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 […]
Unknown Unknowns: The War on Null and Negative Results
The Wellcome Trust, a large funder of biomedical research, is keen to ensure that the findings of that research are widely and openly shared. Here, Jonathon Kram and Adam Dinsmore from the trust’s evaluation team discuss why any apparent bias against writing up and publishing certain types of results would impede scientific progress.
Proof Over Promise: Finding An Impact Factor for Your Career
Publishing in a high-impact journal carries the implicit promise that somehow an individual article also will be highly cited. But the proof of this logic remains unsubstantiated. How about measuring career impact more than journal impact? The authors offer one option they’ve developed.
Myers-Briggs at Work? Might Be a Terrible Idea (MBTI)
Academics already tend to have a bone to pick with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as anything other than a parlor game. Nonetheless, while the personality test has a hold on the popular imagination it shouldn’t enter the workplace.
Old Dominion’s Madhavan Heads Human-Systems Integration Board
Poornima Madhavan, the founder and director of the Applied Decision Making Lab at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, will direct the Board on […]
Defining Policy: Climate Change Governmental Policy in Africa
in our debut cross-posting with Viva Voce Podcasts, Simon Chin-Yee describes his research studying how the political network in Kenya interacts with the changes wrought by climate change.
Leveling the Career Playing Field … with Audio
Viva Voce is a website platform that allows social science researchers to set up five minute podcasts about their research.
Gemma Sou argues podcasts are an ideal medium for early career researchers as social media tend to mirror the academic environment, with CV-like publication lists and stratified networks. By literally giving researchers a voice, findings can be brought to life and a more level playing field for researchers can be established.
The Risks–Both Serious and Subtle–of Fieldwork
Amiera Sawas writes here on her experiences with risks in the field and beyond, finding that institutional protocols are undoubtedly robust on a wide range of physical threats, but more subtle threats, like sexual harassment, which cross psychological and physical lines, are not always explicitly dealt with.
What Do Academia’s Ubiquitous Rankings Accomplish?
Why does it matter whether you study or work at the sociology department that comes first, 12th or 89th in a ranking? Why does it matter whether the journal you publish in is included and ranked in a certain index, or not? Let us know your thoughts.
