ERA Report Released

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has released the ERA report (Excellence in Research for Australia). I've blogged before about this process. The Australian newspaper provides a graphic of the ranking of universities:ANU comes top and Melbourne second which isn't a surprise. UQ is third though which is higher than many may have expected. Melbourne is top ranked in economics though. That isn't

Leadership, Social Capital and Incentives Promote Successful Fisheries

A paper in Nature by Nicolas Gutierrez et al. carries out a meta-analysis of the literature on fisheries management. 130 fisheries are included. The aim was to test whether community co-management can promote sustainability as argued by Ostrom and others. They coded success of the fishery according to number of social, ecological and economic outcomes achieved and also counted the number of

Book Citation Index

Thomson Reuters is adding a "Book Citation Index" to the Web of Science. With the exception of some book series, up till now if your book publication was cited in a journal covered by the Web of Science that citation to your work was included in the Citation Index. But citations to your work in books, even from prestigious presses such as Cambridge were not included. The main source I currently

Cold Fusion Again?

I still remember how excited I was back in 1989 when the original claim of achieving of cold fusion was made. I remember sitting in the communal kitchen where I lived in North London and excitedly telling someone about how important it might be if it was real. They were surprised that I was excited about this one news item. Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall were to come later that

ARC Releases New Discovery Program Instructions

A couple of weeks ago the ARC released the new funding rules for this years grant applications. Now they have finally http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/dp/dp_instructions.htm">released the instructions for this year's applications. The main change that I have noticed so far are:1. Instead of separate sections on "Significance and Innovation" and "Approach and Methodology" in the Project Description (

A New Index from Jorge Hirsch: h-bar

Jorge Hirsch is a physicist at the University of California, San Diego who is mostly famous (outside physics at least) for inventing the h-index. A scholar's h-index is the number of his or her academic papers that have received at least h citations. It has become popular in large I think because it is easy to compute using Google Scholar or the ISI citation index. The main obstacles to

Early Bird Registration Extended to 29th January

If you are interested in sustainability and cities you might be interested in attending this conference to be held next month in Melbourne. Early bird registration has been extended. Visit the conference website to register.