UCLA News Week: Nov. 17, 2010
Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Robert Cargill unravels a strange case of academic cyberbullying in this edition of UCLA News Week, the weekly videocast of research and other developments at UCLA.
"Scholars have not always been the most professional toward one another. There's been a lot of hostility," Cargill said. "This hostility within Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship has now carried over into online media." The case he cites involves New York lawyer Raphael Golb, convicted in September of felony and misdemeanor charges over the bullying of rival researchers in a secret campaign to boost findings by his father, a University of Chicago historian. Golb was scheduled to be sentenced this week. Cargill discusses the case in deeper detail in this UCLA Newsroom video. (Chronicle of Higher Education background on the case.)
Cargill is best known for his work on a three-dimensional computer model of Qumran, a first-century settlement on the shores of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 11 nearby caves at various times between 1947 and 1956. In his 2009 book, "Qumran through (Real) Time," Cargill argued that at least some of the more than 800 scrolls now known to exist were produced at Qumran.
Also in this week's video:
- Kathryn Atchison, vice provost for intellectual property and industry relations, describes how UCLA is generating high value jobs in a down economy.
- Low-income neighborhoods appear to be the most susceptible to West Nile virus, a mosquito-transmitted disease that is linked to more than 1,000 deaths since in the United States since 1999.
- Researchers from the California NanoSystems Institute and the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging have established a faster way of producing highly efficient nano-vehicles for gene delivery.
- Researchers have also, for the first time, identified the molecular cascade that drives the process of reconnection in the brain after a stroke.
UCLA News Week's weekly videocast is produced on Wednesday most weeks during the year. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, sign up for e-mail alerts and view past programs at UCLA Newsroom.
Each week's high-definition video is also available to download and embed. The program is produced by the Office of Media Relations and Public Outreach and the UCLA Broadcast Studio. Follow UCLANewsroom on Twitter for updates on the news at UCLA.