When I started my career as a medical statistician in September 1972, medical research was very different from now. In that month, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal published 61 research reports which used individual participant data, excluding case reports and animal studies. The median sample size was 36 people. In July 2010, I had another look.
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Amazon.com has launched a free app enabling students to trade used textbooks, while Barnes & Noble has expanded sales of its Nook e-reader to more than 630 of its college bookstores.
Amazon Student, an application for iPhone and iPod touch devices, allows users to trade their old textbooks, plus videos, games and other products, in return for Amazon giftcards. The app offers instant price checks, whereby users will be able to scan barcodes from textbooks in a bookstore, to compare prices.
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Pearson has bought German educational materials company Stark Holdings.
The company provides text preparation resources for pupils and teachers. It had sales of €20m for its most recent financial year and has gross assets estimated at €32.6m.
Pearson said the acquisition diversifies its German business and it expects to generate a return on the cost of capital a year after the acquisition formally goes ahead. It is subject to regulatory approval.
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Academic and professional publisher Sage has bought Learning Matters, the independent education publisher founded in 1999.
The sale, for an undisclosed sum, was announced jointly by Learning Matters founder and managing director Jonathan Harris, and Ziyad Marar, global publishing director, at Sage. Harris will continue to work with the company as a consultant. A Sage spokesperson said Learning Matters will stay at its Exeter home until December 2011 with details of a future transition plan to be ironed out.
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Education charity BookPower is to wind down this autumn after suffering a major squeeze in donations over the past 18 months.
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Sales of print books in the academic, specialist and higher education publishing market have slumped in the first half of the year, with one publisher seeing a decline of 22% in print sales. But academic publishers pointed to digital and institutional sales as growth areas outside of the academic retail market.
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South Korea, the world’s most wired nation, has announced it expects to replace all paper text books with electronic tablets at its state run schools by 2015.
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By Jonathan Steinberg
When I began my career in academic life as an historian, the answer was a loud No. Biography fell into the category of ‘unserious’ stuff, written by amateurs. Not any more. Big biographies of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Churchill, Lyndon Johnson and many others pour from the pens of the most distinguished academic historians. My Bismarck: A Life, which appears in February in the UK and April in the USA, will, I hope, find readers both in the professional historical profession and among the public. What has changed? Why has biography become respectable as a form of research?
In the 1960s when I started, the prevailing paradigm came from social sciences. History had to build sociological modes like the totalitarianism model. It had to measure, count and verify. It had to study structures and functions of the social order, drawn from Marxist analysis or Weberian sociology. Anything else seemed dangerously uncertain, ill-defined and, worse, ‘subjective’.
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought down the whole edifice of social science. Nobody in the spectrum of social studies had a clue that the Soviet Union and its vast empire could vaporize in two years as if it had been a mirage; anything with ‘social’ in its terminologies lost purchase along with socialism. The gap left in the set of tools available to historians has not yet been filled. But there were lives out there to study. Even I, educated in Parsonian structural-functional analysis and a dedicated social scientific historian, had noticed an absurd contrast between my models and a twentieth century reality dominated by huge charismatic individuals: Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Biography established itself, I think, because the social science models left out the power of human personality. Serious historians of National Socialism realized that they had to solve the Hitler problem. The great Hitler biographer, Ian Kershaw, begins his massive 2 volume biography with a section called ‘Reflecting on Hitler’ with these words:
‘The legacy of Hitler belongs to all of us. Part of that legacy is the continuing duty to seek understanding of how Hitler was possible. ..the character of his power – the power of the Führer . . . a social construct, a creation of social expectations and motivations vested in Hitler by his followers.’ (pp. xiv and xxvi)
Kershaw makes a fundamental and liberating distinction between the life of the man Hitler and the interaction of that life with the category of rule associated with the term Führer or leader, a political, objective reality, which we can study as we can the growth of modern industry or the changes in population.
In writing my book, I worked on the same principle. For the last four decades, since I first lectured on Bismarck as a very junior research fellow at Cambridge, his achievement puzzled me. How had he done it? Bismarck achieved his feats because his powerful personality disarmed and commanded his supporters and his opponents alike for nearly four decades, but every individual, no matter how great, works within real parameters. Changes in the international balance of power, over which he had no control made his success possible. The institutional structure of the Kingdom of Prussia after the Revolution of 1848 gave him levers of power. The Prussian army over which Bismarck as a civilian could by definition have no say, made his victories possible. He needed a general to be Minister of War, who knew he was a genius and found one in Albrecht von Roon (1803-1879). Finally he had to ma
Tariq Ramadan is a very public figure, named one of Time magazine’s most important innovators of the twenty-first century, he is among the leading Islamic thinkers in the West. But he has also been a lightening rod for controversy. In his new book, What I Believe, he attempts to set the record straight, laying out the basic ideas he stands for in clear and accessible prose. In the excerpt below we learn a bit about Ramadan’s stance as a thinker straddling two worlds.
My discourse faces many-sided opposition, and this obviously prevents it from being fully heard in its substance, its subtleties, and its vision for the future. Some of the criticisms expressed are of course sincere and raise legitimate questions – which I will try to answer in the present work – but others are clearly biased and attempt to pass off their selective, prejudiced hearing as “doublespeak” one should be wary of. I have long been criticizing their deliberate deafness and their ideological “double hearing”: I am determined to go ahead, without wasting my time over such strategic diversions, and remain faithful to my vision, my principles, and my project.
I mean to build bridges between two universes of reference, between two (highly debatable) constructions termed Western and Islamic “civilizations” (as if those were closed, monolithic entities), and between citizens within Western societies themselves. My aim is to show, in theory and in practice, that one can be both 
fully Muslim and Western and that beyond our different affiliations we share many common principles and values through which it is possible to “live together” within contemporary pluralistic, multicultural societies where various religions coexist.
The essence of that approach and of the accompanying theses originated much earlier than 9/11. Neither did it come as a response to Samuel Huntington’s mid-1990s positions about the “clash of civilizations” (which anyway have been largely misinterpreted). As early as the late 1980s, then in my 1992 book Muslims in the Secular State, I sated the first fundamentals of my beliefs about the compatibility of values and the possibility for individuals and citizens of different cultures and religions to coexist positively (and not just pacifically). Unlike what I have observed among some intellectuals and leaders, including some Muslim thinkers and religious representatives, those views were by no means a response to current events nor a change of mind produced by the post 9/11 trauma. They represent a very old stance which was confirmed, developed, and clarified in the course of time. Its substance can be found in my first books and articles in 1987-1989; those views were then built on and expanded in every book I wrote up to the present synthesis. A Muslim’s religious discourse, and the mediator’s role itself, bring about negative reactions in both universes of reference. What makes things more difficult is that I do not merely shed light on overlapping areas and common points between the two universes of reference but that I also call intellectuals, politicians
