This is an experiment that I’m going to try for a while. Sometimes I come across articles that I think are interesting and would like to share – with a short comment – but which don’t warrant a full post. I’m going to try and aggregate these into a weekly digest that I’ll publish on a Friday. In the past I would have pushed these out to Twitter but I’m trying to bring more of my work into my own site instead. We’ll see how it goes.
O’Grady, C. (2021). Fifteen journals to outsource peer-review decisions. Science. Retrieved May 6, 2021, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abj0447
Some scholarly publishers have already outsourced operations like copy editing and printing. Now, 15 journals are outsourcing something central to science itself: the peer-review process. The journals, which include BMJ Open Science and Royal Society Open Science, say they will accept articles reviewed by a nonprofit “peer community” organization.
Now that journals are starting to outsource peer review, how on earth will they justify the cost of publishing with them? At OpenPhysio we charge nothing. Not a cent for authors or for readers. Granted, OpenPhysio is a very small journal with a different vision for academic publishing but that actually makes it harder to do the work.
On a related note, I have an article coming out soon with Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, which we had hoped to publish under an open access license. The cost: $3000! We should have looked into the details before submitting but none of us thought it would be this much. Something has to change.
Harada, J. (2021, May 4). The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you. Signal Messenger. https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data.
Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.
This is such a great example of a subversive activity, albeit one that Facebook quickly saw and banned. Facebook sees you as an input into their advertising algorithms, and there’s not much more to say about it.
Young, S. (2021, April 26). Should You Use Flashcards to Learn? Scott H Young. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2021/04/26/do-flashcards-work/
If you want to learn a topic with a lot of stuff to memorize, flashcards will help you do it better than almost anything else. Mnemonics are trendy, but for medium-to-long-term purposes, flashcards are probably better. It’s also easy to waste your time with flashcards. You can spend a lot of time memorizing something you don’t need to, or fail to memorize the important things you do. Flashcard practice can also be a convenient way to avoid doing the real thing you need to learn.
Nice, short piece about when you should consider using flashcards for your learning, and when they should probably be avoided. It also starts with a short description of how flashcards are linked to memory via spaced repetition practice.
Beighton, F. (2021, April 25). DM168 Reflection: Things that we should find in the ashes: Love Thy Library. Daily Maverick. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-04-25-things-that-we-should-find-in-the-ashes-love-thy-library/
Libraries, by their nature, are sanctuaries. They are designed to feel like safe spaces should feel; orderly, calm, a refuge from the noise and madness of the world, where you’re invited to slow down, to be quiet and to feed your mind.
Last month (18-21 April) Cape Town experienced one of it’s worst wildfires in a decade. Luckily no-one was killed, but the Jagger Reading Room in the library at the University of Cape Town was destroyed. I love books and I love libraries, so this felt like a deep loss, not only for scholars and students at UCT but for humanity. It may have also felt more significant because I’m reading Rebecca Knuth’s Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. I liked the idea that the author suggests…looking at libraries as more than repositories of content from the past and are connected to the future:
Libraries need to move from the transactional – get your library card, borrow a book, return it late, pay your fee – to the membership model, in which they are the central hub of community, a cornerstone of democracy, thought leadership, social change and connection.