Daniel Sarewitz in Nature

The quality problem has been widely recognized in cancer science, in which many cell lines used for research turn out to be contaminated. For example, a breast-cancer cell line used in more than 1,000 published studies actually turned out to have been a melanoma cell line. The average biomedical research paper gets cited between 10 and 20 times in 5 years, and as many as one-third of all cell lines used in research are thought to be contaminated, so the arithmetic is easy enough to do: by one estimate, 10,000 published papers a year cite work based on contaminated cancer cell lines. Metastasis has spread to the cancer literature……..That problem is likely to be worse in policy-relevant fields such as nutrition, education, epidemiology and economics, in which the science is often uncertain and the societal stakes can be high

See this great piece by Bruce Charlton

Professional science has arrived at this state in which the typical researcher feels free to indulge in unrestrained careerism, while blandly assuming that the ‘systems’ of science will somehow transmute the dross of his own contribution into the gold of truth. It does not: hence the preponderance of irreproducible publications.

Interesting exchange of letters in Academic Medicine. At first, it almost seems counterintuitive, that defining a curriculum might afford more control and greater flexibility. But what the authors (see the earlier letters) are highlighting is the increasing damage ‘standardised’ testing may do to long term goals. The letter also would make me wonder how much of the medical school curriculum could be moved on online outwith the bricks and mortar, with medical schools just certifying some preclinical  knowledge.  Yes,  the whole online world has been talking disintermediation for some time, but this is the serious literature catching up with the real world.  If we are serious about broadening access and reducing costs and training more doctors, this seems to me to be one way to go. Of course this means we might need to look at how the course can be more modular, and flexible.

Implementing a universal preclinical curriculum could redefine the requirements for entering medical school and could even call into question the necessity of delivering the pre–Step 1 curriculum in a brick-and-mortar setting. Students could decide whether to take courses offered by medical schools, enroll in courses at other academic institutions, or study the material on their own (as they, in part, do now). Perhaps Step 1 will eventually become the entrance examination for medical school admission. It is essential that medical school curricula provide greater scope and nuance than that of the Step 1 blueprint. Consideration of a universal preclinical curriculum could help us focus the medical school’s primary role in establishing and implementing the teaching and evaluation of essential knowledge, attitudes, and skills required of students as they are trained to become competent, entrustable physicians, not master test takers.

Nice paean to David Attenborough, with the above title. There was a time when it is said that people like Jacob Bronowski were denied academic advance in the UK because he has appeared on TV. How the world of impact has changed. But just as many of us get excited by the power of the web to broaden access and change higher-ed, we should remember that some of the most potent educational agents of the twentieth century, got there before us. I am thinking cheap paperbacks (Pelican); the BBC; the OU on the BBC; and the movement throughout the 1930’s and beyond for prominent academics to reach out to that large part of the population who had been denied access to higher ed. If we want to build large scale resources for higher ed, we could do worse than look at the extraordinary teams the BBC put together. So, please don’t start lectures with those dismal learning outcomes, but just look at how Bond movies grab the attention and focus of their audience. Or just look at the Ascent of Man.

More structural issues in higher-ed that appear hard to change (see previous post). From Science:

Unfortunately, it is not clear why Ph.D. students pursue postdoc positions and how their plans depend on individual-level factors, such as career goals or labor market perceptions.

And in Nature

The number of US faculty members who have tenure or are on the tenure track is falling, according to a report by the American Association of University Professors in Washington DC. Over the past 40 years, the proportion of the academic labour force that is in a full-time tenured position has shrunk by one-quarter, and the proportion in tenure-track posts has halved, reports Higher Education at a Crossroads.

Across large swathes of higher ed there is an enormous amount of cross-subsidy, much of it based on misinformation about ‘what you are buying’. Tech and data will start to unpick at much of this. The future for many institutions is uncertain.

Two articles about Sci-hub (here and here). No, I am not encouraging illegal downloading. But I hope we can look back in a few years with shame at the way journals, their publishers and those who have a vested interest in the mismeasure of science have hindered educational advance, and wasted public money. Some specialty journals do indeed pour money back into their subject, but it is a minority. All too often medical journals are a way of making money for publishers and specialist societies. There will be an iTunes moment (I hope).

Via John Naughton

After a spell as a lecturer and reader at the LSE, he returned to his East End roots at the economics department at Queen Mary College, recruiting an impressive roster of academics and students to its venue in a former biscuit factory on Bow Road.

He was known for giving chances to mavericks: if a headteacher warned of a student’s “difficult” nature, Peston would normally take them on.

From an obit of Lord Peston FT

This brought to mind something in Craig Venters excellent autobiography, A life decoded. He described how he was so busy doing science — and publishing — as a student, that he failed some mandatory graduate exams. The faculty had to ‘invent’ an appropriate exam for him — which of course he passed. They obviously didn’t have to deal with the QAA or GMC.

Education is not just about means, but about maintaining intellectual diversity. We have to be concerned about variation, too. It is all too easy to concentrate on minimum standards or pass marks, without considering whether what we are doing, harms those who as a society we are most in need of.

Vicks sells a rectal thermometer with a Bluetooth transmitter and accompanying smartphone app. Under Armour has announced plans to put biometric sensors in the underwear and other garments it makes. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere companies won’t go to collect information about us.

Nicholas Carr,on surveillance and the internet of things.

Shakespeare’s death on April 23, 1616, went largely unremarked by all but a few of his immediate contemporaries. There was no global shudder when his mortal remains were laid to rest in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. No one proposed that he be interred in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer or Spenser (where his fellow playwright Francis Beaumont was buried in the same year and where Ben Jonson would be buried some years later). No notice of Shakespeare’s passing was taken in the diplomatic correspondence of the time or in the newsletters that circulated on the Continent; no rush of Latin obsequies lamented the “vanishing of his breath,” as classical elegies would have it; no tributes were paid to his genius by his distinguished European contemporaries. Shakespeare’s passing was an entirely local English event, and even locally it seems scarcely to have been noted.

Stephen Greenbelt in the NYRB

Yes, I know not as good as the quip about Jesus of Nazareth: “A fine teacher, but didn’t publish”.

I am not certain when I learned a little about sign language, probably from Steven Pinker’s, ‘The language instinct’. But it is absolutely fascinating, and its study — it seems to me — is yet another one of the almost endless arguments for letting academics play: the world in a grain of sand. There is a short article in this week’s Science:

The use of new parts also makes language more efficient: The youngest ISL signers can express themselves much faster than the oldest—153.2 signs per minute compared with 103.5 signs per minute.

The findings also show that social interaction is essential for language evolution. When a new generation establishes a system for signing, Sandler says, it stays more or less the same as its members age. Her work has shown that when young signers enter a community, they add complexity through experimentation with their peers in what she calls “a social game.” The more players, the more innovations.

You could the same for science in general or any branch of human culture. Which is why many of us worry.