Two jobs open at Lausanne. Postdoctoral researcher (80%), and PhD researcher (80%), 3 years, deadline 27 march 2023.
Continue reading “PhD (80%, 5y) and Postdoc Position (80%, 3y) | SNSF project education attitudes”Destination Europe — A “Game” to Teach About Migration
It’s not a “game” in the sense that migration is about real people, but it’s an education tool using “game” mechanics. Here’s how they describe it themselves:
Destination Europe is an interactive learning and training tool about migration and integration. It is an engaging tabletop tool based on role-play that stimulates discussion and learning about some of the most topical issues in today’s Europe.
Clearly a different take on educating people about immigration and the impact of policies — on human lives. There are different versions for North/Western Europe, and for Central/Eastern Europe.
Call for Papers: Migrants’ skills wastage in the labor market: a multidisciplinary approach for policy formation
The call for our special issue on brain waste is now official: https://www.springer.com/journal/11205/updates/20219924
Deadline for submissions is 31 July 2022
The topic of migrants’ skills wastage has generated a sizable but scattered body of research spanning economics, demography, sociology, law, and other social sciences over the past few years (Griesshaber and Seibel 2015; Flisi et al. 2017; Leuven and Oosterbek 2011; Pecoraro 2014; Capsada-Munsech 2017; Klink 2008; Zhou et al. 2016). While the topic is interdisciplinary by nature, recent work has been disciplinary, generating field-specific hypotheses, data, methods and applications, to the detriment of interdisciplinary links and policy debate. The risk of continuing on the current trend is that specialist disciplinary lines will not only progressively depleting the benefit of informing and generating new knowledge by studying an effectively interdisciplinary phenomenon but generate policy recommendations that only cater for a partial aspect of the problem. In an extreme scenario, they risk becoming irrelevant.
The objective of this special issue is to produce a reference resource which consolidates the existing research body, summarises key insights across several disciplines, and provide a firm foundation for continued interdisciplinary dialogue aimed at unifying knowledge for policy debate and policy formulation.
Specifically with this call for papers, we seek to consolidate research findings from different disciplines on migrants’ skills wastage. This includes the study of topics such as over-education, the international transferability of human capital, statistical or outright discrimination in the labour market and within firms, migration policy, and methodological approaches addressing the self-selection that characterises the choice to migrate and enter the labour market of the host country.
At the same time, we seek novel approaches that unite different perspectives and allow a continuation of interdisciplinary research on the topic, with the objective of providing clear information for policy use. Examples could include, but no be limited to, topics such as the spatial dimensions associated with the under-use of human capital, inter-generational and household effects of experiencing skills under-use (especially educational choices of children whose parents experience skills mismatches), the development of new databases, methodologies or variables, and migration policy considerations from both sending and receiving countries with across regions within a country.
Submission portal: www.editorialmanager.com/soci Submission deadline: July 31, 2022
Guest-editors:
Zhiming Cheng
Wei Guo
Marco Pecoraro
Didier Ruedin
Massimiliano Tani
Guess the Correlation!
Here’s a fantastic way to kill a few minutes better understand correlation coefficients: http://guessthecorrelation.com/
You’re shown a simple scatter plot and enter the correlation coefficient you guess to be associated with it. If you’re close enough, you get coins, if you’re too far off, you lose a heart. There’s even a two-player mode. Basic gaming stuff, but you also build an intuition of what those correlation coefficients we’re throwing around all the time actually mean.
There’s more, though. The game also serves (another) serious purpose: Omar Wagih is collecting the data to analyse how we mortals perceive correlations in scatter plots.
p-hacking: try it yourself!
It’s not new, but it’s still worth sharing:
The instructions go: “You’re a social scientist with a hunch: The U.S. economy is affected by whether Republicans or Democrats are in office. Try to show that a connection exists, using real data going back to 1948. For your results to be publishable in an academic journal, you’ll need to prove that they are “statistically significant” by achieving a low enough p-value.”
The tool is here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/
And more on p-hacking here: Wikipedia — to understand why “success” in the above is not what it seems.
Didier Ruedin 