The University of California recently made international headlines when it canceled its subscription with scientific journal publisher Elsevier. The twittersphere lit up. And Elsevier’s parent company, RELX, saw its stock drop 7 percent in response to the announcement. A library canceling a subscription seems like a simple, everyday business decision, so what’s the big deal? It was not just the clash-of-the-titans […] … learn more→

As a woman working in the environmental sciences, it was always obvious to me that most of my colleagues are men. This tended to focus my attention on surviving in a field in which I automatically contribute to diversity just by being there. Recently though I stopped to consider what I could do to support […] … learn more→

Even though our schools are well-supported by a student loan scam pouring money on them in an ever increasing deluge, they always want more. A sweet spring of such funds comes from foreign students—they get to pay a “non resident” tuition penalty on top of the usual bloated tuition price. It’s particularly prevalent in graduate […] … learn more→

Artificial intelligence systems are powerful tools for businesses and governments to process data and respond to changing situations, whether on the stock market or on a battlefield. But there are still some things AI isn’t ready for. We are scholars of computer science working to understand and improve the ways in which algorithms interact with society. AI systems perform best when the […] … learn more→

If you went to university – or are still there – think about your sleep while there. Would you say you ticked all the boxes for healthy sleep – going to bed at a reasonable hour and waking up at the same time every day, sleeping for around eight hours, and avoiding sleeping in or […] … learn more→

Of all the challenges faced by people who’ve been displaced, perhaps none is more important than to find new meaning in their lives. And so it is with the four young women who are students in a college prep class that I teach at Dickinson College. All four students were among the more than 200 Chibok […] … learn more→

What can be done when evaluations do not stop falling, be they international ( Pisa , Pirls or Timss ), or national ( CP, CE1 ), and that they are not very good? Should we deplore, with Stanislas Dehaene, the absence of a reaction of the “Pisa shock” type  ? The disappointing performances of French students in recent surveys have most often had the effect of indignant […] … learn more→

Australia is often characterised as having a mass higher education system. In fact, it could be called near-universal. According to the 2016 Census, 56% of Australians aged 15 years and over – 9.6 million people – hold a post-school qualification, up from 46% in 2006. Universal education does not mean every Australian should attain a higher education […] … learn more→

In the UK system, the majority of PhD students pass their viva ‘with minor corrections’. Your examiners present you with a list of corrections, you go away and implement them. Easy, yes? Well, no, not necessarily. If you’re lucky, corrections are simply typos, formatting issues etc. So far, so good. Any thesis will inevitably contain […] … learn more→

“This site cannot be reached” is, maybe, the most frequent error that Google Chrome, Opera (and some other Chromium-based browsers) can face. It appears with the following explanations «server DNS address could not be found» and «Server IP address could not be found» and ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED code. The error has nothing to do with the version […] … learn more→