Cambridge Dictionary names ‘perseverance’ Word of the Year 2021 - University of Cambridge : “Perseverance, a word which captures the undaunted will of people across the world to never give up, despite the many challenges of the last 12 months, is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2021. Perseverance has been looked up more than 243,000 times on the websitein 2021, the first time it has made a noticeable appearance. Defined by the dictionary as ‘continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time’, the word’s stellar performance this year may have as much to do with NASA as the pandemic. A spike of 30,487 searches for perseverance occurred between 19–25 February 2021, after NASA’s Perseverance Rover made its final descent to Mars on 18 February.
Minority professor denied grants because he hires on merit: ‘People are afraid to think.’ “‘I don’t care about the colour of your skin. I’m interested in hiring someone who wants to work on the project and is good at it,’ Prof. Patanjali Kambhampati says.”
Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary Publishing Manager, said: “It made sense that lookups of ‘perseverance’ spiked at this time. Cambridge Dictionary is the top website in the world for learners of English, and perseverance is not a common word for students of English to have in their vocabulary. We often see spikes in lookups of words associated with current events when those words are less familiar.”…” [Note – librarians and knowledge pros in every sector have lived the meaning of this word for decades. h/t to us all!]
COVID-19 situation worsens in Europe — Netherlands, Austria imposes full lockdownBusiness Insider.
Vienna brothel offers vaccines and free entryReuters
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation MIT Technology Review. “An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.” One hand washes the other.
Financial Times: “The hidden ‘replication crisis’ of finance. Are swaths of prestigious financial academic research statistically bogus? Campbell Harvey, professor of finance at Duke university, who believes that at least half of the 400 supposedly market-beating strategies identified in top financial journals over the years are bogus. It may sound like a low-budget Blade Runner rip-off, but over the past decade the scientific world has been gripped by a “replication crisis” — the findings of many seminal studies cannot be repeated, with huge implications. Is investing suffering from something similar?…Harvey is not some obscure outsider or performative contrarian attempting to gain attention through needless controversy.
He is the former editor of the Journal of Finance, a former president of the American Finance Association, and an adviser to investment firms like Research Affiliates and Man Group. He has written more than 150 papers on finance, several of which have won prestigious prizes. In fact, Harvey’s 1986 PhD thesis first showed how the bond market’s curves can predict recessions. In other words, this is not like a child saying the emperor has no clothes. Harvey’s escalating criticism of the rigour of financial academia since 2015 is more akin to the emperor regretfully proclaiming his own nudity…”
