A Danish scientist with a grant from the CDC stole two million dollars from it.

Aarhus University said the Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation (DASTI) has gotten grants from the U.S. National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities since 2001. Thorsen directed the administration of the grants, the university said.

After discovering that money was missing, DASTI and Aarhus “became aware of two alleged CDC funding documents as well as a letter regarding funding commitments allegedly written by Randolph B. Williams of the CDC’s procurement grants office. . . .”

“Upon investigation by CDC, a suspicion arose that those documents are forgeries.”

The university’s statement goes on to say that in March 2009, Thorsen resigned from its faculty.

From a letter signed by eighteen faculty:

Lois B. DeFleur’s two-decades-long tenure as president of Binghamton University has ended in real harm to the university’s reputation and pride… Withdrawal from membership in Division I is in the interest of this university that aspires to be a ‘premier’ public research institution… It will send a strong message to Chancellor Zimpher, our students and alumni that we intend to end the spirit of cover-up that was encouraged from the top, raise our academic standards, and restore BU’s reputation.

For the last ten years, Dennis Lasser, a finance professor, has been faculty representative to the NCAA. So he’s done a terrific job of monitoring things at his institution… I guess that’s why the New York Times reporter thinks it’s worth his while to interview Lasser about a situation he did a good deal to help bring about.

Lasser’s comment is contemptible.

The basketball program is a disaster, but if you look at the regular sports and look at the performance before this change in regime, we were doing things the right way… The only reason I would say leave Division I is if we didn’t learn our lesson. If we self-assess properly, I think we can get back on the right track.

Martin Stone, professor of philosophy, is one of the most brazen plagiarists UD‘s covered on this blog.

But this is his only distinction. Otherwise, his plagiarism is much like the other cases of academic plagiarism UD has written about: Because a professor rather than a student did it, his university issued no punishment, but on the contrary allowed him to leave the institution quietly by lying about having fallen ill; and the particular plagiarized material was only one of many acts of plagiarism on his part.

I suppose another small distinction in the Stone case involves his having been a philosopher of religion who pontificated about morality.

The Leuven University student newspaper is not happy about this man, his plagiarism, and the university’s response:

… [The] Institute and the K.U.Leuven together intentionally kept silent relevant information on the functioning of a highly-esteemed member of the academic staff. Though protecting the professor and the reputation of the Institute can be seen as an act of nobility, it is unfair towards the students – as they have the right to know what is going on. Apart from that, it becomes clear once more that the university uses different standards when it comes down to deciding on cases of sentencing plagiarism committed by either students or professors. Also ex-students who were supervised by professor Stone and especially the ones who earned their PhD under his guidance may have been treated unjustly by covering up info of this matter and size.

The member of the Finnish parliament whose work Stone stole found that “tens of pages were identical or nearly identical [to my thesis], although my name was not mentioned at all.”

That was just one of Stone’s publications plagiarized from the work of this man. Stone mined the parliamentarian’s work very extensively. “[N]ot only one, but four articles published by Stone were [in] large part …plain copies of my dissertation.”

“Stone has plagiarized several other researchers, too.”

The medical school at Tufts has a little of everything.

It has the heroic Dr Jerome Kassirer, who writes, and testifies in front of Congress, about the “thinly disguised bribes” that pill and device marketers offer to physicians.

It has the appallingly inept Dr. Kajoko Kifuji, who does little these days other than testify in multiple courtrooms about her malpractice.

And it has, most recently, a whole bunch of cardiologists who seem to be involved, along with the device manufacturer Medtronic, in a false claims investigation.

… responds to a student who complained in the campus newspaper about his banning laptops from his discussion sections.

… The embarrassing sight of members of Congress texting their way through the State of the Union address shows us that not even the rich, powerful and old are immune to [the always-online] compulsion. At the same time, the phenomenon of texting while driving offers clear proof that people will stay online even when doing so endangers their very lives.

These extreme examples demonstrate why a ban on laptops in the classroom is sometimes necessary. For whatever reason, we – not just college students, but all of us – are unable to resist the lure of constant online access. Yet certain activities require the sustained attention that the Internet impedes. Driving a car is one such activity. Discussing complex ideas is another. Everyone knows that students with laptops in class frequently use them for non-class activities such as Facebook and e-mail. At this time, the only answer I can see is to remove the temptation.

… [My student writes that] “it is a student’s individual choice to pay attention – or not – in class.” She is right to point out that students ought to be responsible for their own learning, but wrong to suggest that this responsibility is merely individual. Quality education results from the collaborative interaction of engaged thinkers, not from professors imparting content to passive individuals. Distracted students hurt not only themselves, but the rest of the class as well.

… [W]e must try to reap the benefits of the online world without subordinating every aspect of learning, and life, to its subtle coercions.

Most uncivil behavior from a founder of “one of Singapore’s most established civil-society groups.”

Vivienne Wee has been found guilty of stealing her grant. She got almost a million dollars to work on a website, but secretly transferred the money from the original contractor to a bogus outfit run by her family.

The ICAC, Hong Kong’s anti-graft body, accused the pair of conspiring to hide from City U, and that she had a conflict of interest with the company that was the actual service provider of the IT contract.

The IT contract was for a website and intranet project headed by Wee. It was won by the company Sparkland. But the job was actually done by Locus Interactive, run by Wee’s sister-in-law, Ng Ngar-Sheung.

Both the owner of Sparkland and Ng were also found guilty of conspiracy to defraud. The owner of Sparkland had transferred the university’s payment to Locus, and received a cut of the fees.

The British start covering the American university laptop ban story.

As the controversy grows, University Diaries will of course follow it.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to push the off button on the trend of text messaging during meetings of the Board of Supervisors and various city commissions.

The tech-savvy mayor, himself an avid texter on his beloved iPhone, has asked the city attorney’s office to draft legislation curbing electronic communication during public meetings for fear of city officials being unfairly influenced by lobbyists’ texts.

… Ideas being discussed include banning text messages from lobbyists during meetings, though it would be virtually impossible to enforce; prohibiting the use of all cell phones during meetings, while acknowledging receiving messages from family members and staff may be crucial; and even banning the use of laptops, which allow for instant messaging and e-mails during meetings.

… Several states’ legislatures have restrictions on electronic communication during meetings, ranging from self-policed no-texting rules to making inoperable any device used to transmit data, including cell phones and computers…

All trends start in California.

Alison Bass writes:

… [O]ne of the members of the DSM-V task force is Catherine Lord, a professor at the University of Michigan, who gets big royalties from a diagnostic test she helped develop (known as ADOS) that is used to diagnose autistic spectrum disorders in children. As it turns out, the subcategories for the ADOS test fit very neatly into the new criteria proposed for the autistic spectrum disorders in the DSM-V.

Now, according to an APA disclosure report I found online, Lord has agreed not to accept more than $10,000 from “industry sources” each year from the time the DSM-V is approved until its publication (the report says that will be in 2012, but recently the APA agreed to delayed publication of a new DSM until 2013).

What I want to know is: does this agreement include all the royalties Lord currently receives from the ADOS diagnostic test and the expensive bucket of toys that come with it? And if so, what happens after the DSM-V is published when all those royalties start flooding back in?

More importantly, should Lord have been allowed to sit on the DSM-TV task force in the first place and influence major policy changes in psychiatric diagnoses that will affect millions of vulnerable children? I think not.

… laptops.

… of the aftermath of the latest shooting at a university campus — Ohio State, at a maintenance building, one worker killed, two wounded — has an eerie eloquence. The silent images of police drifting in darkness, siren lights pulsing on top of cars, ambulances sidling to the site. So familiar.

…has been murdered.

The campus paper doesn’t name him, but his students know who he was, and they talk about him to the reporter. He was apparently killed, along with his girlfriend, by his girlfriend’s ex-lover.

… Student Felicia Lopez, in the professor’s Chicano Studies class, said her teacher did not show up for his 10 a.m. Monday class.

“He would tell us before if he was going to miss class,” she said. “He was always excited and passionate to show up to teach.”

… Student Oscar Ortega said the professor canceled class three times in the past two weeks because he had to testify in court as a witness to a domestic dispute case.

“He talked about how concerned he was about the domestic dispute case,” he said. “He was constantly talking about it.”

Students in the professor’s class plan to honor him by wearing black wristbands on their right arms, Ortega said…

The Washington Post covers increasingly popular laptop bans at local universities.

A strange place, Seton Hall University.

It’s Catholic, so it features things like The Heart of the University Retreat Series:

The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the opportunity for quiet reflection guided by four members of the University’s priest community.

… “Deep in the heart of every university are the hearts of its teachers, and as we explore the university’s identity, we naturally need to explore ourselves. Ultimately, whatever our discipline, we teach who we are – `professing’ our worldview, our ethics, our values, as well as our hopes and dreams.”

Just the sort of gentle quiet reflection on values you’d expect at a Catholic school. The heart of Seton Hall is its teachers, and they are teaching values, etc., etc.

… Or maybe that’s not the heart of Seton Hall. Maybe its heart is its basketball program, a program so dirty, with a coach so violent, that it’s featured in today’s New York Times. The photo accompanying the article shows the coach shrieking like the very devil.

Or yet again maybe the heart of Seton Hall is its generous alumni?

… Business Week magazine dubbed [the university the] “Seton Hall of Shame” in 2002 for having not one but three major buildings bearing the names of disgraced corporate executives.

The trio included Kozlowski Hall, Walsh Library (named after former Tyco board member Frank Walsh, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to concealing a $20 million bonus) and Brennan Recreation Center (named after convicted First Jersey Securities founder Robert Brennan, who is serving time for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering).

Seems to be a disconnect between the priest community and the rest of the place.

A recent Drexel University graduate writes an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

… In a classroom, there is a person standing in the front of the room talking, and naively believing, or vainly hoping, that these portable-computer enthusiasts are listening to what he is saying.

To a person in the back of the room, it is plainly obvious that none of these keyboard assailants is paying any attention to the person in the front of the room. They are too involved with Facebook, AIM, Twitter, or the myriad other interactive-media outlets available to be aware of anything taking place in class. These students contribute no more to class than the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s would have. Actually, that particular cadaver would have been much more engaged than the student with a laptop.

[These students] are vacant shells. Their presence is strictly corporeal. What’s more, their frequently furious typing is disruptive…