College of Arts and Social Sciences

News and information of interest to the College of Arts and Social Sciences.

An article on the psychology of leadership, exploring the ideas of what traits people think a leader should have and what traits many leaders in the real world have – including the distinction between management and leadership in business :
http://www.infed.org/leadership/traditional_leadership.htm

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Non-renewable sources of energy are dwindling and the race to replace them not only concerns advances in technology but in making the alternatives such as solar panels more economically viable, as this article discusses.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328505.000-indias-panel-price-crash-could-spark-solar-revolution.html
 

Motivation!

Adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, this animation talks about what motivates us, and the ideas are interesting from a psychological perspective but they also have interesting applications in business, especially in terms of innovation and enterprise. What do you think?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Time?

A great competition for students of all fields… The challenge is to design new ways of representing time:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/10/win-a-watch-in-our-time-competition.html

The Capitalist Network that Runs the World...

The idea of a few large corporations enjoying control over a disproportionate amount of the global economy may not seem desirable or conducive to a spirit of enterprise but this article suggests that it may be natural as "such structures are common in nature".

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

Ig nobel prize – parody or novelty?

Last Saturday (19 March 2011) The Ig Nobel Awards Show came to University of Dundee for the second time, giving the university a taste of an awards ceremony like no other.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in October for ten weirdest "achievements" in scientific research. The Ig Nobel Awards honour achievements that “will make you laugh, but also make you think”, all taken from the world of academic and scientific research.

These are all actual, legitimate scientific research papers, not only covering the usual biology or chemistry, but also Management, Economics, Public Health, Transportation Planning, etc.

To give you a genuine insight of what Ig nobel prizes are, here are a few examples of the previous Ig Nobel Prize Winners:

2010: Management: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random

2009: Public Health: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, US, for inventing a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks

2007: Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, for determining that rats sometimes can't distinguish between recordings of Japanese and Dutch played backward

You can find more of these innovative ideas on http://improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html