No discussion of academic freedom, research integrity, and patient safety could begin with a more disquieting pair of case studies than those of Nancy Olivieri and David Healy. The cumulative impact of the Olivieri and Healy affairs has caused serious self examination within the biomedical research community. The first part of the essay analyses these recent academic scandals. The two case stud...

Transitionsareawayof life inacademicmedicine.While much has been written about these changes,1,2 less attention has been devoted to amore common shift: the move between academic work and clinical ward time.3 This gap has important consequences. For example, some faculty dread upcoming ward blocks. When on clinical rotations, theystruggle to jugglepatientandacademic activities—often doing neithe...

The purpose of this essay is to capture, in its earliest stages, the influence that formal recognition of Boyer’s multiple domains of scholarship within faculty evaluation standards had on a select group of colleagues within a disciplinary diverse academic unit at a mid-sized, comprehensive university. A process is described whereby the combination of a book discussion group, a newly approved f...

In a response to the perceived lack of study and academic skills evident among HE students, a great deal of time and effort is put in across the country to create online resources for students. However, it is common for staff to express a concern that students do not access these resources, or that the resources produce only a minimal improvement in performance. This paper examines the results ...

This essay explores the ways in which boundaries of estrangement are produced in the academic literature assigned for courses on interculturality. As the existence of interculturality is dependent on the ascription of content to culture – since the notion, by definition, always involves more than one singular culture – this essay seeks to provide an answer to the question of what this literatur...

In this paper we are concerned with the location of topics in text processing and the determination of the update unit in looking up topic continuations and topic shifts. Using key elements of the Centering Model of local discourse coherence and empirical evidence from Modern Greek and Japanese we argue that the appropriate update unit for topic tracking is the sentence in its traditional sense...

The e-rater system 1 is an operational automated essay scoring system, developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS). The average agreement between human readers, and between independent human readers and e-rater is approximately 92%. There is much interest in the larger writing community in examining the system’s performance on nonnative speaker essays. This paper focuses on results of a stud...

This essay, written by a statistician and a climate scientist, describes our view of the gap that exists between current practice in mainstream climate science, and the practical needs of policymakers charged with exploring possible interventions in the context of climate change. By ‘mainstream’ we mean the type of climate science that dominates in universities and research centres, which we wi...

Since the 1990s, Internet communications technologies have influenced human activity. Over the last 15 years, a phenomenon called virality—i.e., when content circulates via Internet among an increasingly broad audience at an exponentially rapid rate—has been especially impactful. Only some information achieves virality, so the phenomenon invites reflection. Yet, scholars have failed to adequate...

Student plagiarism is an ever-increasing problem for academic institutions. A growing number of students are using material from the Web in their submissions, without properly acknowledging the source. This paper reviews the need for widespread plagiarism detection systems and evaluates available Web based detection services. Four services are discussed: the Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS...