Author Archive

September 11, 2010 6

The ages of productivity

By in Funding, Reading

Tweet The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, has a good article in today’s Financial Times about the stages in life when different professions are most productive. For example, I did a quick Google/calculation: the average median age of a Nobel Prize winner in physics or chemistry is 55; in the literature and peace prizes, it’s 64. [...]

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September 5, 2010 1

Courting controversy pt. 2

By in Jobs, Opinion, Teaching

Tweet Just a quick follow-up to last week’s post on changes in higher education. The New York Times published an article on Friday, highlighting two new books on the future of the American academy and picking up some of the points I discussed last time: The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured [...]

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August 25, 2010 8

Courting controversy

By in Jobs, Opinion, Teaching

Tweet There’s nothing like an overtly contentious statement to bring in the traffic. And as they go, this is a pretty good one: “Why higher education is like a Ponzi scheme“. The linked post is actually for a radio program, the content of which was based on this original article by a professor of psychology [...]

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January 12, 2010 0

Snowbound! Tips for working from home

By in Multitasking, Time management

Tweet The last week or two has seen some serious winter weather here in the UK. Schools have been cancelled, transport delayed, idiots arrested for driving on frozen canals, and all those other things you would typically associate with places like Canada, not the balmy UK. (No, on second thought, I take back that thing [...]

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November 6, 2009 2

Blog-sized lit reviews

By in Computing tips, Hacks, Software, Writing

Tweet When I started my DPhil, I set myself assignments in order to cover the lit review in easy bite-sized chunks. This worked pretty well but the collated material was scattered across different Word documents, which meant that I couldn’t look at everything at one glance or search the content. However at about the same [...]

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