Misc. links September 26, 2012

On Academic Publishing by Hugh Gusterson "So why not try this: If academic work is to be commodified and turned into a source of profit for shareholders and for the 1 percent of the publishing world, then we should give up our archaic notions of unpaid craft labor and insist on professional compensation for our expertise, just as doctors, lawyers, and accountants do."
Econo Trolls: An Illustrated Bestiary Abstract "In your journey through the Econ Blogosphere, you will be beset by a great many curious and interesting species of EconoTroll. At first you may be intimidated by their voluminous use of insider jargon, their rough-and-tumble personal attacks, their strenuous insistence that you read the complete works of their movements' founders before participating in any discussion, and above all their sheer persistence and apparent surplus of spare time. But fear not, noble traveler, for I have taken it upon myself to create this Illustrated Bestiary, in order to prepare you for (most of) the characters you will encounter on your way..."
Shades of Antony: Sheila Bair says that Timothy Geithner is an honorable man.
Bronte Capital's sahort waves(via Information Processing). Excerpts:
"Bronte has a strong track record picking Chinese frauds on global exchanges in sectors including cement, travel, medical products and education. By its estimates, it has successfully shorted more than 40 Chinese stocks.

“We really do have a hard time finding one that is honest, and we sincerely want to so we can hedge our short positions. There are a lot of good things going on in China. But the good things just don’t get shown to Western investors.”"

""To maintain its risk-management strategy, Bronte needs to find one or two fraudulent stocks a week. Hempton and Maher say there are enough targets, and they have no trouble finding them at this rate. The proliferation of apparent stockmarket fraud – or as Maher calls it, “unwarranted and excessive promotion” – leads one to question if regulators are doing a good enough job to protect investors.

Despite the Trio experience, Hempton has sympathy with the market watchdogs. “If we are 90 per cent right on a company we suspect is a fraud, we make a lot of money,” he says. “But if a regulator is 90 per cent right, they end up with a royal commission, a rap on the knuckles and they all lose their jobs.”"

E.coli caught in the act of evolving from Science News:

"E. coli bacteria growing in a flask in a lab for nearly 25 years have learned to do something no E. colihas done since the Miocene epoch: eat a chemical called citrate in the presence of oxygen. "

and a longer version in The Loom.

Carl Zimmer : Journalists should not let themselves be played This time from anti-GM crowd "But those outside experts were slow to comment in part because reporters who got to see the paper in advance of the embargo had to sign a confidentiality agreement to get their hands on it. They weren’t allowed to show it to other experts."

P.S.(27th September) While Carl Zimmer makes good points in the last link above, he refers to another Discover blog post " Scicurious has a good roundup of the problems at Discover’s The Crux." But reading the Scicurious post, it seems that she might have misread the paper; see comments 26 and 27. She also quotes frequently experts from Science Media Centre whose credentials are not clear. Here is the link to the press release of the Science Media Centre. More reports with links to the paper here and here. From the last report:
"Despite being conducted on the other side of the world, the study has electoral implications in the United States — particularly in California. 

Proposition 37, which will appear on California's ballot in the November election, would require companies to label "food sold to consumers made from plants or animals with genetic material changed in specified ways."..........

Monsanto has already poured about $7 million into a campaign to defeat Prop 37.'