Category: Academia

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Dolphin: Ecological Chains Worldwide Being Damaged

Academia, Earth Intelligence
YARC YARC

Ecological Chains Worldwide Being Damaged

Nathan

Planet Save, 18 May 2012

Subtle ecological chains worldwide are being damaged by human influence, leading to significant losses of population in different ecosystems.

One of the longest ecological chains ever found has just been discovered in the remote Palmyra Atoll, in the Pacific Ocean. This area is useful to science because there are relatively untouched ecosystems that are in close proximity to human-influenced ones.

Researchers there have now documented how something as simple as replacing native trees with non-native palms can lead to a collapse of seabird, plankton, and manta ray populations around an island.

The findings were almost accidental, as the researchers involved were there for a different study involving manta rays and their predator-prey interactions.

As they were doing the study though, they noticed that the manta rays kept returning to the coastlines of certain islands.

At the same time, a different researcher was in the area doing a study on the effects that non-native palm trees had on seabird communities and native habitats.

While interacting with each other, the overlap of the research began to become apparent.

Continue reading “Dolphin: Ecological Chains Worldwide Being Damaged”

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David Isenberg: Death for Reed-Elsevier, Life for Knowledge

Academia, Access, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Knowledge
David Isenberg

Elsevier Versus Wikipedia: Academics Revolt Against Giant Publisher

by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog

CorpWatch, May 11th, 2012

Over 11,000 academics have pledged to boycott Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, for profiting off their work and making it unavailable to the general public. Now Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is about to turn the world of corporate academic publishing on its head, in the same way that his website effectively took down Encyclopedia Britannica.

Elsevier is part of the Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier, which had 2010 revenues of $9.3 billion and annual profits of over $1.67 billion. It publishes over 250,000 articles in some 2,000 journals a year that range from global publications like the Lancet to more specific ones like the Journal of the Egyptian Mathematical Society.

Some of these journals are very expensive. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, for example, sells for $31,000 to Japanese subscribers and $25,000 a year to European and Iranian subscribers. (The rest of the world can buy it for a mere $20,930 a year!) There is a market: University libraries in the UK alone spend over $320 million to make these publications available to their students.

Publishers like Elsevier knew they were onto a good thing because before the arrival of the Internet, there was no other way for researchers to tell their peers about the important work they were doing, or vice versa. Plus getting published in a respectable journal was also the key to keeping academic jobs and getting promotions, so the researchers and professors  – like rock musicians and best-selling writers – were leery about giving away their work for free.

“(P)ublishing companies became the de facto gatekeepers to scientific knowledge, restricting who could see the latest ideas rather than allowing ideas to spread as far as possible,” writes Aloke Jha in the Guardian.

Continue reading “David Isenberg: Death for Reed-Elsevier, Life for Knowledge”

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Chuck Spinney: Open Science or Corrupt Science?

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Chuck Spinney

Add to this idea a more open “peer review” process in place of the present obscure, back-scratching, club-based peer review process, and climate science might be well on its way to depoliticization.

Making research papers freely available is about much more than breaking the monopoly of rich academic publishers

Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University, The Guardian, 20 April 2012

The Guardian's recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.

Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It's about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society.

Read full story.

See Also:

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

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Owl: 63 Drone Launch Sites Across the USA

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
Who? Who?

The maps in this web page are astonishing – it shows the sites of 63 active drone sites in the US. Officials were forced to reveal it after a FOIA lawsuit.

The real question, which the article does not explore much, is what kind of drone missions will these sites support? Will they support another leg in the elite's plan to conduct population reduction, sending out killer drones to cull the overeaters?  Given the military and federal locations of some drone sites, such an impression is strengthened  by an interesting fact revealed in one of the descriptions of the map for the DC area: “The Beltway around Washington DC has the highest concentration of urban and suburban drone sites, including the U.S. Marine Corp base as Quantico Station, Virginia.” Perhaps drone-generated genocide is too over-the-top. Maybe they are using them to merely assert much more control and oversight of the population, gathering much more private information  more cheaply and effectively.

Is there a drone in your neighbourhood? Rise of spy planes exposed after FAA is forced to reveal 63 launch sites across U.S.

Phi Beta Iota:  Highly recommended — full story with a number of very explicit locational maps.

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Jonah Lehrer: How NOT to Kill Creativity

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence
Johan Lehrer

How Not to Kill Creativity – Jonah Lehrer LIVE on Big Think

Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd on April 17, 2012

Jonah Lehrer has been described as a kind of “one man third culture” – after training in Neuroscience at Columbia with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel, he studied literature and philosophy on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Since then, he has written three books that examine and blur the boundaries between science and art, reason and imagination. His latest: IMAGINE: How Creativity Works, looks at the neuroscience and the real-world phenomenon of creativity in case studies ranging from the emotional and spiritual burnout that led to Bob Dylan's brilliant album Highway 61 Revisited  to the invention of the Swiffer.

Amazon Page

Here, Lehrer talks with Big Think's Jason Gots about failure as an integral, essential part of the creative process, and why American schools are so good at killing creativity.

VIDEO (16: 29)

Phi Beta Iota:  Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman for this find.  Lehrer is an M4IS2 master — “the brain is a category buster.”  Honorably priced to begin with, Amazon has taken another $10 off, this book is a major bargain in hardcover at $15.00.

See Also:

DefDog: Nurturing Innovation in Spite of Really Rotten Rote Education + RECAP

Review: A First-Rate Madness – Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Review: Redesigning Society

Sean Eaton: Reflections on Education

Search: global brain human brain + RECAP

What Presidents Don’t Know About Education Plus RECAP of 6 Star Plus Books Relevant to Creating a Smart Nation with a Strategic Narrative that WORKS

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Robert Steele: True Cost Economics Combined with Monitoring Outputs and Outcomes

04 Education, Academia, Ethics, Government, Non-Governmental
Robert David STEELE Vivas

True Cost Economics has been around for a while–Dr. Herman Daly of the University of Maryland merits much of the credit–but it now seems to be catching on.

Not quite catching on, but being discussed by individuals who already appreciate the urgency of teaching and researching true cost economics, is the need to switch from measuring inputs to measuring outputs and outcomes.

Although the US Intelligence Community has long been in need of this approach, to my great surprise I now find that some of the best minds in the university world are thinking along these lines.

In the university world this is called “assessment of learning.”  That is, rather than focusing on inputs (number of hours in classes), universities are working to measure outputs — whether students are acquiring the capabilities that professors intend. Instead of learning to memorize and regurgitate, students are being asked to perform — to be a student of practice, applying knowledge in context.

In development agencies there is a gestating effort to shift from building schools to producing literate people — that means less focus on rote learning and credentialing, and more focus on memorable communication including education delivered one cell call at a time.

Note:  Assessment of learning is an Epoch A approach, but a very positive development.  Child-driven education is  the Epoch B approach.

See Also:

2011 Introduction to Student-Involved Assessment FOR Learning, An (6th Edition)

2009 25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom: Easy, Low-Prep Assessments That Help You Pinpoint Students' Needs and Reach All Learners

2009 Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning

2007 Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom

2003 Assessment for Learning: Putting it into Practice