By Rosemarie Emanuele. Triangular numbers are numbers that can be arranged into equilateral triangles. For example, the number three can form such a triangle with two dots on the base and one on the top, yielding three sides each with two elements in them. Read more...
By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Economics, we often talk of goods and services as being “needs” or “wants.” Needs are things like food and housing, which one cannot do without, while wants are things that are optional, but desired. Read more...
By Rosemarie Emanuele. In math, two numbers, such as ½ and 2, are called “reciprocals” if, when multiplied together, their product is one. I thought of this recently when discussing what my daughter’s college search will look like. She will most likely choose a college that is on a list of schools that provide “reciprocal” tuition to employees of Ursuline. Read more...
By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Statistics, we often use a probability distribution, the “Z” distribution, that is usually called the “normal” distribution. This is because the mean of this distribution is set at some value that is agreed upon as being the most common value of the variable in question. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. A Wikipedia editor who I know, Karen Coyle, recently left the site, finding it an inhospitable place for a woman. It’s nothing new. But considering the cumulative impact of the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” it’s troubling when it turns out a lot of people actually can’t edit it because there’s a significant chance they will run into fellow editors who engage in trollish behavior. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. I noted with loud applause the launch of SocArXiv just in the nick of time. SSRN had been a for-profit but pretty useful place to store papers in the social sciences, but it was fairly old-school; since it didn’t have the resources to make renovations, it teamed up with Elsevier and that makes it no longer useful for those who think making research findings public should be in the public interest, not in shareholders’ interest. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics starts out with a bang: Seek truth and report it. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Allison Gopnik, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, had an interesting piece in last Sunday’s New York Times that has been sticking to my brain like a burr. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. I’ve read David Lewis’s wide-angle provocations in the past, so when I picked up his new book, Reimagining the Academic Library, I expected my thoughts to be provoked. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. All signs point toward an open access future for scholarship. The pressure from funders as well as from academic authors to publish openly is growing. Read more...
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