Oh, the humanities....

Biochemist Gregory Petsko wants your help. He wants you and me to help save the humanities from the growing "spectre [that] is haunting higher education: the spectre of the market", where significant sectors of university education are being reduced, or cut entirely. In this one page commentary in Nature (2010, vol. 468, p. 1003) he observes "the humanities are a victim of two pernicious trends that have crept into the management of universities in the past decade or two, based on the idea that market forces should control what happens in education...". First, it is the running of universities as a business. "Nothing could so undermine the mission of a university as the misguided principle that all parts of it must make a profit" he says. The second "damaging trend is the growing mantra of student choice." He pounds hard by emphasising that "students have neither the wisdom nor the experience to know that they need to know." Petsko, to who I heartily agree with, understands that depth and breadth of education is the most rewarding, and students nor business minded bureaucrats appreciate.
"There is only one market that has any place in higher education: the marketplace of ideas". For if not, universities, the lobby for all the doors to unimaginable breadth of knowledge, are simply closed, making room for the myopic technical schools.

Big Swimmer with Big Pics

BBC reports Colossal pliosaur fossil secrets revealed by CT scanner.
"The X-rays are helping to build up a 3D picture of this ferocious predator, called a pliosaur, which terrorized the oceans 150m years ago. The 2.4m-long (7.9ft) fossil skull was recently unearthed along the UK's Jurassic coast, and is thought to belong to one of the biggest pliosaurs ever found. The scans could establish if the giant is a species that is new to science", according to the report which includes some video of the skull and CT scanning.

More News about Paper and their bound Distributors

In the continually changing world of print or "print", or book or "book", a recent article in the Huffington Post provides more fuel to the burning book question of whether the traditional book will survive. In Print Books (and Bookstores) Aren't Dead, But the Book Business Is about to Change one commentator laments the decline in print book sales is inevitable and probably irreversible.

China, We Have a Problem

A recent article in Science by R. Stone (Altering the Past: China's Faked Fossil Problem. Science, 2010, vol. 330, p. 1740-1741) shows "that many composites and fakes are now finding their way into Chinese museums, especially local museums" who often do not have palaeontologists on staff. Some of these fossils include large marine reptiles, supposedly early Cheetahs, and the now infamous "Archaeoraptor". There are several suggestions to at least reduce the amount of alteration of fossils but for the most part this is still "too lucrative".

More Discoveries From China

New Fossil Site in China Shows Long Recovery of Life from the Largest Extinction in Earth's History
From Science Daily