Learning to Drink and Drinking to Learn

Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent - NYTimes.com: "China devotes significant resources to building a world-class education system and pioneering research in competitive industries and sciences, and has had notable successes in network computing, clean energy, and military technology. But a lack of integrity among researchers is hindering China’s potential and harming collaboration between Chinese scholars and their international counterparts, scholars in China and abroad say.

“If we don’t change our ways, we will be excluded from the global academic community,” said Zhang Ming, a professor of International Relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “We need to focus on seeking truth, not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for personal profit.”

Pressure on scholars by administrators of state-run universities to earn journal citations — a measure of innovation — has produced a deluge of plagiarized or fabricated research. Last December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor.

In an editorial published earlier this year, The Lancet, the British medical journal, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a “research superpower” by 2020."

Cheers as Delhi lets ladies behind the bar - Yahoo! Finance: "Twenty-year-old scotch whisky, vintage champagne. You can find almost anything in the sparkling high-end bars of India's capital, except a female bartender.

Soon you'll find that, too, after Delhi this week changed a century-old law that banned women from serving alcohol.

For activists and alcohol industry insiders, it was long overdue."