Elsewhere in the blogosphere, and on a somewhat related note, The Little Professor and Undine (of Not of General Interest) point out a flaw in James McWilliams’s argument that universities would be justified in raising the tenure bar even higher, since, in his opinion, today’s technology actually makes conducting research so much easier than it was in the past (take that, young turks!). Although Undine admits that it’s certainly “easier to search for things electronically than to lug a stack of index cards to the long tables of reference books,” she rightly notes that many professors don’t have access to the kind of fabulous electronic databases McWilliams raves about (in fact, McWilliams got access to the historical database he describes through a friend at an Ivy League institution, since his own university can’t afford to subscribe to it): 

“These resources aren’t free and available to everyone, and access to them shouldn’t depend on being a faculty member at Moneybag$ University or on having an obliging and well-connected friend who doesn’t mind lending an access code.”

So much for that idea.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

I was interested in writing an academic piece on the general perception of weeds in early America. To undertake this research, I accessed an on-line database of several hundred thousand documents from roughly 1640-1850. (Note: my university cannot afford this particular database, so I’ve gained access through the account of a close friend who works at an institution with ivy on the walls.) Within an hour, I‘d found and printed out more than 74 documents (out of 187 found) with references to “weeds”—my chosen search term. Making matters even more convenient, the term was highlighted, thus obviating the need for me to read the full text.

Given the range of documents that came up, it’s safe to say that—had this powerhouse of a search engine not done the digging for me—it would have taken decades for me to find these obscure references to weeds, most of which are buried in documents living in a vault under some research library in Boston or Philadelphia (I live in Texas).

This experience is becoming increasingly common for those of us who work in the humanities and social sciences. And while I think there are many downsides to relying too heavily, or exclusively, on this form of research, there’s no doubt that it allows the engaged scholar to pursue questions in a much more streamlined (and inexpensive) manner. Which brings me to my question—one that I ask with some trepidation in light of the recent shootings at a University of Alabama faculty meeting: Should publishing requirements for tenure go up for scholars in the humanities and social sciences?

» via Freakonomics

The National Science Foundation and Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service.

The goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, which the company recently introduced to compete with cloud computing services from companies like Amazon, I.B.M., Google and Yahoo. These cloud computing systems allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.

» via The New York Times

The research shows that there is no correlation between the amount of time students spend using social media and their grades. Grades followed similar distributions for all colleges, with the majority of students earning A’s and B’s. The study showed that more students use Facebook and YouTube than any other social media platform. Blogs, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn had significantly lower amounts of student users. Students from the business school had the highest percentage of users of blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn while liberal arts students were the highest percentage of MySpace users.

» via University of New Hampshire » via Inside Higher Ed

Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not. If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opinions on global warming. I’ve never done this stuff, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but that is cheap talk since I haven’t had the opportunity. This works as a “scandal” only because of academia’s overly idealistic public image.

It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate. But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.

Seen at Overcoming Bias

Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works. The announcement has generated a lot of hype for the fledgling company.

Seen at The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Few universities make required reports to the government about the financial conflicts of their researchers, and even when such conflicts are reported, university administrators rarely require those researchers to eliminate or reduce these conflicts, government investigators found.

In a report expected to be made public on Thursday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, said 90 percent of universities relied solely on the researchers themselves to decide whether the money they made in consulting and other relationships with drug and device makers was relevant to their government-financed research.

And half of universities do not ask their faculty members to disclose the amount of money or stock they make from drug and device makers, so the potential for extensive conflicts with their government-financed research is often known only to the researchers themselves, the report concluded.

Seen at The New York Times (free subscription may be required)

(via brynlutes)

Instead, I would like to offer just one list of precepts, all in a positive vein but doing Moses one better. Whereas the Children of Israel were never admonished to critique their own behavior — Just read the tablets and follow the rules, already! — the children of the 21st century must learn to search thoughtfully and judge sources wisely lest they too wander for decades in a metaphysical desert or accept mirages as reality.

Here then is my Hendecalogue, with a twist. These are matters that I, as a college librarian, would like undergraduates to know (or at least know about) before I encounter them:

Seen at Inside Higher Ed