Archive for the ‘Scholarly Publications’ Category
FORT PIERCE –
A University of Florida assistant research professor of biogeochemistry, Dr. Todd Z. Osborne, along with water-management veteran Delia Ivanoff, will co-instruct Environmental Techniques, an innovative course to be offered at the University of Florida/IFAS Indian River Research and Education Center near Fort Pierce.
The course will begin May 15, 6 until 8 pm, and will meet each Tuesday until early August. The course will meet at the Fort Pierce UF campus on May 15, and for fieldtrips, and most coursework completed online.
Dr. Osborne directs a diverse research program at the Wetland Biogeochemistry Laboratory with biogeochemical processes in soil and water in a variety of ecosystems in Florida. At this time Dr. Osborne’s research is highly devoted to Everglades restoration, yet he is also exploring coastal ecosystems research with sea grass, mangrove habitat restoration and mitigation. His wide breadth of expertise includes biogeochemical cycling, organic carbon and nutrients in wetlands, aquatic vegetation, fire ecology, coastal forests and salt marsh ecosystems.
His experience includes positions of increasing responsibility as an assistant research scientist, post-doctoral associate, project coordinator and as a senior environmental scientist.
Ivanoff brings more than 30 years of experience in environmental monitoring, both at field and laboratory settings, to the course. She is South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) senior supervising environmental scientist. A leading environmental scientist with expertise in Best Practices for Environmental Quality Systems Management, her duties include supervising a group of scientists responsible for the Everglades Stormwater Treatment Area (STA), a 65,000-acre wetland treatment facility and the biggest of its kind in the world. In addition to her full-time responsibilities, she is an adjunct professor for Palm Beach State College, as well with the local UF Indian River Research and Education Center, or IRREC.
The course will provide participants with an understanding of the rules and regulations relevant to environmental monitoring, the concept and importance of representative environmental sampling; standard sampling and analytical procedures; use of common instrumentation for sample collection; quality assurance and control for monitoring; proper documentation techniques; and sampling designs and development of a sample plan with health and safety features.
Dr. Osborne earned a Doctor of Philosophy in wetland and aquatic processes and a Master of Science in environmental engineering sciences at the University of Florida. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in applied biology and biotechnology from Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is published frequently in scholarly publications such as the Journal of Environmental Quality, Soil Science Society of America Journal, Journal of Environmental Quality, and Wetlands.
Ivanoff has been with the SFWMD since 1992 and has held positions as a laboratory manager and as quality administrator for environmental programs, prior to working in the STA group. Before this, Ivanoff was employed at the University of Florida Wetlands Biogeochemistry Laboratory in Gainesville, a private environmental laboratory in Massachusetts, and in the Philippine Islands as a research assistant, soil technologist and project manager. Her credentials include a Master of Science degree in soil and water science from the University of Florida and a Bachelor of Science degree in soil science from the University of the Philippines.
Students and environmental professionals looking to enhance their knowledge in the area of environmental monitoring should consider taking this class. Inquiries may be made to osbornet@ufl.edu or to traiko@ufl.edu.
To enroll in Environmental Techniques or University of Florida bachelor and master’s degree programs in environmental management and sciences, contact Jackie White at 772-468-3922, Ext. 148, or by e-mail: jkwhite@ufl.edu.
BY CHRISTINE HOGAN
Recently, I have received an anguished demand from a reader. The message was clear do not aggregate any stories which are hidden behind electronic paywalls, he urged.
Another, referring to Greg Sheridans piece in The Australian following the Cardinal Pell vs Professor Dawkins debate on ABC TVs Q amp; A wrote plaintively: The paywall prevents you from reading it…
Wikipedia defines a paywall as a system that prevents Internet users from accessing webpage content (most notably news content and scholarly publications) without a paid subscription.
It says there are both hard and soft paywalls in use. Hard paywalls allow minimal to no access to content without subscription, while soft paywalls allow more flexibility in what users can view without subscribing. Newspapers have been implementing paywalls on their websites to increase their revenue which has been diminishing due to a decline in print subscriptions and advertising revenue.
The first reader above gave an interesting direction given that, here at CathNews, the editors and I have been considering for more than two years the impact of paywalls on the services which we can deliver to our subscribers (God bless you all!) and our readers (no less valuable to us) every weekday morning and on Friday afternoons now for free.
The big media companies have been considering for an even longer period how to monetise their digital newspapers. One can only imagine the increasing frustration of Rupert Murdoch as he saw his content being drawn down by cyberspace readers who paid not a penny, cent, yen, euro or RMB, for the privilege. There would have been gnashing of teeth from Wapping to Surry Hills.
Over the past decade, we have all become accustomed to having prime content for free at the tap of a keystroke or two. Indeed, I would regularly trawl through The New Yorker (thanks to the Newhouses, who must also have been grinding their teeth, too, as revenue fled from hard copy print to on line and there was initially no mechanism to capture it), The Washington Post, The New York Times and papers of similar international reputation, forcirc a world-wide, web-eye view.
When Church Resources set up the CathNews service in 1999, it was planned to be always a free service. There will be no deviation from that. Both CathNews and CathNews Perspectives are supported by the organisation and by our advertisers.
But there might be publications from which we must aggregate from to fulfil our remit which erect firewalls to protect their intellectual copyright to remind you, it is to report on the Church and Catholics from at home and around the world. To ignore a big, exclusive story in The Australian for instance, because it is behind a paywall would not be in keeping with our mission. We aggregate point to the story, and provide a link and allow readers to decide whether or not they want to subscribe to access the restricted material.
The problem for the media company owners and the stockholders was and is still, to a certain extent that no one in cyber space wanted to pay for good quality journalism. Why would they, indeed, when most of the sites were all available for free?
It was a difficult thing to manage The New York Times took itself behind a paywall for some of its most favoured Op Ed writers and had to come back out because things just were not working out for theeim. (They are back behind it again and urging their casual trawlers to subscribe by offering them, like cyberspace drug pushers, the first 10 hits a month for free.)
At the same time as the publishers were seeing their circulations plummet and internet usage rise, two other phenomena was gathering speed the citizen journalist and the ubiquitous blogger. Sometimes untrained, always opinionated, their ascent was an echo of the inflation of another source of news … the extremist commentator (sometimes known as a bloviator in US tabloid parlance).
These extreme commentators mostly from the Right have affected news and how we consume it asformer Prime Ministerial hackLachlan Harris pointed out. The news cycle was out, the opinion cycle was in something which was manifestly wrong could lead talk back every morning until by 9 am it was proven to be a furphy and abandoned.
What all of this means is that we are in the middle of a rapidly changing media landscape; ways to access and transmit information multiply by the months. It comes at us all day every day from RSS feeds, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn… whatever… but in the end, you have to decide what you really want to read.
Here is what I want for you well-written, well-researched, intelligent pieces from journalists employed by major media organisations who know the difference between editorial and editorialising. And that means, in some instances, paywalls prevent the casual reader going further in the story.
It also means sometimes CathNews and CathNews Perspectives must link to stories which are behind paywalls. For me, the choice is simple we either link to those stories (which the readers can either buy into or not) or we end up with a collection of perhaps lesser stories which do not serve either our mission, our remit, or our readers. For my part as a reader, I would rather be alerted to the existence of a major piece in The Oz or The Tablet than not, and be able to make up my own mind about where I subscribed or not.
I would be interested in hearing your views on the subject. Drop a line into the comments box if you feel strongly one way or the other. Looking forward to reading your comments.
Christine Hogan is the publisher of Church Resources.
Disclaimer: CathBlog is an extension of CathNews story feedback. It is intended to promote discussion and debate. Our bloggers express opinions which may be at variance from Church teaching and the views of Church Resources.
The University of Southern Mississippi Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research will partner with the Aquila Digital Community (http://aquila.usm.edu/) to sponsor an open forum addressing the changing landscape of academic publishing April 20 from 10 am to noon in Gonzales Auditorium, located in the Liberal Arts Building (room 108). This event is open to all members of the university community.
The forum, Academic Publishing: Changes and Challenges will feature a brief overview of recent trends from Dr. Carole Kiehl, dean of University Libraries, followed by an expert panel discussion featuring Southern Miss faculty members representing various disciplines. These faculty members are actively involved in writing and editorial duties for scholarly publications, and include: Parthapratim Biswas, physics; Fengwei Bai, biological sciences; Andrew Haley, history; Vafa Kamali, research; Bikramjit Banerjee, computing science; and David P. Daves, curriculum, instruction, and special education.
A Q-and-A session will be moderated by Associate Dean for Library Collections and Scholarly Communications Corrie Marsh.
For more on this article click HERE.
The women alleged they and other consumers were duped by Nutella television ads, which used words like nutritious and healthy, and by the companys website, which quoted a nutritionist.
Nutella contains little protein and consists primarily of sugar and modified palm oil, the plaintiffs said in court documents.
They also noted that in 2008 a British advertising watchdog had determined that Nutellas manufacturers ran similarly misleading ad campaigns in the United Kingdom.
The settlement, which was reached earlier this spring, will be reviewed before approval at court hearings in California and New Jersey in July.
Eligible consumers can submit a claim for $4 per jar purchase, up to a maximum of $20.
More crucially, Ferrero USA, Inc., the New Jersey-based manufacturer of Nutella, agreed to revise its labelling and advertising campaigns.
The Nutella website, for example, will no longer say that the product contains quality ingredients and it no longer says that Nutella on whole-wheat bread with orange juice and skim milk is a good combination for a balanced breakfast.
Nutella contains over 55 per cent processed sugar, the consumption of which has been shown to cause type 2 diabetes and other serious health problems. Indeed, the serving size, 2 tablespoons, contains 200 calories, 11 grams of fat 3.5 of which are saturated fat (18 per cent of your daily recommended value) and 21 grams of sugar, says one of the lawsuits, filed by Alabama resident Marnie Glover.
Ms. Glovers lawsuit says that she wasnt aware that Nutellas ads were deceptive until January 2011.
A month before, Athena Hohenberg, a San Diego-area mother of a four-year-old, says she found out from friends what was in Nutella.
She was shocked to learn that Nutella was in fact not a lsquo;healthy, nutritious food but instead was the next best thing to a candy bar, her lawsuit said.
Nutella … contains 70 per cent saturated fat and processed sugar by weight. Both these ingredients significantly contribute to Americas alarming increases in childhood obesity, the Hohenberg lawsuit said.
The suits zeroed in on Connie Evers, described in court filings as a registered dietician and purported childrens nutrition expert.
A consultant for Nutella, she was alleged to be the source of the products nutritional claims. She also appears on the Nutella American website, arguing that the spread is a way to get children to eat milk and whole-grain bread.
With the unique taste of Nutella, kids may think they are eating a treat for breakfast, while moms are helping nourish their children with whole grains, Ms. Evers is quoted as saying on the website.
One court document alleged that, as recently as April 2011, two months after the lawsuits were first filed, Ms. Evers was giving a presentation in Orange County, telling California mothers to feed Nutella to their children for breakfast.
The lawsuits included examples of what it deemed to be misleading televised and print ads.
As a mom Im a great believer in Nutella as part of a nutritious breakfast, a woman in one TV spot says.
The words Preservatives and Artificial Colors appear and then are crossed out on the screen.
Print ads with similar themes appeared in targeted magazines such as Parents, Parenting School Years and Womans Day, the complaints say.
Ms. Hohenbergs complaint says she trusted labels on Nutella jars, which claim that the spread is an example of a tasty yet balanced breakfast.
Ms. Hohenberg is not a nutritionist, food expert, or food scientist, her complaint says.
Ms. Glovers complaint says she is a lay consumer who did not possess the specialized knowledge Ferrero had which otherwise would have enabled [her] to see through Defendants deceptive marketing.
It alleged that Ms. Glover paid more for Nutella than for other similar spreads because she had been hoodwinked by the companys advertising.
Plaintiff does not read scholarly publications or other materials describing the negative impact of consuming foods high in saturated fat and refined sugars.
Nutella CEO Bernard Kreilmann was questioned by lawyers for the California plaintiffs and the company had to produce more than 1,200 pages of internal documents.
Afterward, the both sides submitted to a confidentiality order enabling Nutella to keep some documents private to protect its trade secrets.
By the fall, the two sides agreed to enter a mediation process before a retired judge and reached the $3-million out-of-court settlement.
The agreement is open to people in the US who bought Nutella in California between August 1, 2009 and January 23, 2012, or in any other state other than California, between January 1, 2008 and February 3, 2012.
ALAMEDA, Calif., Apr 23, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) –
BioTime, Inc.
/quotes/zigman/219441/quotes/nls/btx BTX
-1.81%
announced today that William Tew, Ph.D.,
BioTime’s Chief Commercial Officer will provide an update on the
development of Renevia(TM) (formerly known as HyStem(R)-Rx)
at an investor meeting in New York City. In his presentation, Dr. Tew
will discuss the global distribution network marketing the HyStem(R)
line of research products being utilized in a wide array of medical
research applications. Dr. Tew will also describe preclinical work
underway at medical institutions throughout the United States including
Cedars Sinai Medical Center, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA,
Harvard Medical School, and the University of Florida. Finally, Dr. Tew
will discuss the product development milestones for the launch of Renevia(TM)
in Europe, with the goal of obtaining the CE mark necessary for
marketing Renevia(TM) in European Union countries by year-end
2013. Dr. Tew’s presentation and a video showing the potential use of
the product in reconstructive surgery will be available for viewing on
BioTime’s web site
www.biotimeinc.com .
Background
BioTime is a leader in developing, manufacturing, and marketing
proprietary biocompatible hydrogels that mimic the human extracellular
matrix (ECM). The human ECM is a web of molecules surrounding cells that
is essential to the formation, function, and growth of discrete tissues
and organs in the body. BioTime’s HyStem(R) hydrogels
are dynamic products that have the demonstrated ability to support the
growth and directed differentiation of stem cells, and are designed as
injectable, resorbable matrices for tissue engineering, regenerative
medicine, and for research applications involving the laboratory culture
of human cells. BioTime’s HyStem(R) technology
has been reported on in over 90 scholarly publications and is presently
being used at several leading medical institutions investigating
potential cell-based therapies for osteoarthritis, myocardial infarct,
stroke, brain tumors, and wound healing. HyStem(R)
offers a convenient delivery matrix and its in situ
polymerization creates a biocompatible, resorbable, scaffold for cell
proliferation and tissue regeneration.
In a scientific publication also dated today, BioTime scientists
reported on one ACTCellerate(TM) line designated 4D20.8 and
demonstrated the differentiation of these cells into cartilage without
the undesirable markers of hypertrophy when the cells were cultured in HyStem(R)-C.
BioTime’s subsidiary is currently in pre-clinical development of the
cell line 4D20.8 combined with Renevia(TM) (formerly HyStem(R)-C
or HyStem(R)-Rx) for the treatment of osteoarthritis. This combined
product is currently designated OTX-CP07.
About BioTime, Inc.
BioTime, headquartered in Alameda, California, is a biotechnology
company focused on regenerative medicine and blood plasma volume
expanders. Its broad platform of stem cell technologies is developed
through subsidiaries focused on specific fields of applications. BioTime
develops and markets research products in the field of stem cells and
regenerative medicine, including a wide array of proprietary
ACTCellerate(TM) cell lines, culture media, and differentiation kits.
BioTime’s wholly owned subsidiary ES Cell International Pte. Ltd. has
produced clinical-grade human embryonic stem cell lines that were
derived following principles of Good Manufacturing Practice and
currently offers them for use in research. BioTime’s therapeutic product
development strategy is pursued through subsidiaries that focus on
specific organ systems and related diseases for which there is a high
unmet medical need. BioTime’s majority owned subsidiary Cell Cure
Neurosciences, Ltd. is developing therapeutic products derived from stem
cells for the treatment of retinal and neural degenerative diseases.
Cell Cure’s minority shareholder Teva Pharmaceutical Industries has an
option to clinically develop and commercialize Cell Cure’s OpRegen(TM)
retinal cell product for use in the treatment of age-related macular
degeneration. BioTime’s subsidiary OrthoCyte Corporation is developing
therapeutic applications of stem cells to treat orthopedic diseases and
injuries. Another subsidiary, OncoCyte Corporation, focuses on the
diagnostic and therapeutic applications of stem cell technology in
cancer, including the diagnostic product PanC-Dx(TM)
currently being developed for the detection of cancer in blood samples,
and therapeutic strategies using vascular progenitor cells engineered to
destroy malignant tumors. ReCyte Therapeutics, Inc. is developing
applications of BioTime’s proprietary induced pluripotent stem cell
technology to reverse the developmental aging of human cells to treat
cardiovascular and blood cell diseases. BioTime’s newest subsidiary,
LifeMap Sciences, Inc., is developing an online database of the complex
cell lineages arising from stem cells to guide basic research and to
market BioTime’s research products. In addition to its stem cell
products, BioTime develops blood plasma volume expanders, blood
replacement solutions for hypothermic (low-temperature) surgery, and
technology for use in surgery, emergency trauma treatment and other
applications. BioTime’s lead product, Hextend(R), is a blood plasma volume
expander manufactured and distributed in the U.S. by Hospira, Inc. and
in South Korea by CJ CheilJedang Corp. under exclusive licensing
agreements. Additional information about BioTime, ReCyte Therapeutics,
Cell Cure, OrthoCyte, OncoCyte, BioTime Asia, LifeMap Sciences, and ESI
can be found on the web at
www.biotimeinc.com .
Forward-Looking Statements
Statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results,
future growth in research, technology, clinical development, and
potential opportunities for BioTime and its subsidiaries, along with
other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans,
or prospects expressed by management constitute forward-looking
statements. Any statements that are not historical fact (including, but
not limited to statements that contain words such as “will,” “believes,”
“plans,” “anticipates,” “expects,” “estimates”) should also be
considered to be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements
involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, risks
inherent in the development and/or commercialization of potential
products, uncertainty in the results of clinical trials or regulatory
approvals, need and ability to obtain future capital, and maintenance of
intellectual property rights. Actual results may differ materially from
the results anticipated in these forward-looking statements and as such
should be evaluated together with the many uncertainties that affect the
business of BioTime and its subsidiaries, particularly those mentioned
in the cautionary statements found in BioTime’s Securities and Exchange
Commission filings. BioTime disclaims any intent or obligation to update
these forward-looking statements.
To receive ongoing BioTime corporate communications, please click on the
following link to join our email alert list:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=83805&p=irol-alerts
SOURCE: BioTime, Inc.
BioTime, Inc.
Peter Garcia, 510-521-3390 ext. 367
Chief Financial Officer
pgarcia@biotimemail.com
or
Judith Segall, 510-521-3390 ext. 301
jsegall@biotimemail.com
Copyright Business Wire 2012
/quotes/zigman/219441/quotes/nls/btx
Add to portfolio
BTX
BioTime Inc.
US
: U.S.: NYSE Amex
$
3.80
-0.07
-1.81%
Volume: 76,986
May 4, 2012 4:01p
P/E RatioN/A
Dividend YieldN/A
Market Cap$191.30 million
Rev. per Employee$26,908
Financial Glossary
Words used in this article:
Home gt; Events gt; CISA Annual Lecture: Is There an Indian Style of Corruption?
CISA Annual Lecture: Is There an Indian Style of Corruption?
By Dr. Arjun Appadurai, Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library, Conference Room 11360
Abstract
I offer here a cultural/historical interpretation of corruption in post-Independence India. I especially want to explore big corruption in India, the recent major scams (such as 2G, Satyam, Commonwealth Games) and the colossal corruption numbers quoted to me in many major Indian cities that I visited this winter, involving land deals, corporate pay-offs, state to center black money flows etc and the world of rumor, scandal and celebrity that now envelops the discourse of corruption in India.
Bio
Professor Arjun Appadurai is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in New York City, NY. He was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India). He is one of the founding editors, along with Carol A. Breckenridge, of the journal Public Culture. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006, Duke University Press) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996, University of Minnesota Press). His previous scholarly publications have covered such topics as religion, cuisine, agriculture and mass culture in India.
Cost: Free and open to the public.
Light refreshement will be served.
Parking
Daily parking in Lot 3: $11
Pay by space parking available in Lot 3 North
Campus Map: Library amp; Parking
For more information please contact
Peyton Park
ppark@international.ucla.edu
Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia
Save to Outlook Calendar amp; iCal
WELLESLEY, Mass. (PRWEB) April 23, 2012
Wellesley College President H. Kim Bottomly today announced the appointment of Layli Maparyan, PhD, as the new Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), one of the nation’s largest and most influential organizations conducting scholarly research and developing action programs centered on women’s and girls’ perspectives. Maparyan will assume her new responsibilities effective July 1, 2012.
“I am so pleased that Dr. Maparyan will join Wellesley in this important role,” said Bottomly. “Her work on women’s issues and her dynamic leadership abilities are ideal for building upon the Centers’ legacy of influential and groundbreaking programming. The invaluable work by scholars at the Centers–undertaken in the United States and abroad–reflects Wellesley’s century-long commitment to investing in women and women’s leadership.”
“As executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, I see my role as working to identify cutting-edge frontiers of policy development, expanding sources of funding, and ensuring that WCW continues to attract and support leading scholars to maintain the rigorous standard of research for which the Centers is known,” said Maparyan. “I’m committed to women’s issues across a wide spectrum–and further, to the role of scholarship in informing meaningful change in the broader community.”
From 2003 to the present, Maparyan served at Georgia State University as associate professor in the Women’s Studies Institute (WSI) and associated faculty of the Department of African American Studies. At Georgia State, she has been graduate director of the WSI as well as a University senator. Previously,
Maparyan had served as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Georgia, where she was founding co-director of the Womanist Studies Consortium. Her civic engagement includes coordinating the National Center for Civil and Human Rights’ Women’s Initiative in Atlanta. Maparyan will hold a faculty appointment in Wellesley College’s Department of Africana Studies.
Known best for her scholarship in the area of womanism, Maparyan has also published significantly in the areas of adolescent development, social identities, Black LGBTQ studies, and the history of psychology. Her scholarly publications include two books, The Womanist Reader and The Womanist Idea, as well as chapters in books, including Locating Women’s Studies: Theorizing Critical Concepts for a 21st Century Field; The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, Vol. 2.; and Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology. Her journal articles have appeared in the Journal of African American Studies; Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research; Women and Therapy; and Adolescence.
Maparyan’s work has been funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships Program, and the Fulbright Specialists Program, among others. Earlier this year, she was recognized with an Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award for outstanding teaching that influences social action and change.
Womanism is a social change perspective that focuses on what everyday women from around the world can contribute to global dialogues about social and environmental problems. It is historically rooted in the cultural perspectives of women of color, particularly Africana women, and integrates social, ecological, and spiritual dimensions into the change process, with the goal of creating well-being for families and communities. Maparyans work focuses on the global applicability of the womanist perspective, encompassing people of all genders and backgrounds.
Work at the Wellesley Centers for Women builds on the belief that when the world is good for women and girls, it will be good for everyone,” says Sylvia Ferrell-Jones, president and chief executive officer of the YWCA Boston and also a member of the WCW Board of Overseers and Search Committee. With equal rights, womens status, leadership parity, and accessible, quality education and child care still challenged in the US and abroad, a commitment to research and action for women has never been more needed.
Maparyan received her BA in philosophy from Spelman College; her MS in psychology from Penn State University, State College; and her PhD in psychology from Temple University. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled Adolescent Ethnic Identity and Adjustment: Relation to Ethnic Characteristics of the Peer Context.
“This is an exciting time for the Wellesley Centers for Women and Wellesley College,” said Ellen Gill Miller, interim chair of the WCW Board of Overseers and co-chair of the Search Committee. “The exhaustive search process that we undertook reflects on the extraordinary combination of personal and intellectual qualities that Dr. Maparyan brings to this position. She is an inspiring thought leader whose scholar-activist vision will contribute tremendously to the Centers’ mission and expertise.”
“For almost four decades, the Wellesley Centers for Women has made vital contributions to Wellesleys historic mission as an advocate for womens education, womens perspectives, and womens leadership,” noted Andrew Shennan, provost and dean of the College. “Under Layli Maparyans direction, and building on the remarkable legacy of former director Susan McGee Bailey, WCW is poised to extend the reach and influence of its own work in exciting directions, and thereby to amplify Wellesley Colleges voice in the world.”
About the Wellesley Centers for Women
Since 1974, scholars at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) have conducted research and action projects that inform public policy and shape public opinion. At the heart of the Centers’ work is the intersection of gender, race, social class, and sexuality–core foundations for future directions. Work at the Centers focuses on three major areas: the social and economic status of women and girls and the advancement of human rights; the education, care, and development of children and youth; and the emotional well-being of families and individuals. With more than 70 staff members and an annual budget of $7 million, the WCW encompasses a wide range of research and action projects.
Work at WCW has been groundbreaking. Research undertaken on peer sexual harassment in schools, child care for younger and school-aged children, equitable education, and women’s representation on corporate boards raised public consciousness and continues to inform policy and practices. Scholars at the Centers have examined complex issues of gender, racial/ethnic, and sexual identity across the life course and social-emotional well-being.
Relational-Cultural Theory, developed at WCW, changed counseling and psychotherapy practices as well as public understanding of factors contributing to psychological health. Some of the Centers’ newest initiatives promote women’s social, legal, and economic status, including advancing women’s human rights in Asia and the Arab world. The Centers is also home to Women’s Review of Books, the leading feminist review for writing by and about women, which has been published since 1983.
About Wellesley College
Since 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in providing an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world. Its 500-acre campus near Boston is home to 2,400 undergraduate students from all 50 states and 75 countries.
By David Steinberg
A vocal and active scientific community is clamoring for unrestricted access to scholarly works, a movement known as open access, while journal publishers largely resist the call. For a reasoned and nuanced commentary, check out EMBO Director Maria Leptins 3/16 editorial in the journal Science. Oh wait, you cant–its behind AAAS pay wall. But why is open access important? And even if it becomes a reality, what will we do with all of that information once we get it? While perceptions of fairness, equity and morality drive much of the open access groundswell, perhaps the greatest imperative is that of maximizing Public Knowledge. Fueled by this wealth of information, new social platforms and semantic search/mining technologies are poised to change the way that science is conducted, communicated and understood.
University of Bristol Professor of Theoretical Physics John Ziman wrote in 1968: Science is Public Knowledge hellip; Its facts and theories must survive a period of critical study and testing by other competent and disinterested individuals, and must have been found so persuasive that they are almost universally accepted hellip; [sciences] goal is a consensus of rational opinion over the widest possible field. As the scope of human scientific endeavor explodes, Zimans mandate becomes increasingly difficult to carry out. Since the first scientific journal, Journal des Scavans, was published in 1665, researchers have penned over 50 million scientific papers (1.5 million in 2009 alone) and there are now over 23,000 scientific journals in circulation.
The vast majority of this work remains locked behind pay walls, where its left to a small group of editors and referees to manually review, curate and error-check the output–a virtually impossible task. In a sweeping 2012 study, Amgen scientists demonstrated that only 6 out of 53 preclinical cancer studies from notable journals could be replicated, according to a recent Nature article. Of 49 highly cited clinical studies evaluated in 2004, only 44% were reproduced, according to finding in the Journal of the American Medical Association published in 2005. And outright mistakes are surging: The Wall Street Journal recently showed that the rate of retractions in scholarly publications has increased 15-fold since 2001.
Publishers dont seem to get it, though, as a recent blame-deflecting editorial by Nature Publishing Group makes clear: What can journal editors and referees do? Sloppiness is sometimes caught, but so much must be taken on trust. We need dramatic changes if we are to avoid getting lost and overwhelmed in a torrent of disjointed and sometimes incorrect scientific data and insight. Certainly the first step is to open up all scholarly publications so that the scientific community can participate as exactly that– a community–in the vetting and dissemination of new research. But even if all of this work were completely transparent, broadly accessible, and 100% open, the technical challenges involved in bringing the right information to the right people at the right time are tremendous.
Imagine, though, a vast, collective hive mind that consumed, processed and disseminated all scientific knowledge instantaneously and ubiquitously, incorporating not only published works, but also raw data, ancillary analysis, and digital signatures of collaborators, resources and other critical elements. Like the proverbial 100th monkey phenomenon, once the hive mind understood something, wed all understand it. In 2012 Internet terms, the hive mind would combine the best of human intelligence (insight, opinion and crowd wisdom) and machine intelligence (big data, machine learning and semantic data mining) in a massive, automated, self-organizing, dynamic, machine- and crowd-sourced wiki of all scientific knowledge organized into topics and relationships, rigorously vetted and reviewed. It would be readable by machine for querying and analytics, and knowledge would be pushed to interested researchers, physicians, journalists, students and consumers when and where they needed it.
While this may seem far-fetched, the building blocks are already being assembled. Google has publicly acknowledged the limits of its PageRank and other algorithms, and is aggressively pursuing a knowledge graph-based approach of creating a massive semantic database of entities and their relationships (eg, storing information like the geography, depth, and surface area of every lake on the planet). Wikipedia itself is already starting to adopt elements of scientific peer review and dynamic scholarly publishing, while Microsoft founder Paul Allen and others are teaching Wikipedia to write itself, funding the Wikidata project to standardize Wikipedias structure and make it machine-readable.
In the meantime, researchers like Andrew McCallum of the University of Massachusetts and David Blei of Princeton are applying an approach called Probabilistic Topic Modeling to sift through millions of scientific publications to discover relationships, themes and emerging fields that humans may not yet even have recognized. Novel, alternative, scientific impact ranking systems based on Tweets, Facebook likes, hyperlinks, downloads, etc. (altmetrics) are redefining reputation-based metrics.
Specialized applications of these approaches will fundamentally change the way science is conducted, communicated and understood across many fields. In healthcare, the hive mind will automatically match patients with the most relevant medical professionals, clinical trials and drug research. Knowledge-empowered patients will arrive at their physicians offices armed with up-to-the-minute disease knowledge provided by a system that knows their personal demographics and health history. In education, dynamic, living repositories of key research fields will enable new PhD students to collapse years of background work into weeks, and static textbooks will give way to self-organizing, multi-dimensional wikis that update in real time. In research, industry and academic scientists seeking outside collaborators will have direct access to state-of-the-art information in any area and be instantaneously connected with the worlds leading experts in that field. The hive mind will democratize science for a new generation of researchers operating out of small colleges, garages and high schools, and level the playing field in the developing world as up-to-date scientific information becomes rapidly and broadly available. Investors, philanthropists and patient groups will see the real story behind a disease, not just the sensationalized headline. Eventually, the hive mind will become a reality, and deep scientific knowledge will pervade everything we do. But all of this hinges on availability of the data, so first things first–publishers, its time for open access.
David Steinberg is a partner at PureTech Ventures, a Boston-based venture creation company. Mr. Steinberg has co-founded 6 companies, most recently Vedanta Biosciences, which is developing therapies based on the biology of the human microbiome, and Knode, an automated platform for identifying and collaborating with experts in biomedicine.
In a blog posted on April Fools Day, Google announced a new feature to its Scholar service. This was no prank. It was the genuine debut of a new tool called Google Scholar Metrics. The service follows the same principle that has made Googles web search engine so successful – when you are unsure what a user is looking for, give them a list of options ranked by a metric of popularity. In this instance, the users are academics ready to submit their next breakthrough but are uncertain which journal to choose. The solution Scholar Metrics offers is a database summarizing the sway of the distributors of scholarship to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research.
Heres how it works. Google creates a list of all the articles a journal has published in a specified period of time. The citations to each article are counted in order to determine the publications h-index, which is the largest number h such that each of the set of h articles were cited h or more times. As an example of how the h-index is calculated, consider a publication that has had six total articles having 2, 18, 11, 3, 22, and 9 citations, respectively. This gives the journal an h-index of four. Articles meeting the h-index criterion constitute the h-core. In the example, the core is the articles with 18, 11, 22 and 9 citations. Within the h-core, the median of the citation counts is used to assess the typical influence among the most highly cited set and is reported as the h-median. In the example, the h-median is 14.5.
You might think the h of the h-measures was for Helder Suzuki, the Google software engineer who made the blog post unveiling Scholar Metrics. Actually, the h refers to Professor Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at theUniversity of California, San Diego. Professor Hirsch originally proposed the h-index in 2005 as a means for individual scientists – theoretical physicists, say – to gauge the quality of their work. Hirsch thought total publications, the standard evaluation measure at the time, was a flawed yardstick of a scientists contributions. In his view, one had to also consider the distribution of citations resulting from a researchers papers to really know whether that scientists output was influencing his or her field. And now Scholar Metrics is applying the same idea to the scientific journal.
Scholar Metrics isnt the first tool for evaluating the influence of scholarly publications-Thomas Reutersintroduced the impact factor. It is calculated by taking the total number of citations a journal has received in the past year and dividing by the total number of articles it has published in the previous two years. Impact factors are released as part of the annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Unlike Scholar Metrics, the JCR is a proprietary service.
So which is the better measure of a publications influence, h-index or impact factor? If we look at the top ten distributors by each measure, we find Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science, the major players we would expect to be at the top of the list, taking the 1, 2, and 3 positions by h-index (Figure below). Not so for 5-year impact factor, which doesnt even includeScience in its top 10 or PNAS in its top 100. In their place are a number ofpublications specializing in reviews, which makes the impact factor seem peculiarly out of touch. Review articles, although much read and frequently cited, are not the papers that shape their fields, and these specialty journals wouldnt even be considered by authors debating where to report their next breakthrough.
KALAMAZOO–Western Michigan University will stage its 47thInternational Congress on Medieval Studies, the largest, most comprehensive academic conference of its kind in the world, Thursday through Sunday, May10-13.
Worldwide, the congress annually attracts some 3,000 medievalists–professional academics, students and enthusiasts interested in the Middle Ages. This year marks the 50thanniversary of the event, which began as a biennial gathering in 1962 and grew to become an annual event in 1970.
Now named the International Congress on Medieval Studies, it is sponsored by WMUs Medieval Institute and held primarily in venues on the Universitys main campus in Kalamazoo.
The Medieval Institute, also founded 50 years ago, ranks among the top 10 North American institutes, centers and programs that focus on medieval studies. Established for instruction and research in the history and culture of the Middle Ages, its pioneering function was to introduce the first Master of Arts in Medieval Studies offered at a state-supported university in the United States.
A half century later, WMU remains one of the few public colleges and universities in the nation with an interdisciplinary graduate program in medieval studies, with the Medieval Institute having earned a global reputation for its academic programs, medieval congress, notable research activities and longstanding scholarly publications program.
Conference highlights
The 2012 International Congress on Medieval Studies will include more than 550 sessions featuring the presentation of scholarly papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops and performances. In addition, the exhibits hall will be filled with nearly 70 publishers, used book dealers, purveyors of medieval sundries and other vendors. There also will be some 90 business meetings and receptions sponsored by learned societies, associations and institutions.
Im pleased to extend the invitation to come and participate in this tremendous rite of spring, says Dr. James Murray, director of the Medieval Institute. An abundance of stimulating subjects, people and imaginative approaches to the Middle Ages await you.
During the congresss academic sessions, scholars will present their latest research findings, culled from the study of material remains of the medieval past as well as written records ranging from epic poems to laundry lists. Sessions will be devoted to the works of famous and less-known authors as well as topics such as old Norse literature and culture; rethinking cultures and identities in the medieval Mediterranean; the political cultures of royal, papal, and Mongolian courts in the late Middle Ages; the life cycle of medieval monasteries; gender and sexuality; religious dress; and medieval medicine.
Individual papers to be presented will include everything from The Crusader Rebranding of Jerusalems Temple Mount, Piety and Propaganda, From Stone to Statue: The Nature/Art Divide, and Medieval Law in Dantes Purgatorio to The Medievalism of JK Rowlings Harry Potter Novels, The Hobbit on Its 75th Anniversary, and Revenants, Ghosts and Trolls: The Living, the Dead and the In-Between.
Special plenary lectures are set for 8:30 am Friday and Saturday, May 11-12, in the Bernhard Centers East Ballroom. Dr. David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will speak first on Conceptualizing Literary History: Europe, 1348-1418. Dr. Paul Binski, Professor of the History of Medieval Art at the University of Cambridge, will speak the following day on The Heroic Age of Gothic: Invention and Its Contexts, 1200-1400.
Among this years workshops will be Electronic Medievalist Games, Teaching Paleography and Codicology, Medieval Music: Reading From the Sources, Computer-Assisted Analysis of Medieval Texts, and Digital Medieval Studies for Dummies.
A reception to help celebrate the medieval congresss 50th anniversary will be held from 5 to 7 pm Friday in the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, where congress attendees will view the exhibition Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture From the Victoria amp; Albert Museum.
For more information about the 2012 International Congress on Medieval Studies, including costs and how to register, visit wmich.edu/medieval/congress or contact the Medieval Institute at medieval-institute@wmich.edu or (269)387-8745.