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 […]
University Decolonization: More Than Mere Iconoclasm
The decolonization debate in African universities raises critical issues about the relationship between power, knowledge and learning, argues Ahmed Essop. It also provides an opportunity to rethink the role of universities in social and economic development and in fashioning a common nation.
Tapping the Value of Positive Psychology
We can all aspire to aim higher, not merely to be free of problems, but to try and truly flourish as human beings and make the most of our all too brief lives. And psychology should have a role in that, says Tim Lomas.
Does Competition Make Peer Review More Unfair?
Researchers decided to conduct behavioral testing on competition and the process of peer review. What they learned offers some prescriptions for improving peer review going forward.
Is It Genre – or Valence and Depth – You Like About a Tune?
Sorting music by genre often says more about the sorter than it does about the tune. A new system developed by an interdisciplinary team has come up with a three-dimension test for determining what someone will like apart from the label.
The Challenge of Regulating Research to Avoid Fraud
The more brazen the willingness to commit academic fraud, the harder it becomes to prevent, suggests Ian Freckelton. So while there is a role for codes of conduct or even criminal courts, finding ways to push temptation to deceive even further out of mind will likeley prove even more successful.
If We Scrap Tenure, What Would Replace It?
Universities need faculty who are dedicated to teaching, but the most persuasive argument in support of tenure – its role in protecting academic freedom– has come to be too narrowly associated with research.
What Does an Anthropologist Actually Do?
Anthropologists use ethnographic methods designed to facilitate their competency in another culture to understand what people do, think, feel and say that might seem strange to an outsider but are completely familiar to an insider. But what does that mean in practice?
Universities Need to Escape the Trap of Competition
There is a modern-day notion that competition will solve all problems, says Rajani Naidoo, and higher education can get trapped in a kind of magical thinking that makes a fetish out of competition.
