Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Michael Hochman, MD, MPH
With the issuing of its updated report on the management of lipids, the American Heart Association (AHA) hoped to provide a clear message to health care providers and consumers about how to use lipid-lowering medications. Instead, the new recommendations have been mired in controversy due to concerns about the validity of the data used in the report.
By Chloe Foster
2013 has been a busy year for the Very Short Introductions (VSIs). Keeping our authors busy with weekly VSI blog posts is not the only thing we’ve been up to. Here’s a reminder of just some of the highlights from our VSI year.
In a matter of months, federal elections in the United States will enter full-swing. I recently asked Costas Panagopoulos, a professor at Fordham University and an expert on political campaigns, a few questions about the important elections recently conducted in the United States and what we might learn from those recent campaigns.
Christmas is big at Oxford University Press and carol-related tasks continue virtually all year. We publish most of the festive music that the world knows and loves, and our editors started working on carols for this Christmas in the summer of 2012. We’re all carolled out every year by August! October, November, and December are particularly frantic for our Music Hire Library.
By Scott Mandelbrote
On 9 November 1683, Robert Morison was knocked down by a coach in the Strand. He died the following day. At the time, Morison was both botanist to King Charles II and Professor of Botany in the University of Oxford, where he lectured regularly in the Botanic Garden.
By Johanna Niegel
Private foundations are attracting a lot of attention as far as international asset protection and estate planning are concerned.
By Anatoly Liberman
I am returning to greyhound, a word whose origin has been discussed with rare dedication and relatively meager results. The component –hound is the generic word for “dog” everywhere in Germanic, except English. I am aware of only one attempt to identify –hound with hunter (so in in the 1688 dictionary by Rúnolfur Jónsson).
By Richard Striner
On 18 December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, thus ending the epochal struggle to kill American slavery. But the long struggle to achieve full equality regardless of race was just beginning. When Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, he knew very well that it might eventually be overturned in court as unconstitutional.
By Kevin Kenny
On this day 135 years ago, John Kehoe was hanged. Convicted in 1877 of murdering a Pennsylvania mine boss 15 years earlier, he was almost certainly innocent of that crime. But Kehoe also stood accused of being the mastermind in a nefarious secret society called the Molly Maguires.
By Colin P. Green, John S. Heywood, and Nikolaos Theodoropoulos
The British labour market shares two important trends with that in the US. Wage inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s and there has been increased use of performance pay, earnings that vary with worker job performance.
By Khalid Koser
International Migrants Day is intended to celebrate the enormous contribution that migrants make to economic growth and development, social innovation, and cultural diversity, worldwide. It also reminds us of the importance of protecting the human rights of migrants.
Five years after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the world waits for recovery. Last time it took a world war and forty million deaths to achieve. In 2008, a domino — Lehman Brothers — fell over, sparking a financial crisis that quickly threatened to bring the developed economies of the world crashing down. “This sucker could go down” was President George W. Bush’s pithy summary.
By Daniel Parker
Snow is falling and your bulging stocking is being hung up above a roaring log fire. The turkey is burning in the oven as you eat your body weight in novelty chocolate. And now your weird, slightly sinister Uncle Frank is coming towards you brandishing mistletoe. This can mean only one thing. In the wise (and slightly altered) words of Noddy Holder: It’s OSEO Christmas!
Nancy S. Kim
Can you enter into a contract without knowing it? According to many judges, the answer is yes. “Wrap contracts” are contracts that can be entered into by clicking on a link or on an “accept” icon and they govern nearly all online activity. Most of us enter into them several times a day and few of us think twice about it.
The recent death of renowned British composer Sir John Tavener (1944-2013) precipitated mourning and reflection on an international scale. By the time of his death, the visionary composer had received numerous honors, including the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, the 2005 Ivor Novello Classical Music Award, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II.
By Michael Ruse
In 1981, a professor from a small university in Canada, I found myself headed south to the state of Arkansas, to appear as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union, in its attack on a new law that mandated the “balanced treatment” of the teaching of evolution and something known as “Creation Science” (aka Genesis read literally) in the science classrooms of that state.