Conflict of Interest in University Research

The American Association of University Professors journal Academe is out, with a new special issue on conflict of interest and corporate influence in university research. See, for instance:

Michael Halpern, "The Costs of a Climate of Fear," Academe, November-December 2010.

Ben Santer answered his doorbell one evening to find a dead rat on his doorstep. He looked up and saw a man driving away, shouting obscenities out the car window. It would be one thing if this were an isolated incident. But Santer had been harassed before. A groundbreaking climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he was a lead author of the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which for the first time attributed global warming to human activity. Santer’s research had earned him high esteem from scientists and contempt from those who did not accept his conclusions.

The funders of climate-change skepticism are engaged in a full-throttle effort to sow seeds of doubt among the public and policy makers, much as tobacco companies did decades ago. Without science on their side, these groups seek to manufacture controversy by attacking scientists conducting important research. . . .

Have You Insulted a Friend Today?

Have you insulted a friend today? There's still time!

This item appeared in today's Penn State Newswire, our online in-house newsletter:

9. Researchers seek 'least playful' adults to participate in survey

Xiangyou (Sharon) Shen, a doctoral student in the Department of Recreation, is seeking participants for an online survey regarding "adult playfulness." Think of the least playful person you know, excluding yourself, and have them take the eight to 10 minute survey at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=LJKvBJeZDnFqNgyAMhu6Eg_3d_3d online. The
password for the survey is 'lg'. For more information, contact Shen via e-mail at sshen@psu.edu.

How did this one get past the IRB committee? A playful person could have a lot of fun with this.

Taking Note

Ever since I began using computers for teaching and writing at the end of the 1970s, I have been hoping for a really good note-taking application. I have tried a lot of them, including making notes on a word processor--easy to type and store, but not so easy to sort.

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times writes of new note-taking software, and makes a special case for Evernote, which has the advantage of storing notes on the Internet, thereby accessible from any computing platform. Google Notes would do this for you as well, but Google has announced that it is no longer developing the application, and this emphasizes the problem with using any computer application for note-taking -- it needs to stay in business or your notes won't be of any use to you.

Manjoo reports that the best current application is Microsoft's OneNote, but the application is available only for the PC--there is no Mac version. In addition to the applications mentioned by Manjoo , there are of course database applications such as Filemaker, and bibliography programs, such as EndNote. For another free application, I'm also currently exploring Scribe, developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. CHNM is also the developer for Zotero , which CHNM advertises as a successor application to Scribe, able to handle both bibliographic entries, with web capture, and standalone notes. CHNM has developed a number of other useful applications.

Most of the dedicated note-taking programs are based on one or both of two assumptions -- that the researcher is making notes that copy, comment on, or amplify parts of a published source the primary reference to which is part of a bibliography; or that the notes are being saved as part of a process of clipping from web-based pages. Most of the programs make it possible to take free-standing notes -- something like the old-fashioned 3x5 or 4x6 card -- but that is not the standard metaphor for all of them.

Farhad Manjoo, "Bringing Order to the Chaos of Notes," New York Times, 27 May 2009.

Columbia University International Research Centers

Columbia University has announced the opening of two new international research centers:

In a concerted effort to deepen its already extensive global perspective, the University is establishing Columbia Global Centers in Beijing, China and Amman, Jordan. They are the first of what the University plans as a network of centers around the world to promote and facilitate international collaborations, new research projects, academic programming and study abroad, enhancing Columbia’s historical commitment to global scholarship.

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