Undergrads get published

Undergrads get published
The best and the brightest writers get the opportunity to shine in Lucerna, the annual publication of the Honors Program.

Open to undergraduates from all disciplines across campus, Lucerna accepts previously unpublished works written during the applicant’s college career.

UNU-IAS is now accepting applications for its three fellowship programmes
UNU-IAS is now accepting applications for its three fellowship programmes, Japan

PhD & Postdoctoral Fellowships – Sustainable Development

The United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) is now accepting applications for its three fellowship programmes:
UNU-IAS PhD Fellowships, UNU-IAS Postdoctoral Fellowships, and JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellowships. The closing date for applications is 31 March 2009.
UNU-IAS is a multi-thematic, interdisciplinary, research and training centre located in Yokohama, Japan. The Institute’s fellowship programmes provide young scientists, policy makers, and developing country scholars with the opportunity to expand their intellectual vision beyond a single scientific field.
UNU-IAS PhD and Postdoctoral Fellowships are offered for a period of 10 months beginning in September 2009. JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellowships are offered for 12-24 months beginning in September 2009.
Postdoctoral candidates must have completed a PhD degree, and PhD candidates must be at the advanced stage of their doctoral dissertation.

Please click on full details link for more information.

Source: http://www.ias.unu.edu/sub_page.aspx?catID=6&ddlID=756

Students clown around

Students clown around
UMKC isn’t your typical clown college, but it sure looked like one last Monday afternoon.

But you don’t have to wear big funny shoes and crazy make-up to be a clown, which is exactly what Assistant Professor of Theatre Stephanie Roberts hoped to help workshop participants see.

Follow up on Duke’s Motion and Two Other Items
The Administration’s Motion Denied

As predicted, the judge in the civil suits denied the Duke administration’s motion to sanction opposing counsel for an alleged violation of Rule 3.6. (See previous post.) Here are details from the News and Observer and the Chronicle.

I wrote a letter to the Chronicle in which I call the actions by Duke’s counsel unprofessional. Understand that this motion was not a request for relief from any alleged harm. The administration’s lawyer denied in court that the motion was a request for a gag order. The motion was solely an attack on the integrity of Charles Cooper and his colleagues and, as I suggested in the previous post, one that had no basis in law. A bar complaint is a very serious matter touching on both the character and professional qualifications of an attorney. It should not be made lightly and certainly not to try and score a rhetorical point.

The administration’s motion is also a mean spirited cheap shot against the players who were also specifically targeted. Although Rule 3.6 only applies to attorneys, the motion requested that the court make a finding that “Plaintiffs and their counsel” violated Rule 3.6 and the local rule incorporating it. It accuses them of violating one of the same rules that their tormentor and the administration’s erstwhile codefendant, Mike Nifong did.

While the administration’s attorneys were rummaging through the Rules of Professional Conduct, perhaps they missed Rule 3.1:

A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b)(2) has a similar requirement.

It is hard to see the administration’s motion as a good faith argument for the extension, modification or reversal of existing law. Interpreting a statute or rule is a matter of reading the text, which is entirely controlling, and there was no suggestion that the language used is vague or ambiguous. Duke’s argument that the spirit of the rule was violated, even if it were true, is utterly beside the point. Moreover, Rule 3.6(b)(2), the public documents exception, appears specifically intended to operate as a safe harbor rule for lawyers trying to comply with the general rule stated in Rule 3.6(a). Finally, even if the court did announce a new rule, it could not give it retroactive effect.

What we are left with the administration is attempting to try the case in the media under the guise of upholding the exact opposite principle. For the administration, appearances have always been the only thing that mattered. Still, this is a new low.

Elmo a Citizen

Congratulations to Moezeldin Elmostafa, or “Elmo” as he affectionately came to be known to supporters of the accused players, who recently became a US citizen. He was also recently named “Hero of the Year” by Reader’s Digest magazine. Durham needs more citizens like him.

Elmo was the taxi driver who picked up Reade Seligmann from the party and was able to help document Reade’s alibi. After Reade’s alibi came to light, Mike Nifong sent two detectives working on the lacrosse case to arrest Elmo on a stale warrant. When they arrested him, they asked him if he “had anything new to say about the lacrosse case.” When he said no, they then took him to a magistrate. He was eventually found innocent at trial.

I hope that the recent renewed publicity will focus attention on one loose end that remains in making Nifong fully accountable for his conduct. Attempting to alter the testimony of a witness is obstruction of justice. While Nifong’s ethical misconduct was addressed by the North Carolina Bar, he has never been made to account for his criminal conduct. Also suspicious was Nifong’s conduct in relation to another witness, the second dancer Kim Roberts. The same day that Nifong personally intervened to have her bail reduced on an unrelated criminal charge, she started giving an account that contradicted her earlier statement to police that no rape had occurred.

Elmo’s case also should be instructive to those who saw Nifong as some sort of champion for social justice because he was targeting affluent or supposedly affluent people. As an immigrant looking to become a citizen, Elmo was one of the most vulnerable people in our society. A criminal conviction of any kind could have resulted in his deportation and permanent exclusion from the United States. Yet, Nifong was as willing to maliciously prosecute him for his own purposes as he was Reade, Collin and David. Indeed, given the fact that Elmo refused to change his story when pressured by police, Nifong’s decision to prosecute him anyway was purely vindictive.

Amended Complaint

Bob Ekstrand who is representing three of the players in the civil suits recently filed an amended complaint which contains additional allegations and information. It also contains embedded audio and video exhibits. Warning! It is a huge file (121 MB). Such is the extent of the misdeeds of Duke and Durham’s leaders.

University of Maine | Promotion and Tenure Guidelines || Promotion and Tenure Guidelines | New Criteria for New Media |

University of Maine | Promotion and Tenure Guidelines || Promotion and Tenure Guidelines | New Criteria for New Media |
New Media Department, University of Maine

Promotion and Tenure Guidelines Addendum: Rationale for Redefined Criteria

New Criteria for New Media

Version 2.2, January 2007

Authors: Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith in collaboration with Steve Evans and Nate Stormer.

ABSTRACT: An argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today’s universities.

Introduction

Recognition and achievement in the field of new media must be measured by standards as high as but different from those in established artistic or scientific disciplines. As the reports from the American Council of Learned Societies[1], the Modern Language Association[2], and the University of Maine[3] recommend, promotion and tenure guidelines must be revised to encourage the creative and innovative use of technology if universities are to remain competitive in the 21st century.

The following points summarize some of the key areas in which new media research departs from traditional academic scholarship, with the aim of providing a rationale for specific criteria for promotion and tenure detailed elsewhere.

New form and content

The differences between traditional and new media excellence lie in both form and content. The hard-copy format of traditional review documentation, such as photocopies or slides, is insufficient for evaluating new media work; screenshots do little justice to electronic projects based on innovative interactive or participatory design. As the MLA puts it, “evaluative bodies should review faculty members’ work in the medium in which it was produced. For example, Web-based projects should be viewed online, not in printed form.”[4]

Further complicating the evaluation of new media achievements is the fact that they are often interdisciplinary, as reflected by the current University of Maine New Media faculty, whose backgrounds range from engineering to computer science to fine art to photojournalism to literature.

For example, while art professors typically divide clearly into critical (Art History) and creative (Studio Art) faculties, new media’s brief history often requires its practitioners to develop a critical context for their own creative work. This is why the majority of pre-eminent new media critics are also artists.[5] It is also why new media research spans numerous genres, from critical essays to political activism to community-building to software design.

Limitations of academic journals

These differences may require evaluators of new media artist-researchers to look beyond the usual standards applicable in other disciplines. As noted by a 2003 National Academies report:

Because the field of [Information Technology and Creative Practices] is young and dynamic, ITCP production is hard to evaluate. Traditional review panels…may be hampered by their members’ ties to single disciplines and the absence of a time-tested consensus about what constitutes good work in ITCP and why. [6]

Ironically, the National Academies study found that the highest benchmark for success in traditional academic departments, publication in peer-reviewed journals, is less relevant to success in new media–and empirically less an accurate measure of stature in the field–than more supple or timely forms of intellectual exposition:

The gold standard for academia–and the criterion most easily understood by parties outside a given subdiscipline–is the so-called archival journal (often published by scholarly or professional societies) that involves considerable editorial selection plus prepublication review and revision, which function as a screening system for quality. But the long lead time for such publications poses problems for subdisciplines in which timeliness–quickly getting an idea into the field–matters.[7]

Leonardo magazine (MIT Press) is currently the only print magazine universally recognized as a peer-reviewed journal about new media. There are currently a handful of networked peer-reviewed journals devoted to new media, such as Leonardo’s Electronic Almanac (Cambridge), Fibreculture (Sydney), and First Monday (Chicago).

Yet the field’s most prominent print publishers and research archivists[8] have acknowledged a 15-25 year lag and limited exposure that makes print publications far less relevant for new media research. Although promising new paradigms for distributed publication are on the horizon, at the time of writing these systems are only in the planning stage.[9] Finally, as the MLA warns, participation in electronic scholarship should not place extra demands on a researcher[10]; an accomplishment in new media research should substitute for a print article or monograph, not merely supplement them.

Alternative Recognition Measures

Given the accessibility and timeliness required for new media research, the following measures of recognition should be prioritized in the evaluation of new media research candidates:

1. Invited / edited publications

Invitations to publish in edited electronic journals or printed magazines and books should be recognized as the kind of peer influence that in other fields would be signaled by acceptance in peer-reviewed journals.

2. Live conferences

The 2003 National Academies study concludes that conferences on new media, both face-to-face and virtual, offer a more useful and in some cases more prestigious venue for exposition than academic journals:

[The sluggishness of journal publications] is offset somewhat by a flourishing array of conferences and other forums, in both virtual and real space, that provide a sense of community and an outlet as well as feedback[11]….The prestige associated with presentations at major conferences actually makes some of them more selective than journals.[12]

New forms of conference archiving–such as archived Webcasts–add value and exposure to the research presented at conferences.

3. Citations

Citations are a valuable and versatile measure of peer influence because they may come from or point to a variety of genres, from Web sites to databases to books in print. Examples include citations in:

a. Electronic archives and recognition networks, such as the publicly accessible databases maintained by the Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal), the V2 organization (Rotterdam), the Database of Virtual Art (Berlin), and the Media Art Net database (Karlsruhe).

b. Books, printed journals, and newspapers. These are easier to find now, thanks to Google Scholar, Google Print, and Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature.

c. Syllabi and other pedagogical contexts. Google searches on .edu domains and citations of the author’s work in syllabi from outside universities can measure the academic currency of an individual researcher or her ideas. In the sciences, readings or projects cited on a syllabus are likely to be popular textbooks, but in an emerging field like new media, such recognition is a more valid marker of relevance.

4. Download / visitor counts

Downloads and other traffic-related statistics represent a measure of influence that has gained importance in the online community recently. As a 2005 open access study[13] concludes:

Whereas the significance of citation impact is well established, access of research literature via the Web provides a new metric for measuring the impact of articles – Web download impact.

Download impact is useful for at least two reasons:

(1) The portion of download variance that is correlated with citation counts provides an early-days estimate of probable citation impact that can begin to be tracked from the instant an article is made Open Access and that already attains its maximum predictive power after 6 months.

(2) The portion of download variance that is uncorrelated with citation counts provides a second, partly independent estimate of the impact of an article, sensitive to another form of research usage that is not reflected in citations (Kurtz 2004).

5. Impact in online discussions

Email discussion lists are the proving grounds of new media discourse. They vary greatly in tone and substance, but even the least moderated of such lists can subject their authors to rigorous–and at times withering–scrutiny.[14] Measures such as the number of list subscribers, geographic scope, the presence or absence of moderation, and the number of replies triggered by a given contribution can give a sense of the importance of each discussion list.[15]

6. Impact in the real world

While magazine columns and newspaper editorials may have little standing in traditional academic subjects, one of the strengths of new media are their relevance to a daily life that is increasingly inflected by the relentless proliferation of technologies. Even counting Google search returns on the author’s name or statistically improbable phrases can be a measure of real-world impact[16].

By privileging new media research with direct effect on local or global communities, the university can remain relevant in an age where much research takes place outside the ivory tower.

8. Net-native recognition metrics

Peer-evaluated online communities may invent their own measures of member evaluation, in which case they may be relevant to a researcher who participates in those communities. Examples of such self-policing communities include Slashdot, The Pool, Open Theory, and the Distributed Learning Project.

The MLA pins the responsibility for learning these new metrics on reviewers rather than the reviewed.[17] Given the mutability of such metrics, however, promotion and tenure candidates may be called upon to explain and give context to these metrics for their reviewers. Again, efforts to educate a scholar’s colleagues about new media should be considered part of that scholar’s research, not supplemental to it.

9. Reference letters

Letters of recommendation from outside referees are an important compensation for the irrelevance of traditional recognition venues. Nevertheless, it is insufficient merely to solicit such letters from professors tenured in new media at other universities, since so few exist.

More valuable is to use the measures outlined in this document to identify pre-eminent figures in new media, or to require new media promotion and tenure candidates to identify such figures and supply evidence that they qualify according to the criteria above.

[1] The ACLS recommends “policies for tenure and promotion that recognize and reward digital scholarship and scholarly communication; recognition should be given not only to scholarship that uses the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure but also to scholarship that contributes to its design, construction, and growth….

We might expect younger colleagues to use new technologies with greater fluency and ease, but with tenure at stake, they will also be more risk-averse….

Senior scholars now have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take certain risks, first among which is to condone risk taking in their junior colleagues and their graduate students, making sure that such endeavors are appropriately rewarded.”

“Our Cultural Commonwealth,” report by the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 29 July 2006,

[http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm[, accessed January 2, 2007.

[2] “Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.” December 2006 report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion,

[http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion] accessed January 2, 2007.

[3] “The Commission encourages each department on campus, as well as the University as a whole, to examine promotion and tenure criteria to recognize and reward innovative uses of technology in teaching, research and service….the University needs to consider the criteria and standards used in the promotion and tenure process.

The Commission encourages each department and the University as a whole to consider whether faculty efforts in this area are recognized, valued, and/or encouraged.” November 2003 report of the University of Maine Commission on Information Technologies, accessed at

[http://www.umaine.edu/documents/CIT.pdf] on May 2, 2004.

[4] MLA Committee on Information Technology. “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages.” 20 May 2000. ADE Bulletin 132 (2002): 94–95. 82, mirrored at

[http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital], accessed 2 January, 2007.

[5] A brief sampling of new media theorist-practitioners includes Simon Biggs (Cambridge University), Matthew Fuller (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), Mary Flanagan (Hunter), Alexander Galloway (NYU), Kenneth Goldberg (Berkeley), Eduardo Kac (Art Institute of Chicago), Natalie Jeremijenko (UCSD), Raphael Lozano-Hemmer (Karlstad University, Sweden), Lev Manovich (UCSD), Randall Packer (American University), Richard Rinehart (Berkeley), and Jeffrey Shaw (ZKM).

[6] National Research Council, Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2003), pp. 8-9.

[7] National Research Council, op. cit., p. 188.

[8] These estimates are from MIT’s Roger Malina (Director of Leonardo magazine) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation’s Alain Depocas (Director of the Centre for Documentation + Research), and are mirrored at

[http://cordova.asap.um.maine.edu/wiki/index.php/Standards_of_Recognition]

[9] The Interarchive project is a possible model for distributed publication; see

[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive]

[10] “Change in favor of a more capacious conception of scholarship, which we strongly endorse, should not mean ever-wider demands on faculty members, most especially those coming up for tenure and promotion.” MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, op. cit., p. 21.

[11] National Research Council, op. cit., pp. 8-9.

[12] National Research Council, op. cit., p. 188.

[13] Tim Brody and Stevan Harnad, “Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact”,

[http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10647/], accessed 5 March 2005.

[14] This recent

[http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0504/msg00051.html]

rejoinder by Morlock Elloi on the list exemplifies the expectations of such online forums:

> If you have any past publications that might help me understand your point of view, I would gladly read them.

While I understand that in paidspeakerworld the weight of the argument is computed as (volume of publications) x (number of speeches), on nettime and elsewhere closer to reality arguments stand for themselves.

[15] Electronic and email texts also have a currency acknowledged by leading institutions in the field. As of December 21, 2005, one of the premiere bibliographic indices in new media, the Langlois Foundation’s CR+D database, included the following indexation for “Jon Ippolito”:

* Author of 10 documents
* Subject of 48 documents
* Participant to 21 events
* Organizer of 2 events

Of the 10 documents by the author indexed, 1 is from an email list and 2 are parts of Web sites. In the case of artist and critic Alexander Galloway, the relevance of his online texts is even more striking: although by 2005 he was the author of several journal articles and an important book from MIT Press, the two documents that represented his writing in the CR+D database were both from email lists.

[16] A statistically significant number of Google returns, eg > 30, may be a necessary but insufficient condition for confirming global impact.

[17] “In evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion, committees and administrators must take responsibility for becoming fully aware both of the mechanisms of oversight and assessment that already govern the production of a great deal of digital scholarship and of the well-established role of new media in humanities research.

It is of course convenient when electronic scholarly editing and writing are clearly analogous to their print counterparts. But when new media make new forms of scholarship possible, those forms can be assessed with the same rigor used to judge scholarly quality in print media. We must have the flexibility to ensure that as new sources and instruments for knowing develop, the meaning of scholarship can expand and remain relevant to our changing times.” MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, op. cit., p. 46.

[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html]

1) Open 2) Semantic 3) Social 4) Mobile

1) Open 2) Semantic 3) Social 4) Mobile
Colleagues/

I have been invited to give an invited keynote at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in early June 2009 at a symposium focused on ‘New Paradigms in Scholarly Research’.

I have chosen to address this theme with a presentation titled

Research and Scholarship In The 21st Century: The Paradigms They Are A’Changin > Open / Semantic / Social / Mobile

I plan to focus on the four broad themes of 1) Open, 2) Semantic, 3) Social, and 4) Mobile.

Under each I plan to profile significant developments that relate to each, namely

__Open__
Open Access / Open Science / Open Source / Open Standards / Etc.

__Semantic__
Valued Added Content and Functionality Within Journals / Monographs / Other Publications

For Examples See My

“E Is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [E-]Journal.” The Serials Librarian 41, no. 3/4 (2002): 293-321.[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/SLv41n3-4.pdf] [Last Article]

“Embedded Multimedia in Electronic Journals.” Multimedia Information and Technology 25, no. 4 (1999): 338-343. [http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/Embed.pdf]

New Age Navigation: Innovative Information Interfaces for Electronic Journals”The Serials Librarian 45, no. 2 (2003): 87 – 123[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf]

As Well As “Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article” that I recently profiled in my Scholarship 2.0 blog at [http://tinyurl.com/cyfe4f]

__Social__

Social networks / Social software / Web 2.0 / Etc.

__Mobile__

Mobile data access

Mobile data gathering

Incorporated mobile content within publications

See my ‘Twitter Science / Publication / Conferences ?’ [http://tinyurl.com/db2827]

I would be most grateful to learn of particular/specific examples within each subtopic (within a research/scholarly environment) that you believe is specifically/particularly noteworthy to profile in my presentation.

Please submit your recommendations at A(s) Comment(s) On This Blog Entry.

If A Formal Presentation Is Not Possible, I’d Love To Discuss The Issues With You Over A Pint Or Two … [ ]

Two hits score seven runs

Two hits score seven runs
Three games, three wins – and the last one was a doozy.

The Kangaroos closed out a series sweep against the IUPUI Jaguars with a 9-4 win on Saturday afternoon.

Freshman Chelsea Hartwig and senior Amanda Evans both homered in the game and sophomore Taya Upkes recorded the win on the mound for UMKC.

Signs Of Epistemic Disruption: Transformations In The Knowledge System Of The Academic Journal

Abstract

This article is an overview of the current state of scholarly journals, not (just) as an activity to be described in terms if its changing processes, but more fundamentally as a pivotal point in a broader knowledge system.

After locating journals in what we term the process of knowledge design, the article goes on to discuss some of the deeply disruptive aspects of the contemporary moment, which not only portend potential transformations in the form of the journal, but possibly also the knowledge systems that the journal in its heritage forms has supported.

These disruptive forces are represented by changing technological, economic, distributional, geographic, interdisciplinary and social relations to knowledge.

The article goes on to examine three specific breaking points. The first breaking point is in business models—the unsustainable costs and inefficiencies of traditional commercial publishing, the rise of open access and the challenge of developing sustainable publishing models. The second potential breaking point is the credibility of the peer review system: its accountability, its textual practices, the validity of its measures and its exclusionary network effects. The third breaking point is post-publication evaluation, centred primarily around citation or impact analysis.

We argue that the prevailing system of impact analysis is deeply flawed. Its validity as a measure of knowledge is questionable, in which citation counts are conflated with the contribution made to knowledge, quantity is valued over quality, popularity is taken as a proxy for intellectual quality, impact is mostly measured on a short timeframe, ‘impact factors’ are aggregated for journals or departments in a way that lessens their validity further, there is a bias for and against certain article types, there are exclusionary network effects and there are accessibility distortions.

Add to this reliability defects—the types of citation counted as well as counting failures and distortions—and clearly the citation analysis system is in urgent need of renewal.

The article ends with suggestions towards the transformation of the academic journal and the creation of new knowledge systems: sustainable publishing models, frameworks for guardianship of intellectual property, criterion-referenced peer review, greater reflexivity in the review process, incremental knowledge refinement, more widely distributed sites of knowledge production and inclusive knowledge cultures, new types of scholarly text and more reliable use metrics.

Source And Full Text Available At

[http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163]

World Heath Organization Raises Swine Flu Pandemic Alert Level – Phramalive.com

World Heath Organization Raises Swine Flu Pandemic Alert Level – Phramalive.com
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apr 30, 2009 – Cannabis Science, Inc. (OTCBB: GFON) has extended its offer to provide its whole cannabis-extract lozenge to health and homeland security officials in Canada and Mexico. The Company’s offer follows the World Heath Organization raising its pandemic flu

Comcast ready to pull the plug on NFL Network – Seattle Times
Comcast Corp. will continue carrying the NFL Network even after their contract expires at midnight, as negotiations continue. Comcast was set to pull the plug on the football network starting Friday. “Comcast and the NFL are engaged in productive discussions toward a new agreement for NFL Network

Optimism about US economy pushes stocks higher – Charleston Daily Mail

Optimism about US economy pushes stocks higher – Charleston Daily Mail
NEW YORK (AP) – Investors are finding more reason to hopeful about the economy. In a welcome surprise Thursday, the government said initial jobless claims fell last week. Economists had predicted an increase. Another reading said midwest business conditions also improved. Not all data were positive

Official: White House communications chief named – Boston Globe
WASHINGTON— A senior adviser on Barack Obama’s campaign has been named the president’s interim communications director, a White House official said Thursday. Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic media consultant, is to take over duties from Ellen Moran, according to the official who spoke on the

World Heath Organization Raises Swine Flu Pandemic Alert Level – Phramalive.com
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apr 30, 2009 – Cannabis Science, Inc. (OTCBB: GFON) has extended its offer to provide its whole cannabis-extract lozenge to health and homeland security officials in Canada and Mexico. The Company’s offer follows the World Heath Organization raising its pandemic flu

Former `enemy combatant’ pleads guilty in Ill. – Boston Globe

Former `enemy combatant’ pleads guilty in Ill. – Boston Globe
PEORIA, Ill.— A man held since 2001 as an alleged al-Qaida sleeper agent pleaded guilty Thursday to supporting terrorism. Ali al-Marri entered his plea before U.S. District Judge Michael Mihm in Peoria. He admitted to one count of conspiring to provide material support or resources to a foreign

US swine flu cases rise to 118 in 15 states – Raw Story
The number of swine flu cases in the United States rose Thursday to 118 across 15 states, with New Jersey and Colorado the latest to battle the virus. New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine announced five people had been confirmed as infected with the H1N1 virus, but said none were in serious condition

Comcast ready to pull the plug on NFL Network – Seattle Times

Comcast ready to pull the plug on NFL Network – Seattle Times
Comcast Corp. will continue carrying the NFL Network even after their contract expires at midnight, as negotiations continue. Comcast was set to pull the plug on the football network starting Friday. “Comcast and the NFL are engaged in productive discussions toward a new agreement for NFL Network

NBA suspends Magic’s Howard – Delaware Online
PHILADELPHIA — Samuel Dalembert said he knows what would have happened if he had thrown the elbow instead of Orlando’s Dwight Howard. “Forget about it,” the 76ers center said. “I’d probably get a banana boat and get sent back home to Haiti.” Howard wasn’t sent to Haiti, but as far as the Sixers are

Peru suspends flights to and from Mexico – Big News Network
Peru suspended from Thursday all flights to and from Mexico over the ongoing flu epidemic, in a decision that Prime Minister Yehude Simon described as ‘painful but necessary’. Mexico City/Washington/The alert for swine flu, which originated in Mexico and has now spread to several countries, was

Sean Driscoll, Caterer to the Stars, Testifies Against Astor Scion Anthony Marshall – New York Observer
The preferred caterer of Manhattan high society , Sean Driscoll , described his longtime client, the late philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor , as a scotch-on the-rocks kind of gal who spent her 100th birthday dining with the likes of Kofi Annan and Barbara Walters . Taking the witness stand

How to: enjoy (enhance) your summer break

How to: enjoy (enhance) your summer break
Ah, summer’s creeping up on us again and some of you may be trying to decide what to do with yourself over break.

Work, play, what to do?

I have a suggestion, a few actually.

For starters, if you have to take summer classes, do so sparingly. If you don’t have to take classes, don’t.

PhD scholarships UCD Innovation Research Unit
4 PhD studentships (Innovation Research)
University College Dublin
PhD scholarship, starting 01/04/2009 or later, for 3 years (1800 EUR per month)
Main areas:
a) Self-defined PhD project in Innovation Research
b) Help with Establishing UCD´s Innovation Research Unit

Job description
Area (a) The advertised positions will offer the opportunity to follow a self-defined PhD project in the general research orientation at IRU.
Innovation, the creation of new, technologically feasible, commercially realisable
products and processes, is permanently emerging from an ongoing interaction process of innovative organisations such as universities, research institutes, firms, government agencies, venture capitalists and others. These actors generate and exchange knowledge, financial capital, and other resources in networks of relationships which are embedded in institutional frameworks on the
local, regional, national and international level. While the contexts of innovation
performance provide turbulent environments with high uncertainty and ambiguity, innovation networks in complex social systems typically show characteristics such as multi-scale interactions with high contingency and nonlinearity, emergent behaviour, pattern formation, and self-organisation. IRU’s research deals with governance issues of innovation networks in complex social systems. Most projects combine a conceptual framework of complexity science and social systems theory with computational methods such as network analysis, agent-based modelling and social simulation. Successful candidates need to apply with a project idea fitting this framework.
Area (b)
The advertised positions at IRU (UCD Innovation Research Unit, http://casl. ucd.ie/iru) are funded by UCD´s Vice-President for Research. IRU works in an environment that will commission independent, multidisciplinary research focused on the broad role, drivers and impacts of innovation.
It will advance knowledge of a broad definition of innovation through high-quality,
independent research which is fully engaged with policy and practitioner communities. It will ensure the maximum impact of new knowledge on policy and practice and develop capacity, in terms of people, data and methods, for future research and knowledge exchange. Successful candidates need to engage fully with the mission of IRU and assist in establishing the unit.

The Positions Since IRU is an interdisciplinary research environment, any disciplinary
background of the PhD candidates are welcome. We are looking for excellent candidates from the natural and social sciences with an interest in combining empirical research and modelling activities for complex systems, in our case innovation systems. A sound background in research methods using both, quantitative (prominently social network analysis and agent-based simulation) and qualitative methods is mandatory though UCD offers the possibility for starting PhDs with a bachelor degree. Organisational skills, love for detail, and social competence would be desirable; very good written and oral English, and permanent residence in Dublin/Ireland is mandatory.
In addition to the superior payment, this positions provide the opportunity to
work in an international research team doing cutting-edge innovation research.
The successful candidates will enrol in the new PhD Programme “Complex Systems and Computational Social Science” at UCD and will receive a PhD degree adapted to the disciplinary area of their main supervisors which can be from the natural or from the social sciences.

Application
Applications should include an up-to-date CV and a cover letter and can be sent
by email (pdf or doc files). Further requests for information before submitting a
formal application are welcome.
Please send your application via email until 15/03/2009 to:
petra.ahrweiler@ucd.ie. We are looking forward to your submission.

—–
Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler
Professor of Technology and Innovation Management UCD Innovation
Research Unit (IRU) Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory CASL University
College Dublin
8 Belfield Office Park
Beaver Row
Clonskeagh
Dublin 4
Ireland

Phone: +353 1 716 5367
Fax: +353 1 716 5396
http://casl.ucd.ie/iru/

petra.ahrweiler@ ucd.ie

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