AU MENU DU CAFE-LIVRE DU 22 MAI

Voici les livres et les films du jour – puisque le “café-livre” s’ouvre au cinéma !

Livres

– Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles, de Kathrine Pancol

– Touché : A French woman’s take on the English, Agnès Catherine Poirier

– They eat horses, don’t they ? The truth about the French, de Marie Piu Eatwell

– Sacrés français : un américain nous regarde, de Ted Stanger

– Ils sont fous ces français, de Polly Platt

– Les oiseaux sans ailes, de Louis de Bernières

– La vérité sur l’affaire Harry Québert, de Joël Dicker

– Par un matin d’automne, de Robert Goddard

– L’Aleph, Jose Luis Borges

– La cathédrale de la mer, d’Ildefonso Falcones

– Mitsuba, d’ Aki Shimazaki

 

Films :

– La leçon de piano, de Jane Campion

– Et maintenant on va où ?, de Nadine Labaki

Giada Di Stefano in the SSRN Weekly Top 5 Papers

For the second time, the article Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance, of which Giada Di Stefano is one of the authors, has been classed in the Weekly Top 5 papers of SSRN.

To find out more, click on this link to acces the SSRN Blog

 

 

 

5. Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance by Giada Di Stefano (HEC Paris – Strategy & Business Policy) and Francesca Gino (Harvard Business School) and Gary Pisano (Harvard Business School) and Bradley Staats (University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School)

Productivity and time efficiency are significant concerns in modern Western societies, with time being perceived as a precious resource to guard and protect. In our daily battle against the clock, taking time to reflect on one’s work may seem to be a luxurious pursuit. Though reflection entails the high opportunity cost of one’s time, in this paper we argue and show that deliberate reflection is no wasteful pursuit: it can powerfully enhance the learning process. Learning, we find, can be augmented if one deliberately focuses on thinking about what one has been doing. Results from our analyses show that employees who spent the last 15 minutes of each day in their training period writing and reflecting on the lessons they had learned that day did 23% better in the final training test than employees who didn’t take time to consider how they had approached the task. This improvement, we find, is explained by greater self-efficacy, i.e. confidence in one’s ability to complete tasks competently and effectively.

Are you subscribed to the HEC Paris e-Journal collection on SSRN?

Every month, SSRN publishes an e-journal collection entitled the ‘HEC Paris Research Paper Series,’ on behalf of HEC Paris

Since April 2013, more than 15 issues have been published, which has provided the opportunity to promote 61 working papers published by researchers at HEC Paris.

  

For those who are not subscribed yet, please do so by clicking on the link.

http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=HEC-Paris-BSR

(you will have to log in first)

 

The complete collection of working papers in the HEC Paris Research Paper Series can be found here:

http://www.ssrn.com/link/HEC-Paris-BSR.html –

Open Peer Review

Open peer review is based around the idea of transparency and disclosure of the identities of those reviewing each particular work, as opposed to the anonymous commenting , known as anonymous/blind peer review.

The Open Peer Review Protocol describes key features of this system:

• Authors invite expert peers to formally evaluate their work posted in any online archive (libraries, repositories, preprint servers, etc).
• Reviewers who accept submit a detailed qualitative and quantitative assessment of the work.
• The reviewer’s name and any conflict of interest are publicly disclosed.
• Reviews are published with a creative commons license (or similar) and become publicly available along with the original work.
• Reviews are  subject to commentary and evaluation by the entire community.
• Author-guided open peer review can be implemented at any stage of an article’s lifetime: (a)before journal submission, (b) during journal peer review (in agreement with the journal’s editor), and (c) after journal publication.

 

Why Open Peer Review can be interesting?

• Previous comments were often managed by journal editors, who could therefore control access to each work and subsequent review
• Anonymity meant people could falsify comments; both friends/colleagues of the author to leave positive commentary, or critics leaving harsher criticisms hiding behind the guise of anonymity
• The accountability of adding a reviewer profile offers reviewers incentives to provide good quality and helpful reviews, as well as get into contact direclty to further works.
• Lower costs (no publisher/editor monopoly)
• Aims to keep taking scholarly advancement further
• Encourages collaboration, and more reviewing as opposed to academic competition.

 

The  Libre project is one which has adopted free Open Peer Review as a platform for a community of volunteer scholars to share and develop its work, and its popularity is growing.

 

To find out more about Open Peer Review, read this article !

 

 

 

The Problem with Data Validation

John Kratz of the California Digital Library recently published an article entitled ‘Fifteen ideas about data validation (and peer review)’

He describes it as a “longish list of non-parallel, sometimes-overlapping ideas about how data review, validation, or quality assessment could or should work, ” and lays out fifteen observations and recommendations to improve the process.

Problems with data validation can sometimes arise, as academic researchers often only publish raw datasets alongside their articles.

As a result it sometimes becomes difficult to assess the reliability and relevance of this data.

Whilst, as the author notes, there are some mechanisms in place to validate data, they are severely lacking in comparison to those in place for example in terms of citations ; where several widely recognised styles are already present.

This is somewhat surprising ; data validation is clearly of high importance in assuring the credibility of an academic article, and therefore strong mechanisms and even a standard procedure should be in place to ensure that this is the case.

One of the ongoing themes which runs throughout Kratz’ ideas is the depth of which the data needs to be reviewed ; not only by one person, but divided up among people or even organisations. Both data and metadata should be reviewed, not only by other academics, but experts in the field, the community and the users of the data. Similarly, aside from mere validation, actual use of the data is a form of review in itself, and works to confirm the true relevance and application of the data to conclude whether it really is fit for purpose.

 View this video coming from Nature for more information on the subject:

 

Word, Excel and PowerPoint now on iPad!

From the beginning of April, 3 small apps that all iPad owners have only dreamed of owning for free, have finally appeared on the App Store :  Word, Excel and Power Point !

Available for free download via the App Store,

these applications allow you to view Microsoft Office documents (doc , ppt , xls … ) with a quality similar in every respect to the Ms Office suite for PC .

You can synchronize your documents via One Drive and access them from another device.

Plus, when you open a document, it will continue exactly where you left off, including any modifications made.

You will have to purchase the paid version of Office 365 ( from 69 € / year) to create and edit documents, and to gain access to the wealth of features and menus of the Office suite.

But if you do not want to spend the money, Microsoft has made the Office Mobile App available for free !

The Office Mobile app allows you to view and edit Word , Excel and PowerPoint files on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro or SharePoint using an interface designed for iPhone ( but that also works with iPad)

Now you can work like the pros !

Research Apps for your mobile device

With the growing use of mobile devices in both daily and academic life, databases and other online resources are increasingly providing mobile access or developing applications to support their platforms.

Two recent examples of this are:

• Emerald
• Ebsco

Emerald  is a leading publisher of journals and books in the business and management domains.
Few month ago, Emerald has released a free application for iPad and iPhone which provides access to 100 000 journal articles, available from the app store.

Here’s how:

Emerald

Open the app store and search for ‘Emerald’
Select and download the free app

 Once downloaded, open the application.

You will be met with the home page, as below

 You can search for articles using the simple search field. 

Your results will be displayed in the form of icons depicting each article title.

NB:  If you are connected to the HEC Wifi network you will also be able to get the PDF full text for each article.

The “Read Full-Text” icon will take you to an article summary page (redirected via your browser) with the option to view the article in full, PDF format in the tool bar on the right hand side of the screen.

 

 

 

The app also allows you to :

•  browse journals by title, by tapping the ‘Browse Journals icon’ to view all available journals alphabetically (as shown below)

 

 

EBSCO

EBSCO uses a platform via your browser to offer mobile access to articles

To gain access, go to the HEC Library website –> Electronic Resources –> Databases A-Z
Scroll down alphabetically to find an EBSCO database, for example Business Source Complete, and touch Access EBSCO databases on your mobile device

 

 

Tap the EBSCOhost Mobile application is tailor-made for the smaller screens of mobile devices icon

 Select one or several databases on the list by ticking the relevant boxes on the left hand side, before selecting ‘continue’

Perform your search as you would normally, providing key words in the search boxes and drop down menus

 

From the list of results, you can get access to an article summary, or to the full text by tapping ‘PDF full text’

 

 

The article will appear on your screen, as below

 

 

 

For further information on any of the above, do not hesitate to contact the library 😉