How the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology became a multimillion dollar organization promoting bullshit science through fake conferences and journals.
Tag: research
👓 Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | 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.
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
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
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
🔖 ❤️ Protohedgehog tweet
DO NOT add this as the URL for a bookmark:
— Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog) June 10, 2018
javascript:location.hostname += '.sci-hub.tw'
Which when you click on a paywalled research article, automatically takes you to the @Sci_Hub version of it.
And DO NOT try this, see that it works wonderfully, and share it with others.
🔖 jayvanbavel tweet
I tried something new at my weekly lab meeting.
Normally we start the meeting by announcing any upcoming events and celebrating accomplishments from lab members (eg papers, awards, graduations, presentations). This week we added failures & setbacks to the announcements. 1/n — Jay Van Bavel (@jayvanbavel) June 2, 2018
reply to tkasasagi tweet
👓 Manifold Scholarship
Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works
👓 Malu Is Like A Golden Ticket | 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.
👓 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
👓 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
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”.
References this study: Moving chairs in Starbucks.1
References
👓 The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) | Nieman Lab
New metrics specifically for news articles.
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
👓 French researchers pledge to go without Springer journals | Times Higher Education
‘No more direct access to Springer’s latest papers? No problem,’ says petition, signed by nearly 4,000