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 […]
Why It’s So Hard to Reform Peer Review
Robert J. Marks, the director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, argues that academic reformers are battling numerical laws that govern how incentives work. His counsel? Know your enemy!
Writing Social Science Fiction in the Age of the Metrix
Burned out by the hamster-wheel of academe and the regime of metrics, John Postill decided the tonic would be to write a spoof spy thriller about a Spanish nerd with a silly name who moves to London in 1994 and accidentally foils a terrorist plot by an evil anthropologist.
HEPI Offers Clarion Call to Protect Free Speech on Campus
Concerns that free speech is being on university campuses, at least in the United Kingdom, are overblown, with the biggest threat originating not on campuses but from the government and its Prevent program. That’s a key takeaway in a new paper from Britain’s Higher Education Policy Institute, Free Speech and Censorship on Campus.
Sociology for Sale
In recent years, sociology has begun a twin global and decolonial turn, marked by a series of high-profile publications that have sought to engage with sociology’s roots outside the Global Northwest. So how effective have these efforts been?
Software Is Not the Silver Bullet to Defeat Plagiarism
Turnitin and similar programs don’t deal with the causes of plagiarism. Rather, argue Amanda Mphahlele and Sioux McKenna, they allow institutions to claim they’re doing something without really tackling the issues that lead students to plagiarize.
Fast Professor: WeChat and Future Academe
Daniel Nehring describes China’s social networking platform WeChat as ‘Facebook on steroids,’ and notes it has long surpassed e-mail as the main tool of mediating communication at Chinese universities while obliterating boundaries between work and home. Is this a cautionary tale for academe outside of China?
Whatever Happened to Conservative Social Thought?
In the wake of Brexit, Robert Dingwall asks a series of probing questions about the eclipse of Conservative Social Thought at universities, such as when did the social sciences last have a serious engagement with the institutions of the bourgeoisie, even though by income and status many of us would belong to that class?
Looking at Plan S From Down Under
Plan S focuses on making all publicly funded research immediately fully and freely available by open access publication. If Australia does not adopt Plan S, the authors argue, it could potentially restrict collaboration, publishing, and funding opportunities with research bodies who subscribe to this ambitious movement.
