Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• Even though basketball teams may have lost, we’ll plug on here at Heard on the Hill World Headquarters.

This past weekend’s episode of “This American Life” on NPR features KU professor Raquel Alexander, a KU business professor who will be heading to Washington and Lee University following this academic semester.

She is talking about lobbying research that we’ve covered before that was done in collaboration with KU’s law dean Stephen Mazza and Susan Scholz, a KU associate professor of accounting.

The research shows that lobbying is a pretty good investment that can return up to $220 for every $1 spent.

• Don Worster, a KU distinguished professor of environmental history, tackled the subject of the future of water use on the Great Plains in a lecture in Nebraska, covered by the Lincoln Journal-Star.

In the long term, he said, demand for water is outpacing supply.

“We can’t sustain the level of agriculture we have now in the Great Plains,” Worster said in the article. “The best we can do is to try to transition to the dryland farming economy of the past — or something like that.”

I’ve covered this issue a bit, as well, with reference to the state’s Ogallala Aquifer.

Worster last week said that the Great Plains would be “a loser when it comes to water,” and added that this country continuing to feed the world is “just not a realistic option.”

• And here’s a list that KU would rather not find itself on, I’m sure.

The folks over at onlineuniversities.com have put together a list of the 10 greatest cases of fraud in university research.

This plagiarism case at KU made the list at No. 3. Though I have no idea how rigorously researched this list was (and they don’t talk about their methodology in putting it together), it’s still probably not pleasant to have put oneself in a position to be on such a list in the first place.

• Maybe Heard on the Hill could use a good lobbyist. I don’t need your money, but if you have 220 tips you’d like to send, feel free to pop a note to ahyland@ljworld.com.