While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

via When Democracy Weakens – NYTimes.com.

As many commentators have pointed out, Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate most collective bargaining rights for public employees’ unions has nothing to do with Wisconsin’s fiscal problems (which are far less serious than those of many other American states). Instead, it represents the culmination of a long right-wing effort to eliminate the power of unions altogether.

via Return of the Class Struggle « LRB blog.

via Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

via C.U. Online Program Posts Profits for Fifth Straight Year | The Cornell Daily Sun.

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?

The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology. It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight that now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.

Progressives, he shows, have been suckers for a myth of human cognition he labels the enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires.

A host of psychological experiments demonstrate that it doesn’t work like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information that confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change.

via It goes against our nature; but the left has to start asserting its own values | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

via Essay – The End of Tenure? – NYTimes.com.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

“It was unbelievable,” said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

via Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s – NYTimes.com.

And governors will continue cutting higher education budgets, which will hike tuition costs, said John Thomasian, director of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. The lack of affordability combined with the complexity of student financial aid threatens higher education’s accessibility, said David Breneman, the Newton and Rita Meyers professor in economics of education at the University of Virginia. “To find out what the actual price of college is going to be is not trivial in this country,” he said. “The kids who are coached know how to run the financial aid system if they are eligible, while the kids from less sophisticated families — I think a number of us worry that they sort of get lost at the starting gate.”

As university budgets shrink, governors are searching for ways to make the remaining education money more effective, Thomasian said. “One of those ways to make it effective is for higher education to start using a lot more online learning.”

via Saving Public Universities.

Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Contemporary Critical Criminology introduces the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical, and political contributions made by critical criminologists around the world. In its exploration of this material, the book also challenges the erroneous but widely held notion that the critical criminological project is restricted to mechanically applying theories to substantive topics, or to simple calling for radical political, economic, cultural, and social transformations.

This book is an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Criminology, Criminal Theory, Social Policy, Research Methodology, and Penology.

Contemporary Critical Criminology (Paperback) – Routledge.

We’ve written a few times about the ongoing fight over whether or not federally funded research should be somewhat accessible to the public. This kicked off a few years back when the NIH, which funds a tremendous amount of research, required that any research that was funded by them had to be published in PubMed, its free and open database of such research one year after it was published in a journal. Scientific journals, as you probably know, are basically a huge scam. Unlike most publications, the journals don’t pay the people who provide all the material in those journals. Instead, the researchers pay the journals to publish their research. Not only that, but in exchange for paying the journal, the researchers also have to hand over their copyright on the research. This gets really ridiculous at times, as professors I’ve spoken with have needed to totally redo their own experiments because some journal “owned” their research, and they couldn’t reuse any of the data.

On top of that, these journals don’t pay people to do peer review. Other researchers in the field are expected to do the peer review for free. Oh, and then did we mention that these journals charge ridiculous sums (thousands upon thousands of dollars) for subscriptions, which many university libraries feel compelled to pay? And that much of the research is paid for by your tax dollars anyway?

via The Intellectually Dishonest Claims Of Those Fighting Against Open Access To Federally Funded Research | Techdirt.