Links for 6/2/10

Reihan Salam

the producer’s lament. Basically, traditional producers — of handicrafts, of pop albums, of community college education — grow accustomed to making a product in a particular way. When cheaper alternatives threaten to put them out of business, we hear a wide array of arguments, many of them conflicting and contradictory (but hey, whatever works!), about why the new mode of production is profoundly dangerous or unjust…

John P. A. Ioannidis, Athina Tatsioni, and Fotini B. Karassa

submitting authors of these second-shots apparently thought that peer-review was a lottery…

A perusal of the scientific literature is also convincing that junk is quite prevalent…

Why would scientists publish junk? Apparently, the current system does not penalize its publication. Conversely, it rewards productivity…

Hopefully, many academic reward systems have shifted away from mere productivity towards taking also impact into account. Impact is usually appraised by citation metrics [8]. However, even junk can get cited…

here is a recipe for ‘success’: co-author more papers (salami slicing, elimination of quality checks, undeserved co-authorship and acceptance of gifts from ghosts can all help); ignore unfavourable reviewer comments; keep submitting until you find a hole in the peer-review system; self-cite; and expect random citations. While the recipe will probably not earn
its practitioners a Nobel Prize, it can still open many doors unfortunately…

Peer reviewers are unpaid consultants, they receive no credit for their reviews, they waste their time, and then their comments are discarded, while the papers that they showed to be wrong
eventually get published and cited and shape the scientific literature. This is very disheartening. Not surprisingly, it is becoming difficult for journals to find committed reviewers…

Felix Salmon

Let’s force endowments to standardize their public reports, and show, rather than tell, just what their highly-paid employees are doing to deserve all their millions of dollars in remuneration. And let’s force them, too, to spend a lot more time concentrating on liquidity risk management, and to cast a skeptical eye on the amount of leverage that these institutions really need…

RON LIEBER

It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.
But colleges and universities bear the biggest share because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.