Besselaar and Leydesdorff tested whether the grant decisions correlate with the past performances of the applicants in terms of publications and citations, and with the results of the peer review process organized by the Netherlands Research Council

In their paper they show that the Council is successful in distinguishing grant applicants with above-average performance from those with below-average performance, but within the former group no correlation could be found between past performance and receiving a grant. When comparing the best performing researchers who were denied funding with the group of researchers who received it, the rejected researchers significantly outperformed the funded ones. Within the top half of the distribution, neither the review outcomes nor past performance measures correlate positively with the decisions of the Council.

The authors conclude with some questions for further research. They suggest a network analysis of applicants, reviewers, committee members, and Council board members. This might provide an answer to the question whether funding is correlated to the visibility of the applicants within these networks. After all, in the social process of granting proposals many processes play a role, apart from scholarly quality: bias, old-boys’ networks and other types of social networks, bureaucratic competencies, dominant paradigms, etc., all play an important role in selection processes.

If my reading of the paper is correct, it might also point to a discrepancy between the grant decision makers and the international academic community. If we consider that metrics (past performance) and peer review very much emerge in international networks and the grant distributors make decisions contradicting the metrics and peer review, what does that tell about the Council members’ involvement in these international networks?

The paper will be published later this year in the journal Research Evaluation.

I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I’ll provide no “value-added.” My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece.

But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they’ll need my seal of approval. I’ll convince developers that, if a game isn’t distributed by my company, then the game doesn’t “count” — indeed, barely even exists — and all their labor on it has been in vain.

Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I’ll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I’ll tell the experts that it’s their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free!

On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous — a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not “rush to judgment” by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense?

I’ve got it: academics!

This was just the hilarious but oh so true intro to the actual review. Read the rest here. Or order Willinsky’s book here. And of course you can also download his book for free right here.

by Lao, Oscar et al. (2008)

Full Text Available in Current Biology; See also this article in the IHT

Maybe not that weird, but definitely interesting. Biologists from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and others have constructed a genetic map of Europe. They investigated genotype data from 2,514 individuals belonging to 23 different subpopulations, widely spread over Europe. Although they found only a low level of genetic differentiation between subpopulations, the existing differences were characterized by a strong continent-wide correlation between geographic and genetic distance. This resulted in the following genetic map of Europe (click to enlarge).

The IHT explains: the genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.

The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders. The other is between Italians (yellow, bottom center) and the rest. This may reflect the role of the Alps in impeding free flow of people between Italy and the rest of Europe.

But the study provides more than just an interesting picture. The authors explain that understanding the genetic structure of the European population is important, not only from a historical perspective, but also for the appropriate design and interpretation of genetic epidemiological studies.

A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea’s Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOURCE: CPST ANALYSIS OF SED, 2006

HT: Nanopolitan

The Graduate Junction was established by Daniel Colegate and Esther Dingley, graduate  students in respectively Chemistry and Education at the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom. They set up The Graduate Junction because they were – in their own words – frustrated by a feeling of isolation in their own research projects and wanted to know who, if anyone, was doing similar research. I have had a quick look at it and it looks good and has the potential to be a valuable tool for graduate students. Much of its success obviously depends on the number of participants it will attract. If I still were a student I would definitely sign up and become member of groups like this.

Researchgate targets a larger community. It is meant as a networking tool for all academics and researchers. It is set up by three students from Germany (one of them now being at Harvard). Two of them in Medicine, one in Computer Science. The concept is backed by a world wide network of experts and advisers. Researchgate has big aspirations. Next to a networking tool, it sees itself as the start of a more profound change where researchers take more and more control over their publications and research findings.

So where will all this lead? Well…my experiences with these new tools for – often conservative – academics have not always been positive. Nevertheless I’m positive about these new tools. Graduate Junction has the advantage that it targets a younger group of people and probably more open to these kind of innovations. In addition, I think that the need of these tools might be more substantial with graduate students than with researchers in general. This is simply because the ‘normal’ channels such as journals and conferences are not so readily available to them and don’t provide that many opportunities for direct interaction.

Researchgate on the other hand has a more professional look and already is backed by a large network of academics. It also seems to provide more advanced technological opportunities like importing endnote libraries and linking with databases such as PubMed. I would love to see a further expansion to enable more interaction and maybe new opportunities for open peer reviewing.

I hope both initiatives will succeed. It’s about time for the academic community to start using the technological opportunities available. Both might turn out to be great new opportunities for inter-organisational, interdisciplinary and international cooperation.

Optimal boarding method for airline passengers

by Jason H. Steffen 

Full Text Available in Arxiv / Physics & Society [PDF]

The problem

Several passenger boarding schemes are used by the airline industry in effort to quickly load passengers and their luggage onto the airplane. Since the passenger boarding time often takes longer than refueling and restocking the airplane its reduction could constitute a significant savings to a particular carrier, especially for airplanes which make several trips in a day.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that boarding from the front to the back is the worst case but that boarding from the back to the front is optimal or nearly so. Indeed, this is the strategy that is often employed, boarding passengers in blocks from the rear of the plane to the front. In this case, conventional wisdom only provides an answer that is half right. The worst  boarding method is, indeed, to board the plane from front to back. As this study shows, however, boarding the airplane from the back to the front is very likely the second worst method.

The Findings

By boarding passengers in a manner that allows several passengers to load their luggage simultaneously the boarding time can be dramatically reduced. This result contradicts conventional wisdom and practice that loads passengers from the back of the airplane to the front. Indeed, it shows that loading from the back to the front is little different from the worst case of loading from the front to the back. The goal of an optimized boarding strategy should focus on spreading the passengers throughout the length of the airplane instead of concentrating them in a particular portion of the cabin.

By boarding in groups where passengers whose seats are separated by a particular number of rows, by boarding from the windows to the aisle, or by allowing passengers to board in random order one can reduce the time to board by better than half of the worst case and by a significant amount over conventional back-to-front blocks—which, while better than the worst case performed worse than all other block loading schemes. The primary drawbacks for any of these methods is likely to be psychological instead of practical. Groups of passengers who wish to board together would be an issue to investigate from both a customer satisfaction point of view and as a component in a more detailed model.

If a workable method to have passengers line up in an assigned order could be found—and it likely may be employed already, then there is the potential for a substantial savings in time. Such a savings would most likely benefit flights between nearby cities where a particular airplane would make several trips in a given day since it might allow one or two additional flights. Or, it might allow an airline to reduce the number of gates that it requires to meet its obligations since each gate would be cleared more rapidly.

My former university – the University of Twente – this week announced that they had rejected a number of Iranian students and that they will not be able to process new applications from Iranian students. Is the University of Twente (UT) getting paranoid? No! They are acting according to a United Nations resolution and a following decision by the Dutch Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They had requested universities to give a formal guarantee that the Iranian visa applicants do not have access to certain specific scientific knowledge (read: nuclear knowledge). UT’s president explained:

Students have the right to attend all courses and they should be able to develop freely. We don’t want to exclude students from education and therefore we cannot give the guarantee that the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs demand from us. (…) As a university we cannot exclude the possibility that Iranians will be exposed to nuclear knowledge. We can’t control that.

The firm stance (or paranoia?) of the Dutch government and their quick action on the UN Resolution is probably related to an event a couple of years ago. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist and developer of the country’s nuclear bomb confessed in 2004 that he had run an illicit global nuclear-proliferation network involving Libya, Iran and North Korea. Kahn had attended the University of Technology in Delft in the 1960s and worked at the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam, a subcontractor for URENCO, a Dutch uranium enrichment facility.

Paranoia or justified caution? Whatever it is it raises some interesting questions. Wes Holleman of Education Ethics (in Dutch) asks whether an educational institution is allowed to restrict access to knowledge because of the risk that they will apply this knowledge for the wrong reasons. In cases where criminal intentions are clear this might be an easy question. But how to establish that wrong intentions are at play (think for instance about tax law)?

In considering these questions, he refers to two declarations of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP): the Joint statement on rights and freedoms of students (1967; 1992) and the Statement on graduate students (2000) mentioning issues such as discrimination on the basis of nationality, race and religion and the compliance of academic freedom. Since these norms are also clearly embedded in Dutch constitutional and educational law, Holleman concludes that:

Educational institutions should think twice before deciding not to admit students to their courses on the basis of their ‘evil’ nationality or their wrong intentions. From an ethical perspective they are walking on shaky ground and legally they might face judicial rulings against these decisions.

I agree with his conclusion, but nevertheless, the university’s decision is understandable. Obviously they cannot neglect the demands from the Ministries. They can either admit the students and ‘police’ them so they will not come in contact with ‘dangerous knowledge’, something which is of course sheer impossible and goes completely against the notion of academic freedom. Or they can decide not to accept any Iranian students, even if this goes against their ethics. And the government? Yes, they are acting rather promptly and maybe slightly shortsighted. Probably that’s because they want the avoid the embarrassment of a second Kahn case.

In a Nature commentary Barbara Sahakian & Sharon Morein-Zamir (University of Cambridge) discuss the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs in order to boost brainpower. And of course, these ‘Professor’s little helpers’ are also penetrating those places where the brains are (or should be) most heavily used: academia.

For many, it seems that the immediate and tangible benefits of taking these drugs are more persuasive than concerns about legal status and adverse effects. There are clear trends suggesting that the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate on college campuses is on the rise, and is becoming more commonplace in ever younger students. Universities may have to decide whether to ban drug use altogether, or to tolerate it in some situations (whether to enable all-night study sessions or to boost alertness during lectures).

But it’s not just the students. Pills also provide brain boost for academics, according to an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement earlier this year:

Feeling under intense pressure to improve your performance at work? Fatigued by the growing demands of a 24/7 society? These are occupational hazards affecting many of today’s academics.

But the suggestion that an individual’s performance can be improved, and tiredness overcome, simply by popping a pill can shock even those academics who have studied the effects of so-called smart drugs.

According to the THES, no major studies have yet been conducted in the UK to discover the extent to which smart drugs are being used by academics or students. The Times Higher made a journey around British academia to poll the opinions and attitudes about the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs in academia. Here are a few quotes:

"If it was possible to enhance cognition by taking drugs that were safe and without side-effects, then why would anyone not take them? Such drugs would be welcome."

"the development of the drugs for cognitive enhancement purposes should be encouraged and could benefit elderly academics."

"it could be argued that there was little difference between students drinking caffeine drinks to stay up all night to revise and taking smart drugs."

"There is evidence to suggest that continual use of these drugs over a period of years can prove detrimental to cognitive functioning and, consequently, future academic success. The analogy with sport is useful here: is immediate success worth the potential physical and mental degeneration in later life?"

"If it were cheaper and more convenient to obtain the current generation of smart drugs, I would certainly consider using them myself. Who among us has not, while struggling to remember an elusive fact, wished for a better memory, or berated ourselves for an inability to concentrate, cudgelling our tired brains to function? These drugs might, at the very least, be an improvement on caffeine, the current mental stimulant of choice for many students and academics.

"Why should it be wrong to strive to better ourselves? Our capacity for conscious thought and for reason – our ability to observe, consider, interact with and perhaps shape the world around us – is part of what we value most about ourselves. Surely we ought to welcome the means to improve it, be that through better education, tools such as computers or the use of pharmaceutical agents?"

I’m quite surprised by the open attitude towards the use of cognitive enhancing drugs in academia (especially considering that they are not anonymised in the THES article). However, I would suspect that the picture would be quite different if a random sample of British academics had been polled.

And me? I’m heavily hooked on drugs and have no plans to kick the habit whatsoever. I get my high quality drugs for moderate prices from either my favorite provider in Newtown, or my favorite distributor on campus.

In order to find out how many submissions were made to academic journals on Christmas Day between 1996 and 2006, Richard Ladle, Ana Malhado and Peter Todd searched Google Scholar for articles received on 25 December. Even taking into account the overall increase in the volume of submissions, there were about 600% more manuscripts received by journals on 25 December in 2006 than in 1996.

Proportion of published papers submitted on 25 December relative to mean number submitted on the 25th of the month (excluding weekends) for all other months in that calendar year. R² = 0.69.

The authors suggest four potential reasons for this move towards seasonal workaholism among scientists:

We are collectively falling victim to the ‘publish or perish’ institutional culture, in which our professional success depends almost exclusively on our publication record.

The pressure on scientists to publish is paralleled by an increase in their administrative and teaching workloads. This pushes research and, in particular, writing into vacation periods.

With the wide-scale implementation of electronic submission systems in the late 1990s, most journals are now ‘open for business’ every day of the year.

Although Christmas Day seems to be an ideal opportunity to get on with some blissfully uninterrupted research, we would urge our fellow scientists to keep their laptops turned off and enjoy a bit of Christmas spirit. You never know, Santa might then be more inclined to bring you that most popular of presents — a paper published in Nature!

[Richard J. Ladle, Ana C. M. Malhado & Peter A. Todd. Come all ye scientists, busy and exhausted. O come ye, O come ye, out of the lab. Nature 450, 1156 (20 December 2007)]

I ran into some interesting papers and essays on the issue of English as the lingua franca of contemporary higher education and science. They raise serious questions about the preservation of ‘scientific languages’, the ability to learn and teach in a non-native language, the homogenising tendencies of a lingua franca and even about flexible interpretation of plagiarism…

Some time ago, biophysicist Stefan Klein wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine about languages and science (Dümmer auf Englisch; English translation here: Dumber in English). Klein wants to ensure the future of German as a language of science and presents some good arguments for it. Roughly, his argument is that the move towards English as a lingua franca makes science elitist and (non native English speaking) scientists dumber. For the first issue Klein refers to a seminar he attended:

All the speakers – six Germans, plus three from the United States and one from Great Britain – were outstanding. And they all spoke either English or, in the case of a German speaker, now and then something similar. But who in the audience spoke English? No one. (…) As someone from the sponsoring foundation told me, of course it would be better if the local guests would simply speak German. This would increase the public resonance. But the professors had another idea. Their argument: People only take a conference seriously when English is the official language.

Klein doesn’t plea for abandoning English as a language for German science but argues that scientists should be accountable to the public: “how do they expect to win the sympathy of a public with which they no longer even have language in common?” He claims that German should remain the language for seminars and lectures. At the same time, the communication media for the experts and specialists can be in English. Klein:

It shouldn’t hurt German scientific language if, in the course of everyday research, publications appear in English. Such articles almost always deal with tiny advances in knowledge – like the question of whether or not gene X is expressed under the influence of protein Y. They are oriented towards a small audience, they seldom influence scientific concepts and they are, even if composed by native speakers, usually linguistically as outstanding as a manual for a DVD player.

In relation to the second issue, Klein refers to researchers in Sweden and the Netherlands who found that “we are dumber in English”. Test results were about ten percent lower on average in English taught courses than in courses taught in the mother tongue.

In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.

By now, English is the sole language used in lectures in 250 out of 1,976 advanced educational fields in Germany (“master’s degree” programmes). Should this development continue, it would mean certain death for German as a language of research. In Sweden’s most renowned university, in Uppsala, they already are considering offering more programmes in Swedish or returning completely to the mother tongue for basic studies.

In continental Europe – and especially Northwestern Europe – you can see a trend where more and more Master’s programmes are taught in English. This of course facilitates international mobility (and the attraction of full fee paying non EU foreign students) and it equips graduates with a global language, something that is especially important in the more globalised, small countries in northern Europe. On the other hand I share the worries of Klein about the disadvantages of learning (and teaching!) in a non-native language. But this issue can partially be solved by improving English teaching, introducing English in early stages of education and by immersing children with the English language at a young age. In my opinion, all this doesn’t necessarily negatively affect the use of the native language.

Clearly, the necessity to become fluent in English becomes less when the native language is widely spoken. The risks of loosing German (or French and Spanish) as a language of science is far less than the risk of loosing Dutch or Swedish as a language of science. First of all there’s simply more users of the language, creating more opportunities for using it as a language of academic communication and publishing. Secondly, small languages are often spoken in small countries, which again are more pushed towards the use of English in other sectors of public life, especially in business.

Another interesting essay on the issue comes from Phillip Altbach from the Center for International Higher Education. He addresses some additional downsides of The Imperial Tongue, and especially the homogenising tendencies related to it:

• The impact of English increases the influence of the major English-speaking academic systems, particularly of the United States and the United Kingdom.
• The use of national languages and the existence of national journals and publishers are called into question by policymakers and academic administrators worldwide. Knowledge is ranked according to whether it is recognized by the international academic community or not. Topics such as local history or research on local health problems may be ignored to gain recognition internationally.
• Countries might lose its distinctive culture if the native language is no longer used for intellectual and academic life. If the knowledge that is most valued is aimed at the international academic world and is communicated in English, there will be negative implications for national scientific and intellectual systems.
• In many countries, academic rewards of all kinds accrue to those using English and participating in global scientific networks. These scholars are typically invited to international conferences, awarded research funds by both international and national funders, and are generally seen as leaders of their scientific communities. However, again, this offers privileges to those who produce their work in English and intend to reach an international audience.
• These factors will tend to orient researchers and scholars to themes that they feel will appeal to an international audience, often at the expense of essential but more parochial themes that might be of interest only to local or national audiences.
• These factors lead to homogenizing knowledge worldwide. Not only is English the dominant language, but its relationship with the controlling trends in international science and scholarship is a powerful combination of forces contributing to decreasing diversity of themes and methodologies.

The use of English as a lingua franca and the tendency towards homogenisation is especially apparent in online distance education. In a paper in the Higher education Quarterly (Don’t leave me hanging on the Anglophone), Simon Marginson discusses the failure of English language global e-learning. Among other things, he argues that for exporting universities, the potential of cross-border online education can only be realised if communications are customised for cultural and linguistic variations.

In his paper, Marginson focuses especially on the Asia Pacific region. The problematic point here is of course that students demand the use of English, especially because it becomes more widely spoken in everyday business life in this region, especially in Malaysia, Singapore, India and the Philippines (and increasingly also in Indonesia or China). This might create a paradox where the more the programmes become customised for cultural and linguistic variations, the less ‘marketable’ they become.

An interesting additional issue related to academic publishing recently came to the fore in Nature. For native English speakers it is not just easier to write in correct English, but also to use the language in an esthetic and artistic way. This point might be even more true for the social sciences and humanities than for the natural sciences, life sciences and engineering. But nonetheless, this response to an accusation of plagiarism in Nature struck me:

The accusations made by arXiv that my colleagues and I have plagiarized the works of others, reported in your news story ‘Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism‘ (Nature 449, 8) are upsetting and unfair.

It’s inappropriate to single out my colleagues and myself on this issue. For those of us whose mother tongue is not English, using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual. I imagine that if all articles from specialist fields of research were checked, similarities with other texts and papers would easily be found. In my case, I aimed to cite all the references from which I had sourced information, although I may have missed some of them.

Borrowing sentences in the part of a paper that simply helps to better introduce the problem should not be seen as plagiarism. Even if our introductions are not entirely original, our results are — and these are the most important part of any scientific paper.

In the current climate of ‘publish or perish’, we are under pressure to publish our findings along with an introduction that reads well enough for the paper to be published and read, so that our research will be noticed and inspire further work.

And it’s not just the academic community that is wrestling with the language problem. The ubiquitous use of English in the global economy raises many new issues as well, as shown by this Wall Street Journal article.

The Nobel Prizes for the sciences have been awarded in the past few days. Since I have nothing smart to say about the use of embryonic stem cells, giant magnetoresistance or chemical processes on solid surfaces, I had a look at the careers of the Nobel Prize winners.

The educational and professional careers of the Nobel laureates in Medicine show a lot of usual suspects like Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, University College London. All of them however made a move to the more peripheral regions of the UK and the US: Cardiff, Salt Lake City and Chapel Hill. All were born outside of the US, although Capecchi moved from Italy to the US early in his life. Evans has remained loyal to England, while Smithies moved from Oxford, to Toronto, then just over the border to Madison Wisconsin and ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The Physics and Chemistry Laureates came from France and Germany and spend most of their life in their home countries. Gerhard Erl held several visiting professorships in the US (Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, UW Milwaukee) but spend most of his career in the technical universities of Germany and the last 20 years in one of the German Max Planck Institutes. Peter Grunberg did his postdoctoral research in Ottawa and spend some time in Illinois, but spend the rest of his professional career in Germany, especially in the Instituts für Festkörperforschung im Forschungszentrum Jülich, where he holds a position since 1972. Albert Fert has been educated and employed in France, in Paris and Grenoble, all his life. Since 1995 he has been Scientific Director at Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS-Thales at the Université Paris-Sud.

Next to come are the Nobel Prizes in Literature (today) and the Peace Nobel Prize (tomorrow). Next Monday the Prize for Economics will be announced. Some hope it will be awarded to an economic sociologist like Mark Granovetter or other sociologists who have had a serious impact on the study of economic behavior. Others are looking more for the hardcore economists based on their impact in the form of citations. Up till now, that has not shown to be a very accurate predictor.

Yesterday was the single most (ok, second most) important annual event for science: the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1991 for those scientific achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. They ‘celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology’.

In Harvard University, great scientists gathered to hear who would follow in the footsteps of eminent illustrious intellectuals like:

Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it’s all too easy to overlook anything else — even a woman in a gorilla suit. (Winners Ig Nobel Prize for Psychology, 2004)

Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden’s National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting (Winners Ig Nobel Prize for Biology, 2004).

Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment was awarded the 2002 Ig Novel Prize for Peace, for three reasons. First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People (Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country).

Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.” [Published in British Medical Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.] (Winner Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2000)

…And many many more…

This years prizes covered everything from the side-effects of sword swallowing to the ultimate evidence (yes finally!) that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards. This years winners are:

Medicine – Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword.

Physics – A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology – Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds.

Chemistry – Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

Linguistics – A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature – Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the”, and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace – The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.

Nutrition – Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, “bottomless” bowl of soup.

Economics – Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation – A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

More than 25 years after the Bayh-Dole Act came into force, Members of the Subcommittee on Technology & Innovation met to discuss the future of the law. The law allows universities to patent inventions that result from government funded R&D. Inside HigherEd reports that most members agreed that circumstances have changed the last 25 years. Competition is coming from China and India, instead of Germany and Japan. Technology is now more complex, with technological innovations being based on a bundle of patents instead of a few. And…universities have become competitors not just collaborators. This last point was observed by Susan Butts, the senior director of external science and technology programs at Dow Chemical.

She agreed with other members that there was a potential for more collaboration between universities and industry, especially since private funding for research and development has increased over the years. But, she said, a primary obstacle to more partnerships is the potential for disputes over intellectual property.

At the heart of the choice faced by universities is whether they should opt for as many patent royalties as possible, or get in on the ground floor with partners from various industries. (Lemley said one IT official had referred to universities as “crack addicts,” hooked on royalties.) Butts argued that licensing revenues are not growing quickly enough to fill the “funding gap,” a reality that would necessitate more private partnerships.American universities, she said, “in stark contrast with most foreign universities, have become substantially less attractive as research partners for companies.

As U.S. universities increasingly focus on controlling intellectual property and maximizing their revenues from licensing inventions, they have become more like competitors than partners to companies that sponsor research with their faculty and students.” The result, she said, is that many companies choose instead to work with a foreign university where there will be less negotiations and more of a willingness to be flexible with intellectual property.

Is this a case of University Inc. going too far in their corporate drift? …or just a case of business fearing more competition?

What did the internets bring me today? A lot of truths and lies:

• World news today – healthcare in the US and who is telling the truth? Michael Moore on CNN, demanding an apology.
• Education & Science news today – Dr. Carmona and the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones: truth vs. lies, a.k.a. science versus politics.
• Blog post today: science versus politics was the theme of yesterday’s ‘great global warming swindle’ event. John Quiggin blogs on this hilarious evening and shows how the delusionists were demolished. And Auxedit shows why it was hilarious.

A nice little snippet from last week’s issue of Nature about a good initiative in open access to research:

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a leading private sponsor of biomedical research in the United States, will require its 300-plus investigators to make their research publicly accessible within six months of publication.

Articles that do not meet this requirement will not be considered when the investigators apply for contract renewals. The policy, announced on 26 June, will come into effect at the start of 2008 and will apply only to papers on which an HHMI investigator is the first, last or corresponding author.”

The researchers are still able to publish in many journals (including Nature) because the Institute will cover the costs that some publishers charge for making papers publicly available after a certain period of time.