for all three documents in one PDF.
  
• 26th November 2010: Lecture at the Wellcome Trust on right- and left-handedness for their evening event Hands: Amazing Appendages.
  
• 24th November 2010: McManus, I.C. (2010) The Lighter Side [article on Gustav Theodor Fechner], The Psychologist, 23 (12), 950 (December).
• 15th November 2010: McManus, I.C. (2010) Note: Poetry, the corpus callosum, and visceral asymmetries, Laterality, 15: 659-662.
• 15th October 2010:  Review in the TLS of Roderick Buchanan's Playing with Fire: The controversial career of Hans J Eysenck], TLS, October 15th, 2010, p.36.
• 13th October 2010: Interview on Radio 2's Simon Mayo DriveTime on left-handedness -- click here to listen to it.
  
• 8th October 2010: Review in the TLS of Helen McDonald's Possessing the dead: The artful science of anatomy, TLS, October 8th, 2010, p. 26.
  
• 2nd September 2010: A light piece for The Psychologist's Lighter Side column on Fun.
• 30th August 2010: A fun sort of paper in Psychology, a new, open-access, online journal. Literally fun in this case, since the paper, written with Adrian Furnham, is about the neglected topic of fun, and is called 'Fun, fun, fun': Types of fun, attitudes to fun, and their relation to personality and biographical factors
• 20th August 2010: Interviewed on a BBC Radio 3 interval talk for the Proms, entitled He played it left hand, with Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand being played in the Prom.  No longer available to 'listen again', but I have a very large MP3 if you contact me.
• 29th June 2010: A paper in BMC Health Sciences Research with Cath Taylor et al entitled, A pre-post test evaluation of the impact of the PELICAN MDT-TME Development Programme on the working lives of colorectal cancer team members
  
• 4th June 2010: A paper in BMC Medical Education entitled "The standard error of measurement is a more appropriate measure of quality for postgraduate medical assessments than is reliability: an analysis of MRCP(UK) examinations"
• 27th May 2010: A paper in the APA journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts entitled, "Beyond the Golden Section and normative aesthetics: Why do individuals differ so much in their aesthetic preferences for rectangles?".
  
• 25th May 2010: Interview on BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind on the 6000 postcards study of handedness.
  
• 12th Mar 2010:  A paper in Cortex entitled Precisely wrong? The problems with the Jones and Martin genetic model of sex differences in handedness and language lateralisation.
  
• 4th Mar 2010: A paper in the APA journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts entitled, " Art Students who cannot Draw", describing research carried out in collaboration with the Royal College of Art in London and the Art School of Swansea Metropolitan University. Click here for details.
  
• 2nd Mar 2010:  The special issue of Laterality entitled The Right Hand and the Left Hand of History has now been published as a hardback edition which libraries or others can purchase separately. Click here for details.
• 15th Feb 2010: Publication of four historical papers, three on the 1953 BBC TV programme entitled Science in the Making: Right Hand, Left Hand, and the other paper on an early nineteenth century lithograph by John Lewis Marks entitled A left-handed compliment. Click here for details.
  
• 17th Jan 2010: The 2009 follow-up of the various cohorts is now closed, and copies of the questionnaires, which are very similar for each cohort, can be found on the pages for each survey (see e.g. the 1991 cohort). The final response rate was 64.2%, and a graph of the response rate against time can be found on the page overviewing the 2009 followups.
  
• 8th Jan 2010: Updating of the two spreadsheets on the Statistical Resources page which carry out calculations on Standard Error of Measurement. In particular the spreadsheets now show how to calculate SEM without knowing reliability, and allows SEM to be calculated in the unusual situation in which all candidates have the same score, and hence candidate variance is zero.
  
• 4th Jan 2010: An unpublished manuscript from 1996 by Phil Bryden, entitled Complementarity of Cerebral Function, written just before his death, has been added to the site. Click here to read about it, or click here for a PDF of the manuscript.
• 31st Dec 2009:  A video of my talk on Mondrian at PINC.8 in 2007 can now be seen at the Dutch internet TV channel Het Gesprek, in English with Dutch subtitles (click here for the link).
• 30th Dec 2009: What's new is introduced.