Scholarly Research Papers: 30 Key, Free Websites

by Roddy MacLeod

Below, I’ve listed 30 freely available websites and services that help anyone find details of new scholarly research.  These are services which link directly to research papers or reports or conference papers or pre-prints or theses which have appeared in journals or subject/institutional repositories, or elsewhere; and especially services which produce RSS feeds, because I’m always interested in RSS, as RSS can be an excellent facility for keeping up-to-date.

These are not services which only allow you to Search, but rather ones which let you browse, or which provide lists of, or information about, new research output, with links to the actual papers.

The first few sites showcase, in various ways, new research:

1. AlphaGalileo calls itself “…the world’s independent source of research news.”  This service distribute news releases and other information from science, health, technology, the arts, humanities, social sciences and business to the world’s media.  As well as News releases, they also have Publication announcements which link to new scholarly books and journal articles.  The news releases and publication announcements can be read by anyone, however there are subscription rates for organisations to post news.  Over 1,700 research organisations use the service – mostly organisations and the larger publishers, rather than individual researchers.  There are RSS feeds for broad subject areas, regions and countries.  For example, this is the feed for Applied Science.

2. ScienceDaily offers readers news, on a subject basis, about the latest scientific discoveries.  It is freely accessible with no subscription fees.  It contains over 65,000 articles – here’s one example, entitled Emulating Nature for Better Engineering, which covers how UK researchers describe a novel approach to making porous materials, solid foams, more like their counterparts in the natural world, including bone and wood in the new issue of the International Journal of Design Engineering.  That particular story was reprinted by ScienceDaily from materials provided by Inderscience, via AlphaGalileo (see above).  Other articles are produced from materials provided by institutions, organisations and others directly to ScienceDaily or through press release services.  ScienceDaily also has RSS feeds, for example Electronic News.

3. Futurity aggregates research news produced by a consortium of participating universities, on a broad subject basis (Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, and Society & Culture).  Sometimes, the news items link to published articles, and sometimes they link to research centres or groups.  The university partners are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Russell Group, and the Group of Eight.  There are currently 62 universities in the consortium, which includes the following UK universities: Cardiff University, King’s College London, University College London, University of Leeds, University of Nottingham, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, and the University of Warwick.   Futurity has RSS feeds, e.g. Science & Technology.

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Current Events: Contagion

by Steven Erlanger, NY Times

Since the start of the euro crisis two years ago, the big fear has been contagion, that market unease about the high debt and slow growth in Europe’s southern rim would infect the core. On Wednesday, contagion arrived with brute force.

Italy, a central member of the euro zone and its third-largest economy, struggled to find a new government as anxious investors drove Italian bond rates well above 7 percent and the markets tumbled worldwide. And although critics have warned of just such an escalation for months, European leaders again were caught without a convincing response.

Unappeased by the imminent resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, investors appeared to have focused on the political gridlock in Italy that seemed likely to follow his departure from office, and the unenviable task awaiting a successor: restoring growth in a country that has seen almost none in a decade, and financing $2.57 trillion in debt. Italy, unlike Greece, is seen as too big to default and too big for Europe to bail out.

Only days after the Group of 20 meeting in Cannes, France, where President Obama and other world leaders urged European officials to take bolder action, they appeared frozen in past positions. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met with her kitchen cabinet of economic “wise ones.” They proposed the creation of a 2.3 trillion euro debt repayment fund that would pool and jointly finance debts of all 17 members of the euro zone in return for some conditions like legal debt limits and collateral.

But Mrs. Merkel effectively dismissed the idea, saying that it could be studied and would in any case require major treaty changes, which would take time. She instead emphasized that deep economic changes were required in some member states and that Europe needed to restore fiscal discipline.

“It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe,” Mrs. Merkel said. “A community that says, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world, that it can never again change its ground rules, that community simply can’t survive.”

But the German prescription of austerity is not popular. It is Berlin, citing the very treaties that it now wants to adjust, that has resisted the boldest answer to the euro crisis — using the European Central Bank as the euro zone’s lender of last resort. Berlin does not even want to sanction American-style quantitative easing to promote economic growth, one recipe to stoking growth and reducing the debt burden.

“Contagion is alive and well,” said Rebecca Patterson, chief market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Unlike Greece, she said, Italy could pose “systemic” risks to the global economy, accounting for 20 percent of the gross domestic product of the euro zone. “People are wondering if we’ve moved to a new level of the crisis.”

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photo: Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency

The Coming Death Shortage

by Charles C. Mann, The Atlantic  {excerpt}

The scientists' argument is circuitous but not complex. In the past century U.S. life expectancy has climbed from forty-seven to seventy-seven, increasing by nearly two thirds. Similar rises happened in almost every country. And this process shows no sign of stopping: according to the United Nations, by 2050 global life expectancy will have increased by another ten years. Note, however, that this tremendous increase has been in average life expectancy—that is, the number of years that most people live. There has been next to no increase in the maximum lifespan, the number of years that one can possibly walk the earth—now thought to be about 120. In the scientists' projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward "engineered negligible senescence"—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have "a good chance of success in mice within ten years." The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. "In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years," says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. "And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born."

Critics regard such claims as wildly premature. In March ten respected researchers predicted in the New England Journal of Medicine that "the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end," because rising levels of obesity are making people sicker. The research team leader, S. Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois School of Public Health, also worries about the "potential impact of infectious disease." Believing that medicine can and will overcome these problems, his "cautious and I think defensibly optimistic estimate" is that the average lifespan will reach eighty-five or ninety—in 2100. Even this relatively slow rate of increase, he says, will radically alter the underpinnings of human existence. "Pushing the outer limits of lifespan" will force the world to confront a situation no society has ever faced before: an acute shortage of dead people.

The twentieth-century jump in life expectancy transformed society. Fifty years ago senior citizens were not a force in electoral politics. Now the AARP is widely said to be the most powerful organization in Washington. Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer's, snowbird economies, the population boom, the golfing boom, the cosmetic-surgery boom, the nostalgia boom, the recreational-vehicle boom, Viagra—increasing longevity is entangled in every one. Momentous as these changes have been, though, they will pale before what is coming next.

From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.

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Sasha Harding, The Swim. Great Atlantic Galleries
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Winning the Battle, But Looking for a Job

by Ian Shapira, Washington Post

In her basement apartment near Eastern Market, Molly Katchpole, the 22-year-old underemployed college grad who ignited a nationwide movement against Bank of America, scrolled through her e-mail inbox. The “urgent” interview requests from various news outlets didn’t much interest her anymore. What intrigued Katchpole, who makes $400 a week as a part-time worker, were the invitations for job interviews at lefty nonprofit organizations.

Surrounded by labor history and anarchy books, thrift-store furniture and a male pet rabbit named Mrs. Crackers, Katchpole noticed an e-mail from an outfit called SumOfUs and read it aloud.

“  ‘Do you want a campaigner job taking on multinational corporations?’ ” Katchpole recited one afternoon last week. She turned away from her laptop. “People keep asking me what I am going to do next. I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not much of a policy wonk. But I am absolutely an activist at heart.”

Ever since Katchpole launched an online petition railing against Bank of America’s proposed debit card fees, the bushy-haired, tattooed member of the millennial generation has become a favorite among TV news show bookers and a hero among netizens. After Bank of America aborted its plan Tuesday to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards, Katchpole is now coping with the come-down. She finds herself ambivalent about all the attention and the David vs. Goliath story line. She also has more urgent worries emblematic of her generation: Starting in December, the art and architectural history major has to figure out a way to start paying off her student loans, which she says will require payments of at least $200 a month.

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The new city feel by Miguel Cordovil
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Going Coconuts

by Seth Stevenson, Slate

Strolling around New York this past summer, I found it impossible to escape the giant, redheaded visage of Rihanna—often staring out at me from the side of a bus barreling through a crowded intersection. The singer had temporarily eschewed her punk warrior aesthetic in favor of a frilly white frock and a tropical beach idyll. In her hand: a Tetra Pak full of Vita Coco coconut water. “Hydrate naturally, from a tree, not a lab,” the ad copy implored.

I’d always thought of coconut water as a treat only encountered when traveling. Sold from a roadside cement-block hut in Vietnam. Sipped from a wrinkled plastic bag pierced with a straw. But the product (which is simply the juice of a young, hacked-open coconut) has suddenly flooded the U.S. market. It’s ubiquitous in Manhattan bodegas, shoving aside the 24 oz. aluminum cans of Modelo. Category leader Vita Coco reports 2009 sales volume of $20 million, 2010 sales of $40 million, and expected 2011 sales of $100 million. Competitors boast similar growth rates. What’s driving this specialty beverage boomlet? And how long can it last?

The most important trend in the refreshment business—going on for more than a decade—is the flight away from sugary, carbonated soft drinks like Coke and Fanta (CSDs in industry parlance) and toward drinks perceived as healthier, more natural choices. The decline of the soda stems in part from the aging of our population; 60-year-old baby boomers are less likely than they once might have been to guzzle down a fizzy Mountain Dew. But there is also a general movement toward something the trend spotters call “wellness.” Achieving wellness, as best I understand it, involves cultivating a keen awareness of nutritional concepts, meditative techniques, and which brand of yoga pants make your butt look awesome.

In fact, the successful arrival of coconut water on these shores has more to do with yoga than you might think. The wellness trend has inspired several profitable beverage launches—inspiring massive bottled water brands like Dasani and Aquafina, alternative sports drink concoctions like Vitamin Water, and single-ingredient juices like Pom Wonderful. Both Vita Coco and close competitor Zico were launched in 2004, near the dawn of the current yoga craze, and their early success was built on the (supple, flexible) backs of yoga-loving women.

In South America and Southeast Asia, coconut water is an anytime drink for all sorts of occasions. Vita was born when its founders chatted up a pair of Brazilian women in a Lower East Side bar, getting an earful about how much the gals missed the coconut water that was a daily staple for them back home. Zico came to be when CEO Mark Rampolla, upon returning home from his job as an executive for International Paper in Latin America, found he and his wife couldn’t live without the stuff. But the key to getting the beverage off the ground in the United States turned out to be yoga and pilates fiends who became the brands’ early adopters and first American evangelists.

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The King of Human Error

by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions—but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so.  (...)

Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, without a single minor-league plate appearance between them, but they had found that people, including experts, unwittingly use all sorts of irrelevant criteria in decision-making. I’d never heard of them, though I soon realized that Tversky’s son had been a student in a seminar I’d taught in the late 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, and while I was busy writing my book about baseball, Kahneman had apparently been busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he wasn’t even an economist. (Tversky had died in 1996, making him ineligible to share the prize, which is not awarded posthumously.) I also soon understood how embarrassed I should be by what I had not known.

Between 1971 and 1984, Kahneman and Tversky had published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. When we are trying to guess which 18-year-old baseball prospect would become a big-league all-star, for example. To a reader who is neither psychologist nor economist (i.e., me), these papers are not easy going, though I am told that compared with other academic papers in their field they are high literature. Still, they are not so much written as constructed, block by block. The moment the psychologists uncover some new kink in the human mind, they bestow a strange and forbidding name on it (“the availability heuristic”). In their most cited paper, cryptically titled “Prospect Theory,” they convinced a lot of people that human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other “experts” have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).

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Photograph by Patrick Ecclesine

Are Cookbooks Obsolete?

by Julia Moskin, NY Times

For many cooks, the pleasure of Thanksgiving is in the planning. In early November, the recipe folders come out, along with dreams of learning to perfect a lattice pie crust, and the cookbooks covered with splatters and sticky notes that evoke holidays past.

Fast-forward two weeks, to the sweaty hours when the sticky notes have curled up and blown away, the cookbooks are taking up all the counter space, and the illustrations for cooking a turkey in “Joy of Cooking” are revealed to be no more informative than they were in 1951.

If the people developing cooking apps for tablets have their way, that kind of scene will soon be a relic. And so will the whole notion of recipes that exist only as strings of words. Many early cooking apps were unsatisfying: slow, limited, less than intuitive and confined to tiny phone screens. Even avid cooks showed little interest in actually cooking from them.

But with the boom in tablet technology, recipes have begun to travel with their users from home to the office to the market and, most important, into the kitchen. With features like embedded links, built-in timers, infographics and voice prompts, the richness of some new apps — like Baking With Dorie, from the baking expert Dorie Greenspan; Jamie Oliver’s 20-Minute Meals; and Professional Chef, the vast app released last month by the Culinary Institute of America — hint that books as kitchen tools are on the way out.

“I never thought I would say this, but I don’t go anywhere without my iPad,” said Kristin Young, a collector of cookbooks in Santa Barbara, Calif., who said that even her favorite volumes are gathering dust. “If it’s not on my tablet, it’s just not useful anymore.”

The interface of a tablet offers possibilities to the cook that would be impossible with a laptop, let alone a book. Swiping, tapping and zooming through information presented in multimedia is a good match for the experience of cooking, which involves all the senses and the brain, as well. And when those faculties fail, as often happens in high-stress kitchen scenarios like Thanksgiving, apps can come to the rescue with features like technique videos, embedded glossaries and social media links.

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illustration: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Kerry James Marshall (b.1955, USA) - Nude (Spotlight). Acrylic on pvc, 61 1/8 x 72 7/8 x 2 7/8 inches (2009)
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Terminator: Attack of the Drone

by Mohsin Hamid, Guardian

Ma doesn't hear it. She's asleep, snorin' like an old brown bear after a dogfight. Don't know how she manages that. 'Cause I can hear it. The whole valley can hear it. The machines are huntin' tonight.

There ain't many of us left. Humans I mean. Most people who could do already escaped. Or tried to escape anyways. I don't know what happened to 'em. But we couldn't. Ma lost her leg to a landmine and can't walk. Sometimes she gets outside the cabin with a stick. Mostly she stays in and crawls. The girls do the work. I'm the man now.

Pa's gone. The machines got him. I didn't see it happen but my uncle came back for me. Took me to see Pa gettin' buried in the ground. There wasn't anythin' of Pa I could see that let me know it was Pa. When the machines get you there ain't much left. Just gristle mixed with rocks, covered in dust.

I slip outside. Omar's there waitin'. "What took ya so long?" he says. He's a boy like me but he's taller so he acts like he's older. "Ya got it?"

"Yeah," I say. I take it out from under my shawl. It's a piece of mirror from the white pickup we found all flattened next to the stream. Truck looked like a giant gone stepped on it. I'd asked Omar how big the machines were and he'd said not that big. Not the ones we had 'round here. But he'd said talk was there be bigger machines out there. Out in the southlands. Machines that could walk. So big each step sound like thunder.

At night I sometimes couldn't sleep 'cause I thought I heard 'em big ones comin'. But they never came. Most likely, there was no such. But my sisters still said if those machines come they surely kill everythin'. They said you'd better run when you hear those machines comin'. But what do they know. They're just girls. They get so scared sometimes they go pee inside when they're supposed be asleep and Ma has to thrash 'em. I only done gone pee inside once, and 'cause I'm the man now Ma ain't thrashed me much that time.

But there's no thunderin' tonight. Tonight there's that other sound. Sound of the machines that fly. That's the kind of machine we get in these parts. You can't see 'em at night. Sometimes you can't see 'em in the day neither. But you hear 'em all the time, huntin'. They'll go away for days. Sometimes weeks'll go by and you ain't heard 'em once. Then they'll be back and there'll be a burial. Ain't no-one never killed a machine in our valley. But Omar and I reckon we've got a chance of it when the sun comes up. Only first we got to get ourselves in position.

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Photograph: Getty

Alvin Lee

Pay to Play: A Vast New Database

[ed.  Great.  Like we need more money in politics.  Thanks, Supreme Court for Citizens United, the gift that (literally) keeps on giving.]

by Ed Pilkington, Guardian

The secretive oil billionaires the Koch brothers are close to launching a nationwide database connecting millions of Americans who share their anti-government and libertarian views, a move that will further enhance the tycoons' political influence and that could prove significant in next year's presidential election.

The database will give concrete form to the vast network of alliances that David and Charles Koch have cultivated over the past 20 years on the right of US politics. The brothers, whose personal wealth has been put at $25bn each, were a major force behind the creation of the tea party movement and enjoy close ties to leading conservative politicians, financiers, business people, media figures and US supreme court judges.

The voter file was set up by the Kochs 18 months ago with $2.5m of their seed money, and is being developed by a hand-picked team of the brothers' advisers. It has been given the name Themis, after the Greek goddess who imposes divine order on human affairs.  (...)

The database will bring together information from a plethora of right-wing groups, tea party organisations and conservative-leaning thinktanks. Each one has valuable data on their membership – including personal email addresses and phone numbers, as well as more general information useful to political campaign strategists such as occupation, income bracket and so on.

By pooling the information, the hope is to create a data resource that is far more potent than the sum of its parts. Themis will in effect become an electoral roll of right-wing America, allowing the Koch brothers to further enhance their power base in a way that is sympathetic to, but wholly independent of, the Republican party.  (...)

Many of the causes backed by the brothers clearly chime with their own self-interests. To encourage the denial of global warming science is obviously advantageous to businessmen who have made their fortunes in drilling and piping of oil; low taxation suits billionaires wanting to cut their own tax contributions; a bonfire of state regulations over business and the environment would be beneficial to a multinational corporation like Koch Industries, which is the second largest private company in the US.

But the two men are also anti-government ideologues who believe in what they preach, an inheritance from their fiercely anti-communist father Fred, who was a founder of the radical right-wing John Birch Society. David Koch stood as vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian party in 1980 on a platform of doing away with a host of public bodies including the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, the CIA, social security, welfare, taxation and public schools.

Though the Kochs have already stamped their influence on the American right, their impact to date looks like small beer compared with their ambitious plans for 2012. According to Kenneth Vogel of Politico, the brothers intend to use their leverage among billionaire conservatives to pump more than $200m into the proceedings, focusing in particular on the presidential race.

Their potential to sway the electorate through the sheer scale of their spending has been greatly enhanced by Citizens United, last year's controversial ruling by the US supreme court that opened the floodgates to corporate donations in political campaigns. The ruling allows companies to throw unlimited sums to back their chosen candidates, without having to disclose their spending.

That makes 2012 the first Citizens United presidential election, and in turn offers rich pickings to the Koch brothers. They have already made clear their intentions. At their most recent billionaires' gathering in Vail, Colorado in June, Charles Koch described next year's presidential contest as "the mother of all wars". A tape of his private speech obtained by Mother Jones said the fight for the White House would be a battle "for the life or death of this country".

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Watching the Moon by Conchita Carambano
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A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage

by Willy Staley, Awl

One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions, then retreating underground to its porky lair—only to be revived once again for reasons never made entirely clear. Each time it rolls out nationwide, people must again consider this strange and elusive product, whose unique form sets it deep in the Uncanny Valley—and exactly why its existence is so fleeting.

The McRib was introduced in 1982—1981 according to some sources—and was created by McDonald’s former executive chef Rene Arend, the same man who invented the Chicken McNugget. Reconstituted, vaguely anatomically-shaped meat was something of a specialty for Arend, it seems. And though the sandwich is made of pork shoulder and/or reconstituted pork offal slurry, it is pressed into patties that only sort of resemble a seven-year-old’s rendering of what he had at Tony Roma’s with his granny last weekend.

These patties sit in warm tubs of barbecue sauce before an order comes up on those little screens that look nearly impossible to read, at which point it is placed on a six-inch sesame seed roll and topped with pickle chips and inexpertly chopped white onion. In addition to being the outfit's only long-running seasonal special and the only pork-centric non-breakfast item at maybe any American fast food chain, the McRib is also McDonald’s only oblong offering, which is curious, too—McDonald’s can make food into whatever shape it wants: squares, nuggets, flurries! Why bother creating the need for a new kind of bun?

The physical attributes of the sandwich only add to the visceral revulsion some have to the product—the same product that others will drive hundreds of miles to savor. But many people, myself included, believe that all these things—the actual presumably entirely organic matter that goes into making the McRib—are somewhat secondary to the McRib’s existence. This is where we enter the land of conjectures, conspiracy theories and dark, ribby murmurings. The McRib's unique aspects and impermanence, many of us believe, make it seem a likely candidate for being a sort of arbitrage strategy on McDonald's part. Calling a fast food sandwich an arbitrage strategy is perhaps a bit of a reach—but consider how massive the chain's market influence is, and it becomes a bit more reasonable.

Arbitrage is a risk-free way of making money by exploiting the difference between the price of a given good on two different markets—it’s the proverbial free lunch you were told doesn’t exist. In this equation, the undervalued good in question is hog meat, and McDonald’s exploits the value differential between pork’s cash price on the commodities market and in the Quick-Service Restaurant market. If you ignore the fact that this is, by definition, not arbitrage because the McRib is a value-added product, and that there is risk all over the place, this can lead to some interesting conclusions. (If you don’t want to do something so reckless, then stop here.)

The theory that the McRib’s elusiveness is a direct result of the vagaries of the cash price for hog meat in the States is simple: in this thinking, the product is only introduced when pork prices are low enough to ensure McDonald’s can turn a profit on the product. The theory is especially convincing given the McRib's status as the only non-breakfast fast food pork item: why wouldn't there be a pork sandwich in every chain, if it were profitable?

Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of. What makes the McRib different from this everyday horror is that a) McDonald’s is huge to the point that it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants b) it is made of pork, which makes it a unique product in the QSR world and c) it is only available sometimes, but refuses to go away entirely.

If you can demonstrate that McDonald’s only introduces the sandwich when pork prices are lower than usual, then you’re but a couple logical steps from concluding that McDonald’s is essentially exploiting a market imbalance between what normal food producers are willing to pay for hog meat at certain times of the year, and what Americans are willing to pay for it once it is processed, molded into illogically anatomical shapes, and slathered in HFCS-rich BBQ sauce.

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Photo by "theimpulsivebuy."

Escalation in Digital Sleuthing

by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education

The spread of technology designed to combat academic cheating has created a set of tricky challenges, and sometimes unexpected fallout, for faculty members determined to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms.

In the latest development, the company that sells colleges access to Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection program that checks uploaded papers against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal content, now also caters directly to students with a newer tool called WriteCheck, which lets users scan papers for plagiarism before handing them in.

Meanwhile, faculty members at some colleges are adopting a reverse image-search program called TinEye, which lets them investigate plagiarism in ­visual materials like photos and architectural designs.

Cheating is nothing new. But as the ­frontiers of academic policing continue to advance—some 2,500 colleges now use Turnitin—faculty members are being pushed to confront classroom conundrums: Should they scan all papers for plagiarism, and risk poisoning the classroom atmosphere? Should they check only suspicious texts, and preserve harmony at the risk of missing clever cheaters? Could Turnitin and technologies like it lead to more plagiarism, since professors might depend on their imperfect results rather than vigorously investigate suspicious material on their own?

One expert on plagiarism, Rebecca Moore Howard, worries that the widespread adoption of antiplagiarism programs is putting professors in the role of police officers. "When used as a default, they also set up a default climate of suspicion in the classroom," says Ms. Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University.

Gauging the extent of plagiarism is difficult. Roughly 62 percent of undergraduates and 40 percent of graduate students admit to having cheated on written work, according to the latest figures from a long-running national survey by Clemson University's International Center for Academic Integrity. The infractions range from cut-and-paste copying to buying a custom-written paper from an essay mill. Despite the perception that cheating has gotten out of hand with so much online content available to copy, the numbers have not changed much over the two decades that the survey has been conducted.

What has changed is how much easier it is to find plagiarism. Once, instructors who suspected cheating had to trek off to the library and hope they could track down the book a student had plagiarized from, recalls Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Now they can start the investigation with software that resembles a spell-checker. Some colleges even mandate that all written assignments be subjected to a digital pat-down. The growth of online education also favors such scanning, since papers must be submitted electronically anyway.

The results of all this digital sleuthing can be devastating, a fact that was driven home in a widely discussed blog post that drew fresh attention to the issue in recent months. In an essay headlined, "Why I will never pursue cheating again," Panagiotis Ipeirotis described what happened after he started using Turnitin in his "Introduction to Information Technology" class last fall at New York University. By the end of the semester, 22 out of the 108 students had admitted cheating.

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Photo: Sarah Weeden for The Chronicle

Persephone

[ed.  Top photo is Thomas Hart Benton taken in 1939, by Alfred Eisenstaedt.  What I like about this picture are the artists in the background who are painting relatively straightforward nudes while Benton sees something quite different.  And, if you're wondering what it's like to be a nude model (who doesn't?), read this.]

Persephone, 1938-1939, by Thomas Hart Benton
via:  here and here