background preloader

Cost of Knowledge

Facebook Twitter

Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything. Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries.

Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything

People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are. Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data. Bobby Duffy, managing director of the Ipsos Mori social research institute, said: These misperceptions present clear issues for informed public debate and policymaking. For example, public priorities may well be different if we had a clearer view of the scale of immigration and the real incidence of teenage mothers. Alan Rusbridger gives evidence to MPs over NSA revelations. Sick of Impact Factors. I am sick of impact factors and so is science.

Sick of Impact Factors

The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years. The Cost of Knowledge. Coursera. Directory of Open Access Journals. Khan Academy. Udacity - 21st Century University.