blog.shrub

A dental student at Marquette University got in a bit of trouble over a blog posting.

I’ll let the Marquette Warrior sum it up:

But this is the first case we know of (there probably have been many we don’t know of) when a precipitous and emotional reaction from University administrators led to a punishment that, if it stands, will ruin a student’s career.

Offended at blog statements that were ill-considered, but did not clearly (and probably did not at all) violate any ethical or professional norms, they imposed a tough sentence.

When the student had the temerity to ask for the hearing he had every right to, they ignored the expert testimony of their own ethicist, refused to hear the testimony of a faculty member who could discuss the prevailing norms of student blogging, and came down on the student like a ton of bricks.

The entire process did not look like the adjudication of a case of student misconduct. It looked like a vendetta.

apparnetly not only do some SUV drivers have bad taste in cars, they are also committing insurance fraud.

Like Malcolm, I, too, went to university in Ontario. I, too, filled out the tanking sheet. He describes my school and program kindly:

There were several good ones and several better ones and a number of programs—like computer science at the University of Waterloo—that were world-class.

And I, too, find the US school admissions process very strange:

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the Colleg Entrance Examination Board tests as th principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had straightforward shot at attending.
…
[T]hat meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising.
…
Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
…
If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day.

I really hope no one can take this guy seriously:

Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.

Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology.

Vancouver named ‘world’s best city’:

For the fourth year in a row, Vancouver has claimed the top spot on an international ranking of the world’s most livable cities.

Toronto is ranked 9th; Calgary is 10th; no American cities made the list.

“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. And so many of the people in the arena were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
—Barbara Bush on hurricane refugees.

Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’:

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

some news of note:

• George Bush signed and executive order lifting wage restrictions and allowing government contractors rebuilding new orleans to pay workers less than the prevailing wage
• FEMA’s email server broke.
• New Orleans being underwater was preventable.
• Former FEMA head Mike Brown padded his resume
• FEMA refused help from Amtrak, Wal-Mart, the Coast Guard, firefighters and others.
• Jay Rosen reiterates the press may have found a spine.
• Evacuees are stuck — like being in prison.
• Republicans forced a vote on a relief bill without people having read the bill:
  

  the Republican Leadership in the House of Representatives limited floor consideration of the $52 billion Katrina relief bill proposed by President Bush and voted to reject any Democratic efforts to amend the bill to include a wider array of relief measures, RAW STORY has learned.

  Democrats said no one had even seen a copy of the legislation.

• Pat Robertson is once again off his rocker, saying ” John Roberts can ‘be thankful that a tragedy has brought him some good.’”

some cops detained, arrested and released an innocent man on the tube because he was “suspicious”:

The police decided that wearing a rain jacket, carrying a rucksack with a laptop inside, looking down at the steps while going into a tube station and checking your phone for messages just ticked too many boxes on their checklist and makes you a terrorist suspect. How many other people are not only wrongly detained but wrongly arrested every week in similar circumstances? And how many of them are also computer and telecoms enthusiasts, fitting the police’s terrorist profile so well?

While a police officer did state that my rain jacket was “too warm for the season”, could it have been instead that the weather was too cold for the season? The day before had been the coldest July day for 25 years.

Nicholas D. Kristof calls George W. Bush “A Wimp on Genocide in Sunday’s New York Times:

Mr. Bush’s position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an “obligation” to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that “We are prepared to take collective action … on a case by case basis” to prevent genocide.

That was still an immensely important statement. But it’s embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can’t even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

I can’t understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base - the religious right - has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration “has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”