Archive | March, 2007

Economics conferences update

30 Mar

With the run up to the Easter holidays and a brief respite between terms, the economics conference season is in full swing – here’s a round-up of a few of them:

Royal Economic Society Conference 2007 is being held at the University of Warwick, with keynote speakers including Abhijit Banerjee from MIT, Martin Browning from Oxford and Al Roth from Harvard.

Scottish Economic Society Conference 2007 is being held in Perth and features the President’s Lecture given by Angus Deaton from Princeton, talking about “Growth, Poverty and the Improvement of Global Health”.

Economic History Society Conference 2007 is being held in Exeter and concludes with the Tawney Lecture from Cormac O Grada of University College Dublin on “The Ripple that Drowns: Twentieth Century Famines as Economic History”.

Welsh Economics Colloquium 2007 is being held in Gregynog, nr. Newtown in Powys and features keynotes from Michael Artis of Manchester University and Richard Harris from the University of Glasgow.

Explore the websites above for papers, press releases, research summaries and archives of previous conferences, with selected items appearing on the Economics in Action blog once the conferences are over.

While we are on the topic of conference, don’t forget that the call for papers for the Developments in Economics Education (DEE) conference organised by the Economics Network is still open.

Intute: Economics links to more information about economics conferences

The myth of user generated content?

28 Mar

A post from Jane Secker reporting on a session at the LILAC 2007 conference in Manchester, showed that Intute users or at least library and information professionals would like to see Intute review more user generated content. I hope to catch up with my colleagues who were at the session soon and find out what delegates specifically mean by user generated content.

Is user generated content all its cracked up to be? And is there much of it out there, that is educational? Wikipedia is often cited as the doyenne of user generated content, but people may not be using it for entirely scholarly purposes, which may drive others towards the newly founded Citizendium instead. And over 70% of the content is produced by just a few hundred people, despite Wikipedia’s global user base of millions and hundreds of thousands of registered users.

These figures should not come as a surprise, as they fit in with longer term trends about online participation stretching back to the use of discussion boards and other systems, as pointed out by Jakob Nielsen. Or to put them in a truly up-to-date context, the Freakonomics blogger Stephen J. Dubner recently explored the issue of blog comments and stated that the ratio of readers to commenters was gigiantic.

Perhaps the reality behind the user generated content hype is that most of us prefer to watch, rather than take part and that the lesson of everything 2.0 is not the current proliferation of blogs, wikis and social networking sites, but that users have collectively realised that they want to be able to edit, annotate, remix and create content themselves and not just be passive receivers of information.

But in the meantime, it’s worth pointing out that Intute: Social Sciences already features a fair slice of what is “traditionally” referred to as Web 2.0 or user generated content – we feature over 200 academic blogs, have reviews of various podcasts for the Social Sciences, as well as, producing some ourselves, plus we have even tracked down a few uses of wikis by the Social Science community.

Deep Throat (papers) exposed

27 Mar

The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has opened materials from Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s on Mark Felt, the source known as Deep Throat, to researchers, scholars and the public.

A selection of the Deep Throat materials can be viewed in an online exhibition from the Center, with images of the type written notes that Woodward would produce after his clandestine meetings with Deep Throat that often took place in an underground parking garage.

These meetings were memorably portrayed in the 1976 film All the President’s Men where actor Hal Holbrook summed up the way to crack the Watergate case was to “follow the money”, a phrase that Woodward does not recollect Felt using and may well have been improvised on the film set.

Felt’s identity as the high level source who helped Woodward, was kept secret for over 30 years until Felt’s relatives revealed him as The Guy They Called Deep Throat in a Vanity Fair article in 2005, which prompted Woodward and Bernstein to finally confirm the story in the Washington Post.

Sadly we will never know what motivated Felt to become an informant, due to his failing memory. However Woodward has written up his recollections of the meetings in the book The Secret Man and the honourable tradition of leaking information about governments in the public interest, has even been updated for the 21st century with the founding of the Wikileaks website.

Search Intute: Social Sciences for more on Nixon and Watergate

The Trap, freedom and Social Science

26 Mar

The latest series from Adam Curtis about how academic ideas have shaped modern society, The Trap: what happened to our dream of freedom follows in the footsteps of the Power of Nightmares and the Century of the Self.

While some in the blogosphere have been critical of Curtis and his portrayal of some of the theories and thinkers in this series, his grand sweep of intellectual synthesis and use of rapidly edited archive footage provides a visual and thought provoking spectacle that you rarely encounter anywhere else.

But what of the ideas and intellectuals that Curtis features? If you want to dig further and find out more about them, then Intute: Social Sciences can help.

The first programme looked at how mathematical models of human behaviour influenced security decisions in the Cold War and later the field of Economics as Game Theory sought to explain the economic choices made by people. It also looked at the ideas of R.D. Laing and his controversial work that challenged the role of psychiatry in the diagnosis in mental health disorders. Curtis brings these ideas together to explain the rejection of the idea that politicians and bureaucrats act in the public interest.

The second programme looked at the role of genes in determining behaviour and cited the Ax Fight anthropological study of the Yanomamo people, as well as, the work of Richard Dawkins. These ideas were brought together with the economic theories of Friedrich Von Hayek to produce governments obsessed with targets and measurable outcomes. Curtis argues that this obsession produced distorted outcomes, reduced social mobility and reinforced existing elites, causing economists to look again at the game theory / free market model and reassess the concept of behavioural economics.

The final programme saw how Isaiah Berlin’s work on liberty had shaped political theory and had been used to justify extreme economic deregulation in Russia, which produced a crisis in Russia’s economic transition. It concluded by looking at how neoconservative ideas about using military force to bring freedom to Nicaragua and Iraq had interacted with modern terrorism to end up restricting freedom in Western countries.

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More to life than Google?

23 Mar

New research from the ESRC has highlighted the limitations that academic researchers may encounter with Key Websites Buried in (an) Information Avalanche. As standard Internet search engines try to meet the needs of any and all potential users, it is therefore not surprising that there is a niche for a service like Intute which can focus on resources that better meet the requirements of the academic community.

Exploring the research further via the ESRC Project page and the Oxford Internet Institute project page, the researchers examine the “winner-takes-all” hypothesis whereby a small number of highly interlinked sites may be responsible for a high proportion of Internet traffic in specific subjects – this sounds somewhat like the Long Tail theory, which has been cited as indicative of online behaviour in a number of areas.

While it may be true that not being in the first 3 pages of a Google search may mean that a resource is invisible, it is also increasingly true that your Google search may not be the same as my Google search. The move to personalised search results may lead to a world where users don’t encounter resources that disagree with their own world view, an idea that is not just confined to Internet search, but has also appeared in the area of wikis, with Conservapedia being set up to counter the “liberal bias” of Wikipedia.

Other online commentators such as Karen Blakeman and Phil Bradley have tried to highlight the limitations of Google as a one-stop search solution and while Information Professionals always need to remember that the average user doesn’t find the process of finding things out as interesting as we do, the broader message about Information Literacy still needs to be made and in terms the academic community can relate to – it’s never a good idea to base a research strategy on a single source – Google or not.

It is a theme that will be explored further today at the Beyond the Search Engine debate at Oxford and the LILAC conference in Manchester next week which some Intute staff will be attending.

Or try using the Internet Detective from the Intute: Virtual Training Suite if you want to learn more about these issues or explore one of the subject based tutorials if you want to get to the best of the web on a particular topic.

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Budget 2007: reaction online

21 Mar

Gordon Brown has delivered his 11th Budget as Chancellor

Follow the online reaction via:

An excellent selection of links is available from the LSE Library

Brown opened by quipping that only Gladstone had delivered more Budgets and that he had only delivered his 12th by combining the roles of Prime Minister and Chancellor, a mistake he would not make.

Some of the other sources you can follow include:

  • Technorati for mentions of Gordon Brown on blogs
  • Google News for mainstream reaction from news sources
  • and of course search Intute: Social Sciences for more on budgets and Brown

Relevant Intute: Social Sciences browse sections include: Public Administration of the Economy, Macroeconomic Policy and Taxes and Taxation

Intute: Social Sciences Podcast 012

20 Mar

Listen to the programme (12 mins, 6 MB)

Welcome to the Intute: Social Sciences podcast.

This programme features a Social Welfare special, with interviews from our recent Internet for Social Welfare seminar and a selection of the new resources added to Intute: Social Sciences

Interviews

In this edition we talk to Angela Upton about SCIE, the Social Care Institute for Excellence and Sue Jardine about Social Care Online

Latest additions to Intute: Social Sciences

Featured resources in this podcast are:

To keep abreast of the latest additions to Intute: Social Sciences, visit our New Resources section, subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for email updates on MyIntute

If you have any comments about the Intute: Social Sciences Podcast, then please do get in touch by emailing paul.ayres@bristol.ac.uk and thanks for listening.

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Economics news round-up

16 Mar

The Economics Network have issued a call for papers for consideration for their upcoming Developments in Economics Education (DEE) conference, to be held in Cambridge in September. Plus there are still a few days left to fill in their survey of economics lecturers, which includes  the chance to win a Pocket PC.

Over on the Economics in Action blog this week, Intute: Economics have been contributing to their coverage of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. Romesh’s Greatest Hits are a Top 10 style run down of some of the Economics stories he has covered over the past year and enhanced with links to further Internet websites.

… and finally this week saw the release of a new 20 pound note featuring the famous economist and philosopher Adam Smith, the first Scotsman to feature on an English banknote. The Bank of England website features a webcast of Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, talking about Adam Smith.

Search Intute: Economics for more on the topics of banknotes, money and Adam Smith

ESRC Festival of Social Science

12 Mar

The ESRC Festival of Social Science is underway with over 70 events in 25 towns in cities throughout the country.

Some of the highlights from the events include a web preview of an upcoming book on Wellbeing in Developing Countries, and a two month free trial of the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences for UK businesses, not-for-profit organisations and European universities.

Intute: Social Sciences are running the Internet for Social Welfare seminar up in Edinburgh today and we are also contributing to the Economics in Action blog of the Economics Network – highlighting some topical Economics research from the last year.

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ESRC Festival of Social Science

9 Mar

The ESRC Festival of Social Science starts today and all told there will be over 70 events in 25 towns and cities throughout the country.

As part of the festivities the ESRC are also launching Britain Today – looking at the state of the nation in 2007 through the a mixture of academic opinion pieces alongside informed journalistic writing. Britain Today costs £3.95 and is available from WHSmith.

Leading academics have also contributed to the latest edition of The Edge another ESRC publication that digests what is happening in the world of Social Science research.

Intute: Social Sciences are running the Internet for Social Welfare seminar (now fully booked) in Edinburgh as part of the Festival. We hope to bring you some coverage from the seminar as part of the next Intute: Social Sciences Podcast in a couple of weeks time.

Search Intute: Social Sciences for ESRC related websites

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