The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted linkurl:remembrances;http://chronicle.com/article/Remembering-the-Victims/64199/ of the three researchers killed on Friday when Amy Bishop, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, opened fire in a faculty meeting, reportedly because she had been denied tenure. linkurl:Media reports;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/us/15alabama.html?ref=us revealed this weekend that Bishop had fatally shot her brother in 1986 (the shooting was dismissed as an accident), and that she and her husband had been questioned in a 1993 case in which a pipe bomb had been mailed to a Harvard professor.
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University of Alabama shooting Image: Wikipedia |
With healthcare reform plans teetering over the last month, Billy Tauzin, president of the pharmaceutical industry trade group PhRMA who brokered a deal between drug makers and the Obama administration over health care reform last year, is linkurl:resigning;http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/02/whither-the-dc-lobby-tauzin-resigns-from-phrma/ from his post. The deal had industry backing the health care overhaul and taking on $80 billion in cost-cutting measures over a decade, in exchange for President Obama's backing away from two campaign vows costly to pharma. According to linkurl:the New York Times,;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/health/policy/13pharm.html unnamed drug industry lobbyists said his departure raises questions of whether pharma will continue to support healthcare reform. Tauzin, whose annual salary is $2 million, said he will leave his post at the end of June. Push for African research
International organizations are supporting a plan to convince the "G8+5" nations -- G8 countries plus five leading emerging economies -- to fund for 1,000 senior level scientist positions at universities across Africa, according linkurl:to SciDevNet.;http://scidev.net/en/news/backing-grows-for-african-research-chairs-1.html Researchers would be paid $100,000 per year, and would provide leadership in research addressing the United Nations' linkurl:Millenium Development Goals;http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ and mentorship and training to discourage the brain drain of young scientists. So far, the countries have not committed to discussing the plan at their next meeting in June. Journals on Twitter
And finally, linkurl:the blog In the Pipeline;http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/12/who_follows_these_things.php asks a head-scratcher of a question: Why exactly should scientific journals be on twitter, and what do researchers gain in following them?
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:personalized meddling;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55475/
[March 2009]*linkurl:Africa needs basic science;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/54777/
[July 2008]
