By offering a broad overview of the open data movement’s first 10 years, the editors of a recent collection of essays hope to provide an account that helps practitioners, policy-makers, community advocates, and anyone else in the open data movement, to progress the movement over the next 10 years…
The necessity of rigorous if uninspiring academic writing is perhaps best illustrated with the story of a prominent 18th-century intellectual named Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that illnesses were caused by blockages that interfered with the healthy flow of magnetic fluid through the body.
Here’s a clear, scientific reason drawn from the field of complexity economics to combat rising inequality: good business models that serve many people are becoming less profitable. Solid entrepreneurial ideas that would benefit everyone get passed over when there are easier opportunities to make money by catering to a few individuals with a whole lot of dollars to spend.
As part of their impact agenda, universities increasingly promote and train academics to carry out research collaborations across disciplines and with non-academic partners. While this can be impactful, Helen B. Woods argues that attempts to direct research in this way can produce inauthentic collaboration, and suggests an ideas-led approach.
In the last 20 years or so there has been much excitement, particularly in science and technology studies, about Actor-Network Theory. One of its most distinctive features is the way in which it ascribes agency to material objects. Perhaps we should not be crediting Bruno Latour or Michel Callon with the original insight – but an English humourist, Paul Jennings.
The popularization of mindfulness, write Daniel Nehring and Ashley Frawley, cannot just be understood as a recent response to public perceptions of a mental health crisis. Rather, it is the result of developments in academic psychology, in its clinical uses in psychotherapy, and in its growing commercial exploitation from the 1980s onwards.
A new machine learning tool can detect and classify different strengths of Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter. Bertie Vidgen and Taha Yasseri explain their processes in creating a new tool that detects Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter.
Danielle Tomasello describes The Social Scientist, a non-profit networking and outreach community of STEM professionals. Our volunteers answer questions that will benefit scientists’ interests, including a view of their work, environment and what it took for them to get there.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
Michael Burawoy, whose embrace of public sociology and the public at work lead him to describe his influential academic niche as “industrial […]
To address research credibility issues, we must reform the role of metrics, rankings, and incentives in universities.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of […]
Xenotransplantation is a fascinating subject – for obvious reasons, as it involves transplanting organs or other body parts across species boundaries (in […]
