The DSM-5 and its Discontents

A controversy has arisen over the draft of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (called the DSM-5 for short). Of interest to the students and faculty in the Health Services Management Program as well as the Psychology Program, The DSM classifies mental disorders, its code numbers serving as a kind of numerical language between practitioners and insurance companies. A diagnosis classified in the DSM determines whether the insurance company will reimburse for medication.

The recent drafts of the DSM-5 have provoked a revolt among practitioners. David Elkins, professor emeritus at Pepperdine University and president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, posted a petition online last October, which gathered over 3,000 signatures within three weeks. The the British Psychological Society posted an open letter to the DSM-5, detailing its objections. Allen Francis, the person who chaired the task force which produced the 4th edition of the DSM has compiled numerous blog posts documenting the reaction against the DSM-5 and voicing his objections to it in no uncertain terms. American Counseling Association president Don Locke wrote his own letter to the APA (link uncertain).

Critics of the draft contend that its new diagnoses will lead to over-medicating patients. For example, here's a quote from the British Psychological Society's letter: “clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences.”

You can read The American Psychiatric Association response to Dr. Locke's letter.

If you are interested in investigating this issue further please feel free to ask the librarians in the University Library for assistance.

Special report on Online Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education has release a special report on online education featuring two white papers on lecture capture plus 10 Faculty Perspectives on What Works in Lecture Capture.

Go to this link to download the white papers

The University Library has ordered a copy of the full report. Please call or e-mail us if you are interested in reading the report when it arrives.

New Features on PrivCo database

New features on PrivCo Database

Dan Gingert, Manager, Academic Subscriptions, for PrivCo, LLC
alerted us to new features on PrivCo Database. Excerpt from his e-mail of December 5, 2011 follows:


1. Data export to Excel: All of PrivCo's private company financial data tables, as well as search results, are now easily exported to Excel, making it very easy to analyze a private company's financial data, create graphs and tables in Excel, as well as to integrate PrivCo financial data into your own existing data sets.

2. Research reports available in PDF format: All PrivCo private company research reports and investor profiles are now available in PDF download format for cleaner viewing, printing, and PDF sharing with colleagues.

3. Added investment firm principles and direct contacts: We have added a list of key management with individual contact information to thousands of our investor profiles, from venture capital firms to angel investment groups to university business incubators.

4. Company revenue growth rates added: In addition to location, revenue size, and employee size, PrivCo has also added 1 and 3 year revenue growth rate as a criteria when conducting an advanced search of private companies, and for company-to-company analysis, comparison, and valuation.

Message from Dan Gingert, Manager, Academic Subscriptions, for PrivCo, LLC
PrivCo LLC

Wikipedia redactions

According to a news item in the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" Wikipedia has started removing not only content but also the history of that content ever having existed on the site. (Read What Wikipedia deletes, and why).

Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have completed a report redacted content during 2010 : What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content. (.PDF, 4 p.).

Wikipedia has had to resort to the same human-labor-intensive work that characterizes scholarly publications due to the libelous nature of the offending content, in addition to blatant violations of copyright law.

My favorite comment on the Chron's Wired Campus story: "Plagiarism in Wikipedia - Do not copy and paste stuff into the place that everyone copies and pastes from."

Gartner's 10 most strategic tech trends of 2012

In Tech Republic's Tech Sanity Check "Look out: The 10 rising tech trends of 2012," October 17, 2011, Jason Hiner alerted us to Gartner's list of the 10 most strategic tech trends of 2012:

1. Media tablets and beyond
2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces
3. Contextual and social user experience
4. Internet of Things
5. App stores and marketplaces
6. Next-generation analytics
7. Big data
8. In-memory computing
9. Extreme low-energy servers
10. Cloud computing

Gartner analyst David Cearly explained how IT leaders should think about the “strategic technologies” on this list:

“A strategic technology is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise during the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment or the risk of being late to adopt… Companies should use the list as a starting point and adjust based on their industry, unique business needs, technology adoption model, and other factors.”
Information and quote above is from
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/look-out-the-10-rising-tech-trends-of-2012/9470?tag=nl.e053, retrieved October 19, 2011

See also Gartner's Press Release, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1826214

Higher education leads to fewer job losses, per OECD Education at a Glance 2011

Excerpt from OECD article re Education at a Glance 2011 begins:
"People with university degrees have suffered far fewer job losses during the global economic crisis than those who left school without qualifications, according to the latest edition of the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance. Good education and skills are crucial to improving a person’s economic and social prospects.
Unemployment rates among university graduates stood at 4.4% on average across OECD countries in 2009. But people who did not complete high school faced unemployment rates of 11.5%, up from 8.7% the year before. This adds to the huge problem of youth unemployment that today exceeds 17% in the OECD area."

Excerpt above is from
http://www.oecd.org/document/21/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_48651029_1_1_1_1,00.html, retrieved September 13, 2011


The full report is available via http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/61/2/48631582.pdf
OECD (2011), Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2011-en
ISBN 978-92-64-11420-3 (print)
ISBN 978-92-64-11705-1 (PDF)

Inside Higher Ed Sep 13, 2011 alerted us to the annual OECD report.

Google Books Bilbliography

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.s Google Books Bibliography, available via http://digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm "presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Books. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Books and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it." Quote from website listed above, retrieved August 15, 2011

Tips for Managing Your Digital Life, from New York Times

Article in New York Times on Friday, August 12, provides tips for managing your digital life. Check it out at

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/fashion/tips-for-managing-social-networking-burnout.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26

Finding Foundation Support for Your Education, Foundation Center workshop

Greetings, wanted to make sure you all know about the upcoming workshop at the Foundation Center, 312 Sutter Street, San Francisco, on Finding Foundation Support for Your Education 1-2:15 pm. You can register via
http://grantspace.org/Classroom/Training-Calendar/San-Francisco/Finding-Foundation-Support-for-Your-Education-2011-08-19-San-Francisco-CA2

Plus check out the Foundation Center for other workshops and resources.

With StatPlanet, Create Interactive Maps and Graphs Using World Bank Data

New York Times article "World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data" today includes mention of StatPlanet
http://www.sacmeq.org/statplanet/ which "lets people explore more than 3,000 World Bank economic indicators with interactive maps and graphics." It was developed by Frank van Cappelle, a doctoral candidate at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in Australia. Check it out! And check out, too, the GGU University Library Data for Decisions LibGuide http://ggu.libguides.com/data Want more? Join us for the Data for Decisions workshop at the GGU University Library on July 23 at 3 pm.

For StatPlanet, Frank van Cappelle was awarded first prize in the World Bank's Apps for Development Contest.

For World Bank Data, see http://data.worldbank.org/

Quote is from The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/business/global/03world.html?pagewanted=3&src=recg retrieved July 3, 2011.

StatPlanet requires Flash.

Need for more college graduates, differences in wages for college and high school graduates

In The Undereducated American, Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose contend that if the U.S. were to add 20 million postsecondary-educated workers to the U.S. workforce by 2025, income inequality would decline.
They envision:
15 million would hold Bachelor's degrees,
1 million Associates degrees
4 million would have attended some college but earned no degree

They include in their report a chart showing wage differential for college and high school graduates in various fields. The report, issued by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, was described in today's Academic Impressions e-mail alert Higher Ed Impact, Daily Pulse: News & Trends in Higher Ed, June 27, 2011.

See http://cew.georgetown.edu/undereducated/

Wikipedia revisions to watch out for

Librarians do not hate Wikipedia. We just regard it with skepticism and caution. Some articles on Wikipedia may prove useful, but we advise against relying on it. When the subject proves a bit controversial, a "revision war" can erupt, making the content of a Wikipedia article change from one minute to the next. Keep this in mind if you cite Wikipedia in your papers that you may have to specify the time as well as the date you read the cited article. But usually you can trust that the authors and editors will provide a useful overview of a non-controversial subject.

Notice my use of the word "usually" in that last sentence. You wouldn't think of something like the Ride of Paul Revere as controversial, would you? All people who grew up in the U.S. learned about this in elementary school. But alas, now the story of Paul Revere has descended into controversy. How did this happen?

Sarah Palin garbled the story of Paul Revere's ride last week. But rather than admit to the error, she insists that her account really was accurate. Then her followers tried to edit the Wikipedia article about Paul Revere (See the Wikipedia revision history here also the discussion of the revisions here).

(18th century face-palm originally posted on Boing Boing)

Some may argue that this proves Wikipedia has a built in defense against less than completely honest revisions. But how can you tell? Standard reference publications employ professional editors and fact checkers. That's why they cost money. The University Library has spent some of Golden Gate University's students' money on solid, reliable sources of information. Please take a look at this list of databases and also contact the librarians by phone (415-442-7244), e-mail or Chat if you have any questions or need any help with your research.

Let's see Wikipedia offer that service.

Financial Planning Workshop on June 9 has been canceled

The Financial Planning Workshop with Larry Souza, scheduled for June 9 at Golden Gate University, has been canceled.

Explore the Universe with skysurvey.org

Check out http://skysurvey.org/ to explore the Universe. "The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures." Quote is from website, retrieved 6/4/2011 Kudos and thanks to Nick Risinger, who created this amazing site.

Last chance to read microfiche before the world ends at 6 pm tonight

Greetings, If the world ends at 6 pm tonight, today may be your last chance to read microfiche (in this world, at least). So come on in. The GGU University Library is open until 5 pm today, giving you plenty of time after we close to get ready for the rapture.

Remember we are here for you forever --or at least until the world ends.

Online course should always include proctored exams

Thankfully, GGU CyberCampus does this as SOP. To understand it's importance (and to read some startling admissions from students) see the post in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus on proctored exams for online students.

Then there is the question of cheating. Ms. Wachenheim’s study did not gather any direct evidence, but she reports anecdotally that students have told her how they work in groups to compile huge caches of the publishers’ test-bank questions. She quotes one student as saying, “We may not learn the material, but we are guaranteed an A.”

One wonders how much they would learn if they expended the same amount of effort reading the course material as they do on avoiding reading the course material?

Managing your online reputation

Faculty and anyone else who regularly publishes (or would like to some day): be mindful of your online reputation.

An article in Nature News, Best face forward, explains how not just to keep track of your online presence, but to take more control over it.

Most interesting is the mention of a private company that will do this for you:

Online Reputation Manager, headquartered near Rochester, New York, is a company that uses search-engine optimization strategies to repair the online image of clients who have been besieged with unfavourable press.

Here's a new sub-field within Public Relations I hadn't heard of before. Know any other similar companies? Please let us know in the comments.

Five gadgets that will be dead in 5 years

Courtesy of Prof. Bob Fulkerth:

Five gadgets that will be dead in 5 years. From MSNBC's Gadgetbox blog.

Inside Higher Education today alerted us to the new book
'The Constitution Goes to College: Five Constitutional Ideas That Have Shaped the American University in which the author, Rodney A. Smolla, president of Furman University, "argues that key values in American higher education can be traced to the U.S. Constitution. Some of the traditions in academe that the book traces to the Constitution include the divide between public and private spheres, the distinction between rights and privileges and ideas of equality." The book is published by New York University Press. Quote is from Inside Higher Education, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/26/new_book_about_how_the_constitution_influences_higher_education retrieved April 26, 2011. The Inside Higher Education article, also available via tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/constitutionuniversity, includes an interview with the author. Following is one question and an excerpt from the author's response:
"Q: How do you see the Constitution influencing the shape of private higher education in the United States, given that private colleges are not state actors?

A: I argue that there is a 'shadow constitution,' a blend of statutes, contracts, and customs, providing a network of principles that often mirror the protections that derive directly from the Constitution, providing legal or customary protections that largely reflect constitutional principles and doctrines. ..."

Willingness and ability to learn identified as key traits for CEOs

"The C.E.O.’s are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, but they are the best students," writes Adam Bryant in an article adapted from The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons From CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed. The article appeared in the New York Times, April 16, 2011.

In the book, which was just published, Adam Bryant analyzes interviews he has conducted with 70 leaders to determine traits that indicate what it takes to be a leader. The five traits he identifies in the article are: 1. "Passionate curiosity," 2. "Battle-hardened confidence," 3. "Team smarts," 4. "A Simple Mind Set," and 5. "Fearlessness"

We are ordering Adam Bryant's book for the GGU University Library, so you can soon come and check it out.

Student Success in Higher Education Report from AFT

Academic Impressions today alerts us to the report, "Student Success in Higher Education," from the American Federation of Teachers Higher Education.

According to the AFT website http://www.aft.org/yourwork/highered/studentsuccess.cfm
"The report outlines a number of key elements of college student success, recommends ways to create effective programs and outlines the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders in creating the conditions for students to succeed. The publication is based on extensive outreach with AFT higher education members and education policymakers, as well as a series of focus groups among higher-risk first- and second-year college students that are documented in the companion report "Exploring Student Attitudes, Aspirations and Barriers to Success."

Quote is from http://www.aft.org/yourwork/highered/studentsuccess.cfm

retrieved April 4, 2011. Both reports, Student Success in Higher Education, and Exploring Student Attitudes, Aspirations and Barriers to Success, are available at the website for downloading.

Enhanced Access to Chronicle of Higher Education

The University Library has provided online access to The Chronicle of Higher Education to GGU faculty, students and staff for over a year now. We now have an enhancement to the online service.

The University's email domain "@ggu.edu" has been added to the authentication database. As a result, anyone who has, or creates, a free Chronicle account using this email domain, will now be able to do a number of things, including,

1. Access premium content posted at Chronicle.com from any location without going through your institution's proxy server
2. Access premium content from one's smart phone
3. E-mail articles to colleagues.
   

Just a reminder, the GGU subscription also provides the following:

• Sign up for any of our free e-newsletters such as Academe Today,
• Chronicle Review, the Global Edition, and others
• Sign up for job alerts
• Participate in Chronicle forums
• Comment on Chronicle articles

You can use the link above to go to the web site to create your personal account now.

How to read a paper

Although this relates to "hard" science, the basic principles of reading an academic or purportedly academic paper remain true. Perhaps this may serve as a reading assignment for a brief introduction to critical reading?

How to read a paper, by Ben Goldacre.