August 19, 2008

Fewer University-Based Researchers Appear on 2008 List of Young Innovators

The proportion of inventors and researchers who are at universities in the annual “Young Innovators Under 35” list, compiled by Technology Review, has shrunk, from 22 out of 35 in 2007 to 17 out of 35 this year.

Every year since 1999, the editors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology magazine create this list to praise young innovators whose inventions and research the editors find “most exciting” in fields such as medicine, electronics, and nanotechnology, among others.

The institution with the most researchers on the 2008 list is Harvard University, with four (plus a joint representative with MIT). The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology have two each. Researchers at three foreign universities, in Britain, Canada, and Israel, also appear on the list.

Some of the university-based projects that caught the attention of the editors at Technology Review include a quest to design microbes to make fuels and drugs, a miniature robotic fly, and an electronic nose that can diagnose cancer by sniffing the patient’s breath. —Maria José Viñas

August 11, 2008

Audio Interview: Making Sense of the 'Digital Explosion'

A new book, Blown to Bits, offers engineer’s-eye views on copyright infringement, digital censorship, and “why we lost our privacy, or gave it away.” Two of the book’s authors — Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard University — weigh in on what they call “the digital explosion.” —Andrea L. Foster

Pollster's New Book Likens Online Universities to Zip Cars in Their Growing Appeal

National surveys show that a majority of Americans think online universities offer a lower quality of education than do traditional institutions. But a prominent pollster, John Zogby, says in a book being released on Tuesday that it won’t be long before American society takes to distance education as warmly as it has embraced game-changing innovations like microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and “the simple miracle of Netflix.”

The factor that will close that “enthusiasm gap” is the growing use of distance education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House).

The book, which is based on Zogby International polls and other studies, also touches on public attitudes toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and international affairs, and on what men and women really want from each other. Mr. Zogby says polls detect signs of society’s emerging resistance to big institutions, and its de-emphasis on things and places. “We’re redefining geography and space,” he says — and a widening acceptance of online education is part of that trend.

Today there is still a “cultural lag” between the public’s desire for flexible ways to take college courses and what the most-established players offer, Mr. Zogby said in an interview with The Chronicle. “There’s a sense that those who define the standard haven’t caught on yet,” he said.

But Mr. Zogby writes that polling by his organization shows that attitudes about online education are changing fast. His polling also points to other challenges that colleges will face as they race to serve a worldwise generation of 18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls “First Globals.”

In one 2007 poll of more 5,000 adults, Zogby International found that 30 percent of respondents were taking or had taken an online course, and an additional 50 percent said they would consider taking one. Those numbers might skew a little high, he said, because the poll was conducted online and the definition of an online course was broad, including certificate programs or training modules offered by employers.

Only 27 percent of respondents agreed that “online universities and colleges provide the same quality of education” as traditional institutions. Among those 18 to 24 years old, only 23 percent agreed.

An even greater proportion of those polled said it was their perception that employers and academic professionals thought more highly of traditional institutions than online ones.

Rapid Shift in Attitude

Yet in another national poll in December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45 percent of the 1,004 adults surveyed believed “an online class carries the same value as a traditional-classroom class,” and 43 percent of 1,545 chief executives and small-business owners agreed that a degree earned by distance learning “is as credible” as one from a traditional campus-based program.

Differing attitudes in two polls taken within a year, Mr. Zogby said, show that “the gap was closing” — and he said that wasn’t as surprising as it might seem. As with changing perceptions about other cultural phenomena, “these paradigm shifts really are moving at lightning speed.”

That, said Mr. Zogby, is why he writes about online universities in a chapter — “Dematerializing the Paradigm” — that discusses the rise of car-sharing companies like Flexcar (now merged with Zipcar), the emergence of Internet blogs as a source of news and information, and the popularity of microbrewed beer.

And while it may be true that microbrews and Zipcars, at least, are still very much niche products, Mr. Zogby says they are signs of transcendent change — just like the distance-education courses that are being offered by more and more institutions across the country. “When you add up all the niche products, it’s a market unto itself,” he said.

In the book, Mr. Zogby also highlights the emerging influence of the First Globals, whom his book calls “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant and internationally aware.

It is these First Globals, he writes, who are shaping what he says is nothing short of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character away from wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources.”

Higher education, he said in the interview, needs to take notice and adapt. These days, he said, students are much more likely to have experienced other cultures firsthand, either as tourists or because they have immigrated from someplace else. Whether college for them is a traditional complex of buildings or an interactive online message board, said Mr. Zogby, “there is a different student on campus.” —Goldie Blumenstyk

August 10, 2008

Court Orders MIT Students Not to Present Findings on Flaws in Fare Cards

A court order has prohibited three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who discovered a potentially costly flaw with subway fare cards from presenting their research at a hacker convention this weekend, and the three are facing a lawsuit filed by the Boston transit agency.

According to The Tech, a student newspaper at MIT, the students were surprised when the lawsuit was filed on Friday because they had already discussed their findings with the agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Their research, for a class project at MIT, demonstrated that the magnetic fare cards could be reprogrammed to show a balance of more than $600, allowing people to ride the subway free.

In a news release, an official of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that is advising the students, called the court order “an illegal prior restraint on legitimate academic research.”

The student newspaper pointed out that much of the information the order sought to suppress was already available online, in part through the transit agency’s court filing. Copies of the court order and other documents in the case have been posted on the newspaper’s Web site.

In a similar case in the Netherlands this year, a chip manufacturer sued researchers who found that transit-system cards could be cloned, but a court ruled in the researchers’ favor, allowing them to proceed with plans to publish their results. —Charles Huckabee

July 25, 2008

Randy Pausch, Computer Scientist Famed for His 'Last Lecture,' Dies

More than a year after he was given six months to live, and after 10 months during which he touched millions over the Internet with his last lecture and helped write a best-selling book about life, illness, and hope, Randy Pausch died today, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was 47.

In September 2006, Mr. Pausch was told that he had incurable pancreatic cancer. His last lecture, at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, about achieving childhood dreams, drew international attention and was viewed by millions on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet.

It also spawned the book The Last Lecture, written with Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Last month Mr. Zaslow told an audience of college officials at The Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum that Mr. Pausch had given him information for the book while riding his bicycle. Mr. Pausch donned a headset and spoke to Mr. Zaslow over a couple of months in sessions that totaled 53 hours. He also revealed that Mr. Pausch’s health had deteriorated sharply in recent months.

Mr. Pausch said he felt awkward about his fame, but he did use his influence to lobby Congress for more federal support for pancreatic-cancer research. He also appeared on Oprah and other TV shows. He even got a small role as an extra in a new Star Trek movie.

In his lecture and book, Mr. Pausch talked a lot about the need to have fun in life. “I mean I don’t know how to not have fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it,” he said in his Carnegie Mellon lecture. “You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I’m clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate.”

In honor of Mr. Pausch, Carnegie Mellon plans to name a footbridge after him. The bridge will connect the university’s Gates Center for Computer Science with the Purnell Center for the Arts. Hilary Robinson, a university dean, told The Chronicle that the bridge symbolizes Mr. Pausch’s commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to computer-science education.

Today Mr. Pausch’s home page at Carnegie Mellon could not be opened, probably because it was overwhelmed with traffic from all over the Internet. —Josh Fischman

July 21, 2008

About-Face: Psychological Association Will Not Charge for Open Access

Apparently charging scholarly authors $2,500 to place their articles in a free online database wasn’t such a good idea. Facing withering criticism from open-access advocates, the American Psychological Association has announced that the fee policy “is currently being re-examined and is not being implemented at this time.”

After the plan to charge authors and their universities was reported by The Chronicle last week, some critics called the psychological association “cash-flow hounds.” The association had planned to levy the charge against authors for placing their articles in PubMed Central, the online database run by the National Institutes of Health.

The fee put researchers in a bind because the NIH’s guidelines require scientists with its grants to place their articles in the database, but the psychological-association plan would charge those researchers a fee for complying with the rule. An association official told The Chronicle that the group was considering the fee to recoup lost revenue from journal subscriptions and licenses due to open access.

Peter Suber, in the Open Access News blog, says he applauds the change of heart but worries that the new position is only temporary because the association says the policy is still being re-examined. —Josh Fischman

July 16, 2008

Psychological Association Is Rethinking Policy on Open-Access Archiving

The American Psychological Association appears to be retreating from a new policy on open-access archiving that drew sharp criticism after it was described on Tuesday by The Chronicle.

On this News Blog and elsewhere online critics said the association’s plan to charge authors $2,500 each to post their published articles on a free online database was, at best, “regressive” and, at worst, the work of “cash-flow hounds” in the group’s “money-making machine.” (At least one prominent open-access advocate defended the policy.)

Today the policy that was posted online yesterday has been replaced with a statement that the policy is being “re-examined.”

Yesterday the same link went to a statement saying that the psychological association would charge $2,500 to authors who must archive in PubMed Central, the repository of papers published by researchers with grants from the National Institutes of Health, and would archive their manuscripts for them. —Lila Guterman

Update, 4:45 p.m.: Rhea Farberman, the association’s director of communications, told The Chronicle that the group was considering the fee to recoup licensing and subscription revenue lost because of open access. Thanks to open access, she said, “all publishers are forced to look at how to cover the costs of such things as peer review and publishing, editorial work, production work, paper, ink, all those things.”

July 15, 2008

Psychological Association Will Charge Authors for Open-Access Archiving

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

Researchers who have grants from the National Institutes of Health must deposit their published articles in the institutes’ online archive, PubMed Central. Last week the journal Nature and many of its offshoots announced that they would deposit their authors’ articles for them. Free.

Now the psychological association says that its authors “should NOT deposit” their own manuscripts, and instead should allow the group to do so. “The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university,” the policy says.

Because the NIH does not charge a fee, that money is apparently going to the psychological association.

Open-access advocates like Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, expressed outrage. “It’s as bad as it looks,” he told The Chronicle. “This is not a good use of anybody’s money.” Depositing an article in PubMed Central, he said, is a “clerical job that can be done by a machine.”

The psychological association did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle. —Lila Guterman

July 8, 2008

'Nature' Journals Will Archive Authors' Papers in Open-Access Databases

To satisfy many of the largest sources of grants in the biomedical sciences, including the National Institutes of Health, researchers must place copies of their published papers in free online repositories, like the NIH’s PubMed Central. That requirement is one of the successes of the open-access movement’s push to making research journals available to anyone, regardless of whether they subscribe.

Now a leading subscription-based journal, Nature, along with many of its offshoots, like Nature Cell Biology and Nature Neuroscience, have announced that they will offer to deposit authors’ papers in the repositories.

The journals will begin offering the service at the end of the summer, according to Tara Packer, head of author and referee services for Nature Publishing Group. She thinks the service will prove useful, she told The Chronicle, as several authors have already contacted the publishers for assistance with uploading their manuscripts to the repositories.

The Nature journals allow, and now will facilitate, archiving that goes public six months after papers are published. —Lila Guterman

June 23, 2008

Web Site That Gave Students Improper Help on GMAT Is Hit With $2.3-Million Penalty

The Graduate Management Admission Council has been awarded $2.3-million in damages in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the operator of a Web site that posted real questions and unauthorized study materials to help students pass the council’s business-school entrance examination, the GMAT, the council announced on Friday.

Students who used the site, ScoreTop.com, to try to improve their scores on the Graduate Management Admission Test may regret it. The council has seized a hard drive from a server used to run the Web site, and says it will notify business schools of anyone who violated its testing policies by using the site. The council, which administers the admission test, will also cancel those students’ scores.

Students looking for the Web site today instead read the following: “Warning! If You Are Looking for ‘Real’ GMAT® Exam Questions, Think Again!” A series of threats against cheaters followed. That set off a flurry of panicked e-mail messages and blog entries.

More than 4,000 graduate business and management programs worldwide use the GMAT to assess the qualifications of M.B.A. candidates.

The council was given control of the Web site by a U.S. District Court in Virginia, which also ruled that Lei Shi and other operators of the site must pay the council legal fees, court costs, and other relief. The council sued Mr. Shi, who was living in the United States at the time but has since returned to his native China, for distributing copyrighted GMAT-related materials through the site without the council’s permission. —Katherine Mangan