tagged w/ schoolanduniversity.com
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The bros get help recovering from a hangover.
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The bros prank the dean while they are very high.
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During Hurricane Irene, the media pulls out all the stops.
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MPH wants to get his drink on, but Count Steve won't cooperate.
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A Scottish university is battling a tobacco giant's attempt to gain access to its research into the smoking habits of thousands of teenagers.
Philip Morris International (PMI), which makes Marlboro cigarettes, has submitted Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to Stirling University.
The research examines why the teenagers start smoking and what they think of tobacco marketing.
Academics said agreeing to the request would be a major breach of confidence.
They are also concerned it could jeopardise future research.
Prof Gerard Hastings, of the university's Centre for Tobacco Control Research, said: "It is deeply concerning they are even trying to get this data.
"We are talking about children and this is data the tobacco companies themselves would never be allowed to collect."
He said it would be "catastrophic" if the centre lost its fight and was forced to hand over the data.
'Enormous implications'
"Most fundamentally this information was given to us by young people in complete confidence," he said. "We assured them we would treat it with absolute confidence and that it would be restricted to the research.
"There is no way that Philip Morris qualifies in that definition.
"It has enormous implications for academic freedom."
The centre, which is part of the university's Institute for Social Marketing, of which Prof Hastings is director, was established in 1999 by Cancer Research UK and aims to discover why children start smoking.
Over the past decade the study has involved up to 6,000 teenagers and young people aged 13-24.
The department initially refused even to respond to the request, complaining it was "vexatious".
But the information commissioner said on 30 June that this was not the case and also found the university had failed to respond to the request within the time limit.
The university said it had now made a "proper response" to Philip Morris, but is still refusing to hand over its research.
A spokeswoman for the information commissioner said the company could appeal again.
"If the commissioner comes to the decision that the university was not correct and has not applied the right exemptions, he can order the release of the information," she added.
Private information
A Philip Morris International spokeswoman said: "PMI made a Freedom of Information request to understand more about a research project conducted by the University of Stirling regarding plain packaging for cigarettes.
"Such government-funded research conducted by public institutions is covered by the Freedom of Information Act, in accordance with which members of the public can request information held by public authorities."
She added: "With regards to this FoI request, the Scottish Information Commissioner confirmed in his decision of 30 June, that we had a legitimate interest in seeking the information and asked the university to respond to the request.
"We are not seeking any private or confidential information on any individuals involved with the research. As provided by the freedom of Information Act, confidential and private information concerning individuals should not be disclosed."
The spokeswoman added that the commissioner also concluded that the information request submitted by PMI was not designed to cause disruption or annoyance to the university.A Scottish university is battling a tobacco giant's attempt to gain access to its... more
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pdy
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added this
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1 year ago
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Dick thinks of a new career path.
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Many years people are interested in doodling. Everything started from cavemen who leaved pictures on walls. “George Washington, Thomas Edison, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Vladimir Nabokov were doodlers. Bill Gates and Frank Gehry are among today's active doodlers.”
Today many schools and universities refuse from doodling and consider it as absolutely useless occupation. But some professors think they are wrong and implement doodling in their job.
For example Virginia Scofield, an immunologist at the University of Texas used doodling for memorizing complexities of the subject. Her students adore these methods and use them as well.
“Jackie Andrade, a professor at the University of Plymouth, published a study finding a 29 percent increase in information retention gained by doodlers. She noted that, contrary to popular belief, doodling seems to prevent people from losing focus on boring or complex subject matter. It gives learners who may otherwise mentally check out an opportunity to check back in.”
Read more here: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/02/brown.creativity.doodles/index.html?hpt=hp_midMany years people are interested in doodling. Everything started from cavemen who... more
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Ira watches the wind up to the 10th anniversary.
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We are living in a vast assassination by the pen of all things necessary to sustain a democratic society, in particular the greatest assault has been leveled against the university by the forces of neo liberalism. The current policies of austerity have made efforts to turn the university into a trade school, against its roots in the enlightenment thinking of creating a space which raises the questions of society into one which simply answers them for ruling elites. As a result of slowly stripping universities of its ability to form critical ideas the powers that be will ensure a society that can run the machines but lack the ability to question their purpose priming society for fascist anti democratic forces.
If you've eve wondered why we have scientist can willingly make weapons of mass destruction without ethical pause, why engineers design advanced structures for the military contractors without thoughts of the human impact, and so on then you need to look at the institutions from which they study. If there is to be a dialogue then let it be started with the subject of our education.
*An excerpt from the article sheds a little more light:
The barrage of anti-democratic practices does not end there, nor do they limit themselves to Catalonia or even Spain. Current austerity measures are being imposed within the context of the implementation of the European Higher Education Area, commonly known as the Bologna Process. Billed as a project of European integration and academic modernization, this massive program actually represents the anti-democratic imposition of what is known as the Anglo-Saxon model of university accreditation across 47 highly heterogeneous countries, as well as a re-orientation of academic curricula towards a more specialized, technocratic training regime.
As Slavoj Žižek has put it before, “underlying these reforms is the urge to subordinate higher education to the task of solving society’s concrete problems through the production of expert opinions.” And of course, one needs only to look at the current crisis for evidence of the quality of the expert opinions produced through this inherently myopic methodology. What’s more, the Bologna process further deepens the downward spiral of the university-as-business model, where our aforementioned experts produce research at the behest of banks, multinational corporations and governments acting together through public-private partnerships in order to produce profits (a recipe which hardly guarantees the researcher’s independence, a necessary ingredient in producing reliable knowledge).
http://roarmag.org/2011/09/the-neoliberal-assault-on-university-education-2/We are living in a vast assassination by the pen of all things necessary to sustain a... more
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Dick pursues his dream of being an astronaut.
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Bitter's test selling scheme gets put on hold when he gets into a fight on the Internet.Bitter's test selling scheme gets put on hold when he gets into a fight on the... more
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Biff and Werewolf discover a video game of questionable morals.
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While some occupy Wall Street, the bros go about their day.
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The bros talk about flying high and flying to the moon.
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The bros have enough superpowers.
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The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.... http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/your-details/43008-neuroscience-vs-philosophyThe experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007,... more
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worrg
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added this
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1 year ago
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Dick watches news that's even too obvious for him.
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Obama's intern tries to help him with the Occupy Wall Street protest.
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Jack tries to think of better uses for his superpowers.
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Norm looks for his roommate.
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