Archive for 'Idiocy'
Manual Labor
As if health care reform, the mess in Afghanistan, and H1N1 weren’t enough to ruin your day, having to cope with new editions of two major style manuals (neither of which actually keeps up with new information formats because they keep changing) is one of those “in the cosmic scale of thing it’s really incredibly [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on October 18th, 2009 under Idiocy.
Comments: 21
I’ll Take the Humanities for Ten Thousand
Jennifer Howard of the Chron (subscription required) offers a preview of a study commissioned by the National Humanities Alliance and funded by Mellon which looked at the back office costs of flagship journals published by scholarly societies (many of them in the social sciences, oddly) and concluded that they actually cost more than STM journals. [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on July 20th, 2009 under Idiocy, Open Access, Research Issues, Scholarly Communications.
Comments: 2
This Journal Brought to You By . . .
It was shocking at the end of April when The Scientist reported that Elsevier had published a scholarly-journal-like series that was actually advertising paid for by Merck. The peer-reviewed-like articles in the journal-like object were either reprints or summaries of articles that reported results favorable to Merck drugs. There were also “review” articles that had [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on May 9th, 2009 under Commercialization, Idiocy, Information Ethics, Information Literacy, Scholarly Communications, information industries.
Comments: 5
Heather Has Two Mommies and Just Canceled her Amazon Account
A current kerfuffle on the Internets has to do with Amazon de-ranking GLBT-themed books as reported on the LA Times Jacket Copy blog.
Amazon’s policy of removing “adult” content from its rankings seems to be both new and unevenly implemented. On Saturday, self-published author Mark R. Probst noticed that his book had lost its ranking, [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on April 13th, 2009 under Commercialization, Idiocy, Information Ethics.
Comments: 5
Dumber Students Or Out Of Touch Academics
Are students getting dumber or are the academics working with them just getting more out of touch with those they teach? That debate has been hanging around for a while and now the noise level is increasing by more than a few decibles. I first wrote about this back in January 2006 when I discussed [...]
Posted by StevenB on September 15th, 2008 under Idiocy, Student Issues, Teaching.
Comments: 4