By Colleen Flaherty. “That’s kind of the headline finding to me, that in three-quarters of academic fields there’s a gender imbalance towards men,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher in the institutes’ education program and co-author of Exploring Gender Imbalance Among STEM Doctoral Degree Recipients. Read more...
By Colleen Flaherty. Much of the world’s knowledge is contained in JSTOR, a vast digital academic library. But most of that content is behind a subscription wall. And if you’re not looking for something specific -- or even if you are -- attempting to take in all that knowledge can be an overwhelming experience. Read more...
By Brian Mathews. At conferences I often end up in conversations that go like this:
“I want to do this innovative thing but my administration won’t get onboard—what can I do?”
This is difficult because there are so many factors that need to be unbundled. A common problem I’ve realized is that librarians never learn the art of pitching. [Note to ACRL: I’m willing to do a free webinar on this topic sometime in Summer 2015.]
In the entrepreneurial world there is a lot of talk about recognizing the difference between ideas and opportunities. More...
By Chris Takacs. Colleges are human institutions, with all the messiness and adaptability that living creatures bring with them. The best colleges realize this and operate accordingly. More...
By Laurie Essig. California’s enacting on Sunday of the “yes means yes” law is a victory for some campus feminist activists but an ill-conceived detour for feminism. More...
By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. For those of us who value intellectual and political freedom, what could be more heartening than the sight of thousands of students and other “umbrella” protesters in Hong Kong defying Communist authorities and asserting democratic ideals? Meanwhile, on the mainland, what could be more dismaying than China’s sentencing of the Uighur economics professor Ilham Tohti to life in prison on charges of separatism. More...
By Jason B. Jones. Longtime readers (George, mom) will know that I have a giant internet crush on Merlin Mann, who most people outside of Tallahassee first heard about through his productivity-themed website 43folders, then through his Inbox Zero e-mail talk at Google, and most recently as a podcaster on shows such as Back to Work, Roderick on the Line, and You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene. (How big a crush? I invited him for a 3-talk visit back in the day.) Merlin usually says that he’s interested in time and attention, and in creative work. Read more...By Anastasia Salter. If you’ve been on Twitter or Facebook lately, you might have seen the first apparent signs of a migration, with users announcing their new account names on the currently invitation-only social network Ello. This isn’t the first time there’s been a new network apparently on the horizon (remember the short-lived exodus to App.net, the still-on-life-support Google Plus, and the decentralized concept of Diaspora pods? Konrad, at least, certainly appreciated Diaspora.), but it’s caught the attention of those looking for an alternative to the advertising-heavy and commercial space of Facebook. Of course, right now it’s pretty empty. Read more...
By Ben Yagoda. I just turned in to the publisher the final version of a book, and have now started on this post. Not exactly a Trollope move, but it’ll have to do. (“Every day for years, Trollope reported in his ‘Autobiography,’ he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next.” —Joan Acocella.)
My satisfaction, pride, and relief in having finished were tempered, a little bit, by the number 80,517. That’s how many words are in the book and, frankly, they don’t quite seem like enough. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. It’s got an all-star cast: Steven Pinker of Harvard, John McWhorter of Columbia, Geoffrey Nunberg of Berkeley, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Adele Goldberg of Princeton, Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty, Brad Hoover of Grammarly, Bryan Garner of A Dictionary of American Usage, and dozens of other marquee attractions, including (way down in the credits) yours truly. I’m talking about Grammar Revolution, a quirky feature-length documentary by David and Elizabeth O’Brien, which is intended—I think—to wake us all up. More...
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