As you will see in our link sidebar at R there are two new blogs - Media Policy and Law@LSE and Virtual Law@LSE. So if you have been mainly reading our postings about media regulation or politics or privacy you should definitely be bookmarking these two newcomers (both of which feature postings by Damien Tambini, a lecturer here in the media department).
I have just learned that those with valid university email addresses (not just US ones, UK ones seem to work too!) can get free access to the New York Times’ TimesSelect service (which allows you to read the columnists which are normally password protected and lets you look at articles from their online archives). Handy! Thanks Kathleen and Chuck…
Having just about finished a literature review for a report on ICT and disadvantage (I’ll provide a link when it becomes available) can I plead with other authors to be specific in their abstracts? Here’s a (suitably anonymised) example of how not to do it…
“… The study investigates the links between [X, Y, and Z] and reveals the changing situation experienced by [people].”
OK so what was the nature of the links?! How has the situation changed? I know an abstract is necessarily of limited length and it can be hard to summarise months of research in a few sentences but abstracts are is meant to enable the reader to quickly get a sense of whether the paper or report itself will be of use. With abstracts like these the reader has no choice but to read the whole thing or discard it.
PS To make matters worse the report in question was divided into sections but the version I downloaded didn’t come with a table of contents or endnotes!