Author Archives: Kelli Barr

Economics of food: Neoliberalism for the win

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Britt’s post below about food ethics motivated me to revisit my extended commentary on the economics of food. Previously in the series, I described the apparent zero-sum game between economic success on a global scale and local economic prosperity. Aid … Continue reading →

Posted in Environmental policy, Public Philosophizing, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security | Leave a comment

More specialization: please and thank you!

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Kelli Barr

A new report on education from the National Research Council “offers new framework to guide K-12 science education,” and advocates for a shift in the philosophical framework undergirding the US education system: The new framework is designed to help students … Continue reading →

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Open access and epistemology

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Kelli Barr

In a recent Nature piece, Paul Ginsparg recounts the evolution of ArXiv, an online repository for preprint article submissions in physics that he created two decades ago at the dawn of the Internet, and reflects on the compartmentalized nature of … Continue reading →

Posted in Future of the University, Libraries, Open Access | Leave a comment

Let the games begin!

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic are upping the stakes in the burgeoning industry of scientific metrics. These free, widely-available online platforms allow users to search for academics or academic scholarship and also compute citation metrics, such as the H- and … Continue reading →

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‪A short history of fossil fuels

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Kelli Barr

The video is called “300 years of fossil fuels in 300 seconds,” produced by the Post Carbon Institute. That the central focus of this historical overview is on the modern age is no accidental quality. There is something pernicious about … Continue reading →

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This must have been painful

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Kelli Barr

In 2009, the Observer (UK newspaper) was leaked a letter to the Queen from an accomplished group of London School of Economics economists explaining some of the factors that resulted in the failure of economists to detect the credit crisis, … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics & STEM Research, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security, Transdisciplinarity | Leave a comment

Which will go first: the ocean or fossil fuels?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Kelli Barr

The latest ocean news: scientists are gearing up for the next few decades of continued decline in marine populations, the extinction of shallow-water coral reefs, and major perturbations in current physical and chemical stabilizing systems. The first ever interdisciplinary, international … Continue reading →

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Reintroducing academic knowledge into the world

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Keith Brown and I attended UNT’s second annual Symposium on Open Access on Friday. The academic movement toward open access is based on valuing academic information and scholarly output as a public good, and therefore should exist in the public … Continue reading →

Posted in Accountability, Future of the University, Libraries, Open Access, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security | 2 Comments

Economics of food: Global vs. local?

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Kelli Barr

My last post ended with a description of the positive feedback loop involved in globalizing commodities – in this case food – as well as a brief description of some of the disastrous consequences. Here I want to detail a … Continue reading →

Posted in Environmental policy, Public Philosophizing, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security, TechnoScience & Technoscientism | Leave a comment

Economics of Food: Symptoms of Schizophrenia

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Kelli Barr

In a previous post, I introduced this extended discussion on the economics of food. More specifically, my purpose is to begin to unpack what we mean by ‘national security’ – a sign, in the Nietzschean sense – in a neoliberal … Continue reading →

Posted in Environmental policy, Public Philosophizing, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security, TechnoScience & Technoscientism | Leave a comment

Economics of food: Is national security at stake?

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Against the predominant current of 19th century philosophy, Nietzsche contends in the Genealogy of Morality that history, while organic in nature, need not be assumed to be teleological in order to be intelligible. As an organic ‘entity’, i.e. human civilization, … Continue reading →

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Capturing quality… whatever that is

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Adding to the slew of academic rankings, the Times Higher Education released its own “state-of-the-art” ranking of world institutes of higher education. Harvard is #1 and seven out of the top 10 universities in the world are American, which shouldn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Metrics, Public Philosophizing | 1 Comment

Parsimony & predictive ability: Competing values?

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Kelli Barr

A common assumption as far as statistical modeling and their predictive powers is that as databases grow in size and scope and available computing power increases, the models will become more and more accurate at predicting choice, behavior, risk, etc. … Continue reading →

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Business as usual

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Unfortunately for environmental protection and regulation bodies, this means new budget restrictions at the state and federal level that cut even deeper into the wound of continued ideological attacks on their existence. Even if most have weathered the political blows, … Continue reading →

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AAUP shows bleak future for university instruction

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Kelli Barr

The American Association of University Professors recently released a report on the economic state of the profession, noting a number of alarming trends in American colleges and universities that, while not entirely new, are being accelerated by the recession and … Continue reading →

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Research and metrics and impact, oh my!

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Kelli Barr

I recently undertook a sojourn with CSID director Robert Frodeman and asst. director Britt Holbrook across the Ditch (my first ever!) for a workshop at Brunel University just outside of London. Our hosts, Claire Donovan and HERG (the Health Economics … Continue reading →

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Facebook may save philosophy… this time

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Kelli Barr

At Greenwich University in the UK, the honors BA in philosophy is on the chopping block. The Times Higher Education (UK equivalent of the Chronicle of Higher Education) describes the backlash from philosophical faculty and department heads that are members … Continue reading →

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Google to the rescue!

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Kelli Barr

In an attempt to influence the climate change conversation, Google teams up with 21 climate scientists from various disciplines and sub-disciplines to create a media-driven public relations campaign for the results and significance of climate science, noting a “large gap … Continue reading →

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Risk management in the 21st century

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Kelli Barr

A recent finance article in the NY Times drew some interesting parallels between the false sense of security surrounding both the financial crisis in 2008 and the nuclear power plant crisis in Japan. In both instances, the rhetoric of risk … Continue reading →

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Et tu, academe?

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Kelli Barr

What I find interesting about conversations I’ve had with people outside of the academy about the financial crisis is the readiness to blame the people who took out mortgages in areas hit the hardest with foreclosures. The argument goes something … Continue reading →

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Economics needs a reality check

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Despite the growing gulf between econometrics – GDP, unemployment statistics, and consumer/producer price indexes, among others – and what they actually intend to measure, these numerical abstractions are increasingly the determinants of our policy decisions, with the very real danger … Continue reading →

Posted in Accountability, Economics & STEM Research, Interdisciplinarity, STEM Policy | Leave a comment

“He who pays the piper calls the tune”

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Kelli Barr

The former quote is from a commenter on a recent opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Laura Essig, assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College and frequent Chronicle columnist, laments the instances of donors to academic institutions … Continue reading →

Posted in Accountability, Economics & STEM Research, Future of the University, Public Philosophizing | Leave a comment

Climate science and its discontents

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Daniel Sarewitz has recently stirred commotion with an article in Slate that discusses the political affiliations of American scientists. Responding to a Gallup poll that points out a remarkable match between political ideology and belief that climate change is occurring, … Continue reading →

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Is a code of ethics two years too late?

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Kelli Barr

It has been almost two years since the financial collapse of 2008, and economists are just now calling for a code of ethics (raise your hand if you thought economists already had a code of ethics, just like almost all … Continue reading →

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Mapping Science… & everything else

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Kelli Barr

Science-Metrix, an independent consulting firm “specializing in the assessment of science and technology (S&T) organizations and activities,” has provided a visualization of the connections between scientific disciplines/subfields and the rest of academic research areas. The tool and its various iterations … Continue reading →

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