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The New York Times reports on a study published in Oikos, an Ecology journal, describing a correlation between increasing beer consumption in Czech avian ecologists and decreasing publication output and number of citations.

Though the public may tend to think of scientists as exceedingly sober, scientific schmoozing is often beer-tinged, famous for producing spectacular breakthroughs and productive collaborations, countless papers having begun as scrawls on cocktail napkins.

…
“It’s rather devastating to be told we should drink less beer in order to increase our scientific performance,” Dr. Symonds said.

I’m living in a horrible nightmare world! I have a brewery in my kitchen! There’s a beer tap in my fridge! My PhD advisor wears a Victoria Bitter t-shirt to the lab!

Thankfully, the usual caveats with respect to causation vs. correlation apply, as do the less usual concerns of generalizing Czech ornithologists to the general scientific population (though Shelley does have an African Grey…). Still, I’ll be needing a beer about now.

Link to Article: Grim (2008) A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecolosgist. Oikos, 117(4), p.484.

(Stats for above figure: Shows pooled data, open circles are from 2002 survey, closed are from 2006 survey, with pooled r= -0.52, p= 0.0008.)

Over at sneedleflipsockTheBlog there is a fantastically extensive roundup of reactions to the major course revamps currently being undertaken by Melbourne University. They run the gamut from newspaper editorial to undergrad blog, but all provide an interesting insight into the public perception of this rather profound shift in Australian tertiary education.

I’d like to talk about the accompanying and truely bizarre dreamlarge campaign, but that’ll have to wait for another day.

This as the University of Melbourne announces that revenues from international students now make up $192 million of it’s $1.28 billion consolidated income.

The Age, 5/5/2007 Over the past seven years, 31 apartment blocks sprang up in the area, many on Swanston Street, creating a spine of high rises between RMIT and Melbourne University. Nearly 10,000 students live in them. Almost none are Australians. On Swanston Street, 95 per cent are from overseas - a reflection of a booming market in fee-paying students from South-East Asia that has seen the number of foreigners studying in Victoria pass 100,000. [...]

They arrived to find their room-mates, if they had one, and their neighbours were also from overseas. They went to orientation sessions designed exclusively for foreigners.

As a result, they bonded with other student migrants, and were cut off from the local community.

(Full Article, Photo Credit)

The Age reports that several Australian university student associations are lobbying against the use of TurnItIn.com, an anti-plagiarism database, on the grounds that it violates the intellectual property rights of students. I’m inclined to agree. While it could be argued that Google Books similarly utilises others IP for profit, they are indexing published works, and offer an opt-out to authors.

Elisabeth Tarica (Feb, 2007) The Age, Education Section.

Liz Thompson, a students’ rights officer at RMIT Student Union, says Turnitin is taking millions of previously submitted papers - where the copyright resides with the student author - and using them to make money without consent.

Any work that is submitted to Turnitin automatically becomes part of the company’s database.

“When people sign online for enrolment there’s a little bit down the bottom that says you agree to have your work transmitted for the purposes of detecting plagiarism. If you don’t sign on for that, you can’t enrol. That is taken by RMIT as permission for Turnitin, who then use it to make a whole lot of profit because their pitch is that they have the hugest database,” Ms Thompson says.

Unfortunately, the complete aforementioned article is only available by subscription/purchase.

Also See: TLF: TurnItIn and Google Book Search: the same thing?