Posts by David Hood
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A Times Higher Ed. article also does not like the Gold model.
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Hard News: Open or not?, in reply to HORansome,
need to publish in big name journals with high impact factors (A and some B grade journals)
As part (I think) of the movement surrounding OA, I have been seeing increasing analysis of impact factors, and criticism of them. So, in much the same time period as the boom in articles about open access, I have been seeing a boom in articles like this
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Also, in at least some version of the "Gold" model I have seen the phrase "access for the people of the United Kingdom" has be a part of the wording, In those models the U.K. was effectively buying subscription access for the country to the journals. I haven't checked if this is part of the latest round of suggestions.
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Since you mention the TPPA, there was the ars technica artical the other day on the change in U.S. language around copyright (linking the change to ACTA getting the slapdown in Europe)
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A story I heard in the late eighties, when doing my undergraduate degree, and to which I am not entirely sure how accurate it is- During the large scale urbanization from the 1950s one tribe in particular went into the civil service, and this dialect became "Standard Maori". No citations or attributions for that though.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Please correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but there’s no evidence of trade between ANZ and the rest of the Pacific post-migration, right?
The Kermadec Islands have evidence of discontinuous (multiple, independent) use as a stop over point. As they never seem to have been occupied on a long term basis, it is easier to see the evidence of repeated visitation than somewhere continuously occupied.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But if I only get to travel overseas to one conference in 5 years I’m damn well not going to a photoshop course!
Twitch Please don't try to make A0 posters in Photoshop Twitch
I teach our university's two hour (2 measly hours) Conference Poster Making course, but I have to acknowledge most people would rather do their own thing using Powerpoint, assuming that it is as good at producing giant sheets of paper as it is slides, rather than come to a course to learn to use a layout program (though that same program can be equally use at making diagrams & maps).
I name Powerpoint specifically as that is the main culprit for people turning up at helpdesk going I wanted to make a poster, but it won't print and I'm out of time. -
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Emma Hart,
Don’t be silly, it’s only comms. Anyone can do comms.
I initially read thaty as "it's only commas. Anyone can do commas"
Clearly, it needs to be in a harder to read font, so I pay more attention. -
There was a fairly well known paper published back in 2010 “Fortune favors the bold( and the italic) : Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes” (though in the original title the bold is also subscripted). This paper found that, in short, hard to read fonts improve learning (because you are going to more cognitive effort. Whereas while easy to read fonts are pleasant, they are also make the contents more forgettable. To quote from the abstract
Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.
So in this sense, it probably did make the announcement much more memorable.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Tom Beard,
And talk of Comic Sans’ accessibility to dyslexic people is a red herring, since there are plenty of other options that are at least as good.
All the studies of evaluating fonts for dyslexia I've read have suffered from rubbish sample sizes and/or poor experimental design. That said, my impression of the literature is that if you are using a program that can increase inter-letter spacing, that will make far more difference than font choice. It is just that font choice is within most peoples control.