Can Academics Be Entrepreneurial? - You’re the Boss Blog. In a recent op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Carl Schramm, Robert Litan and Dane Stangler of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation called on policy makers to “unleash America’s academic entrepreneurs” as a way “to foster the creation and growth of new businesses.” While I agree with the authors’ view that America’s academic entrepreneurs are an important tool for encouraging new business creation and growth, I believe that they underestimate the scope of academic entrepreneurship. They say that “currently, a university professor with an idea may commercialize it only by using his university’s technology licensing office,” but that view underestimates the vast amount of academic entrepreneurship that occurs outside of the university licensing system.
First, we found that academics are a pretty entrepreneurial lot. Approximately 16 percent of them run businesses that they founded. That makes academics more likely to be entrepreneurs than the average American. Scott A. Social Media: Highlights of Future of Civic Media. Ph.D. scolarship: Virtual Worlds, 1 Nov. | Virtual Worlds Research Project. The research project “Sense-making strategies and the user-driven innovations in Virtual Worlds” (2008-2011) – funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council, KINO – offers one full, 3-year Ph.D. scholarship. The start date is 1 November 2008. The Ph.D. scholarship will be located in the Research Group, Communication Forms and Knowledge Production, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University.
The overall aim of the research project is to gain theoretically- and empirically-based insight into avatar-based virtual worlds as sites for user-driven innovation. The project works with an understanding of innovation as socially and culturally specific processes of meaning-making in which learning takes place and knowledge is constructed, negotiated and shared. One key focus point is the role of conceptions of space, body and person in shaping the design and use of, and changes in, avatar-based virtual worlds. The application should include: Nations And Networks. I was reading the NY Times today on the excellent Editors Choice App on the iPad and came across this line in a piece by Scott Shane: “We’re still focused on the nation and not the network,” said John Arquilla, professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.
“You can do brilliantly in Afghanistan and still not deal with the Faisal Shahzads of the world.” This is not a post about the US' strategy in its war against terrorism. I have very mixed feelings about it and don't feel that I can add anything to that debate. This is a post about nations and networks. And there are some networks that are as big as countries. These are some of the largest networks but as Professor Arquilla points out there are all sorts of networks on the Internet and some of them are dangerous.
I think we are just beginning to understand the power of these networks and what they can become. Good Readings in Economics. Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw has posted his reading list of economics books for a freshman seminar. (Hat tip to Cafe Hayek.) Here it is: The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert HeilbronerSpin-Free Economics, by Nariman BehraveshCapitalism and Freedom, by Milton FriedmanEquality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by Arthur OkunNudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass SunsteinThe Return of Depression Economics, by Paul KrugmanAnimal Spirits, by George Akerlof and Robert ShillerThe Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan CaplanEconomic Gangsters, by Raymond Fisman and Edward MiguelThe Price of Everything, by Russell Roberts I confess that I have not read all of these; I tend to do little reading of economics aimed at a general audience.
(Most of the ideas in these books I saw in the economics journals before the books came out.) Capitalism and Freedom: I'll always remember how thrilled I was reading this my freshman year of college. Publish or Perish - Anne-Wil Harzing. Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage.
Version: 4.17.0 (18 June 2015) About Publish or Perish Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. Total number of papers and total number of citations Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year Hirsch's h-index and related parameters Egghe's g-index The contemporary h-index Three variations of individual h-indices The average annual increase in the individual h-index The age-weighted citation rate An analysis of the number of authors per paper. Note: Support for Microsoft Academic Search is still in its early stages and its coverage is more limited than that of Google Scholar.
Seminar on quantitative research in virtual economies - programme details | Virtual Economy Research Network. UPDATE: seminar programme details, including the presentation topics, available below. On Monday, 2nd June, the AVEA project at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) organizes an open research seminar on so-called virtual economies. In the seminar we focus on the following question: “Why should economists and social scientists be interested in virtual economies?” Through discussion and presentations by academic researchers and industry representatives, we investigate the potential of conducting quantitative research on virtual economies that is of interest to mainstream, “serious” researchers.
Virtual economies are economic systems that take place in online services. Details and programme Date: June 2, 2008Time: 9:45 to ~17:00Place: HIIT premises at Spektri Business Park, Pilotti building, Espoo, Finland (contact) Coffee and snacks will be served. Please confirm your attendance by Friday, May 16, by emailing Tuukka Lehtiniemi, tuukka.lehtiniemi{ät}hiit.fi. Welcome! Like this: Paper and video-discussion about what virtual worlds are. Research journal about virtual worlds. Edcucation (academic, tutorials, discussion groups) on second life: a very useful list. Libertarian tendencies in virtual worlds.