MetaFilter posts tagged with OSU

Undersea eruptions explored from only 10 feet away

pwb503 — Thu, 25 May 2006 18:44:50 -0800

"We were forced to evacuate the remotely operated vehicle, 'Jason II,' several times to avoid getting it enveloped in volcanic clouds," said Bill Chadwick, ...one of the authors of the study. "But at other times, we could observe the eruption from only 10 feet away - something you could never do on land. So in some ways, we were able to see processes more clearly at the bottom of the ocean than we ever could on land. That was surprising." From KGW (bugmenot). Podcasts, videos, images, sounds, daily logs, and lots of information can be found on the project's website.

BLM Pulls Funding After Controversial Results Emerge

pwb503 — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 13:58:59 -0800

First it was announced that an Oregon State University graduate student was publishing a story in the journal Science. titled, "Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk," which undercut Bush administration-backed arguments for post-wildfire logging. A week later it was made public that nine professors in the College of Forestry (which gets 10% of its funding from a logging tax) lobbied the journal not to publish the article. Among them was John Sessions, lead author of a report that pressed the U.S. Forest Service to expand salvage logging. After attention was brought to the professors' attempts to keep the article from being published, many worried about the university's reputation regarding academic freedom, if not the state of academic freedom throughout the academic world. However if it wasn't difficult enough to just worry about your own professors standing in the way of getting your data published, you also have to worry about the government pulling your funding if your data doesn't match the data they want to see.

"The Bureau of Land Management acknowledged Monday that it asked OSU if the three-year study led by graduate student Daniel Donato and published last month in the journal Science violated provisions of a $300,000 federal fire research grant that prohibits using any of the funds to lobby Congress and requires that a BLM scientist be consulted before the research is published."

"It's totally without precedent as far as I can recollect," said Jerry Franklin, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied Northwest forests for decades. "It says, 'If we don't like what you're saying, we'll cut off your money.' "

dnash — Fri, 14 Jun 2002 18:03:04 -0800

Cheer for Bush, or face arrest, OSU grads informed. A first person account of how Bush's speech at the Ohio State Graduation today resembled nothing so much as a fascist rally - as graduates who had planned to protest by simply turning their backs to Bush during his speech were informed that if they did so they would be arrested and expelled (no diploma). Inside the stadium, crowds of Bush suppporters had been bussed in from miles away. And everyone was instructed to cheer loudly for the president.

antimarx — Tue, 04 Dec 2001 21:14:46 -0800

Racial stereotypes hurt academic performances --on standardized tests--for whites.