Mass-produced PhDs at heart of academic fraud ‘plague’

Follow on Twitter as @jgro_the

A new study says the extraordinary scale of PhD fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities, writes Jack Grove, reporter covering teaching and learning, quality assurance, student affairs and access to higher education for Times Higher Education.

Photo: Higher Education in Russia and Beyond (HERB)

With more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years, PhD forgery is now an “integral part of Russia’s statehood”, rather than a “fringe phenomenon”, according to the analysis published in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country’s National Research University Higher School of Economics.
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Additional resources

Beetlemania: a slew of similar PhD theses
on ground beetles was another 
potential case of doctoral fraud in Russia, 
Dissernet claims

Mass-produced PhDs lie at heart of Russia’s ‘plague’ of doctoral fraud by Jack Grove.
Academic ‘scallywags’ are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group.

Some Observations on the Subject of Dissertation Fraud in Russia by Andrei Rostovtsev.

Source: University World News

Emilie du Chatelet: the woman science forgot

"Émilie du Châtelet explained Newton to the French." by Robyn Arianrhod.
 

A portrait of Emilie du Chatelet attributed to Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. 
Photo: DeAgostini / Getty Images

Émilie du Châtelet was a gifted mathematician and Voltaire’s mistress. Together they spearheaded Newton’s revolution in France. 
Robyn Arianrhod, senior adjunct research fellow at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University tells the tale.

A spirited debate raged in 18th century Europe about what was driving the movements of the planets. In England, Sir Isaac Newton and his followers said it was gravity: the same invisible force that propels a falling apple also commands the planets in their marvellously ordered paths. 
 
On the other side of the Channel, many Continentals favoured René Descartes’ theory of a swirling cosmic “ether” that, like a celestial tornado, swept up the planets in its wake.
 
This disagreement is more than an historical curiosity – it went to the heart of what it takes for a proposition to qualify as a truly scientific theory.
 
An unlikely pair of champions helped win the victory for Newton in Continental Europe: France’s best known and most controversial playwright, Voltaire, and his lover, mathematician Émilie du Châtelet. Her scientific work includes what is still the definitive French translation of Newton’s Principia. Yet after her death she was all but forgotten. If she was remembered at all, her achievements were often belittled, lost in the shadow of the “great men” in her life. But modern-day historians have rediscovered Émilie, and her story is inspiring new generations of women mathematicians, myself included.
 
When Emilie moved to Cirey to join her lover, tongues wagged salaciously.
 
Born in Paris in 1706, she is surely the most glamorous female mathematician in history. Tall and aristocratic, passionate in both her intellectual and amorous pursuits, she was larger than life. Too large for most people at the time: too ambitious, too intellectual, too emotional and too sexually liberated. Too much of a feminist, too: she pulled no punches when writing of her struggle to educate herself in higher mathematics and physics (because girls were denied access to good schools, let alone universities): “If I were king,” she wrote, “I would reform an abuse which effectively cuts back half of humanity. I would have women participate in all human rights, and above all, those of the mind.” 
 
At 26, she captivated Voltaire, who was seduced by her brains as well as her beauty. He was already notorious as an upstart commoner with a wicked wit. Émilie, by contrast, was born to the aristocratic life; her father had been chief of protocol at Louis XIV’s court at Versailles. She’d been married off at 18 to the Marquis du Châtelet, with whom she soon had three children. Having done their duty for the Châtelet line, she and her husband then lived relatively separate lives – a common situation in aristocratic families. Less common was the remarkable friendship that developed between husband and wife, so that ultimately the marquis supported not only Émilie’s unusual ambition, but also her passionate relationship with Voltaire. Taking a lover was the norm at that time of arranged marriages, but Émilie and Voltaire scandalised polite society when they set up house together: extra-marital love affairs were supposed to be discreet dalliances, not alternative marriages. Curiously, their domestic arrangement – and their role as Newtonian revolutionaries – were as interconnected as the mysteries of the cosmos they set out to explain. 
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Source: Cosmos 

Diamonds are forever, and so are mathematical truths?

Over the next few weeks, Leo Corry, historian of mathematics and  author of A Brief History of Numbers, helps us understand how the history of mathematics can be harnessed to develop modern-day applications today. In this first post, he explores how the differences between perceptions of truth in maths and history affect the study of those subjects.

Diamond by nafets. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

Try googling ‘mathematical gem.’ I just got 465,000 results. Quite a lot. Indeed, the metaphor of mathematical ideas as precious little gems is an old one, and it is well known to anyone with a zest for mathematics. A diamond is a little, fully transparent structure, all of whose parts can be observed with awe from any angle. It is breathtaking in its beauty, yet at the same time powerful and virtually indestructible. This description applies equally well to so many pieces of mathematical knowledge: proofs, formulae, and algorithms.

Leonhard Euler, for instance, was the greatest mathematician of the eighteenth century and we associate his name nowadays with many beautiful mathematical gems. Think of the so-called Euler Formula: V – E + F = 2. This concise expression embodies a surprising property of any convex polyhedron, of which V represents the numbers of its vertices, E of its edges, and F of its faces. But probably the most famous gem associated with his name is the so-called ‘Euler identity': e^ip + 1 = 0.

Beyond the mathematical importance of this identity it is remarkable how often it is known and praised, above all, for its beauty: “the most beautiful equation of maths”, we read in various places. A most impressive diamond!

But we can compare mathematical ideas to diamonds not only in terms of beauty. Diamonds are also, as you surely remember from the James Bond film, forever. And so are proved mathematical results. Indeed, the theme song of the Bond film defines very aptly, I think, the way in which mathematicians relate to those ideas with which they become involved and invest their best efforts for long periods of time:

Diamonds are forever,
Hold one up and then caress it,
Touch it, stroke it and undress it,
I can see every part,
Nothing hides in the heart to hurt me.
— Shirley Bassey, Diamonds Are Forever

Of course, before reaching the point where mathematical ideas become diamonds, likely to remain forever, there is a period of groping in the dark. This period may sometimes be long and the dark may be deep, before light is finally turned on and the diamond becomes transparent. You can then touch it, stroke it and undress it, and you will truly understand the necessary interconnection between all of its parts.

In a recent TED video, the Spanish mathematician Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón tells his audience that “if you want to tell someone that you will love her forever you can give her a diamond. But if you want to tell her that you’ll love her forever and ever, give her a theorem!” (Unfortunately, in spite of the accompanying English subtitles, his most successful jokes are lost in translation from Spanish.)

And so, it is the eternal character of mathematical truths and the unanimity of mathematicians about them that sets mathematics apart from almost all other endeavors of human knowledge. This unique character of mathematics as a system of knowledge may be stressed even more sharply by comparison to another discipline, like history for example. At its core, mathematical knowledge deals with certain, necessary, and universal truths. True mathematical statements do not depend on contextual considerations, either in time or in geographical location. Generally speaking, established mathematical statements are considered to be beyond dispute or interpretation. 
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Source: OUPblog (blog)

Guidance for Competency Based Education Experimental Site Released

The Obama Administration has worked steadily to increase access to and completion of high quality degrees for students of all ages and backgrounds. One specific thrust has been to remove barriers that stand in the way of innovation in higher education, including those that prevent promising new educational models from expanding. 
 

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Competency based education (CBE) is one example of a promising new delivery model with the potential to improve degree completion, reduce costs to students and improve transparency and alignment of learning outcomes to the needs of employers and society. And the field is growing – recently, a survey suggested that as many as 600 postsecondary institutions in the United States are currently designing or implementing CBE programs.

In 2014, the Department of Education launched three experiments under the Experimental Sites Initiative – Competency-Based Education, Limited Direct Assessment, and Prior Learning Assessment – as an opportunity to learn more about this and related delivery model and to experiment with Title IV disbursement models designed to incent student achievement and student success. Among those, the Competency-Based Education experiment provided the most expansive regulatory waivers and modifications, and in the time since that experiment was announced, it has become clear that additional detail and guidance from the Department of Education regarding that experiment would be helpful to both institutions and accrediting agencies.

I am delighted to say that we are ready to release the CBE Experiment Reference Guide for institutions participating in the CBE experiment. We believe that this Guide will offer tremendous support for both experienced and new CBE providers as they implement this experiment. We recognize that many of you were anticipating that the Guide would be released earlier this summer, but it was very important for us to have a high level of confidence that the guidance it contains is on very firm ground. The Guide can be located at https://experimentalsites.ed.gov/exp/guidance.html.
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Source: U.S. Department of Education (press release) (blog) 

Get a grip: Have robotic hands come of age?

Higher mammals! Stay with us. We could use your front cortexes and opposable thumbs.”

Marc Ambasna-Jones, UK-based freelance writer and media consultant summarizes, "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has got to grips with robotic dexterity, says Prof. Alberto Rodriquez." 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Photo: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The penguins in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa were very pragmatic if nothing else. To rebuild the crashed plane they needed human help. It’s good to know that for the moment at least, we humans still have a value, even in animated fiction. In the real world, things could be a little different.

As robotics evolves rapidly, features of human ability are being consistently copied and challenged. Perhaps we take grip for granted but at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts the problem of how to make robotic hands and instruments grip effectively seems to have been solved.

Photo: Alberto Rodriguez

We caught up with MIT School of Engineering professor Alberto Rodriguez to find out more.

Q. Are dexterity and agility two of the biggest physical challenges for robotics?
A. From the ones that are physical, dexterity and agility are certainly prominent. But there are many abilities that today pose great challenges for robotics, including cognitive ones such as learning and reasoning. We humans are extremely good at all of them, in a way that might bring them closer to an artistic expression than engineering. We are agile and dexterous without an explicit understanding of what it means to be or how to become.

How complex is the process of creating dexterity in a robotic gripper and what was the biggest challenge?
Replicating dexterity, or hand manipulation in general, requires the combination of many disciplines. It involves the complexities of adaptive behavior, since a broad manipulation capability needs to deal with different task, objects, and environments, and involves the detailed and fine-grained particularities of interacting with the real world.

A manipulation system requires thinking, at the very least, about actuation, control, perception, and materials. Advances in one of them do not necessarily get us too far since they are interconnected. It is by thinking at the interconnection between them that we can solve the problem.

Manipulating an object in the hand, such as you would do when playing with a pen, requires a very complex gripper. Many robot systems, however, have very simple grippers, like the parallel-jaw grippers we see in industry. The key idea in our approach is to by-pass the strong requirements of gripper complexity by outsourcing them to the rest of the robot arm and the environment.  We call it extrinsic dexterity, and it takes the form of a robot pushing against the environment to manipulate the grasped object.

How long did it take you to achieve the desired levels of force to make the grippers effective?
One of the interesting twists of this approach is that, by employing extrinsic dexterity rather than intrinsic, the need for gripper accuracy, speed and strength is outsourced to the robot arms, which these days happen to be very accurate, very fast, and very strong. In some cases all three at the same time. So current robots and grippers are already capable of 
it.

The main challenge is in modeling the interaction between gripper, object, and environment, with a degree of accuracy so that a robot can decide the best way to interact/push with the environment to reconfigure a part.
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Source: IDG Connect

Annual Nobel Conference at Gustavus explores science and experience of addiction

Photo: Suzy Rook

Gustavus Adolphus College hosts the 51st annual Nobel Conference Oct. 6-7." inform Suzy Rook, Regional Managing Editor of The Le Center Leader, Le Sueur News-Herald, St. Peter Herald and Waseca County News.
 

Photo: Southernminn.com

This year’s conference will bring together physicians, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and treatment experts to discuss the topic of Addiction: Exploring the Science and Experience of an Equal Opportunity Condition. “Addiction is an equal opportunity condition because it can affect each one of us, whether we develop our own addiction or are affected by the addictions of others including family, friends, co-workers, or members of our communities,” Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and 2015 conference chair Peg O’Connor said.

This year’s Nobel Conference is unique because it connects experts on the causes of addiction with experts in the treatment of addiction. “This combination of highly respected and provocative speakers will challenge each other and all of us in the audience to rethink our understanding of addiction and effective treatments,” O’Connor said.

The two-day conference will feature addiction professionals from Columbia University, Duke University, the Yale School of Medicine, the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, and the Alltyr Clinic in St. Paul, Minn. The opening speaker is 2000 Nobel laureate in medicine, Dr. Eric Kandel. Kandel is a professor of brain science, biochemistry, and cellular biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, the founder of Columbia’s Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, and a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Visit gustavus.edu/nobel for the full schedule and speaker biographies.

Tickets are still available for the Nobel Conference. Reserved seats on the main floor are available for $120 and general admission tickets are $75. Tickets may also be purchased for Wednesday evening’s Nobel Conference Banquet for $30. A buffet lunch is available for $12.50 per person per day. Tickets for the conference and meals can be purchased online at gustavustickets.com or by calling the Gustavus Office of Marketing and Communication at 507-933-7520. Media passes are available upon request.

Source: Southernminn.com

Big Data has a degree problem by Meris Stansbury

Follow on Twitter as @eSN_Meris

"NCES reveals that the growing data science field can pull from an incredible number of statistics majors, but it’s still not enough." reports Meris Stansbury, Managing Editor.

Photo: Campus News

Increasing by more than 300 percent since the 1990s, the number of undergraduates in statistics degree programs is hurtling the major into the fastest growing in the U.S. But the growth may not be enough to satisfy the high demand for technology-based fields like data science and database management—which could spell trouble for colleges and universities anxious to effectively analyze massive amounts of big data.

Delving into newly released data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) “Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System Completions Survey and NSF/NCSES: Survey of Earned Doctorates,” the information shows that bachelor’s degrees in statistics grew 17 percent from 2013 to 2014, marking 15 consecutive years the number of undergrads in statistics has risen.

For comparison, while the number of undergraduates earning statistics degrees has increased by more than 300 percent since the 1990s, the number of undergrads earning science and engineering degrees grew by 72 percent over the same period.

Copyright: ASA

Yet, notes the American Statistical Association (ASA), which analyzed the NCES data, the demand for statisticians, especially in the field of data science and management, is likely to outpace this growth.
According to ASA’s research within the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) data, total employment for statisticians has grown from 28,000 positions in 2010 to 85,000 in 2014. Also, BLS projects job growth for statisticians will increase 27 percent between 2012 and 2022, outpacing the projected 11 percent rate for all other occupations.

In an ASA press release, the organization states that while these figures may be conservative because they do not include the many jobs that require substantial expertise in statistics (data scientist, market research analyst, etc.), the number of graduates in statistics each year—approximately 2,000 bachelor’s degrees, 3,000 master’s degrees and 575 doctorate degrees—seems unlikely to match this demand.

“We’re entering an era of tremendous growth in the profession of statistics that is not unlike the growth of computing professionals in the 1960s and 1970s,” explained ASA President David R. Morganstein in a statement. “At that time, software engineers and programmers were still relatively rare, but grew quickly and steadily as computing became something every large company needed to remain competitive. We’re seeing a similar trajectory in statistics. Advances in computing, technology and Big Data continue to raise the demand for statisticians.”

In a 2011 report, notes the ASA, McKinsey Global Institute said a “significant constraint on realizing value from Big Data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning,” and predicted a potential shortage in the U.S. of 140,000 to 190,000 workers with deep analytical skills by the year 2018. It also warned of an additional shortage of 1.5 million managers and analysts who can use the analytical output of Big Data for decision-making.
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Source: eCampus News

Active Learning in Mathematics, Part III: Teaching Techniques and Environments

Blog offered by the American Mathematical Society. 
The goal for this blog is to stimulate reflection and dialogue by providing mathematicians with high-quality commentary and resources regarding teaching and learning. 

Because there is no simple solution to the challenges facing mathematics education, this blog will serve as a big tent, giving voice to multiple contributors representing a wide range of ideas.  Contributions will include practical “teaching tips,” commentary on current mathematics education research, discussions of social/curricular educational policy, and more.

On Teaching and Learning Mathematics

Active Learning in Mathematics, Part III: Teaching Techniques and Environments

Mathematics faculty are well-aware that students face challenges when encountering difficult problems, and it is common to hear instructors remark that successful students have high levels of “mathematical maturity,” or are particularly “creative,” or write “elegant” solutions to problems.  To appreciate research results regarding active learning, it is useful to make these ideas more precise.  Motivated by research in education, psychology, and sociology, language has been developed that can help mathematicians clarify what we mean when we talk about difficulty levels of problems, and the types of difficulty levels problems can have. This expanded vocabulary is in large part motivated by…

…the “cognitive revolution” [of the 1970’s and 1980’s]… [which] produced a significant reconceptualization of what it means to understand subject matter in different domains. There was a fundamental shift from an exclusive emphasis on knowledge — what does the student know? — to a focus on what students know and can do with their knowledge. The idea was not that knowledge is unimportant. Clearly, the more one knows, the greater the potential for that knowledge to be used. Rather, the idea was that having the knowledge was not enough; being able to use it in the appropriate circumstances is an essential component of proficiency.
— Alan Schoenfeld, Assessing Mathematical Proficiency [17]

In this article, we will explore the concept and language of “level of cognitive demand” for tasks that students encounter.  A primary motivation for our discussion is the important observation in the 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) article “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics” by Freeman, et al. [8], that active learning has a greater impact on student performance on concept inventories than on instructor-written examinations.  Concept inventories are “tests of the most basic conceptual comprehension of foundations of a subject and not of computation skill” and are “quite different from final exams and make no pretense of testing everything in a course” [5].  The Calculus Concept Inventory is the most well-known inventory in mathematics, though compared to disciplines such as physics these inventories are less robust since they are in relatively early stages of development.  Freeman et al. state:

Although student achievement was higher under active learning for both [instructor-written course examinations and concept inventories], we hypothesize that the difference in gains for examinations versus concept inventories may be due to the two types of assessments testing qualitatively different cognitive skills.  This is consistent with previous research indicating that active learning has a greater impact on student mastery of higher- versus lower-level cognitive skills…

After introducing levels of cognitive demand in this article, our next article in this series will directly connect this topic to active learning techniques that are frequently used and promoted for postsecondary mathematics courses.
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Related links 
Active Learning in Mathematics, Part I: The Challenge of Defining Active Learning
Active Learning in Mathematics, Part II: Levels of Cognitive Demand 

Source: American Mathematical Society (blog)

Study outlines how businesses can better serve local schools by Laura Devaney

Follow on Twitter as @eSN_Laura

"Harvard study reveals how a new roadmap could benefit U.S. public education. summarizes Laura Devaney, Director of News.

U.S. businesses could increase their positive contribution to and impact on public K-12 education if they adopt a newly-established approach that connects students in poverty to services essential to their success.

Photo: eSchool News

The study, released by Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competiveness Project, focuses on communities across the nation that have implemented the Collective Impact approach and have seen meaningful improvement in educational outcomes.

The report, Business Aligning for Students: The Promise of Collective Impact, provides a roadmap for how business leaders can actively participate in Collective Impact. American businesses donate $3 to $4 billion dollars and countless volunteer hours to American public education every year.

Collective Impact provides a process and structure to the system communities usually have for supporting their students. The approach brings together community leaders from the school district, business and nonprofit organizations, government, parent groups, and religious organizations. Collective Impact helps these diverse stakeholders work together to ensure pre-K-12 students are receiving services essential for learning from tutoring to nutrition to mentoring.

By focusing on specific goals, improving the quality and coverage of services, identifying best practices and rigorously measuring results, Collective Impact moves the current service delivery system from chaos to coherence.

Photo: Allen S. Grossman

“Despite the sustained commitment of business leaders, they are often frustrated by the slow pace of education improvement in their communities. We found that if businesses join forces with others through Collective Impact – they can align and coordinate their efforts and together make more meaningful progress in improving students’ performance,” said Allen S. Grossman, Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School and author of the new report. “We encourage business leaders, who collaborate and rely on data to run their businesses, to take a similar approach to supporting public education. Collective Impact has the potential to be a game changer in American education.”
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Additional resources

Business Aligning for Students: The Promise of Collective Impact (PDF)

Source: eSchool News    

World University Rankings 2015-2016: results announced

"US continues to lose its grip as institutions in Europe up their game" inform World University Rankings.

World University Rankings 2015-2016: top 10

The world dominance of universities in the US has further waned in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016, despite the fact that the country boasts almost a fifth of institutions in the table.

A total of 147 US universities feature in the top 800 – the largest THE rankings to date – including the California Institute of Technology, which claims pole position for the fifth consecutive year.

However, there are signs of decline for the traditional Western powerhouse lower down in the table. The US now has 63 universities in the top 200, down from 74 last year, and 77 the year before. Six of these make the top 10, compared with seven last year; after Caltech, these are: Stanford (third), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (fifth), Harvard (sixth - its first time outside the top four in the rankings’ 12-year history), Princeton (seventh) and the University of Chicago (10th). The UK’s universities of Oxford (second), Cambridge (fourth) and Imperial College London (eighth), and Switzerland’s ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ninth) fill the rest of the top 10.

Phil Baty, THE rankings editor, said that the US’ movement is to some degree owing to significant improvements to the rankings’ data sources this year, with “improved coverage of research not published in English and a better geographical spread of responses to our academic reputation survey”.

However, he added that it also demonstrates that the US’ leading status as the world’s top magnet for academic and student talent “cannot be taken for granted”, citing figures that show that 47 states in the US have implemented higher education funding cuts since the global recession in 2008.

Simon Marginson, professor of international higher education at the UCL Institute of Education, said that US research is “not declining in the absolute sense”, but rather “other countries are improving and crowding into the top 200 space”.
One of these competitor nations is the UK, which has improved its standing this year. A total of 78 UK institutions feature in the top 800, with 34 of these sitting in the first quarter, up from 29 last year.
Other countries in Europe have also performed well. Germany has 20 universities in the top 200, a rise of eight since last year, while the Netherlands has 12 in the first quarter, up from 11. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s ETH Zurich is the first non-Anglo-American institution to make the top 10 for a decade.
Overall, Europe has 345 universities in the world top 800, meaning its institutions comprise more than two-fifths of the table...

The THE World University Rankings use 13 performance indicators to examine universities’ strengths. View the full methodology, along with the World University Rankings 2015-2016 top 800.
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Related link 
Chris Parr is joined by rankings editor Phil Baty, rankings reporter Ellie Bothwell, and student content editor Carly Minsky to discuss the results of the latest THE World University Rankings.
Listen to the World University Rankings 2015-2016 podcast
 
Source: Times Higher Education