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Follow your own publishing path |
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Monday, 22 September 2008 |
One of the familiar laments of BlogScholar emerges again in the New York Times:
“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in
the textbook publishers,” said R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech. “We have lots of knowledge, but we
are not getting it out.”
McAfee accuses academic publishers of dumbing down textbook content to reach the widest possible audience at intolerably high prices. So he took the option of publishing his new economics textbook for free on the Web in Word or PDF while offering selected booksellers the right to sell hard copies at a siginificant discount.
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Latest BlogScholars - Sep 2008 |
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Wednesday, 10 September 2008 |
It is always a pleasure to review all the submissions that come into
the BlogScholar academic blog directory. Even some of the spam can be
entertaining - submitted to linguistics category "... the lingeree blog
teaches you how to use creative linguistics to peel back the layers of
your girlfriend's lingeree" or submitted to life sciences "... the
science of life is really all about people, and people are all about
sex, so read more about sex on our blog and improve your life sciences".
What is particularly startling about the last one is that someone with
a pornographic sex blog would imagine that submitting it to the life
sciences category in the BlogScholar academic blogs directory would
actually improve the traffic. Last time I checked SEX was just barely
outstripping LIFE SCIENCE in online search terms but as we all know the
Internetwork moves so fast ...
But on a more serious note there have been some really good
Blogscholars submitted lately so I thought I would take a moment to
draw attention to a few.
- Eight Minutes Old
notes as many sightings as he can find of pareidolia, false images our
brains make up from patterns that have nothing to do with them. Jesus
and the Virgin Mary abound.
- Female Science Professor writes that ... "I still feel like I don't understand why, given the number of science
blogs in existence, some people think that this particular blog should
have more scientific content. Does it mean this blog is less rigorous?
- Dracula vs Eisenstein
brings attention to an idea we all should have thought of long ago -
paint a picture of something you want to buy, sell the painting for the
cash you need to buy the real item you painted.
- Some students might contend that every academic blog could go by the title "Cranky Professor" but if they were all as good as this one and this one it might not be such a bad idea.
- And finally Everyday Science tries to pinpoint Michael Phelps' movements in the pool to the nano-degree and Daniel Craig learns the guitar
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India: Academic Crocodile |
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Tuesday, 08 July 2008 |
If your blogroll doesn't include Indian scholars and academics now,
wait a few years and play catch-up because as the Indian proverb says:
"If you are going to live by the river, make friends with the
crocodile". India is serving notice to the global academic community of
a new dawn in global power and presense. Don't get eaten. Make friends.
India is the fastest growing region of Internet use in the world. During the first half of 2008 India's internet use grew by 27% with over 28 million current users. It is often ignored
by those academics claiming undue western industrialized influence over
the Internet that Asia long ago surpassed North America and Europe in
Internet use. Despite the fact that Asia only enjoys 14%
population penetration of Internet this translates to a massive 38% of
global internet usage (compared to 17.5% in North America and 27% in
Europe) and can only grow from here. This is the reality of the real
global Internet. The idea of the west managing or exploiting the
Internet for neo-colonial means will be a distant memory in a few years.
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