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The Chronicle: Footnoted

A daily look at academic blogs.

Footnoted Takes a Summer BreakMay 21 2008

As academic blogs slow down for the summer, we’ve decided to take a short break at Footnoted. We’ll be using the time to take a step back to see how the blog is going — and how it could be reshaped or improved. We’d love to hear from you with any ideas, suggestions, praise, or even scorn. Just send an e-mail to footnoted@chronicle.com Thanks so much for reading and commenting.

In the meantime, here are the five most popular items from the past few months:

Is Jodie Foster Responsible for Reaganomics?May 19 2008

What was the greatest wealth-creating film of all time? That question was answered by Robert Mundell, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics at Columbia University. His answer: Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster.

Mundell's explanation, according to a report in The Financial Times, works like this: Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley, claimed he shot the president in an effort to impress Jodie Foster. (The movie features a scene in which De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.)

The wave of sympathy for Reagan in the wake of the shooting deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. According to Mundell, the passage of those tax cuts at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money was instrumental in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

"Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," Mundell said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5-trillion and $15-trillion of output to the U.S. economy."

Bush 'Appeasement' Comments Outrageous, Says Steve GimbelMay 16 2008

Steve Gimbel, at Philosophers’ Playground, is frothing at the mouth over President Bush’s remarks in Israel about “appeasement.”

As The New York Times put it:

President Bush used a speech to the Israeli Parliament on Thursday to liken those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals” to appeasers of the Nazis — a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, who has advocated greater engagement with countries like Iran and Syria.

Gimbel, of Gettysburg College, writes:

There are so many angles from which outrage should flow from Bush’s “appeasement” comment in front of the Knesset. Making a cheap Nazi reference in front of the Israeli legislature that is celebrating the founding of the nation which was came about in no small part because of the actual horrors of Nazism is tasteless. Taking a nation’s celebration of their 60th anniversary and hijacking it for domestic political shots is rude. Misrepresenting diplomatic engagement for appeasement is dishonest. Overlooking the fact that Bush himself is engaged in exactly this sort of diplomacy with fellow axis of evil leader Kim Jong Il and that the Is

Research Gone WrongMay 16 2008

From Nature comes a sad tale of the retraction of two high-profile biochemistry papers, a process that turned a Duke University professor against one of his graduate students.

In February, Homme W. Hellinga retracted articles that he had published in Science and the Journal of Molecular Biology claiming to use a computer program to design a highly active enzyme, one of biochemistry’s tough problems. Mary A. Dwyer, then a graduate student in Mr. Hellinga’s laboratory, had performed much of the work described in the two articles, but she told Nature that at the time of publication, “I felt like we weren’t quite there yet.”

Another scientist, John P. Richard, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, tried to repeat the work but could not, turning up what looked like problems with Mr. Hellinga’s experiments. After Mr. Richard contacted Mr. Hellinga, the Duke professor contacted Ms. Dwyer last fall, after she had moved to another department at Duke to do postdoctoral research.

She told Nature that Mr. Hellinga said, “I find it really hard to believe that you didn’t make this up.” She defended herself, showing him data from her laboratory notebooks. But Mr. Hellinga referred her to the dean’s office, which conducted an inquiry into potential research misconduct.

In February, the papers were retract

Why Solitaire (Might) Make Professors BetterMay 15 2008

In 2001 Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, took to the opinion pages of The New York Times to record his displeasure with those students who use their laptops during class to surf the Internet, play games, e-mail, or even trade stock.

Ayres now has a prominent supporter in Saul Levmore, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, which has taken the step of blocking Internet access in most of its classrooms. Levmore notes that Internet usage "appears to be contagious if not epidemic" during classes.

In praising Levmore's decision, Ayres stresses that there is no good a priori argument against multitasking. "The case is at best an empirically-informed hunch about what is the best way to teach. I see some power to a parentalism argument that teachers should ban surfing because it impedes students’ ability to learn," Ayres writes on the Freakonomics blog.

But Ayres does concede that some of his more crafty students have come up with a plausible argument in favor of laptop-based distractions in the classroom: If he is forced to compete with the Internet for his students attention he will have more incent