Archive | November, 2009

Get Social Science research on your iPhone

24 Nov

The Social Science Research Network is a world wide collaborative of over 800 scholars that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research.

To that end, they have just released a new app for the iPhone / iPod Touch allowing users to search and read the full text of over 250,000 papers.
issrn

They say

“iSSRN, our free iPhone App, was released recently. It provides instant access to the latest Social Science and Humanities research in the SSRN eLibrary from scholars around the world. iSSRN is available from Apple’s iTunes store.

iSSRN allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to search over 250,000 papers and read the full text of the papers directly on their device.”

The app is very easy to install and use, with the PDF versions of papers quite nicely presented and the multi-touch functionality enabling you to zoom in and out of key passages – although there is a limit to the amount of serious reading that you can do on a screen that small.

The SSRN includes a number of subject specific covering Economics, Management, Political Science, Law and other topics.  The networks encourage the early distribution of research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of research papers.

Intute features more Internet resources from the Social Sciences.

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Economics audio and video

23 Nov

Royal Economic Society logoThis week the Royal Economic Society (RES) annual public lecture will be delivered by Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsay Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, on ‘Law and Morality in Economic Life’.

The lecture will explore fundamental questions about our world by looking at differences in institutions – cultural, legal, social, political and economic – within which people try to shape their lives. He will argue that the importance of law and morality in economic life follows from the essentiality of trust in the social world. The enormous differences in people’s lives are based in the extent to which they trust one another to comply with agreements.

The RES website features videos of lectures from previous years, while the RES annual conference website features a range of videos of keynote addresses and special sessions from the 2009 conference at the University of Surrey.

The RES are not the only economics related organisation to make lecture videos available. The Economic History Society have published the last three Tawney Memorial Lectures on their website, looking at the Britishness of the Industrial Revolution, the role of nature in economic history and famine in the Twentieth Century.

The recent Growth Week at the International Growth Centre at the LSE included a range of audio and video recordings of speakers, including: Esther Duflo (MIT) on ‘Developing Rural Areas’, Nicholas Sterm on ‘Green Growth’, Tim Besley (LSE) on ‘The Political Economic of Development’ and Paul Collier (Oxford) on ‘Natural Resource Management’.

… and if that is not enough, then there are regular audio interviews with leading economists available as Vox Talks from the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the podcasts from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at the University of Bristol.

Intute has an archive of Economics podcasts from RES conferences and other Internet resources on the topic of Economics.

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Deal or No Deal for economics teaching

13 Nov

The popular TV game show Deal or No Deal has been turned into an economics classroom experiment by John Sloman, Director of the Economics Network.

The game can be used to demonstrate expected value and risk attitudes and students can use it to make calculations. It can also demonstrate the diminishing marginal utility of income.

An Excel file can be used by the lecturer to control the game and play the part of the banker, while students discuss the risks, psychology and odds at each stage of the game.

Deal or No Deal has been a topic for a number of popular economics articles available via EconPapers and Google Scholar that explore topics such as decision making, risk and rationality.

The Economics Network features a range of classroom experiments and games for use in the classroom.

Intute features more Internet resources on the topic of Economics.

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