Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Learn From COVID-19 Myths – Don’t Just Debunk Them
Instead of viewing rumors and myths as misperceptions that can be suppressed with accurate information, we should treat them as opportunities to understand — and respond to — the legitimate anxieties of the people who adopt and share them. In other words, we should look at them as valuable feedback that can help improve our own reporting and messaging.
Breaking Bad News: How to Talk With the Misinformed
It’s also common to encounter people who are misinformed but don’t know it yet. It’s one thing to double-check your own information, but what’s the best way to talk to someone else about what they think is true – but which is not true?
When Updates End
t’s Academic Book Week 2020! The theme this year is the environment, and makers, providers and readers of academic books will be celebrating them as vehicles for ground-breaking ideas. To kick off the week, David Beer, author of ‘The Data Gaze,’ discusses the notion of ‘digital atrophy’ and consumer capitalism within the technological and social environment we inhabit.
Academic Writing Needs More from Me, Myself and I
The move towards including the first person perspective is becoming more acceptable in academia, notes the University of Queensland’s Peter Ellerton, who adds, there are times when invoking the first person is more meaningful and even rigorous than not.
A Renaissance Primer on Academic Writing
Stoyan V. Sgourev, possibly the only management professor teaching (and indulging in) art history, argues that many of the key principles that guided the evolution of painting during the Italian Renaissance can be usefully applied to the domain of academic writing. Leonardo quite likely never intended to articulate advice on writing as an intellectual activity, but Stoyan borrows generously from his style and writings in formulating a number of basic principles that can help connect with the reader in a similar way to his paintings.
Jargon May Be Even Worse for Communicating Complexity Than You Thought
Jargon, a specialized language or set of expressions used by a specific group, is by its nature exclusionary, so it’s likely no surprise that scientific, technical or legal jargon may leave outsiders in the cold. A series of studies from researchers at Ohio State University suggests that jargon may turn off people well beyond an offending passage, and that one popular way to soften any harm – using jargon but immediately defining it – may not work.
Making Sense of Data in the 2019 General Election
Statistics are not the final objective answer to things. They can be interpreted in lots of different ways, even when none of those ways is wrong per se. That opens up a space for public debate, which is good news, but it also opens up a space where statistics can either be lauded as the truth (when they are not), or dismissed out of hand as ‘biased’.
Sizing Up a ‘One Size Does Not Fit All’ Mass Media
If you were going to create an encyclopedia about “mass media,” your first task likely would be to define both words in the term. Doing so was immeasurably easier in the 1920s, when the term “mass media” first started making the rounds, but it’s grown corresponding harder as both the popular conception of ‘mass’ has mutated and the very media itself has evolved from purely paper to heavily broadcast to OMG online.
