Jason in the Guardian

Jason Warr (one of our PhD students) has made the news in a debate about whether prison education is working: Guardian 30 January.

"Did you actually read my article?" The 5 Species of Journal Reviewers

Oh, the joys of peer-reviewed journals. I myself can give some hilarious and ludicrous examples where you start to doubt the usefulness and fairness of some reviews. Professor Robert A. Giacalone (Temple University) has written an article about his experiences:  The 5 Species of Journal Reviewers. Let us know what your experiences are!


"Yet it is the nasty reviewer that many of us like the most because her vitriol is usually accompanied by an outright rejection, which means that we will not have to respond to the comments. We will not have to degrade ourselves by agreeing with her and "fixing" it. We will not need to mollify her lack of humanity with changes that will likely make the paper worse rather than better.
I just try not to think about how those reviewers must be treating their students."


Thanks to Amy for pointing us to this article!

Should academics blog?

This blog post about whether academics should engage in the blogosphere is an interesting one. Personally I think it's an invaluable way of academics engaging with the public, breaking out of the ivory tower that we get accused of residing in, getting new ideas which helps mine and other's research and putting forward tentative ones for discussion. What do others think?

IoC alumnus Nathan Muwereza joins Gateway Challenge with his African Community Team Support

Nathan Muwereza, an IoC-alumnus and now doing his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, is also active founder of the African Community Team Support, a non-profit organisation in his home country Uganda, that wants to restore and empower victims of injustices such as war, rape and domestic violence, but also school dropout and forced marriage. By providing them with training in professions such as hairdressing, horticulture, and nursery school education they create opportunities to earn their own income and build their own economically independent lives. Furthermore, once they earn their own income, they contribute to training others so that they can sustain this empowerment an increase the number of people reached.

ACTS have now been accepted by GlobalGiving UK to participate in its Gateway Challenge, a fundraising opportunity for nonprofit organizations in which they get the chance to compete for bonus funding prizes. 

To pass the Challenge, they must raise £2,000 from 50 donors between the 21^st November and the 21^st December. If they meet this target, they will get a permanent spot on GlobalGiving UK’s fundraising website, where they have the opportunity to benefit from corporate relationships, exposure to a new donor network, and access to dozens of online fundraising, support and training tools. In addition, they could earn up to £2,000 in bonus prizes if they raise the most money and get the highest number of donors!

Click here for more information about the project and to donate. If everyone reading this blog would give £12, it would be possible for ACTS to reach their benchmark of £2000 (based on the blog stats!). Most of all, it would allow them to do more of their valuable work. 

As Nathan writes 'anything given by anybody will be a great help to us in this challenge. 

"One candle lit will help light several others" So help light other candles for us wherever you are.'

This is our story: book on human trafficking

Wendi Adelson, who writes a blog about human trafficking, has written a book about this topic: This is our story. Wendi studied for an MPhil in International Relations at Cambridge and now works as an attorney with the Center for Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University. She has written the book as a way to communicate her clients' stories to the general public while protecting their confidentiality.

It's currently available on Kindle, but should soon be on paper as well. For more information on ordering the paperback version, contact Wendi. I haven't read it, but the reviews on amazon are extremely positive.

The exercise of discretion in the probation service and Bottoms’ model of compliance

Jake writes about compliance in probation in the Early Career Academics Network Bulletin of the Howard League for Penal Reform. He concludes that "although the move towards compliance was seen positively by offender managers and there is evidence of them exercising discretion after a period of very limited discretion, the fact that the move thus far has been set within a managerialist framework means that the kind of compliance achieved is short-termist and might work against normative compliance as proposed by Bottoms."

Managing references

Do you ever feel disorganized? Don’t know which paper you found so useful earlier? Do you dread the prospect of adding the reference list at the end of your paper or thesis? I felt like that last year. Then someone pointed me to this really useful program, called Mendeley. It helps you manage your pdfs and references and it really pays off if you start using it as early as possible.

Here is why I recommend it:

It’s FREE! (as opposed to EndNote, for example)

It has a lot of useful functions, including a pdf-viewer, the option to mark documents as ‘favorite’, ‘read’ or ‘unread’, or ‘needing review’

It can often extract the reference information from a pdf, such as author, title, year, etc. (Though I recommend reviewing the information of each article when you add it)

Your library is synchronized to an online storage space. When I bought a new laptop, I only had to re-install Mendeley and all my papers were there!

With a Word-plugin, you add citations and when you’re done, you can generate the bibliography with a click of the mouse, matching your preferred citation style! When I’ve done that, I copy the bibliography to WordPad, so that I can make changes (funny things happen when I try doing that in Word) and then I copy it back to Word

In addition there are online features, like groups and paper recommendations based on your library. It’s also useful for collaboration apparently, although I haven’t tried that myself.
That’s not to say that it’s a perfect program yet – they are working to make it better and compared to a year ago, it has improved a lot. Luckily you get the updates for free, and the developers welcome any feedback!

It’s worth trying out this program to see how it can help you. If you have any questions you can e-mail me (efjcv2 [at] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk), since I’m a Mendeley advisor (volunteer position, I have no commercial motivations to promote it!)

On Saturday 29 October at noon, I will be in the Clare Hall meeting room to give a brief demonstration of the program and provide some tips based on my own experience. This would be a good opportunity to ask questions. I would also like to invite people who have used other programs, or anyone who has tips on managing articles and references. Let’s help each other out!

For more information, you can check:

http://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/ (A comparison of Mendeley to other reference managers)

http://www.mendeley.com/features/ (An overview of Mendeley’s features)

http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/?_section=footer (Here you can download Mendeley!)

Happy writing!
Esther