Below is a list of online resources for studying and teaching philosophy. Feel free to share it and/or add your own suggestions. Continue reading 30+ Online Resources For Studying & Teaching Philosophy
Tag: Grad School
How I Learned To Love Academic Reading
When I read visually, I tend to read very slowly. Like really, really slow! A 30-50 page text can take an afternoon if I’m not terribly motivated and also distracted. Of course, my job requires me to do hundreds of pages a week. So I cannot do all of my academic reading visually. Fortunately, there are other ways of reading. I’ll discuss them below.
1. Visual Reading
When I have a text in front of my eyes, I am very tempted to take my time, read very carefully, and look for ways to appreciate the sections that would otherwise strike me as unimportant. Giving in to these temptations can be foolish. To explain consider a few questions.
- Can I finish all of my reading if I take my time?
- Does this allegedly important text deserve a careful reading?
- Is this allegedly important text actually important?
For much of my academic reading, the answer to at least one of these questions is “no.” In other words, usually…
- I cannot finish all of my reading if I take my time…
- it’s not clear that a text merits a careful reading, or…
- it’s not clear that a text is important.†
Don’t get me wrong, the visual reading method is sometimes crucial for academic reading. If you really want to (try to) understand the nuances of a text (or a series of texts), then careful visual reading, with intermittent breaks for note-taking is probably worthwhile.
But visual reading is not well-suited for every situation. For instance, Continue reading How I Learned To Love Academic Reading
My Sit-stand Desk
I am often thinking of ways to improve my desk setup. But I’m cheap, so I have held off on buying anything. Instead, I’ve MacGyvered a few desk setups mostly with redundant university stuff (see “Office Space: Desk Setup“). But I recently gave in and bought something to upgrade my desk setup: an adjustable sit-stand desk attachment.
SIT-STAND DESKS
I can’t afford an entirely new adjustable sit-stand desk. Fortunately, there are sit-stand desk attachments. They are made to be used with traditional sitting desks. And some of them are affordable.
Peer-review: should we get rid of it?
There are way more manuscripts than opportunities for respected peer-reviewed publications (Sinhababu 2016). So many good manuscripts might never be properly reviewed (or published). This would be bad. In this post, I’ll mention a few potential solutions. Then I’ll briefly evaluate one: eliminating compulsory peer-review altogether.
1. Peer Review Is New
I learned from Kate Norlock that peer-review is a relatively recent thing.†
… the surprisingly short history of what we now think of as peer-review [Times Higher Ed.] … the Google ngram on peer-review: [Google ngram article] …. suggests that academics have only been so fixated on it as the measure of our worth since the 1970s.
2. The Current Form of Peer Review Isn’t Obviously Optimal
One reason for peer-review might be that it inhibits bias. And there is some evidence that anonymous peer-review reduces bias (Budden et al 2008). However, a review of 17 studies Continue reading Peer-review: should we get rid of it?
4 Ways To Maximize My Daily Routine
Last summer I accomplished less than I had hoped. I want to do better this time around, so I am looking for opportunities to be more productive. The first step involves looking at my daily routine.
Daily Routine: The Ideal
First, I find that I am most productive and satisfied when I fit work into the 8-to-5 (ish) schedule.
Second, I find that I do my best work when I leave the house.
So my best days look like this: I go to the office as early as possible, work as much as I can until around 5, exercise, and then leave.
Achieving The Ideal
Obviously, I have to deviate from Continue reading 4 Ways To Maximize My Daily Routine
Interview with ACI Scholarly Blog Index
I recently answered some questions from Traci Hector at ACI Scholarly Blog Index. More about the interview and about ACI below.
What We Talked About
- My experience of studying religion.
- Why philosophy led me to cognitive science.
- How intuition is related to beliefs about god and science.
- Computational corpus linguistics and how philosophers use it.
- How I use blogging and social media for my research.
- My thoughts on podcasts.
- About blogging as an academic.
The full interview is here: http://aci.info/2016/04/27/aci-interview-with-scholarly-blogger-phd-candidate-nick-byrd/
About ACI Scholarly Blog Index
…an editorially created and curated index of scholarly social media. Authors are selected for inclusion based on their academic credentials as well as the scope and quality of their writing. Metadata, taxonomies, and proprietary Author Profile Cards are appended to each publication. An elegantly sophisticated search interface easily surfaces highly relevant articles. Post-search filtering allows researchers to further hone in on appropriate articles. ACI Scholarly Blog Index is free to use.
Check out ACI Scholarly Blog Index at acindex.com
Where to follow ACI:
Twitter @aciblogindex
Facebook facebook.com/aci.info
LinkedIn linkedin.com/company/4859067
Google+ plus.google.com/+AciInfogroup
Peer-review: on what basis should we reject papers?
When you peer-review a paper, you can make one of a few basic recommendations to the editor. One option is this: do not publish the paper.
So what criteria should you use to make such a recommendation? In this post, I argue that some criteria are better than others.
1. Is the paper convincing?
A friend of mine mentioned this criterion the other day: “…[philosophy] papers ought to be convincing.” Call this the Convince Me standard or CM.
Maybe you think that CM sounds like a reasonable standard for peer-review. I don’t. Continue reading Peer-review: on what basis should we reject papers?
What do philosophers do, anyway?
Lots of people ask me this question. Students. Friends. My mom!
I spend a lot of time with philosophers, so you might think that I have a good answer to this question. Alas, my answer usually sucks. You can find some of my worst answers to this question over at The American Philosophical Association (APA) Blog: “You’re a philosopher, eh? What do philosophers do?”
I’ve also shared my general thoughts on how to answer this question in that post. But if you want really good advice on how to answer this question, check out what philosophers are saying in the comments.
Excerpt
Let me be the first to admit that I’m doing it wrong. My philosophy pitch is…well, boring. And my delivery is awful. When someone asks me about what I do, my first (and now-automatic) response is a sigh.
What can I say? When people so reliably respond to philosophy with confusion or condescension, I become a little insecure. Unfortunately, insecurity doesn’t help. It just makes my next philosophy pitch even worse. I need to break the negative cycle.
Special thanks to philosopher Skye Cleary for connecting me to the APA blog.
Featured image: “Philosophy” from dakine kane, CC BY 2.0, cropped, adjusted color
Text-To-Speech for Speed Reading & More
My job requires lots of reading. But sometimes I read very slowly. Other times my body is occupied doing something that precludes the ability to read from a book or an electronic display. So I have been looking for ways to fit in more reading and to read faster. Text-to-speech technology provides the means to do this. So I use text-to-speech for speed reading, for multi-task reading, for and a few other things. In this post, I will (a) talk you about the best PDF-to-speech app that I have found and (b) talk about how I use text-to-speech more generally.
1. PDF-to-speech
Most computers, tablets, and smartphones can read text aloud in one way or another. However, until recently, I have not found text-to-speech software that can do both of the following:
- Speak the whole document start-to-finish. Every new page seems to trip up the software, so I have to restart the speech playback at the beginning of every new page.
- Ignore header and footer text. If the software can do 1, then it gets sidetracked by the text in the headers and footers every time it advances to the next page (e.g., copyright notices and page numbers; see figure 1 below).
Productivity, Overworking, & Incentives
University faculty might face a dilemma. On the one hand, productivity is required for faculty to keep their job, be promoted, and — for tenure track faculty — secure tenure. And one way to survive in the competitive academic market is to outshine the competition in terms of productivity. And one way to be more productive than the competition is to overwork yourself. After all, overworking is associated with greater productivity (Jacobs and Winslow 2004; see also Seals and Rodriguez 2006 and Thomas 1992). However, overworking is also associated with lower job dissatisfaction (ibid). So, overworking