At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dutch science was without doubt world-class. The first Nobel Prize for chemistry went to the Dutchman Van ‘t Hoff. The first three recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics were either Dutch (Zeeman and Lorentz) or were partly educated in the Netherlands (Röntgen).  All of them were born in upper-middle-class families.

Left or right
In western societies we write from left to right. In mundane texts lines are left justified. This alignment allows for quick reading. You do not know yet what will be in the new line, but you (and above all your eyes) sure know where it begins. You can improve readability by implementing full justification. But only if you use a lot of hyphenation and micro-space adjustment. Otherwise you get those ugly stretched sentences that hamper reading, rather than facilitating it. If you use MS-Word and full justification use the WordPerfect compatibility switch, as explained here.

For editors of scientific journals it is quite hard to find referees, leave alone good referees, for peer reviewing their received manuscripts. A good referee is a person that sends in a good referee report and does so in time, and responds quickly to additional requests from the editors. Why don’t peers want to review manuscripts of their colleagues?

There are a number of reasons. Professional scientists are very busy and - perhaps more importantly - they will never get public credit for their review job.

A few days ago, I participated in the second day of the training course “Taking charge of your PhD-project”. This is a one-time mandatory course for all PhD-students employed by FOM, which I estimate to be more than 100 persons per year.

To make a long story very short, I must say I was deadly bored.

My impression from the whole course was the following: “A successful PhD is one who can manage his/her supervisor in such a way that he/she can write a thesis within the exact four years of his/her contract (so no prolongation). Within two days we teach you, all 10 students at the same time, techniques and skills you will need to control your disobeying supervisor.”