Eideard

Meles Zenawi and Essam Sharaf
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Ethiopia and Egypt have agreed to review the impact of a planned $4.8 billion Nile river dam, which Addis Ababa announced in March, in a bid to open a “new chapter” in once-strained relations.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and his Egyptian counterpart, Essam Sharaf, made the announcement at a joint news conference following talks in Cairo on Saturday. “We have agreed to quickly establish a tripartite team of technical experts to review the impact of the dam that is being built in Ethiopia,” Zenawi said. Experts from Sudan will also be part of the team.

Sharaf said Ethiopia’s planned construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam “could be a source of benefit” – an apparent change in tone by Egypt’s new rulers on what has been a highly contentious issue.

“We can make the issue of the Grand Renaissance Dam something useful,” Sharaf said. “This dam, in conjunction with the other dams, can be a path for development and construction between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt…”

Zenawi’s visit to Cairo was the first by an Ethiopian official since former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising in February…

The dam is planned for the Blue Nile river in northwestern Ethiopia, a few kilometres from the Ethiopia–Sudan border.

The dam is designed to have an installed capacity of 5250 MW, which is threefold of the 1885.8 MW installed capacity of the 12 currently operational hydro-power plants of the nation.

Bravo. It ain’t easy – it ain’t ever easy to negotiate treaties over natural resources especially water rights. Cripes, we’re still governed by water rights here in New Mexico that go back to Spanish colonial times. Technically, it’s against New Mexico law to collect rainwater after it falls from the skies — unless used by a farmer.

That these nations are willing to discuss and consider collaboration is a step forward.

Previous studies have found that the vast majority of published psychological research in the United States is based on American samples and excludes 95 percent of the world’s population. Yet, these results are often generalized and taken as universal.

When University of Missouri doctoral student Reid Trotter examined perfectionism and coping methods in Taiwanese culture for his dissertation, he decided to collaborate with a graduate student in Taiwan. From their collaboration, they found that models of perfectionism and coping were not universal. Trotter hopes his experience will encourage more researchers to develop cross-cultural relationships.

“In general, there has been very little cross-cultural research in the United States,” Trotter said. “This has resulted in an insufficient understanding of the psychological functioning of the human species. Cross-cultural research requires developing a relationship with a member of the culture in which you plan to study. This relationship will help researchers address possible cultural blind spots that may unintentionally weaken the study.”

Previously, geographical barriers limited researchers’ ability to develop these relationships. Now, technology, such as Skype, can help scholars facilitate communication and work through possible cultural misunderstandings.

“Cross-cultural relationships require trust and respect and should be collaborative instead of hierarchical,” said Puncky Heppner, professor of educational, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. “Researchers need to be aware if they are coming across as condescending in another culture and realize they are examining a culture with their own glasses that may tint a situation blue, whereas other glasses may tint a situation yellow.”

Overdue.

American researchers face a horde of parochial fences of their own creation, limitations built into systems by funding, departmental competition, scholarly history.

Professional skeptics and pundits should skip this article as it actually deals with science instead of talking about science as if you really read anything.

It’s worth remembering that the currency among professional researchers is in publications – research papers. They are the manifestation of a research group’s work, a reference document, the bar by which a researcher is measured and the stock-in-trade of the knowledge that they produce, use, share, and archive.

The problem has always been that those research papers are on paper…

“The manner in which you become ‘literature aware’ can be slow and is limited in scope to the views and criticisms of your physically immediate peers,” said Ali Salehi-Reyhani, a researcher in single cell proteomics at Imperial College London.

“Web 2.0 throws that open to a global community of experts with tools like f1000 and Twitter.”

F1000 is a tool that highlights high impact papers and allows scientists to subject them to post-publication peer review.

“The viral nature of Twitter allows information to be rapidly and critically spread to an audience thousands to millions wide,” said Mr Salehi-Reyhani. “Tweeting scientists can exploit this to quickly pass on that hot new paper to their peers with minimal effort yet maximum effect.”

The imminent release of Google Wave could also be a boon for the cat-herding exercise of collaborating on a research paper, as each participant in a given conversation – or “wave” – using the service can add, delete, or change a given document, with a live, most-current version of a document in progress visible to everyone in the wave, no matter the time zone.

“Science always builds on what’s gone before and sharing results and data and ideas is a core part of that – it’s just that in the past we haven’t been able to do that as efficiently as we can today.”

RTFA. It’s not so much about the software utilized for the process of collaborative research, writing, editing and discussion. It’s about developing the process with what the Web has to offer 24/7.