Dude, who moved my lizard shit?

This has nothing to do with China, but if you’ve ever worked/lived/suffered in academia, then this story is more than just a humorous anecdote from the trenches of scientific inquiry…rather it’s a wonderfully succinct and painful metaphor about our labors of love and the the grail of academic validation.

From the Chronicle News blog:

One Man’s Worthless Bag of Dung Is Another’s Priceless Research

Daniel Bennett has vowed to sue Britain’s University of Leeds for incinerating 77 pounds of feces he collected from the rare Bhutan lizard during seven years of doctoral research in the rain forests of the Philippines.

Writing in Times Higher Education, the biologist describes his horror upon returning to Leeds from his fieldwork on Varanus olivaceus, a relative of the Komodo dragon.

“I was surprised to find my desk space occupied by another student and to see that photographs of my daughter, my girlfriend and my favorite lizards had been removed from the wall,” he writes. “The laboratory space where my samples had been stored was empty. Irritation turned to fear as I realized that my personal effects had been carefully stowed in boxes, but there was no sign of my 35-kilogram bag of lizard shit. Fear

February 6th, 2009

Online Collections: Historical Photographs of China; Korean War

Via H-Asia:

Historical Photographs of China

Historical Photographs of China project, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, UK & Institut d’Asie Orientale (IAO), Lyon, France

Self-description: “A collaboration between scholars at the University of Bristol, University of Lincoln, and the Institut d’Asie Orientale, this project aims to locate, archive, and disseminate photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands overseas. These are often of even greater historic interest than might ordinarily be the case, as the destruction of materials inside China in war and revolution in the twentieth century, and especially during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, means that there is a relative dearth today of accessible photographic records in China itself. [...]

The photographs archived here come from the collections of a Chinese diplomat, foreign businessmen, staff of the administrations in the Chinese treaty ports, missionaries, and officials of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. They shed light on political events such as the 1925 May Thirtieth incident, on working and social life, on treaty port architecture, commercial history, the history of dress and fashion, and of course the history of photography in China. They were taken by talented amateur photographers, by foreign snap-shotters,

February 6th, 2009

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