Archive for October 4th, 2007
Her With Her Foot in Her Mouth
Asmaa Abdol-Hamid is worth a blogpost at some time. If she continues along this line, she’ll be the new Kresten Poulsgaard.
Bonus information: The Unity List has spin-doctors.
Next: Total World Domination
AaB 0 – 0 Sampdoria = Sampdoria out of the UEFA Cup, AaB on to the group stage. This is the first time a Danish side has managed to knock out an Italian side in an international tournament – maybe not as great as OB’s victory against Real Madrid in the mid-1990s but still an achievement.
The international team is hopeless, Brøndby IF is almost dead and buried and FC Midtjylland got blitzed in Moscow, but apart from that everything is fine. Well, almost … FC København ought to make a goal or five in the next fifteen minutes.
Update at 21.48: One goal coming up…
Update at 21.55: Totally forgot about OB – Sparta Praha. The doctors will be prescribing a lot of tranquillisers in Odense.
Update at 22.45: Never mind the tranquillisers. They’ll be needing anti-depressants in Odense.
Update at 23.13: FC København 2 – 1 Lens. Too bad about OB.
Bombs in Copenhagen – in 1985
How short memory is: Copenhagen has in fact been the scene for a terrorist attack – in 1985. Now a Swedish court has reduced – or rather limited – the sentence for one of those involved.
I don’t know why I, and most likely most other people, had forgotten about the incident.
An Editorial Oops
I discovered that I for some reason had published the post “Condition Red” twice. No idea why, but I’ve deleted the version without comments.
Search 2.0.0.7
Earlier today, I attended a lecture by Lars Iselid who is a librarian at the Medical University Library here in Umeå about what is happening in the world of searching. These are some reflections which are more or less linked to Iselid’s discussion. Iselid has two homepages – internetbrus.com in Swedish and nowherenorth in English.
Back in the good old days – by this I mean the 1980s – searching for sources for academic research was relatively easy: If you were a Danish political scientist (or studying political science in Denmark), you only had to check out Politica, Scandinavian Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research and American Political Science Review to get a reasonable picture of the lay of the land. And students were used to reading them: Articles were assigned in courses from the first semester.
Academics also published their results in something called books back then. They were relatively easy to access at libraries.
If you needed more information, the not particularly handy Social Science Citation Index and International Political Science Abstracs – they were published and updated in huge cloth-bound volumes every three months – were available at the Royal Library. The real problem with both the SSCI and IPSA was that nine out of ten references you found in most cases turned out to be useless for your work – but you would only find out after looking up the referenced journals. The good thing was that after shifting all that paper, you didn’t need any extra physical exercise.
Since the mid-1980s it’s been down- or perhaps rather uphill all the way. The discipline has expanded and diversified and political pressures for international (i.e. English-language) peer-reviewed publications has meant that books are now obsolete while the number of scientific journals have exploded.
What, exactly, is the difference between the Journal of European Policy, the Journal of Social Policy and the Journal of European Social Policy? You have five seconds to give a precise answer! 
Enter digitalisation and the internet.
In one way, the internet is a great thing because you have all the information in the world at your disposal at the tip of some keys.
Except, you don’t. Lots of relevant stuff is in closed databases or behind paywalls – this is especially a problem for academic journals – and not easily accessible. And what is easily accessible – googleable might be a useful term here – is often of dubious quality.
And more specifically: How do we deal with this from a didactic perspective? How do we un-google new students (meaning: How can we teach them, that Google and similar search engines are some tools, not the tools to collecting information?)
Universities and colleges have an advantage because they have libraries and even more importantly librarians. Libraries are not just collections of information: They are also organised collections of information and guides to independent searches.
Therefore, the didactic rule #1 in academic education must be to give students a thorough introduction to the college or university library and its human, material and digital resources. There is a world beyond Google.
Just to elaborate a bit on this: Google and similar search engines are great general tools, but there are times where you need more specialised tools. There are times when a screwdriver is more useful than a hammer.
Didactic rule #2 is that students should have a thorough introduction to and exercises in source criticism. Who produced this material? Which sources is it based on? And so on. (Yes, I’ve worked with historians and I’ve taught Methods).
Rule #3 is that it is essential for students to know the difference between an unscientific (say, a political) argument, an encyclopaedic article and a research article (or book). They all have their uses but in different contexts. As teachers we should also remember to show what the specific value of academic articles and books are – during my years in the Swedish system I have often felt that this was a problem due to the way courses are organised and the rules of the copyright system. (A related problem is the lack of emphasis on methodology in courses in political science – many students have problems reading and interpreting academic articles).
But what about Wikipedia, Google, Google Scholar compared with other sources and databases and what about open access publishing compared with commercial academic journals? I’ll try to get back to that later.
links for 2007-10-04
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Zack Snyder’s film is ‘comic-book’ entertainment, but that is little excuse for its xenophobia, amorality and inaccuracy.
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Det är fascinerande att det på bloggar är möjligt att skriva på ett sätt som är så vulgärt att det vore omöjligt i press eller i etermedier. Det är som om det som sägs på bloggen inte sägs på riktigt.
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Ett möjlig förklaring till att så många läst Alex Schulmans blogg kan vara att de tror att Alex Schulman är på riktigt. … Vilket inte är så säkert.
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Globalisation may call for retrenchment of governments’ redistribution activity, but if private insurance and financial markets are to be able to replace the income smoothing, we need stronger supervisory, regulation, and antitrust actions.
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My view is that Americans are more likely to overrate the value of buying a home, if only because they underestimate the probability of divorce. It is also harder for them to imagine career opportunities in other geographic areas, plus many people overest
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A visit to Beijing generates two immediate impressions: growth continues at top speed; and, surprisingly, there’s little sign of any real instability anywhere.
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But when it comes to the underlying message, and the standards of evidence used to support it, “The Shock Doctrine” is a true economics disaster.
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I think we should be concerned by the way that history has suddenly become more elitist than almost every other major discipline in the humanities and social sciences.
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As the dollar has started to slide, the question is: how far, how fast? This column, which is based on Paul Krugman’s recent Economic Policy article suggests the answers are: pretty far and pretty fast.
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More and more, people are demanding action on global warming, but carbon taxes appear to be a very unpopular solution to the problem: