A bibliometric analysis of academic publication and NIH funding

Academic productivity and research funding have been hot topics in biomedical research. While publications and their citations are popular indicators of academic productivity, there has been no rigorous way to quantify co-authors’ relative contributions. This has seriously compromised quantitative studies on the relationship between academic productivity and research funding. Here we apply an axiomatic approach and associated bibliometric measures to revisit a recent study by Ginther et al. (Ginther et al., 2011a, Ginther et al., 2011b) in which the probability of receiving a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 award was analyzed with respect to the applicant's race/ethnicity. Our results provide new insight and suggest that there is no significant racial bias in the NIH review process, in contrast to the conclusion from the study by D. K. Ginther et al. Our axiomatic approach has a potential to be widely used for scientific assessment and management.     

Education for radio

Aristotle discussed various forms of rationality in the Organon and other works. Aristotle held that in making judgments, the soul used five means— intelligence, episteme (scientific knowledge), sophia (theoretical wisdom), techne (art), and phronesis (practical wisdom). The nature of rhetoric as a techne employed in persuasion and grounded in probabilities distinguishes it from discourse in natural science, metaphysics, and philosophy. Aristotle's comparative study of the reasoning used by each of these means enables us to recognize rhetoric's uniqueness.     

ICT Policy and Implementation in Education: cases in Canada,Northern Ireland and Ireland

Countries with similar levels of economic development often implement different education ICT policies. Much of the existing research attributes such differences to economic and political factors. In this paper, we examine the development of ICT policy and implementation in the two parts of Ireland and in two Canadian provinces and find that historical, social and cultural differences also play an important role in the way ICT policies develop. In particular, we see differing historical perceptions of the role of the state and church in education playing a more important role than has hitherto been recognized.     

Patrons of the revolution. Ideals and institutions in postwar behavioral science

This essay argues that shifts in patronage for the postwar behavioral and social sciences were linked intimately to both intellectual and institutional changes. This broad argument comprises two subarguments: first, that there were in fact two distinct, successive patronage systems for postwar social science--not one, as is commonly assumed; and, second, that the first postwar patronage system played a major role in enabling a series of behavioral revolutions and interdisciplinary syntheses across the social sciences, while the second postwar patronage system encouraged the development of specialized concepts, techniques, and technologies within the disciplines. The essay also suggests that the widespread concern among social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s that their fields were fragmenting was at least in part an unintended consequence of the rise of the second system.     

Crossing the Line

The paper charts the progress of the ‘Window Sills’ project in Exeter, UK which brings together artists, art students, cultural organisations, and the community in a plan for urban renewal. Seeking to loosen boundaries, it uses the idea of ‘thirdspace’ to question the notion of public and private space, using the city's and its river's constant changes as an analogy. The window and the window sill become the interface where the project seeks a transformational act in the lives of those involved by locating the experience in the local and the personal, although the implications cross much wider boundaries.