Here’s a new Nature Medicine paper: “Maternal cannabis use in pregnancy and child neurodevelopmental outcomes.” Of course we’re going to want to read that.
And the findings don’t disappoint our curiosity: The authors find a 50% increase in the rate of autism spectrum disorder in children born to women who use cannabis compared with women who don’t.…
I’ll double down on something I wrote last week: Don’t predict, describe.
Especially: Describe trends and tell us where/what they will lead to.
Right now, expert predictions are, at best, thought exercises that verge on entertainment. At worst, they’re horoscopes: almost always wrong, almost always without accountability, almost always hiding one or more key and very debatable assumptions.…
Q&As bury your treasure. Your research-based treasure — your ideas, frameworks and solutions — that we need to solve wicked problems.
But sometimes — especially if the platform is high-profile enough — a Q&A might provide an essential push to a researcher’s public authority as well.…
Researchers can make three kinds of quotes that add authority to their outreach content:
They read your thought leadership content; now they’ve looked up your website bio to learn about your leadership.
The last thing they want to read is an extension of your CV — academic in style. Or a list of your achievements without cohesion or relevance.…
(Another Tuesday, another Tuesday Thought Leadership Teardown. See all the teardowns in this series.)
You’ve landed an op-ed in the New York Times, offering perhaps the definitive explanation on why it’s impossible for Facebook to ban political advertising.
That’s great, right?…
We’re told that anecdotes (brief retellings of incidents) are impoverished forms of communication, and stories (longer narratives with peaks and valleys and telling details and surprising twists and moments of reflection and insight) are the highest form of communication.
SMH.
In a recent “The Undercover Economist” — economist and journalist Tim Harford’s reported column for the FT designed to answer questions based on the best available research — Harford asks the question “Should we take a few long holidays, or lots of short ones?”…
If you’re going to write a research report in 2019, please don’t make us read the whole damn thing to get the point.
Like Brookings does.
Or Cato.
Or CAP. (Yes, we get a short overview, but then it’s Scrollville.)…
The monarch butterfly is in trouble — in large part because development is chewing up its habitat, including that of its feeding and host plants (milkweed) across North America.
Just to stabilize its population, the monarch needs an “additional 1.8 billion stems of milkweed,” according to Abigail Derby Lewis of Chicago’s Field Museum and Adele Simmons, a philanthropist, writing in a recent Chicago Tribune op-ed.…
Disasterology is the public scholarship site of Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management & disaster science at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
It’s great. It has much of everything public scholarship should have — the bones of a one-stop shop for translating research into timely, jargon-free insights and solutions that decision makers and other non-specialists can actually apply.…