I recently came across an interesting site called “The Google College Rankings”. The premise of the site is to use Google search results to determine the “top” (for some definition of top") universities in a country. This approach is much less methodical than the better known Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Here’s the page for Irish Universities/Colleges.
Google Scholar is one of the mainstay tools that my colleagues and I use in our day-to-day jobs. I use it for everything from helping me identify potential reviewers, check conflicts of interest and determining the academic standing of an author (through their h-index, for example).
For all its excellence, GS doesn’t get as much attention or new features as many of the better known Google properties. Not least of which is the lack of a Google Data API to the service, which would be immensely useful.
Earlier this week, Google launched the Google Scholar Blog. Hopefully, this heralds a resurgence in development of new features for GS.
Over at the NY Times, Paul Krugman is having another pop at Ireland’s “fiscal austerity”.
The comments both in support of and contradicting his argument are interesting.
Ireland’s current EU Commissioner is Ms. Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is the Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.
She has issued an open invitation for an online debate, to be held on June 17, on how to make Europe into an Innovation Union.