In the Shakespeare play As You Like It main character Rosalind reads the epilogue, from which we cite:

If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;

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The reason for writing this post is a bewildering experience on my side while preparing a talk a few months ago. I was invited to give presentation on May 17 of this year for a 200-people audience at a material science conference.  The organizers had asked me to deliver a critical – and if possible, humorous –  evaluation of the development in science that the presentation of results gets an ever increasing weight, much at the expense of the content. While preparing the slides for my speech I was looking for an example of a paper of outstanding presentation quality. So I checked which paper was selected that week (Published May 10, 2010) to be an outstanding example of  Physical Review Letters (PRL), the most important physics journal. I was shocked to discover that this scientifically indeed brilliant paper, selected by the prestigious board of editors, was of abominable presentation quality (I will give details later).

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Ever-increasing competition for unfairly limited funding is backfiring. Territorial allocations and research topic fixing is hurting the creativity of researchers and specially demotivating the younger generation.

The title of this post may sound too provocative, but let me quote three dialogs, which I have witnessed in the last six months, to show how real this threat is. You may have heard such conversations as well.

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