Money on the Mind is a blog on behavioural economics “& other mind-blowing things” by a Dutch PhD student at Warwick Business School.
It has some recent interviews with behavioural economists, including UEA’s Professor Sugden.
SciDev.Net
SciDev.Net carries news and analysis about science and technology for global development.
It has a section of Practical guides, such as:
- How to advance your career in science
- How to give a science flash talk
- How to question numbers
- How to write about your science
Eastminster
UEA’s School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies has a politics blog called Eastminster.
While it appears to be written entirely by two people called Editor and Admin, closer inspection reveals the actual authors.
Some examples of posts:
- Seven Myths Used To Make The Case For A Second Referendum
- Terrorist obituaries: some early research reflections
- Hugo Chávez, Alí Primera, and the politics of popular music in Venezuela
- Genocide in the early twentieth century: Germany’s forgotten colonial history
Library language
INTO Resource Centre has a new leaflet for its users:
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Lonweb parallel texts
Lonweb or Languages-on-the-web has some stories and other texts translated from English into other languages. The texts are displayed in parallel.
For example, this is the beginning of a story in Indonesian and English:
| Pencarian untuk Lorna | The search for Lorna |
| Daisy Hamilton adalah seorang detektif swasta. | Daisy Hamilton was a private detective. |
| Dia berumur 30 tahun dan telah menjadi detektif dalam dua tahun ini. | She was thirty years old and had been a detective for the past two years. |
| Tiap pagi dia pergi ke kantornya untuk menunggu panggilan telpon atau membukakan pintu bagi klien yang membutuhkan pelayanannya. | Every morning she went to her office to wait for phone calls or open the door to clients needing her services. |
Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai and Turkish.
Note: INTO Resource Centre has a few books of parallel texts (English with Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Spanish), like this one:
Semicolon, by Cecelia Watson
A new book about the semicolon is reviewed by Stan Carey. It is available from Amazon, etc.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. … All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Kurt Vonnegut
What not to study if you want to be rich
An article in the Spring 2019 issue of Society Now summarizes the impact of a university degree on future income in Britain. The full report is from the Institute of Fiscal Studies.
For men, studying creative arts, English or philosophy results in lower average earnings than if they hadn’t gone to university at all:
For women there are no subjects with negative returns, but studying creative arts increases earnings by only 9%. (For medicine it’s 75%.)
So if you want to earn more money, study the subjects on the right of the graph: economics, medicine, architecture, business, law, etc.
On the other hand, there is at least one thing that money can’t buy.
Why spelling is hard – but also hard to change
In Lingthusiasm Episode 33 Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch discuss spelling.
Gretchen: I think of spelling systems across languages as kind of like living in a house. When you first move into a house, you unpack everything and you hopefully say, “Okay. I’m gonna be organised this time.” And you say, “This is where everything’s gonna go.” But the longer you’ve lived in a house, the more random boxes of stuff in the attic you have.
Lauren: English has lived in the house of the Latin alphabet for a very long time.
You can listen to their discussion or read it.
Bar chart races
A bar chart race is an animated bar chart that shows changes over time.
For example, the top 10 countries by CO2 emissions per capita from 1800 to 2014:
The most populous cities in the world from 1500 to 2018 (with audio commentary):
You can make your own bar chart races at Flourish.
Source: Economics in Action
Oxford Academic videos
Oxford University Press has a YouTube channel, Oxford Academic, with videos on many topics.
For example, there are some Very Short Introductions to human evolution, behavioural economics, fungi, William Shakespeare, Iran, Buddhism, neoliberalism, etc.
Here is Professor Jones of Norwich Business School on branding: