Ultimately, students may feel less ripped off by essay mills than by universities.

I like this take on plagiarism and cheating. As has been said before, if somebody can write your essay, and the change in style not be noticed, those claims in the glossy prospectuses are hollow. Canaries in the coal mine.

I saw this giant problem in my education, and I actually designed a course called, “Physician Heal Thyself, Evidence-based lifestyle.” I brought in all these doctors who are experts in sleep medicine, sleep, fitness nutrition, food as medicine, functional medicine, integrative medicine, osteopathy and acupuncture. I got them all in a room and said I want you to teach students what we’re missing. We need to make this medical school education and have to implement this into the board certification programs as well as board exams. If it’s not required, it’s not going to be taught.

No, I am not taking this too seriously. Awhile back, I compiled a list of all the things we needed to  inflict on / ask medical  students to know : I had to buy a larger hard drive. And as for this ‘new medicine’ George Bernard Shaw described it a long time ago.

Quartz

I began as a university student after two years of military service. My brain was like an empty sponge. University was fantastic, a world full of knowledge and very interesting people. I studied medicine and went to philosophy lectures as much as I could, and then mathematics until my medical exams came up.

Wolfram Schultz in the THE

During the 7-year period between the introduction of tacrolimus in preclinical studies in 1987 and the FDA approval of tacrolimus in 1994, the transplant program at the University of Pittsburgh produced one peer-reviewed article every 2.7 days, while transplanting an organ every 14.2 hours.

Always thought these surgeons needed to spend more time in theatre .

Science. Obituary of Thomas Starzl.

What he was doing in this was holding a crucial middle ground. He understood better than anyone else that the public realm has to fight for its existence against two equally great dangers. One is the culture of self-enclosed, technocratic expertise, the hiving off of intellectual life into increasingly minute specializations and increasingly impenetrable professional dialects. The other is the insistence—so much in the ascendant now—that there is no expertise at all, that scholarship and rigor and evidence are the mere playthings of elitist eggheads. Bob’s great gift to civic life was the living demonstration in every issue of the Review that these impostors could be treated with equal—and magnificent—contempt. He held open the space for that great republican virtue: common curiosity. He made this fierce effort seem so natural that it is only in his absence that we realize how hard it is to do and how much it counts.

Fintan O’Toole. From a collection of essays on the late Bob Silvers of the NYRB.

O’Toole gets the central problem the academy is failing on. Not that the academy is ever sufficient.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/05/11/robert-silvers-tributes/

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, like Cameron and François Hollande, belong to the exam-passing classes.

FT

The use of Benzedrine by American athletes in the 1936 Berlin Olympics prompted the Temmler company on the edge of Berlin to focus on creating a more powerful version. By the autumn of 1937, its chief chemist, Dr. Fritz Hauschild (in postwar years the drug provider for East German athletes), created a synthesized version of methamphetamine. This was patented as Pervitin. It produced intense sensations of energy and self-confidence.

In pill form Pervitin was marketed as a general stimulant, equally useful for factory workers and housewives. It promised to overcome narcolepsy, depression, low energy levels, frigidity in women, and weak circulation. The assurance that it would increase performance attracted the Nazi Party’s approval, and amphetamine use was quietly omitted from any anti-drug propaganda. By 1938, large parts of the population were using Pervitin on an almost regular basis, including students preparing for exams, nurses on night duty, businessmen under pressure, and mothers dealing with the pressures of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church—to which the Nazis thought women should be relegated). Ohler quotes from letters written by the future Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, then serving in the German army, begging his parents to send him more Pervitin. Its consumption came to be seen as entirely normal.

Lots I didn’t know, but any reader of David Healy will not be surprised. A dermatologist doesn’t come out of it too well, either.

Antony Beevor in the NYRB

Once upon a time the government gave money to universities, and the universities educated people (or they tried). Now things are different. The government buys educational services, and the universities are the contractors.

Not so much Software as a Service, but Education as a Service.

According to the job description for the chair of modern Greek studies posted last month, whoever fills the professorship part-funded by the Greek Laskaridis shipping family will not be paid an “official salary” from the university. Instead, they will receive an unspecified share of €20,000 (£16,730) from the Dutch Society of Modern Greek Studies to carry out numerous academic duties for, on average, one day a week.

The professorship, named after the late shipping heiress Marilena Laskaridis, lasts for five years, during which time the post-holder will be asked to teach, to supervise PhD students and to win research grants. Despite being based in Amsterdam’s Faculty of Humanities, the professor would not be an employee of the university and would not receive any of the usual benefits enjoyed by other staff.

THE

Technology magnifies power in general, but the rates of adoption are different. Criminals, dissidents, the unorganized—all outliers—are more agile. They can make use of new technologies faster, and can magnify their collective power because of it. But when the already-powerful big institutions finally figured out how to use the Internet, they had more raw power to magnify.

This is true for both governments and corporations. We now know that governments all over the world are militarizing the Internet, using it for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Large corporations are using it to control what we can do and see, and the rise of winner-take-all distribution systems only exacerbates this.

This is the fundamental tension at the heart of the Internet, and information-based technology in general. The unempowered are more efficient at leveraging new technology, while the powerful have more raw power to leverage. These two trends lead to a battle between the quick and the strong: the quick who can make use of new power faster, and the strong who can make use of that same power more effectively.

Bruce Schneier, on Crooked Timber, talking around Cory Doctorow’s new novel ‘Walkaway’. BS—well worth reading in full, as usual.