Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Michael Levine-Clark
One of the things that I love about being a librarian is that as a profession, we work together to share ideas and resources. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this collaborative spirit is interlibrary loan (ILL). We send each other books, DVDs, CDs, articles — whatever we can reasonably share. And we do this at considerable expense to our own institutions because we see a mutual benefit.
By Dennis Baron
Machines can grade essays just as well as human readers. According to the New York Times, a competition sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation produced software able to match human essay readers grade for grade, and a study of commercially-available automatic grading programs showed that computers assessed essays as accurately as human readers, but a whole lot faster, and cheaper, to boot. But that’s just the start: computers could lead to a reading-free future.
By Jan Westerhoff
Most people think that even though it is possible that they are dreaming right now, the probability for this is very small, perhaps as small as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. In fact the probability is quite high. Let’s do the maths.
Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. We sat down with author Stuart Firestein to discuss the relationship between science and ignorance, the importance of asking the right questions, and which scientists are to be admired for throwing everything that was known out the window to come up with some of the unifying theories of life itself.
On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica a major predator in the community of animals living on sandy beaches is a snail, a species of Olive Shell (Agaronia propatula). This snail moves up and down the beach by ‘surfing’, extending its foot so that it is carried along in the wave swash. It is a voracious hunter and its main prey is a smaller species of Olive Shell. In its wave-washed environment it has to act quickly.
By Joachim Cohen and Luc Deliens
The quality of dying, and maintaining quality of life for those who are dying and for those caring for them, is an inherent aspect of public health. In developed and developing societies everyone is affected by death and dying (either directly or indirectly, for instance in case of a dying relative) and it affects several aspects of their health and wellbeing. Adequate health promotion can improve the circumstances in which these people need to cope with death and dying and is thus susceptible to improve several aspects of health. Sadly, though the manner in which people die and the quality of dying has blatantly been neglected as a priority of public health, partly because death and dying, in all its aspects, have rather been regarded as antonymous to health and a failure of health care.
By Jack Copeland
Germany’s Army, Air Force, and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during the Second World War. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war, such as weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands — sometimes within an hour or two of its being transmitted.
By Michael Otto
This summer, nonfiction reading lists are replete with voices from the battlefield. On bestseller lists, accounts from World War II are only a few steps away from inside perspectives on today’s Seal Teams. And regardless of the theater of battle or the decade of conflict, one cannot turn the final pages of these books without a deep appreciation of the value of team for those in conflict. The fighting unit, the organizational basis by which men and women at war live their daily lives, inspires tremendous loyalty — appropriate to the life and death contingencies members of the team face together. In battle, being a strong team member can save your life as well as the lives of those around you.
By Stephen R. Anderson
Human languages are not biological organisms, despite the temptation to talk about them as “being born,” “dying,” “competing with one another,” and the like. Nonetheless, the parallels between languages and biological species are rich and wonderful. Sometimes, in fact, they are downright eerie…
By Frank Close
Now that the boson has been found (yes, I know we physicists have to use science-speak to be cautious, but it’s real), I can stop hedging and answer the question that many have been asking me for months: how do six people who had an idea share a Nobel Prize that is limited to three? The answer is: they don’t. To paraphrase George Orwell: All may appear equal, but some are more equal than others.
By Susan Bélanger and Edward Shorter
Written by Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published on 4 July 1865. The book has remained in print ever since, becoming one of the most popular and influential works in all of literature. Alice has been translated into nearly a hundred languages, appeared in countless stage and screen adaptations, and continues to resonate throughout both academia and popular culture.
By Holly Rogers, M.D.
At the university counseling center where I work, the students are limp with relief when the semester finally grinds to an end and summer arrives. For college students and graduate students around the country, summer brings a much-needed break from the pressures of the academic year. However, academic pressures are not the only challenges facing emerging adults, young people between the ages of 19-29. They are typically dealing with a wide range of challenges and stressors that are related to their stage of life; they are in the midst of a developmental process that can take quite a bit of fortitude to resolve.
By Amanda Krause
Not long ago, I saw an image floating around the Internet. It simply displayed two items — a cassette tape and a pencil — along with the following statement: “our children will never know the link between the two.” Upon a quick search to locate that image the other day, it looks like it was the topic of a reddit post back in 2011. But as viral things tend to do, it lingered, making its way into Facebook posts and into Internet “age tests” aimed at prompting either confusion or nostalgic reflection.
Climate change is a major topic of concern today, scientifically, socially, and politically. But the Earth’s climate has continuously altered over its 4.5 billion-year history. Geologists are becoming ever more ingenious at interrogating this baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, and seemingly contradictory evidence. The story of the Earth’s climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail — maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change. Below, you can listen to Dr Jan Zalasiewicz and Dr Mark Williams talk about the topics raised in their book The Goldilocks Planet: The four billion year story of Earths Climate.
By Stephen Blundell
Do you own any magnets? Most people, when asked this question, say no. Then they remember the plastic letters sticking to their refrigerator door, or the holiday souvenir that keeps takeaway menus pinned to a steel surface in their kitchen. Maybe I do own a few, they say.
By Donald W. Black, M.D.
Today is the 15th anniversary of one of the oddest episodes in the annals of sports: Mike Tyson bit the ear of Evander Holyfield in the third round of a heavyweight rematch, which led to his being disqualified from the match.