Interdisciplinarity has been a hot topic in academia for several decades and is probably here to stay. Having done interdisciplinary research for almost 10 years in the UK/US academia, I feel I am in a position to offer my advice regarding the challenges and rewards of crossing the treacherous boundaries of disciplines (and departments). For a … Continue reading 10 tips for interdisciplinary research careers
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PhD Studentship at LSHTM/Birkbeck on food geography
Application Deadline: Monday 8 April 2019, full info on the LSHTM website. Project Title: Impact of changes in the food environment on food and drink purchasing using large-scale secondary data Supervisory Team Principal Supervisor: Professor Steve Cummins (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Co-Supervisor: Dr Laura Cornelsen (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Co-Supervisor: Dr Andrea Ballatore (Birkbeck, University of … Continue reading PhD Studentship at LSHTM/Birkbeck on food geography
Moving to open access in GIScience
See also my list of open access resources for GIScience. Open access is coming. The radical European Plan S is just the latest of major pushes to reform the current expensive and irrational model. Since the second half of the 20th century, academic authors have usually published without fees, while a handful of private publishers reap handsome … Continue reading Moving to open access in GIScience
GIS is bigger than Big Data: The battle of the buzzwords
Have you heard of hyperlocal, cloud computing, and the gig economy? Arguably, these are buzzwords used to describe things that have existed for a long time in a new, exciting way (e.g. services aimed at local markets, outsourcing computational tasks to data centres, and poorly paid, insecure jobs). Wikipedia has a nice, up-to-date list of … Continue reading GIS is bigger than Big Data: The battle of the buzzwords
GIScience PhD scholarship at Uni. Leicester on “Data Census”
Come work with us! New GIScience/geographic data science fully-funded PhD scholarship at the University of Leicester, co-supervised by Dr Stefano De Sabbata, Prof Nick Tate (Uni. of Leicester), and Dr Andrea Ballatore (Birkbeck, University of London). All outstanding students of GIScience, quantitative geography, and related disciplines are encouraged to apply. [Full call here] Deadline: 21st January … Continue reading GIScience PhD scholarship at Uni. Leicester on “Data Census”
[R tool] Google Trends comparator for 5+ terms
As part of our research on the geography of search engines, we coded a new R tool, including ideas from my colleague Simon Scheider (Universiteit Utrecht). Google Trends is a great source of "big data" about search behaviour at a large scale, but it limits the number of query terms to 5. Because of the … Continue reading [R tool] Google Trends comparator for 5+ terms
Bullshit (academic) jobs
Some good quotes from Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (David Graeber, 2018): Most universities in the United Kingdom now have public relations offices with staffs several times larger than would be typical for, say, a bank or an auto manufacturer of roughly the same size. Does Oxford really need to employ a dozen-plus PR specialists to … Continue reading Bullshit (academic) jobs