By Jennifer Polk. “When did you decide to leave academia?” This question, or some version of it — “How did you know that you didn’t want to be a professor?” for example — is one I’m regularly asked. It comes up in conversation, on Twitter, or when I’m on a careers panel. It’s a fair inquiry, and the questioner tends to ask because she is wrestling with making a decision about her own future. But it’s a question that I can’t answer. More...

By Nana Lee, Zayna Khayat and Reinhart Reithmeier. Improving your ability to communicate your research clearly and concisely can help you secure funding, impress in job interviews and even just refocus your brain when you get stuck on a paper or article. More...

By Shari Graydon. Improving your ability to communicate your research clearly and concisely can help you secure funding, impress in job interviews and even just refocus your brain when you get stuck on a paper or article. More...

By Chantal Braganza. As pornography has proliferated in the digital era, so too has its study, even though this multidisciplinary field has been around for at least 30 years. But, say scholars, the study of sexually explicit subject matter has often been muddied by a binary pro- or anti-porn attitude. More...

By Melonie Fullick. If you’re like me and you’re attached to the sensory experience of using paper, and you don’t like having ever-increasing numbers of gadgets around, then you might not have considered using any kind of e-reader. You might have sniffed at the idea of abandoning the pleasures of books and papers in order to squint at a wee screen. More...

By David Kent. This quarter featured one of our most heavily commented on posts since the classic “Say NO to the second postdoc entry” in 2009, but unlike the personal angst that the postdoctoral post dredged up, this quarter’s “Sorry Rick Mercer, I’d love to agree but I think you’re wrong” post was about the level of interest Canadians had in all things science. More...

By Léo Charbonneau. According to its most recent annual report (PDF, pg. 26), the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario received roughly $5.5 million in operating funds from the provincial government for the 2012-13 fiscal year. The amount of quality research the council is able to conduct with that relatively modest sum is impressive. More than 90 percent of its funding goes to research activities, the rest to governance and administration. More...

By Martha Crago. Convergence is in the air.
October 22, 2014, I was in lockdown in the Ottawa Convention Centre. I had arrived there for a meeting at 9:30 a.m. after  walking with a colleague from our hotel. On our way, we had stopped briefly at the War Memorial as we talked about upcoming Remembrance Day activities in Halifax. More...

By John Osborne. On Tuesday, Jan. 6, the university librarian wrote to ask me to participate in the second annual “Freedom to Read” event which will be held at Carleton University on the Monday after reading week. I receive a great many such invitations on more or less a daily basis, and it is impossible to accept them all. So my immediate reaction was to decline; but the horrific events in Paris the following day, Wednesday Jan. 7, caused me to change my mind. This attack was not simply a murderous assault on the staff of Charlie Hebdo, but more broadly a challenge to the very notion of free speech, itself a sine qua non of a free society. This challenge is particularly relevant to universities, given the special role which we play in society, a role that perhaps might be thought of as society’s collective “conscience”. Of course this is not the only role which universities play, but it is an important one, particularly in the broad domain of the humanities and social sciences. And thus I hope that the slogan which has been heard at public demonstrations and vigils in recent days, Je suis Charlie, will be embraced fervently by all of us in academic life. More...