Keith Brown, Kelli Barr, and I have a short piece published in the new issue of Nature.
The correspondence also contains a link to a slightly revised version of our original submission. Since Nature keeps everything behind a pay wall, here is that link.
Very interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts on the idea that seemingly negative events could be turned to indicate positive impact.
We all know — don’t we? — that our H-index can only grow with the passage of time. But Geoffrey Alderman has a plan, an impact plan, to ensure that our impact keeps growing in other ways, as well.
This is funny, and I’m sure Professor Alderman is poking fun at the very idea of impact. Nevertheless, there’s a serious angle to this. Many of us, whether we want to admit it or not, are involved in academia in an effort to change the world. And many of us are well aware that we may have to wait to be born posthumously, as Nietzsche said.
In any case, while we play the long game, it’s nice to have diversions such as this, occasionally:
“We are trying to protect our orthodoxy, not to let anyone to wipe their feet on our faith,” said Manana Okhanashvili. “We must not allow them to have a gay demonstration here.”
via Gay Rights Rally Is Attacked in Georgia – NYTimes.com.
I have a few things to say about this. First, shame on all of y’all (including myself) who assumed this was the state of Georgia, USA.
Second, people who use religion as justification for hate ought to rethink the whole thing. Really, you have no sense of shame, so shame on you for that.
Finally, I actually redacted the quote, above, from the NT Times. Here it is in its entirety, with the part I previously omitted in bold:
“We are trying to protect our orthodoxy, not to let anyone to wipe their feet on our faith,” said Manana Okhanashvili, in a head scarf and long skirt. “We must not allow them to have a gay demonstration here.”
Now, what conclusion are we supposed to draw from that snippet? That Manana Okhanashvili is a religious zealot? I think we got that from the words and actions. Let’s stop feeding into stereotypes by judging people by the clothes they wear, ok, NYT? Or did I misunderstand the true necessity of that bit of detail?
Don’t Go to Grad School | LinkedIn.
This is definitely worth reading — and thinking about very carefully.
Comments now open on proposed policy to allow more fracking on public lands.
Librarian Dave Puplett discusses the role of the librarian.
Interesting to view the librarian as midwife — very Socratic. At the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID), we’ve discussed the possibility of the philosopher bureaucrat before, along with what constitutes ‘real’ philosophy. What about the philosopher librarian?
A librarian should be well positioned to affect scholarly communication — for instance, she may well be involved with Open Access policies, such as the one we recently adopted at UNT, or be an advocate for them at her institution.
In the latter situation, the librarian will have to convince the university community that an Open Access policy is in the university’s interest. In the former situation, unless the existing policy is mandatory, it will be up to the librarian not only to disseminate information about the policy to the researchers at the institution, but also to make a case that those researchers ought to participate. In other words, the librarian will have to be able to construct an effective argument — the classic skill of the philosopher. Either the librarian will have to become a philosopher, or a philosopher will have to become the librarian.
For our other posts on Open Access, click here.
So, I found Amber today on Twitter. I forget exactly how. Anyway, she was, or so I thought, an IT person saying philosophically interesting things. Now, she has revealed that, in fact, SHE’S A PHILOSOPHER! I should have known.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how my philosophy degree has shaped my thinking, and how many people I meet in my workworld that have philosophy degrees. In fact I was discussing that with David Mossley just recently.
I’ve been forming a little theory about why that is, and this evening I just read a post by Professor Peter Bradley, a philosopher about why there are not very many visible philosophers in the “digital humanities” field. It didn't quite match my perception of the digital space, so I got to thinking I might write this post after all.
Way back I heard an episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4, where they were debating philosophers vs scientists. It struck me as rather a “what did the philosophers ever do for us”? question.
In everyday language, philosophy is seen as:
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A good rundown of some of the technology available to academics (including altacademics) that raises the question of academic identity. Nice to see an IT person questioning this idea. Librarians also tend to be aware of this stuff — as they should be. I think both university librarians and IT professionals can help reach out to academics to spread the word.
You’re probably familiar with Linked-in: it is a profile service for many sorts of people and I’ve noticed that outside the UK it is used for academic networking too, more so than inside the UK, at least in the circles I move in. It has 225 million members. You might not know about Academia.edu (nearly 3 million) and researchgate (2.8 million). They are examples of social networks for academics. Google scholar allows academics to manage their publications profile. Flavours.me is one of several personal profile tools that allows you to pull together identity over many platforms.
Now comes ORCID, a researcher identifier scheme increasingly being adopted by big publishers and third party web services alike. In it’s own words:
“ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated…
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The latest in the showdown between Rep. Lamar Smith and NSF.
NSF Says No to Congressman’s Request for Reviewer Comments – ScienceInsider.
Interesting to think about the limits of confidentiality here.
Dude … they also do plants over at PhyloPic.
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