The numerical basis used to study African economies suffers from major knowledge gaps. This needs to improve if numbers are to inform policies that will encourage growth and push back poverty.
Embarking on the path to a PhD is a scary business.
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Peter Ngure, African Population and Health Research Center
Many people are left floundering when they try to get working on their PhDs. In Africa, this is often because the skills they need haven’t been developed earlier in their academic careers.
Thumbs up to expert opinion.
REUTERS/Peter Nicholls
Scholars have long encountered skeletons in the academic closets of peers and intellectual heroes. But is there a point where a scholar’s behaviour is so taboo that their research should be consigned to the academic junk pile?
Gold miners appear after being trapped underground at a mine in Carltonville, west of Johannesburg. Managing their safety has been a major issue as South Africa has among the deepest and most dangerous mines.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
When sociologists, driven by their value commitments, go beyond the relative comfort of the classroom and engage with organisations outside the university, they dirty their hands.
Voters see claim and counter claim about the economic effects of leaving the EU but the overwhelming consensus among economists is that Brexit will make Britons worse off.
In academia, you’ll need to.
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Contributing to the public good should be a top priority for public and land grant universities. Here, some ideas on how to match what institutions value with academics’ own drive for service.
Beware: free speech can be painful.
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Academics must teach students how to think – not what to think.
Too many academic careers are shaped around writing journal articles nobody reads and planning twice-weekly lectures to a diminishing class of students.
flickr/Sixth Lie
Prime Minister Turnbull has signalled a desire to move away from a ‘publish or perish’ academic culture toward one that prioritises public impact and engagement. It’s a challenge scholars should embrace.
A former dean of Sydney University’s Faculty of Medicine, where I work, once appointed me to a role where I was to try and increase the news media profile of our staff’s research and to encourage them…
Students on the campus of the University Paris 3.
Stéphane De Sakutin/AFP
Men are harsher critics of research that reports evidence of gender bias in STEM fields, while women find it more compelling. How can we deal with the reality when we’re biased about bias?
The more academics fear being involved in media storms, the less they feel free to explore topics they consider important.
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Public engagement of academics has increased enormously in recent decades. But this new level of engagement is producing problems and conflicts for which many academics are ill-prepared.
Why did people make their personal information so easily available to a company that facilitates cheating?
Johan Viirok
In the Ashley Madison hack were reports of 74,468 unique “.edu” email addresses. If people chose to use their .edu addresses, what does that tell us about awareness of privacy online?
Professor of Management & Organizations; Professor of Environment & Sustainability; Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan