My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Wellcome Funds Pan-African Research Consortia – The Wellcome Trust is pouring nearly $50 million into bolstering research capacity in Africa. On Thursday, the U.K. biomedical research charity announced seven pan-African research partnerships, involving more than 50 universities and research institutions, as part of a ?30 million pound ($49.4 million) initiative.
• Creative destruction – Some see the financial catastrophe as the kind of crisis economist Joseph Schumpeter prescribed to kick start a new cycle. But conditions may not be right for an innovation-led boom, believes Sami Mahroum.
• What Is a Master’s Degree Worth? – How do students know if an M.A. is worth it or not? What degrees might be worth getting, and which are not? How does a student weigh the risks and benefits of taking that intermediate step in higher education?
• Beware scientific fundamentalism – Science journalists should aim to be "informed critics" of science, supporting its values but wary of backing everything said in its name.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Germany’s mediocre universities – Thousands of less coddled students recently staged protests across Germany against their conditions. “Back education, not banks”, demanded protesters fed up with overcrowded lecture halls, crumbling campuses, tuition fees and a chaotic conversion from the traditional diploma to a European two-tier degree system.
• New agency to aid university development – new agency to aid Commonwealth states in building stronger higher education systems has come a step nearer as Commonwealth education ministers agreed to back further investigation of the plan. The 17th Commonwealth Conference of Education Ministers in Kuala Lumpur welcomed the findings of a working group which had investigated the possible establishment of a Tertiary Education Facility for the Commonwealth, and agreed that work should begin.
• Sweden to work on building the ERA – Building a European Research Area that dignifies the label requires a high level of integration and coordination. But at present there is no overarching structural framework for achieving this.
• Governments Embracing a Role in Innovation – The tricky, many-step process by which ideas become products and services — has typically been seen, studied and celebrated at the micro level, as a pursuit for entrepreneurs and clever companies. But governments are increasingly wading into the innovation game, declaring innovation agendas and appointing senior innovation officials.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Europe 2020: the new Lisbon strategy – Ideas for Europe in 2020 and a new Lisbon strategy from the Dutch Social Economic Council.
• Bologna Process ’stifling creative thinking’ – The Bologna process, which aims to harmonise academic standards and remove barriers to mobility of students and teachers, focuses on results instead of encouraging in-depth study and critical thinking, Spiekermann said.
• Andrew Moravcsik on the EU Elections – The fact that 43.4 percent of Europeans—around 160 million people—turned out to vote for a body of politicians that allegedly “no one cares about” is actually quite remarkable. Surely, American commentators should not cast stones: turnout in midterm U.S. elections is generally lower. Even more important, prophets of a Euro-malaise miss the most important fact about EU democracy: European elections are not about Europe.
• University refunds tuition fees to foreign students – Foreign students will be refunded over half a million kroner in tuition fees paid as part of a European exchange masters programme.
• Is freely available research better disseminated? – Are freely availably scientific papers better disseminated? Many believe so, but this column presents new evidence suggesting that the higher number of citations received by open access papers is mostly due to a difference in quality. Nevertheless, there is a problem of access to the scientific literature in developing countries that needs to be addressed.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• The Great U-Turn – Over the past century, individuals seeking to better their lives have seen the US as the land of opportunity. But the recent economic recession has apparently changed this view, as some immigrants are deciding to return home, for good.
• Innovation and the economy – Plans are in hand to introduce innovation bonds as a new means of financing technology start-ups.
• Foreign fees may founder as ‘perfect storm’ brews – A “perfect storm” caused by recession, increasingly tight visa regulations and other factors such as concern about swine flu is putting the UK at risk of losing crucial income from overseas students, universities have been warned.
• Go Dutch, save money – Why don’t more British students head to the University of Maastricht, where they can take degrees in English and – best of all – pay lower fees than at home?

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Fall-off in venture capital hurting innovation, warns OECD – A dramatic decline in the availability of venture capital is stifling innovative start-up companies and damaging long-term growth prospects, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
• Academic Earth – Video lectures from the world’s top scholars – Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.
• Education and technology: Supply, demand, and income inequality – US educational attainment growth has substantially slowed since the 1970s. This column explains how the educational slowdown caused much of the recent rise in economic inequality and concludes that the futures of inequality and the US depend on increasing the supply of highly educated workers.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Joint PhDs becoming popular – A major two-year project undertaken by the European University Association with the support of the European Commission and involving 33 universities in 20 European countries has found that collaborative doctoral programmes are growing in importance in Europe and offering real value to universities and industry.
• Open Access publication can save the Netherlands up to 133 million euros – If every scientific and scholarly article were publicly available, it would save the Netherlands EUR 133 million a year. That figure is given by the Australian economist Prof. John Houghton in a study that SURFfoundation presented today to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
• Climate Change and Intellectual Property – NYTimes.com – Besides cash, some suggest that any accord must ensure developing countries have access to the proprietary mitigation technologies — that is, the intellectual property that companies in the developed world are creating to fight global warming — at bargain basement prices. But several high-tech multinational companies, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recently set up the Innovation, Development and Employment Alliance to counter efforts to roll back patent protection on climate technology.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Plasterk handhaaft binariteit in titulatuur wo/hbo – A typical Dutch solution to a typical Dutch problem
• Western Universities’ Asian Programs Endure – Asia's booming education market has been a major draw for top-tier universities in the West over the past decade. Asia has a large appetite for tertiary education, and many countries have a shortage of home-grown universities.
• ‘Universities’ out as DIUS is succeeded by business ministry – Universities have reacted with disappointment after the Government department that dealt with higher education was scrapped and replaced by a "super-ministry" that will focus on business, skills and the economy.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• The Atlantic Century: Benchmarking EU & U.S. I nnovation and Competitiveness – In this report, ITIF assesses the global innovation-based competitiveness of 36 countries and the European Union (EU)-15 region, the EU-10 region, the EU-25 region, and the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) region, both as they currently stand and in terms of progress in the last decade. We focus primarily on comparisons between the United States and Europe and comparisons between the United States and European Union and selected other nations around the world to see which is the most competitive in the new innovation economy.
• The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S. – BusinessWeek – "We live in an era of rapid innovation." I'm sure you've heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?
• our feel good innovation engine « orgtheory.net – A discussion about whether the U.S. has lost its innovative umph has been roiling across the internets in reaction to Business Week’s provocative cover story.
• In Defence Of The Lisbon Agenda – Asking whether Lisbon has really been "a flop", Mettler says "the two key targets of the Lisbon Agenda, a 70% employment rate and R&D spending of 3% of GDP, have not been met by all member states". Nevertheless, "that 'failure' overshadows two positive aspects," she explains. "Firstly, several member states have met these targets. Eight EU member states have employment rates in excess of 70%, while two have managed to reach the ambitious R&D goals." (…) "Secondly, the targets themselves have been extremely helpful in shifting and guiding the policy debate."
• Associations, networks, alliances, etc.: making sense of the emerging global higher education landscape – Over the last decade an assortment of new or substantially transformed stakeholders has emerged. ‘Established’ national and international stakeholders are having to take into account ‘global network’ universities like New York University and the University of Nottingham, Google (est., 1998), private firms like Thomson Reuters, a more assertive European Commission (especially the Directorate Generals of Education and Culture, and Research), and a myriad of regional and international consortia…

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Janez Potocnik: Theme of the week » Blog Archive » A step ahead for research infrastructures! – Last week, the European Research Area took a step forward: thanks to the joint efforts of research ministers and the European Commission, a number of major research projects will soon be able to register in a new legal form which will be exempt from value-added tax (VAT).
• Twelve Commandments for Higher Education Reform – Unfortunately, higher education is in such need of repair, in my distinctly non-deified opinion, that I think we need 12 commandments to reform it.
• Philip G. Altbach: Is open door in higher education desirable? – Simply to throw the academic doors open would be a serious mistake. India, like other developing countries, needs a clear and transparent policy and regulatory framework.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Silicon Valley Continues to Lead North American Metros – Silicon Valley, the largest and most influential high-tech center in the world, continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in North America in the breadth and scope of economic activity it creates through technological innovation. But many other metros have built strong and diverse industries that should allow them to prosper when the global economy recovers, according to a new report from the Milken Institute.
• Obama vows to boost science ties with Muslim world – The United States' commitment to science diplomacy in parts of the developing world assumed a firmer shape yesterday (4 June) when its president, Barack Obama, outlined a science plan during his landmark speech at Cairo University in Egypt.
• Split Over Open Access – In the debate over "open access" to scholarly research, the Association of American University Presses has weighed in on the "anti" side of things, backing legislation that would end a federal requirement that work supported by the National Institutes of Health be available online and free within 12 months of publication.
• Times Higher Education – UCL embraces open access with institution-wide mandate – University College London has become the latest British institution to introduce a mandatory open-access repository for its scholars' work in what is a growing international trend. The institution announced this week that all its researchers will have to deposit their papers in UCL's online repository, where they will be accessible free of charge.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Chinese economy needs ‘huge’ investment in student talent – China’s education revolution, which has seen an explosion in the number of university entrants, could be stalled by “bottlenecks” in the supply of talented students, a meeting of leading Asian university heads has heard.
• Fraud in science: Liar! Liar! | The Economist – That people, from politicians to priests, cheat and lie is taken for granted by many. But scientists, surely, are above that sort of thing? In the past decade the cases of Hwang Woo-Suk, who falsely reported making human embryonic stem cells by cloning, and Jan Schön, a physicist who claimed astonishing (and fabricated) results in the fields of semiconductors and superconductors, have shown that they certainly are not.
• Monoglot researchers are damaging UK competitiveness – Scholarship is being damaged by a lack of “essential” foreign language skills among UK- born and educated researchers, a report from the national academy for humanities and social sciences has warned.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Sweden admits Lisbon Agenda ‘failure’ – "Even if progress has been made it must be said that the Lisbon Agenda, with only a year remaining before it is to be evaluated, has been a failure"
• Europe gets ready for alternative rankings – The CHERPA-network has won an open call for tender by the European Commission to develop and test an alternative design for a global ranking of universities. The network will conceptualize and test the feasibility of a multi-dimensional global ranking based on the CHE ranking methodology and on the classification of higher education institutions developed by CHEPS.
• Time for a ‘Bretton Woods’ of innovation – At a meeting in Brussels, leading academics and business executives urged governments to better to coordinate the R&D, education and other innovation-related programmes included in their national economic-stimulus packages.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• European elections: Anti-science sentiment infects politics | Science | guardian.co.uk – Science has a role to play in guiding virtually every aspect of policy, and yet a survey of the main political parties' attitudes to key scientific issues reveals a startling lack of clarity
• As Research Funding Declines, Chavez, Scientists Trade Charges — Science – Tension between Venezuelan academics and their president, Hugo Chávez, has mounted further after Chávez criticised the country's scientists. Chávez instructed scientists to stop working on "obscure projects" and make themselves useful to people living in slums in his weekly television programme in early May. He has also commented that the science minister should "put the screws" on "feeble scientists" to get better results.
• Privatise elite universities, says top VC – Britain's elite universities should be allowed to privatise to form a US-style Ivy league, a senior vice-chancellor said today. Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, said institutions including his own, as well as Cambridge and Oxford universities, should be freed from state control to allow them to charge students more than the current £3,140 capped fees and recruit greater numbers of international students to boost their income.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Tiananmen protests hold little interest for China’s youth | International | Reuters – Final year Chinese university student Li Teng knows finding a job during the global economic crisis will be tough. Yet he shakes his head at the thought of taking to the streets to protest.
• The News Record – U.S. Universities Seek to Adapt to European Advances – "If the Bologna Process ends up working, it will change the dynamics of international higher education dramatically," said Lloyd Armstrong, the former provost at the University of Southern California and a higher-education scholar. "We will, in many ways, be the odd man out."
• University World News – US: The business of higher education – In recent years, colleges and universities have encountered increasing pressure to operate like businesses. As the logic goes, businesses must survive in a cutthroat climate of unfettered competition and, thus, their organisations need to be leaner, more efficient and more responsive to the needs of their customers than not-for-profit organisations, such as colleges and universities.
• CHINA: Ministry recruits 2,000 foreign scholars – In a bold move to rapidly expand research capacity of its universities, China's Ministry of Education is helping underwrite the costs of recruiting and retaining 2,000 foreign experts. About 70 select universities, as well as 211 schools that comprise an elite 100+ universities, can apply to the ministry's university section with proposals to expand key research positions.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Schools could lose out after student attacks – AUSTRALIA'S lucrative education industry could pay a high price for recent attacks on Indian students, agents in India who help arrange student placements have warned.
• Why do Institutions of Higher Education Reward Research While Selling Education? – Higher education institutions and disciplines that traditionally did little research now reward faculty largely based on research, both funded and unfunded. Some worry that faculty devoting more time to research harms teaching and thus harms students' human capital accumulation. The economics literature has largely ignored the reasons for and desirability of this trend. We summarize, review, and extend existing economic theories of higher education to explain why incentives for unfunded research have increased. One theory is that researchers more effectively teach higher order skills and therefore increase student human capital more than non-researchers. In contrast, according to signaling theory, education is not intrinsically productive but only a signal that separates high- and low-ability workers. We extend this theory by hypothesizing that researchers make higher education more costly for low-ability students than do non-research faculty, achieving the separation more efficiently.
• Sector needs young blood to combat ageing profile – The agency’s report Resources of Higher Education Institutions 2007-08 shows that the average age of an academic working at a UK university is 43. But over the past four years, the proportion of academic staff aged over 55 has increased from 18.9 per cent to 20.5 per cent. During the same period, the proportion of academics aged under 35 has dropped from 25.9 per cent to 25.2 per cent.

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