👓 Hundreds of Researchers From Top Universities Were Published in Fake Academic Journals | Motherboard

Read Hundreds of Researchers From Top Universities Were Published in Fake Academic Journals (Motherboard)
How the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology became a multimillion dollar organization promoting bullshit science through fake conferences and journals.

👓 Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon

Read Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it by Jon Tennant (Aeon)
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
I agree with much of what he’s saying here, but it’s so dense and talks around the issue so much that it’s simply just another diatribe against the system. While there is a prescriptive portion, we’re going to need a whole lot more in terms of a list of what individuals and institutions should be doing.

So yes, more of the how to fix it piece please.

👓 This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time | Extend Activity Bank

Read This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time by Alan Levine (Extend Activity Bank)
I sometimes tell people that when technology evangelists espouse that their tool saves you time, that it’s a red flag warning / code talk for “I am lying”. These days many people rely on social media and their own professional learning networks to provide them information of interest. And these do work well to some degree... <a href="https://extend-bank.ecampusontario.ca/assignments/indispensable-tool/" class="more-link" title="Read This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time">Read more »</a>

👓 La plus rare et la plus pure | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Read La plus rare et la plus pure by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
After yesterday’s search for the source of Simone Weil’s oft-quoted “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” went a bit Lot-49ish on me, I wondered whether I should just have been satisfied with that “attributed to.” But I’m glad I didn’t let it go, for a couple of reasons.

Reply to a reply to Dan Cohen tweet

Replied to Reply to Dan Cohen tweet by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)
Dan, There are a lot of moving pieces in your question and a variety of ways to implement them depending on your needs and particular website set up. Fortunately there are lots of educators playing around in these spaces already who are experimenting with various means and methods as well as some of their short and long term implications.
@jbj Given the number of people I’ve seen experimenting over the past months, I’d be happy to put together a series of short pieces for @ProfHacker covering the areas of overlap of between , , , research, academic publishing, samizdat, commonplace books, etc. Essentially tighter versions of some of https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/ but specifically targeting the education space using WordPress, Known, and Grav. Let me know if you’d accept submissions for the community.

🔖 ❤️ Protohedgehog tweet

Bookmarked a tweet by Jon TennantJon Tennant (Twitter)
This suggests some interesting bookmarklet functionality.

🔖 jayvanbavel tweet

Bookmarked a tweet by Jay Van Bavel on TwitterJay Van Bavel on Twitter (Twitter)
Van Bavel outlines an interesting change in how he’s running lab meetings.

reply to tkasasagi tweet

Replied to a tweet by tkasasagitkasasagi (Twitter)
I hope you do blog about it, I’m sure many would find it useful. I’ve been using my own website as a commonplace book for a while now, not only for blogging as you’ve considered, but also to bookmark interesting things, to highlight and make notes of what I read, and generally use it as my online notebook/research/study space. I do post some personal tidbits, but a large amount of what I post (both research and personal) is actually private and only viewable by me. Perhaps worth considering as you continue your studies which others have interest in as well?

👓 Malu Is Like A Golden Ticket | Christopher Lynn – Medium

Read Malu Is Like A Golden Ticket by Christopher Lynn (Christopher Lynn – Medium)
This piece is about the fieldwork I’ve conducted the past two summers. I just wrote it the weekend before the first day of class, so, for better or worse, students heard an early draft of this story that may get published on its own somewhere or in a book some day in some form that will probably ultimately be very different than this. I wrote it because I think our work this summer epitomizes the nature of neuroanthropology as essentially biocultural, and because I think this story encapsulates much of our experience of fieldwork this summer. There may be less neuro than you’d expect here, given the course I read it to, but it’s the ethnographic prelude before we’ve finished collecting and analyzing the neuro data.
This was a long read, but utterly fascinating!

👓 Johnson: Does speaking German change how I see social relationships? | The Economist

Read Johnson: Does speaking German change how I see social relationships? (The Economist)
Different languages condition different habits of mind—but perhaps not entirely different worldviews
I wonder what this same type of research looks like for pronouns of non-binary people?

👓 Your behavior in Starbucks may reveal more about you than you think | Science | AAAS

Read Your behavior in Starbucks may reveal more about you than you think (Science | AAAS)
Cultural differences are revealed in coffee shop etiquette, study in China finds

👓 With the grain: sociology | Espresso: The Economist

Read With the grain: sociology (The Economist (Espresso))
Research has shown that wealthier, urbanised regions tend to harbour more individualistic personalities, while poorer, agrarian areas have more collectivist, community-minded ones. But why? A study from the University of Chicago published this week suggests such differences could be down to a region’s predominant crops—an insight gleaned, improbably, from observing nearly 9,000 customers in Chinese cafes. People in China’s south farm rice, which requires a whole village’s co-operation on irrigation; in the north, they grow wheat, far less demanding of collective effort. The researchers’ first observation was that latte-lovers in wheat-growing regions were far more likely to be alone. Then the team surreptitiously blocked thoroughfares with chairs. Among northerners, 16% shifted the chairs (individualism is marked by actively modifying one’s environment), while only 6% from the rice-cultivating south did so (collectivists tend to work with what they’ve got). It’s an intriguing sociological suggestion, perhaps to be filed under “you are what you eat”.
Randomly ran across this over the weekend and seems like the kind of cultural/food-related study that Jeremy Cherfas would enjoy.

References this study: Moving chairs in Starbucks.1

References

1.
Talhelm T, Zhang X, Oishi S. Moving chairs in Starbucks: Observational studies find rice-wheat cultural differences in daily life in China. Science Advances. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap8469. Published April 25, 2018. Accessed April 28, 2018.

👓 The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) | Nieman Lab

Read The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) by Laura Hazard Owen (Nieman Lab)
New metrics specifically for news articles.
I love that there’s research1 going on in this area and it portends some potentially great things for reading, but the devil’s advocate in me can also see a lot of adtech people salivating over the potential dark patterns lurking in such research. I can almost guarantee that Facebook is salivating over this, though to be honest, they’ve really pioneered the field haven’t they, just in a much smaller area of use. Of course I’m also curious if they did or are planning any research in how people read content on social media?

I wonder what it would look/feel like to take each of these modalities and apply them individually for long periods of time to everything one read? Or to use them in rotation regardless of the subject being read? Or other permutations? I suppose in general I like to read how I like to read, but now I’m going to be more conscious of what and how I’m doing it all.

References

1.
Grinberg N. Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text. WWW ’18 Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3186180. Published April 23, 2018. Accessed April 27, 2018.

👓 French researchers pledge to go without Springer journals | Times Higher Education

Read French researchers pledge to go without Springer journals (Times Higher Education (THE))
‘No more direct access to Springer’s latest papers? No problem,’ says petition, signed by nearly 4,000