Thursday, October 27, 2005

A Wellspring of Scientists, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin, on liberal arts colleges as producers of scientists. Liberal arts colleges have a long, prolific history of sending students on to graduate school and careers in science, both as front-line researchers and to serve as the next generation of faculty. They enroll about 1 in 12 undergraduates, but turn out almost 1 in 6 future Ph.D.s in science and engineering. Oberlin, Reed, Swarthmore, Williams, Wellesley, and similar schools that concentrate on undergraduate education and award few if any degrees beyond the bachelor's take pride in their ability to train future scientists—despite, or perhaps because of, their small size. "We have open doors," says A. Malcolm Campbell, a biologist who teaches and conducts genomics research at Davidson College in North Carolina. "The students come in, they ask questions, we get them into our labs. The students are not afraid of their teachers. Teaching is highly valued here, as is the mentoring and the hands-on access to research opportunities. It's the right mix." "The cutting-edge science is done at the R-1 [Research 1, or major research] universities. No one would quibble with that," says James M. Gentile, recently appointed president of the Research Corporation, who has served as dean for the natural sciences at Hope College in Michigan. Regardless, Gentile says, "there are wonderful liberal arts colleges across the country where the intensity and fervor of teaching" is akin to the passion that scientists bring to the lab at research universities . . . "The bright and bold," says [Manju M.] Hingorani [of Wesleyan University[, "they'll do great anywhere. It's the others who are bright but maybe not so bold who benefit the most from places like this." Small colleges often turn students on to research. "Students here often don't know about research as a career," says Nancy H. Kolodny, a professor of chemistry at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "It's our responsibility that they find out about it as early as possible." A Wellesley alumna, Kolodny took chemistry to fulfill a distribution requirement, then spent two summers in a lab with other Wellesley students, courtesy of the National Science Foundation. "If I hadn't gone to Wellesley or another small liberal arts college, I never would have gone into research," says Kolodny. Access to faculty is easier at small liberal arts campuses than at most R-1 universities, says molecular biologist Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University and a former HHMI investigator. "In addition," she says, "students in small liberal arts colleges aren't spending their time with disgruntled eight-year graduate students terrified they won't get their Ph.D.s and five-year postdocs terrified they won't get a job." . . . The approach of getting undergraduates into labs with faculty, not only as mentors but also as research partners, no longer is exclusively the province of highly selective, private liberal arts colleges. It has now caught on with a growing number of other private and public colleges as well. . . . So the liberal arts college model of science education and research is spreading. At Wesleyan, Manju Hingorani says of her 14-hour days in class, office, and lab: "I am very tired, but I am so happy. I see the faculty and students committed to science and more research money around me, and at many other institutions as well. It is a very exciting time." They enroll about 1 in 12 undergraduates, but turn out almost 1 in 6 future Ph.D.s in science and engineering. Wow. And more. Good piece. (Also available in PDF.) 11:10:39 PM    comment []

U.S. cybersecurity test shelved until 2006, by Anne Broache, CNET News.com. A national exercise designed to test the government's readiness to handle cyberemergencies won't happen until February, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman confirmed Wednesday. The department, which is headed toward a cybersecurity makeover of sorts, originally planned to run the mock attack-and-response game--known as Cyberstorm--in November. "While this exercise will be an important test of our readiness to respond to and mitigate a significant cyberattack, our first priority as a department is responding to real world events," spokesman Kirk Whitworth said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "As a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, many of the department's resources, as well as those of the private sector which would have been involved in the Cyberstorm exercise, were reallocated to deal with the disasters in the Gulf." 10:08:50 AM    comment []

Three from BNA News: GOOGLE ARGUES NEWS HEADLINES ARE NOT COPYRIGHTABLE BNA's Electronic Commerce & Law Report reports that Google has argued that news headlines that are purely factual and merely ten words long lack sufficient originality to preclude others from copying them. The argument comes in a brief filed in the Agence France Presse v. Google litigation. Google is seeking dismissal of Agence France Press's claim that Google is infringing its copyrights by copying AFP news headlines for reuse on Google's news aggregation sites. Article at http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/eip.nsf/is/a0b1v5g6d1 For a free trial to the source of this story, visit http://www.bna.com/prodcuts/ip/eplr.htm CATHOLIC SCHOOL TELLS STUDENTS TO REMOVE INTERNET BLOGS A Roman Catholic high school in New Jersey has ordered its students to remove personal blogs from the Internet in the name of protecting them from cyberpredators. Officials say the directive is a matter of safety, not censorship. However, constitutional experts say the case raises interesting questions about the intersection of free speech and voluntary agreements with private institutions. [Newsday] BANKS TO BLACKLIST CROOKED WORKERS IN FRAUD FIGHT Major US financial institutions are working to set up a new defence against insider fraud involving a database of employees who are known to be scam risks. The new database will list information on employees at financial institutions who were fired because they compromised customer data or knowingly caused financial losses. 10:08:37 AM    comment []

Bob Rankin's Internet History page (including computers in the 1620's). 9:08:25 AM    comment []

You can read on his blog when Neil Gaiman started writing his new novel Anansi Boys and engage him in conversation about it at The Well's Inkwell. 8:08:15 AM    comment []