Academic Incentives Gone Awry: Why Junk Persists in the Scientific Literature
The system of scientific publication is broken, with rewards cynically exploited by many players while science fills with more and more garbage. How can we fix this?
Web 2.0 Next: Companies Place Bets on Consumer Relationships and Collaboration
As Web 2.0 matures, new entrants are starting to find ways to extract value in innovative ways.
Information Chasing — a New Addition to Browsing, Seeking, and Searching
The classic bins of user behavior — browse, search, and seek — may have a third and more vital aspect.
Blogs, Twitter, and YouTube: Just Amplifiers of Traditional Media, or a New Set of Filters?
Blogs, Twitter, and YouTube feast on traditional media, but they change the agenda for millions in the meantime, as a recent Pew study shows.
Facebook, Diaspora, Public, Private, and the Fork in the Road
Can Diaspora restore social networking to personal control?
Get the Picture: PowerPoint, Systems Dynamics, the Military, and the New York Times
What we know is important, but how we interpret it is vital. Getting the NYTimes/PowerPoint narrative right requires a little more complex knowledge.
The First Four Years of College: Why Are Students Spending Less Time Studying?
A new economic analysis of the time spent realizing a four-year degree shows decreases across the board since 1961. What does it mean? Why is it happening?
Is Facebook Eroding Privacy? Or Does Social Media Require Us to Lower Our Expectations?
Facebook argues that its erosions of privacy reflect changing social norms. But is what it’s doing just plain wrong?
Education Set to Music: The Cognitive Bias Song
Cognitive bias is on display all around us. Which one are you seeing? This song teaches you the differences.
Friday Fun: Bill Murray Reads Poetry to Construction Workers
While building a new poetry center, construction stops so Bill Murray can share a few poems (and jokes) with the workers. A lovely moment, captured in video.
Has Publishing Revealed the Achilles’ Heel of Webist Political Philosophies?
Does the power of prestige and prestige-granting organization confound the politics of the Web?
Traditional Measures of Quality: Irrelevant, Miscast, Outdated, and Inhibiting?
How we measure quality may be a form of vestigial elitism, stemming from the print age. And it may be holding us back.
Lessons for Publishers: Listen, Learn, and Experiment
In less than a minute, essential advice for survival today and success tomorrow.
The Paranoia of Publication “Bias” — How a Study Proves Its Point by Making Its Point
Positive research results may indicate that the scientific system is working efficiently.
PLoS’ Squandered Opportunity — Their Problems with the Path of Least Resistance
The Public Library of Science was once a radical force, but is now dependent on author-pays bulk-publishing for its livelihood, which introduces all sorts of problems for every journal publisher. What went wrong?