Monthly Archive for November, 2010

From Diane Spencer, in University World News

For the first time in decades, a student protest ended in violence on Wednesday night with missiles hurled at police and windows smashed at Conservative Party headquarters in London’s Westminster. At least 50 people were arrested and 14 taken to hospital including seven policemen.

The demonstration was called to protest against the coalition government’s plans to raise the cap on tuition fees by three-fold to £9,000 (US$12,350) and impose cuts of 40% on teaching budgets.

Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the violence and praised the bravery of the “thin blue line” of policemen while speaking on the eve of the G20 summit in Seoul.

To read more…

From Nikil Saval, in n + 1

What you noticed first were the chairs. Behind the chained-shut glass
doors of the San Francisco State business school, students had piled and
zip-tied enough spindly metal chairs to block the hallways. Through the
windows you could see them rising up the building’s wide stairways.
There were hundreds, maybe a thousand?—?as many chairs as protesting
students. It was an overwhelming sight, symbolic of a student body sick
of taking things sitting down.

At noontime crowds encircled the entire business building, chanting
“Walk out, SF State! / Shut it down like ’68!,” but the late afternoon
grew quiet and fogbound. A few faint protest songs could still be heard
as anemic remnants of the crowd milled around, wary of the arriving
police cars. One student had taped a plank of wood to his shoe and
clumped along in a ludicrous march all his own. The scene regained some
life when representatives from the local hotel workers union arrived
with an experienced picket-line leader, who screamed classic chants
through his megaphone in a way the younger students never could.

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By Sheldon Krimsky, in Academic Online

Refereed journals in science and medicine are the gatekeepers and repositories of knowledge in their respective fields. Research reported in peer-reviewed journals builds professional careers, determines which drugs and medical devices are licensed, influences what medical treatments become standards of care, and establishes the veracity of scientific theories. Maintaining the reliability, integrity, and objectivity of journal content is paramount, particularly in an era of increasingly common university-industry partnerships. Journal editors have become attentive to the need to preserve the credibility of their publications to colleagues within their disciplines and to the general public.

These relatively new university-industry partnerships, largely fostered by federal policies put in place in the early 1980s, have required government funding agencies and journal editors alike to rethink how to ensure publication integrity. Yet despite the best efforts of editors to set standards of research integrity, the escalation in conflicts of interest in academic science and medicine that has occurred over the past three decades has cast a shadow over many publications.

To read more…