Post-Doc: 2012-13 fellowship competition, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, Washington DC‏

2012–13 FELLOWSHIP COMPETITION
Applications due February 17, 2012

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is now accepting applications for the 2012-13 fellowship competition.

The Center awards fellowships to candidates working on their dissertations (ABD), postdoctoral researchers, and senior scholars. Applicants must be affiliated with an academic and/or research institution; the Center will also consider immediate post-docs and faculty between appointments.



The specific fellowship and the length of the award are at the Center’s discretion. Individual awards generally range up to nine months of residency; a minimum of three consecutive months is required. Fellowships of five months or longer have proven most effective. Stipends range up to $3,500 per month for the purpose of defraying local housing and other miscellaneous living expenses. Residents of the Washington, DC–metropolitan area receive a reduced stipend of $1,750 per month.

All applications and supporting materials must be submitted electronically and in English by February 17, 2012. The Center will announce its decisions in May 2012.



To learn more about the fellowships, go to ushmm.org/research/center/fellowship/.



To apply or read the complete competition guidelines, go to ushmm.org/research/center/fellowship/application/.

If you have additional questions, please e-mail vscholars@ushmm.org

Conference: Intellectual Property in Modern Europe, Leipzig, 1-3 November 2012‏

Call for Papers - International Conference

GWZO - University of Leipzig, Germany (1-3 November 2012)



International Conference



Intellectual Property in Modern Europe – Tracing the Expansion of a Concept



Date: 1-3 November 2012

Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe

Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas e. V. an der Universität Leipzig (GWZO)



The concept of intellectual property has developed into a major institution governing the national, international and transnational traffic and exchange of knowledge and (cultural) goods in the modern world. Framed at the intersection between the private and public sphere, the development of intellectual property rights reflects the diachronic wrangling to balance and regulate the access, distribution and diffusion of information and knowledge in modern societies. By the end of the 19th century, the leading Western European states had devised national legislations and partook in international organizations for the protection of intellectual property, whereas the majority of the newly created Southeast, East and East Central European states started to create domestic protection systems and got incorporated into the international system of intellectual property protection only at the dawn of the 20th century. Taking this observation as our starting point, the conference will examine the introduction and institutionalization of intellectual property (copyrights and patents) in Modern Europe from a comparative perspective.



By including a perspective of and from East Central and Southeast Europe, the conference seeks to develop a new comparative analytical framework for exploring the history of intellectual property in Modern Europe. The development of intellectual property in Southeast and East Central European States was initially shaped by growing international conformity pressure during the inter-war period. The establishment of socialist legal systems and cultures that followed after World War II promoted the abolishment of private property. Since 1989/1990 states in these regions and their societies are again under extreme transformation, adaptation and innovation pressure to (re-)individualise the protection of (intellectual) property. The (re-)establishment of a legal system that protects copyrights and patents, is not only seen as part of a legal and political transformation process but also as a necessary pre-condition for catch-up modernisation and a trigger for innovation.



The conference is organised by the project group “Legal Culture(s) of East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries” / “Rechtskulturelle Prägungen Ostmitteleuropas in der Moderne” at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe / Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas e. V. an der Universität Leipzig (GWZO - www.uni-leipzig.de/gwzo).

The project group investigates the legal culture(s) of East-Central Europe focusing on the history of material and immaterial property rights in agriculture, industry, culture and science. Legal culture is being analyzed by devoting special attention to land ownership, copyrights, patents and brands which are particularly controversial in the modernization processes since the late 1800s. The project is directed jointly by professors Dr. Stefan Troebst and Dr. Hannes Siegrist of the University of Leipzig. The project’s participants explore respectively the significance of the category “landownership” (Dr. Dietmar Müller), the protection of industrial property (Cindy Daase, M.A.) and the function and relevance of copyright (Dr. Augusta Dimou) in East Central Europe in the twentieth century. The group examines intellectual and industrial property rights focusing on processes of internationalization, transnational appropriation and local adaptation of legal doctrines, norms and institutions. Special attention is paid to the interplay between national, regional, transnational and global actors and institutions in the creation of normative orders.



We invite scholars working in the broader field of the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies and literature, legal scholars, experts in media and communication studies, economic historians as well as historians of science and technology to contribute to this conference with case and/or comparative studies as well as with theory focused papers. The call is open for established as well as young scholars and PhD students at an advanced stage of their PhD. We especially encourage scholars from Southeast and East Central Europe to submit paper abstracts. We envision the publication of selected contributions in an individual volume.



Proposed papers could address but are not limited to the following topics:
The transfer of legislation, concepts, norms and international standards and their “domesticization” in new contexts
The effect of intellectual property rights in modernisation and industrialisation processes, esp. on cultural and scientific developments

3. Law and its context: How do political, social, cultural and economic developments affect processes of legalization?
Formal and informal practices: What is the relationship between normative prescriptions and actual practice?
The role and connection of experts and/or lobby groups/associations in the institutionalization, popularization and enforcement of norms and standards on a national and international level (authors, publishers, international organizations, inventors, business associations etc.)
Framing and staging public discourses and debates on intellectual property
Philosophical and theoretical elaborations of the notions of “labour” and “property” and alternative conceptualizations regarding the “protection of ideas”
Real Socialism: Ideology and Intellectual Property, a change of doctrine and definitions of intellectual property?
Post-Communism and transformation: The end of ideology in the protection of intellectual property?
East – West comparison: Was the transfer of international (legal) norms to East Central and Southeast Europe a one-way street or were there cross references, reciprocal influences, and/or backslashes?
Intellectual property at a critical junction – new media / new inventions: Shifts in habits, marketing techniques, tastes and legislation
Standardization and Institutionalization: their role in the internal regulation of society and the state as well as in the regulation of international relations and transnational group interests



The conference will take place from 1st to 3rd November 2012 in Leipzig. Conference language is English.



Please send an abstract of not more than 500 words and a short biographical note of not more than 250 words not later than 20 February 2012 to Augusta Dimou (dimou@uni-leipzig.de) and Cindy Daase (cindy.daase@uni-leipzig.de). Successful candidates will be informed by 30 March 2012.

Please note: The conference papers will be due on 1st October 2012.

Travel costs and accommodation of the admitted panellists will be fully covered by the conveners.

Conference: Health, Culture and the Human Body, Istanbul, 13-15 September 2012‏

The 2nd international and interdisciplinary conference on Health, Culture and the Human Body Epidemiology, ethics and history of medicine, perspectives from Turkey and Central Europe Istanbul, Turkey, 13-15 September 2012

Demographic
change in a globalized world raises not only social and economic issues but also ethical problems within the medical system of aging societies.
Medical
care for elderly people cannot be conceptualized and organized without considering a cultural understanding of aging and the economic and social circumstances of a given society. In this regard this conference will focus on ethical, historical and epidemiological perspectives of aging in a global world, including issues such as health care research and health-related knowledge, attitudes and practices of elderly people. Further subjects of the conference are the beginning of life and sexually transmitted diseases, which will also be discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective.
This
conference will focus on the selected cases from Turkey, Germany, and other countries which for the last 50 years have been closely connected by substantial migration processes, as they had been earlier through medical scientific exchanges and common clinical practice. After the well received first round held in Germany (Mainz) in 2010, the aim of this second conference is to establish a discussion platform for different ethical considerations among historically connected countries, applying an interdisciplinary “medicine studies” approach to selected sample cases from
Turkey, Germany and other countries with comparable relationships.
The chosen
thematic areas are:
· Aging, culture
and medicine (aging and culture, aging and perception of the body, medical care and geriatrics, geriatrics and ethics, hospice systems)
· Sexually
Transmitted Diseases (e.g. AIDS,
syphilis, gonorrhea; the social perception of venereal diseases and medicine, politics-ethics and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases)
· Beginning of
life and ethics (Assisted Reproductive Technologies, abortion,
religion-medicine and the beginning of life)
· Migration
and Health
Abstracts (max. 250 words) of proposed
conference papers should be submitted by 29
February 2012, to the attention ofHakan Ertin MD PhD,E-Mail:
hakanertin@gmail.com Istanbul
University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of History of Medicine and Ethics.
Tel: +90 532 321 71 77 Fax: +90 212 414 22 86 Publication of selected papers is envisaged.
Venue:Istanbul University Doctorate Halls –Beyazıt, Istanbul, Turkey
Organisation:
Hakan Ertin MD, PhD (Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey) Rainer Brömer PhD (Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey) Ilhan Ilkilic MD, PhD (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany) Hajo Zeeb MD, PhD (BIPS – Institute for Epidemiology and Prevention Research, Bremen, Germany)

Conference: Medworlds 4- "Domino Effects and Hybridization of the Mediterranean", 29 Mays University, Istanbul, 5-7 Septermber 2012‏

An interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Department of History, 29 Mayis University, in collaboration with The Mediterranean Seminar and Research Centre of Trans-Mediterranean Studies, University of California; Bern University, Department of the History of the Art, TransMediterraneanStudies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are countless discussions and publications, case studies and unresolved questions, and eventually, research projects on “histories in and the history of the Mediterranean”, which all underline the commonalities and differences between the cultures and histories of the region. One issue should be kept in mind when considering these: It is no doubt very easy to be captivated by delightful similarities, overlooking diversity or, on the other extreme, to see insurmountable differences under the spell of modern national or global theories. However, the Mediterranean, a place of constant flux, should be more accurately described as ‘hybrid’: Frontier societies and particularly shores share an amalgam of cosmopolitan socio-economic and political structures.

One example process that brings about hybridity is migration and its domino effect-style repercussions. Although classical historiography highlights the region as one ‘source’ for many ideas, species, social organizations and religions, it is also a perennial destination for outsiders. This can be evidenced by the salient immigrations of people from all directions towards the Middle Sea, not restricted to ‘Völkerwanderung’. One can easily describe these waves of arrivals as multiple ‘domino effects’ which had corollary effects on the region in diverse localities. Shifts of ideas, modes of production, methodology, science, religion, language are among dynamics brought about successively by the various influxes to the region and yield hybrid outcomes. The dislocation of substances, structures, hierarchies, languages, religions and traditions in a domino effect facilitates the re-emergence of these social elements in the new location in novel and ingenious ways. In time, their imported or suspended character takes on a more permanent and assimilated character – a hybrid is born.

We hope that our rubric of 'Mediterranean Worlds' is broad enough to encompass the work of scholars conducting research across the whole range of elements of Mediterranean culture and history, while at the same time highlighting this year's special topic of 'domino effects and hybridization.’

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Suggested panel presentations comprising 3-4 presenters and chairperson (please submit 3/4 x 250-word abstract and a short rationale for the panel theme). 250-word abstracts for twenty-minute papers that broadly address the above themes, and that may address, but not be limited by, the following topics:

• Hybridity as an Aberration
• Incorporation and Reproduction of Liminality in institutions
• History of the “the Other” in the Mediterranean
• Language variation, multilingualism, language contact and contact
languages in the Mediterranean
• Reverse Processes: Modernity?
• Oral Tradition and Artistic Performance as Means of Intercultural
Communication
• Hybridity in Mediterranean Art and Architecture
• Hybridization of Land Settlement Patterns
• Saints, Pilgrims and Missionaries: travels in the Mediterranean hybridity
• Hybrid Methodologies
• Hybridity in Byzantine Archaeology



http://medworldsfour.wordpress.com/

Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing, Claim Researchers

Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science.

[snip]

While the concept of peer review is widely considered the most appropriate system for regulating scientific publications, it is not without its critics. Some feel that the system's reliance on impartiality and the lack of remuneration for referees mean that in practice the process is not as open as it should be. This may be particularly apparent when referees are asked to review more controversial ideas that could damage their own standing within the community if they give their approval.

Questioning referee competence

Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel at the Medical University of Vienna set out to make an assessment of how the peer-review system might respond to incompetent refereeing. [snip]

The researchers created a model of a generic specialist field where referees, selected at random, can fall into one of five categories. There are the "correct" who accept the good papers and reject the bad. There are the "altruists" and the "misanthropists", who accept or reject all papers respectively. Then there are the "rational", who reject papers that might draw attention away from their own work. And finally, there are the "random" who are not qualified to judge the quality of a paper because of incompetence or lack of time.

[snip]

Within this model community, the quality of scientists is assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution where each scientist produces one new paper every two time-units, the quality reflecting an author's ability. At every step in the model, each new paper is passed to two referees chosen at random from the community, with self-review excluded, with a reviewer being allowed to either accept or reject the paper. The paper is published if both reviewers approve the paper, and rejected if they both do not like it. If the reviewers are divided, the paper gets accepted with a probability of 0.5.

Big impact on quality

After running the model with 1000 scientists over 500 time-steps, Thurner and Hanel find that even a small presence of rational or random referees can significantly reduce the quality of published papers. When just 10% of referees do not behave "correctly" the quality of accepted papers drops by one standard deviation. If the fractions of rational, random and correct referees are about 1/3 each, the quality selection aspect of peer review practically vanished altogether.

"Our message is clear: if it can not be guaranteed that the fraction of rational and random referees is confined to a very small number, the peer-review system will not perform much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased!) coin," explain the researchers.

[snip]

Don't forget the editors

But Tim Smith, senior publisher for New Journal of Physics at IOP Publishing, which also publishes physics world.com, feels that the study overlooks the role of journal editors. "[snip]. In relation to this study however, one shouldn't ignore the role played by journal editors and Boards in accounting for potential conflicts of interest, and preserving the integrity of the referee selection and decision-making processes," he says.

Michèle Lamont a sociologist at Harvard University who analyses peer review in her 2009 book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, feels that we expect too much from peer review. [snip]

When asked by physicsworld.com to offer an alternative to the current peer-review system, Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a "market for scientific work". He envisages a situation where journal editors and their "scouts" search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. [snip]

[snip]

Related

"Peer Review And Journal Models" / Paolo Dall'Aglio

[http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0608307]

About the author

James Dacey is a reporter for physicsworld.com

[http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/43691]

!!! Thanks To Antonella De Robbio For The HeadsUp !!!

The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship

The Idea of Order explores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, "Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?" by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, "On the Cost of Keeping a Book," by Paul Courant and Matthew "Buzzy" Nielsen, argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, "Ghostlier Demarcations," examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing.

The reports are introduced by Charles Henry; the volume includes a conclusion by Roger Schonfeld and an epilogue by Charles Henry.

June 2010 / 123 pp. / $25 / ISBN 978-1-932326-35-2 / CLIR Reports 147

Source And Full Text Available At

[http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html]

NISO, IU Receive Mellon Grant to Advance Tools for Quantifying Scholarly Impact From Large-scale Usage Data

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., and BALTIMORE, Md. -- A $349,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University Bloomington will fund research to develop a sustainable initiative to create metrics for assessing scholarly impact from large-scale usage data.
IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing associate professor Johan Bollen and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will share the Mellon Foundation grant designed to build upon the MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) project that Bollen began in 2006 with earlier support from the foundation. Bollen is also a member of the IU School of Informatics and Computing's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program faculty.

The new funding for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-scale Usage Data," will support the evolution of the MESUR project to a community-supported, sustainable scholarly assessment framework. MESUR has already created a database of more than 1 billion usage events with related bibliographic, citation and usage data for scholarly content.

[snip]

The project will focus on four areas in developing the sustainability model -- financial sustainability, legal frameworks for protecting data privacy, technical infrastructure and data exchange, and scholarly impact -- and then integrate the four areas to provide the MESUR project with a framework upon which to build a sustainable structure for deriving valid metrics for assessing scholarly impact based on usage data. Simultaneously, MESUR's ongoing operations will be continued with the grant funding and expanded to ingest additional data and update its present set of scholarly impact indicators.

[snip]

Data from more than 110,000 journals, newspapers and magazines, along with publisher-provided usage reports covering more than 2,000 institutions, is being ingested and normalized in MESUR's databases, resulting in large-scale, longitudinal maps of the scholarly community and a survey of more than 40 different metrics of scholarly impact.

Sources
 
[http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=15037]
 
[http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/15040.html]