'HORNS VS AGGIES: THE SCOREBOARD DEBATE:
Who's is better?
Texas A&M's athletic director takes his shot.

My scoreboard is better than your scoreboard!

Those are the taunts bouncing between Austin (home of the so-called Godzillatron stadium big screen) and College Station (where 12th Man TV also goes on the air Saturday).

Texas A&M's athletic director, Bill Byrne, has even entered the fray, defending the Aggies' slightly smaller high-definition screen.

"If having the largest screen was all we wanted, we could have done that easily," Byrne wrote in his weekly column on Aggieathletics.com. "We decided it was important to be attentive to programming. As a result, our big-screen content . . . will be better than on any screen in the country, guaranteed. . . .

"When it comes to putting together game-day audio and video production, we're the Joneses."

Was that a veiled shot at DeLoss Dodds? The Texas AD once famously said that UT doesn't keep up with the Joneses because, "We are the Joneses."

UT officials on Thursday declined to enter the fray, opting to let Godzillatron speak for itself.

But coach Mack Brown did boast about the Royal-Memorial big screen in his talk Thursday to the Austin Longhorn Club. "It's huge," Brown said. "It's the best in the world, not just the country."'

For connoisseurs of John Betjeman, his centenary has brought many blessings. For one thing the 100th birthday itself fell on a drizzly Bank Holiday Monday, enabling true believers to eat damp fishpaste sandwiches on the prom before retiring to hold hands in tea-shops. To improve the occasion two biographers are sparring viciously over their hero: Bevis Hillier, who over 25 years wrote a magisterial three-volume authorised biography, and A. N. Wilson who obliges us this year with a briefer, elegantly readable one of his own. Hillier is quoted condemning Wilson as “despicable . . . a playground bully” and Wilson says Hillier is “old and malignant”. Hoorah!

But even better, The Sunday Times unveils a splendid hoax perpetrated on the hapless Wilson. The paper reveals that a 1944 love letter, used in his book as proof of an apparent affair, is a fake. It was sent to the biographer by a person calling herself Eve de Harben, of an untraceable address in the Cote d’Azur. She sent a typed version, claiming that the original belonged to an equally untraceable American collector. Wilson, all unsuspecting, welcomed the document and included it in his book. Now, close examination reveals that the opening letters of each sentence spell out the message “A. N. WILSON IS A SHIT”.

... The hoax was unveiled by a letter from the mysterious “Eve de Harben” to the newspaper, claiming that it is her revenge for something terribly rude that A. N. Wilson once said about the late Humphrey Carpenter, yet another literary biographer. Mr Wilson, says the paper, admits that he should have asked more questions, especially as, when he returned the typescript to de Harben, it came back marked “Addressee and address not known”.

'While it may seem like a chore to outsiders, many bloggers enjoy the compulsion. Mark Lisanti, who runs the entertainment gossip blog Defamer, is much like Mr. Romenesko in his no-vacation tendencies. Although he gets three weeks off each year from Gawker Media, which owns the site, he rarely takes a day. Not because he can't, he just doesn't want to. "My plan is to die face down on the desk in the middle of a post..."'

It is still far too early to sound the death knell, but for many small liberal arts colleges, the SAT may have outlived its usefulness.

Since Bowdoin and Bates dropped their testing requirements decades ago, more than a fourth of U.S. News & World Report’s Top 100 liberal arts colleges have made admissions exams optional, and new ones are joining the list at a quickening pace.

The new colleges include Mount Holyoke, Middlebury, Hamilton, Union and Dickinson. In recent months, George Mason, Providence College and Hobart and William Smith Colleges have also become test-optional.

Admissions officers said eliminating the testing requirement had increased both the size and diversity of their applicant pools, and bolstered their reputation as places personal enough to consider each applicant individually.

At the same time, the revamped, longer SAT, the drop in average scores announced on Tuesday and recent problems with scoring have created growing disenchantment. College officials also say that tests — whether the SAT or in the Midwest the ACT — are not the best predictors of performance.

“Test scores are a much weaker predictor of how students will do in college than their high school transcript,” said Mark Gearan, the president of Hobart and William Smith. “We really know our applicants, because we have an admissions staff that can read every essay, have a personal interview and review the high school transcript in depth.”

Half a century ago, the SAT was a tool for opening college access to students who did not come from elite schools, a steppingstone to academic meritocracy. But many admissions officers now see the test as a barrier to low-income students and those who do not speak English at home.

Test scores, college officials say, present a skewed picture both of poor students who have had little formal preparation and wealthy ones who spend thousands of dollars — not to mention evenings, weekends and summers — on tutoring.

“We felt the system had gotten out of whack,” said Steve Syverson, dean of admissions at Lawrence University, which admitted its first test-optional freshmen this year. “Back when kids just got a good night’s sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler that helped you find the diamond in the rough. Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots."

Test-optional admissions also allow colleges to admit interesting students with low scores, without pulling down rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others who use SAT scores to rate colleges. In fact, test-optional admissions may raise rankings because low scores are unlikely to be submitted.

More than 700 colleges and universities are test-optional, but most accept nearly all their applicants. For now, the SAT and ACT remain a rite of passage for students applying to colleges that are more selective in their admissions. There is also no evidence that guidance counselors are advising students to skip testing, and most applicants still submit scores to test-optional colleges.

But that could change.

“We are now at a point where, if you’re interested in a liberal arts education at the best schools in the country, you can put together a good portfolio of colleges to apply to and not take the test,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, a group critical of standardized testing.

The College Board, which administers the SAT, sees the trend as wrong-headed, but no real threat. “Even if half of the best small schools in America go test-optional,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, “it’s a minimal number of students.”

Of the nation’s 17 million college students, fewer than 250,000 attend the top 100 liberal arts colleges.

“At a time when the United States is vying internationally for excellence,” Mr. Caperton said, “it’s very contrary to any decision-making process, in business or education, not to use the data that’s available. If I were a parent, applying to a selective school, I would prefer them to use all the data they possibly can.”

But many families visiting test-optional colleges have a different preference. “I think SAT-optional is great, it’s wonderful,” said Lynne Brandes, of Hanover, Mass., who took her daughter, Jacqueline, on a New England college tour this summer. “Some families have the money to pay for tutoring, but some don’t. I’d love to see the SAT’s abolished.”

At test-optional colleges, admissions officers say they look forward to students’ liberation from testing.

“We hope that now that there are more test-optional schools, students will think about not taking it and putting their time and money into other activities like music or writing or community service,” said Jane B. Brown, vice president for enrollment at Mount Holyoke, which dropped the SAT requirement in 2001. “We hope they will have more interesting lives.”

But most admissions officials at selective colleges continue to rely on standardized test scores. “They’re especially useful for evaluating the rural Midwestern kid who’s No. 1 in a graduating class of nine at a high school you don’t know,” said Paul Thiboutot, dean of admissions at Carleton College.

William Shain, the dean of admissions at Bowdoin, has seen the pros and cons. Last year, he was at Vanderbilt, where tests are required. At Bowdoin, the first and most selective college to become test-optional — admitting fewer than a quarter of its applicants — Mr. Shain is mindful that each student admitted without scores displaces one with stellar scores and grades. He also said test scores become more helpful as high school transcripts provide fewer clear indicators of students’ abilities.

“Many schools won’t do rankings, there’s enormous grade inflation, and parents help write some of the essays,” he said. “It’s not so easy to disentangle from SAT’s. Even the bond-rating people, when a college borrows money, look at SAT scores.”

True, neither the Ivy League nor most large universities are about to drop their testing requirements. At the Ivies, anything that helps differentiate among hordes of highly qualified applicants is useful. And many large public universities do admissions by the numbers. But some state universities have minimized their use of SAT scores. For example, Texas students in the top 10 percent of their high school classes are automatically admitted to the University of Texas or Texas A&M.

Growth in test-optional admissions would be bad news for test-preparation companies like Kaplan, which this month issued a news release playing down the trend and warning that students who plan to apply only to test-optional colleges are “limiting their options.”

Admissions requirements vary widely, even among test-optional colleges. Middlebury, for example, is not entirely test-optional, but it allows students to substitute three subject exams — Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or SAT II’s — for the SAT or ACT. Like several others, it also asks students for a graded high school paper.

At Bates College, William Hiss, vice president for external affairs, said the policy helped attract exceptional students who might not otherwise apply. Lien Le, a Vietnamese refugee with an SAT verbal score of 400, who applied to Bates without submitting her scores, earned a biology degree magna cum laude and then a medical degree at Brown.

“Sure, all the kids who get SAT’s over 700 have real academic strengths,” he said. “But can you say that all the kids who get under 600 don’t, that they won’t do well?”

No, according to Bates’s 20-year study of test-optional admissions, finding that the graduation rate of those who submitted scores differed by only one-tenth of a percent from that of students who did not, about a third of Bates students.

“Human intelligence and ambition is more complex, more multifaceted, than any standardized testing system can capture,” Mr. Hiss said.

Mr Einfeld's friends are rallying around him, with one telling The Australian he was "pale and depressed."

A North Coast resident has lodged a statutory declaration stating that his vehicle was in the custody of "Marcus Einfeld's Spirit" when it was clocked speeding in April.

Contrary to what critics of the database plan might have the public believe, we in academia know remarkably little about what emerges from the vast and diverse system of higher education. Why do students drop out? Where do they go when they do? What factors in primary and secondary school, beyond grade-point averages, class rankings and standardized test scores, best predict their success or failure in college? What impact does their educational experience have on our students' success or failure after graduation?

We are ill-equipped to answer these questions. Without comprehensive information, both individual institutions and society lack the tools to assess how the system is working, how it is failing and how it might be improved.

Proponents of the database -- including, interestingly, many leaders of the nation's community colleges and public universities -- view it as a means for educators to achieve the accountability for which lawmakers and the public are clamoring.

[T]he mother of all steroids exposes, the piece that should have alarmed America and told us where all of this steroid mess was headed long ago...ran in late October 1988. It caused quite a stir in my college locker room, and I've never forgotten the story. I'm not sure anyone else in America read it. It was hidden in an obscure sports magazine called Sports Illustrated; maybe you've heard of it.

The piece might have been 8,000 words, and it foreshadowed absolutely everything that is going on today.

For the past year, I've sporadically tried to locate the piece on the Internet. You can find the sidebars to the main story on Lexis.com, but you can't find the main story. Monday, I called the author, Rick Telander, now a sports columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times and a noted author. He faxed me a hard copy of the story, and he shares my disbelief at the way American sports fans and some journalists pretend like the steroid crisis is new.

"It's all in there," Telander told me. "There's nothing new. Not one iota. I get really frustrated when people say sportswriters buried their heads about steroids."

It's the same frustration I feel when sportswriters try to reduce the steroids crisis to Barry Bonds and home runs. It's juvenile and highly unfair. It avoids an obvious reality that a young sportswriting friend, Bomani Jones, summarized perfectly: "Baseball corrupted Barry Bonds more than Bonds corrupted baseball."

All of our athletic steroid users are victims, even and especially Bonds. They're victims of America's obsession, glorification and money-injection of sports.

Telander exposed this beautifully in 1988 when he befriended a University of South Carolina football player, Tommy Chaikin, and persuaded him to tell his steroid story. It's as fine a piece of journalism as you'll find. It's more relevant today than it was when it was written.

Chaikin told absolutely everything about his steroid abuse and his teammates. He estimated that half of the Gamecocks' 100 players used or tried steroids. I'm going to repeat a passage from the article that is likely to make some of you very uncomfortable. But it's the passage that sparked the most discussion in my Ball State football locker room, and it's a truth about the steroid controversy that most people are reluctant to address. I'm not repeating this passage out of some form of perverse delight. I'm repeating it because we have to understand everyone's motivations if we're ever going to come close to getting a handle on this problem.

Here's what Chaikin said in 1988 that no one in authority dealt with then or now:

"Another thing that had gotten to me was trying to compete with the black guys. I hadn't played against many blacks, and they intimidated me with their strength and speed. I'd say all but a couple of the guys on my team who used steroids were white, and the reason they did was to keep up with the other guys on steroids and with black athletes."

That passage set off great debate in my Ball State locker room, because the sentiment rang true in our environment, too.

I've always believed that German Olympic athletes turned to science after Hitler was embarrassed by Jesse Owens and Co. American Olympians turned to science to keep pace with the foreign athletes who were using. My belief is that in the last 20 years of college football, black players turned to steroids to keep pace with the steroid users.

This is a verifiable fact: My football coaches certainly favored the steroid users over the nonusers. The pressure to use was immense. Telander wrote a powerful piece in what was then the most influential sports publication on the abuse of steroids by college athletes, and not one of my coaches chose to address the topic with our team. Steroid use was the white elephant in the room that we were supposed to ignore.

We're still ignoring it. We've simplified the discussion and resorted to labeling all of the users as dirty, nasty, immoral cheaters because that makes it easier to go after Bonds and protect the sanctity of a meaningless record.

I'll be honest. Some of the guys who used steroids when I was playing football were/are some of my best friends. Good guys. Victims of college sports becoming big business. Victims of their desire to compete at the highest levels. Victims of the leadership failure of the men in authority over them. Victims of our collective sports obsession. No different from Barry Bonds. No different from all the athletes getting busted today.

According to the people leading the Bonds-steroids witch hunt, Barry watched sportswriters go nuts over Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's 1998 home-run chase, and Barry turned to the needle to keep pace.

The indifference to Telander's 1988 masterpiece laid the foundation for where we are today.

If you want to get rid of performance-enhancing drugs in team sports, start punishing the team owners, coaches, universities and high schools that financially benefit from steroid abuse. Test the college athletes regularly and fine the coaches and strip the schools of scholarships when the players turn up dirty. Test the pro athletes regularly and fine the coaches and owners and strip the teams of roster spots when the players turn up dirty. Of course, you can still punish the players, too.

Five years of this kind of policing, and NFL linemen will go back to weighing 260 pounds, and recovery from serious knee injuries will take nine months to a year again.

But right now there is no real motivation to clean up the athletes. The leagues and colleges are making way too much money. Sports fans don't really care. Sportswriters only care because it's a tool to carry out their vendetta against Bonds.

Listen, a university administration that allows the type of "adult" binge drinking on campus like it does on football game days has zero moral authority to lecture its kids. Zero.

We're far from innocent out here in the community.

Ever notice we bust a lot of Mexican restaurants for serving underagers, but conveniently "overlook" a half dozen obvious offenders downtown. We'll wag the finger on our right hand while holding out the left for all that sweet, sweet tax revenue produced by the downtown "hospitality" (wink-wink) industry.

Another election season is now upon the citizens of Athens-Clarke County, and, to no one's surprise, one of the issues that defines where political lines are drawn in the community has also surfaced again.

Helped along this year by recent stories in this newspaper noting that 40 arrests for underage drinking were made during the first weekend of the University of Georgia's fall semester, and that four new bars were set to open in downtown Athens, the question of where downtown is headed - and what, if any, controls should be placed on a nightlife fueled by dozens of bars and clubs - is once again likely to become a focus of this year's campaigns for Athens-Clarke's mayoral and commission seats.

What's amazing about "the downtown issue" is that it doesn't necessarily have to be an issue at all.

As this newspaper's Aug. 22 story, "40 charged with underage drinking over weekend," clearly indicates, people under 21 years of age indulging in alcohol use - and abuse - is a problem in the community. Just as clearly, downtown is a major locus of that problem, as illustrated by the fact, noted in the Aug. 22 story, that police on foot patrol arrested "several underage drinkers with beer on sidewalks outside of bars."

The logical inference to be made is that there are some bars in the downtown area that are serving alcohol to people under the legal drinking age. Need something more, albeit admittedly anecdotal, to bolster that conclusion? How about the Aug. 18 column in The Red & Black, UGA's independent student newspaper, in which the writer named a specific downtown bar that's "usually packed with freshmen."

In short, the only real "issue" in downtown Athens is that some bars are operating in violation of the law, serving alcohol to people too young, legally speaking, to consume it. Getting control of that issue shouldn't be particularly difficult, nor should it require any political gymnastics.

All that anyone holding a mayoral or commission seat - or who hopes to hold one of those seats - has to do is insist that laws pertaining to the legal drinking age are enforced in downtown Athens, and to make sure that the alcohol licenses of establishments that run afoul of those laws are revoked at the earliest opportunity.

Will that approach ensure that downtown Athens becomes a safe and appealing place for those who enjoy a night out that includes the consumption of an alcoholic beverage or two or three? Certainly not. Anytime alcohol is a factor in nightlife - in downtown Athens, or anywhere else - there's a possibility that unacceptable, even dangerous, behavior will ensue.

But clamping down on underage drinking would accomplish one important thing. It would keep any number of young people away from situations they are incapable of handling responsibly.

From that, it follows that, for the mayor and commission - and the people now seeking those offices - the "downtown issue" comes down to a relatively simple question.

Is the local tax revenue generated by alcohol sales so important they're willing to look away as some of that revenue is provided by underage drinkers, through downtown businesses operating in violation of the law?

The next time any big-time college football coach or AD complains about financially contributing to all of the campus sports that don't bring in any money -- pretty much everything but a handful of school's men's basketball programs -- remember the Godzillatron and all its superfluous glory.

Although, this could lead to yet another revenue stream for [the University of Texas]. It's only a matter of time until the school starts selling T-shirts and hats and posters and sweatshirts featuring a Longhorn logo plastered across the gargantuan scoreboard. The end result of which will be more merchandising moolah and an even larger video board in five years when this one gets boring.

Actually, what would be even better is if they could save computerized crowd images from the board and print those directly onto shirts. You know, like when you go on an amusement park rollercoaster -- with 10,000 of your closest friends. Think about it: Given the size of the new video screen, during crowd shots, just about everyone at the game will make an appearance. Imagine all of those $25 burnt-orange-and-white T-shirts, with the crowd pic printed chest-high, sandwiched between "I was on Godzillatron!"

Its nickname is Godzillatron.

Frankly, no other word would do justice to the monstrous new football stadium scoreboard at Texas.

Towering over the south end zone at 55 feet tall and 134 feet wide, it is more than just a Texas-sized upgrade of the scoreboard at Royal-Memorial Stadium, home of the defending national champions.

It is nearly as wide as the field itself and will be, for a short time at least, the largest high-definition video display board in the world, school officials say.

And Texas players can't wait to watch super-sized replays of their touchdowns.

"Oh man, that thing's big," said wide receiver Quan Cosby. "At night, we don't need the lights, it's so bright."

Built by South Dakota-based Daktronics Inc., the $8 million scoreboard and accompanying sound system easily dwarf the old unit. It is the most visible change so far in a $150 million stadium renovation that will add about 10,000 seats in the north end zone, bringing capacity to just over 90,000 by 2008.

The last time Texas fans got to watch the old scoreboard, it was showing highlights of the 2005 national championship season. The new one will debut Sept. 2 when No. 3 Texas plays North Texas.

"The last board outlived its life," said UT athletics spokesman Nick Voinis. "Now look what we've got."

The board is so large it took some major adjustments just to get it in place.

For starters, the university had to upgrade its utilities capacity to supply the board with enough juice. Keeping it cool in the Texas heat was another issue.

Whether it's a typical 100-degree Texas afternoon or the heat generated by the board itself, both will damage the board over time. UT officials had to install 40 5-ton air conditioning units.

And for sheer size surprise, the support columns are as large as redwood tree trunks. The heads of the grounding bolts measure about 5 inches across.

"When they first starting building it, I thought it was going to be half the size that it is," said defensive end Tim Crowder. "When they kept adding more and more, I was like `How big is this thing going to be?."'

When workers first started testing the lights and sound system, it created a buzz among the video game generation.

"The guys are talking about trying to hook up an Xbox to play games," Crowder said.

Daktronics spokesman Mark Steinkamp said the Texas scoreboard is the highest resolution screen the company has ever installed. The Godzillatron nickname appears to have originated on Texas fan Internet sites, and Steinkamp said he likes it.

"Maybe we should try to trademark it," he said.

Inspiration for Godzillatron came from a visit to old rival Arkansas in 2004. The Razorbacks had installed a 30-by-107 video board at their stadium, and Texas officials were impressed.

Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds strives to keep the Longhorns at the top of the heap when it comes to facilities -- "We are the Joneses" he likes to say -- and said he's pleased with the latest addition.

"When we got into it, I said 'Let's put one up that will make people in the new north end feel like they're sitting in their living room watching TV,"' Dodds said. "That's about how it will be."

For now, the video board is the largest in the world. UT officials say they're told that within a few months, a slightly larger one in Asia will own that designation.

Even so, in a state where size definitely matters, the Longhorn board will be bigger than a new one going up at Kyle Field at rival Texas A&M. That board measures 53 feet by 73 feet, said Alan Cannon, A&M's associate athletic director for media relations.

Cannon said he's ready for inevitable size comparisons between rivals. The Aggies play Texas in Austin on Nov. 24, when they'll get to see themselves on the big screen.

"Content is all that matters," Cannon said.

Even after his move into Yale’s administration, [Duke president] Brodhead remained so thoroughly the literature professor as to embody the type — shy, prone to a slight stammer, but speaking in long, elegantly formed passages, filled with literary allusion.

...As Brodhead was getting settled [at Duke], Joe Alleva, Duke’s athletic director, rushed in with urgent news: the Los Angeles Lakers had offered Coach K the job of head coach, and Krzyzewski was thinking of leaving Duke.

After forty years in the academy, Brodhead, on his first day in the new job, was facing a crisis wholly foreign to him. But he understood that losing the star coach would be a disastrous beginning, and he took Krzyzewski to dinner and desperately sought common ground. There was no way that any school, even Duke, could compete monetarily with the N.B.A. (the Lakers had reportedly offered Krzyzewski forty million dollars), but Brodhead did have one edge: his status as an academic heavyweight. He told the coach how highly valued he was at Duke, not just for his winning but for his talents as a teacher, and if Krzyzewski stayed he would retain his auxiliary position as a “special assistant” to the president. As the days passed, Brodhead found himself joining the crowds of students chanting “Coach K, please stay!” and helping to fill a human chain forming the letter “K” outside Cameron Indoor Stadium. On July 4th, Krzyzewski made his decision: he would stay. But he waited until the next day to relieve the president of his agonies.

“What you saw there was the lay of the land,” Orin Starn, a Duke professor who specializes in the anthropology of sports, recalls. “The fact is that it’s the basketball coach, Coach K, who’s the most powerful person at Duke, and in Durham, and maybe in North Carolina — much more powerful than the college president himself. So Brodhead —I mean, there was almost this kind of ritual humiliation, this ritual obeisance, or fealty, that was required of him.”



...Orin Starn, the [Duke] sports-anthropology professor ...says [Duke] has become “this place that’s sort of divided against itself. On the one hand, you have this university that wants to be this first-class liberal-arts university, with a cutting-edge university press, these great programs in literature and history and African-American studies, that’s really done some amazing things over the last twenty years, building itself from a kind of regional school mostly for the Southern élite into a really global university with first-class scholarship. But then you have another university. That’s a university of partying and getting drunk, hiring strippers, frats, big-time college athletics.”



...Such a commitment to sports carries a significant price tag: Duke’s annual athletic budget is nearing fifty million dollars. ...Starn says, “If you were starting from scratch at Duke, no one would have imagined an athletics program where the budget is almost fifty million dollars. This huge outlay of expenses and energy and visibility of sports is just clearly out of proportion with what it should be. Yes, athletics has a place in college education, but not this sort of massive space that it’s taking.”

'More doubts have emerged over Marcus Einfeld's academic record, with the San Diego-based Pacific Western University unable to find any record of the former Federal Court judge as a graduate or student.

...More questions now exist over Mr Einfeld's relationship with Pacific Western University. His extensive Who's Who entry says he obtained a PhD from there in 1993.

The doctorate has been pilloried because of Pacific Western's reputation as a "diploma mill" where, for the right price, academic credits are awarded for "life experience" without any study being done.

But the absence of any records linking Mr Einfeld to the university raises the possibility that his Who's Who entry contains false information.

"We've had an extensive search but we can't find any record of Mr Einfeld as either a graduate or a student," Pacific Western president Ronald Detrick said. "We inherited the files and I can't vouch for them being complete. But when we get requests, we generally find the records."

Mr Einfeld also claims to hold a doctorate of laws from Century University in New Mexico. A spokeswoman for the online university would say only that Mr Einfeld had been registered as a student.

In 2004, Pacific Western University was named in Congress as one the worst "diploma mills" in the US.'

Eleven universities, including the University of Toronto, say they will no longer participate in the annual Maclean's magazine ranking of them because it is arbitrary and flawed.

David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto, didn't mince words last night when he spoke about the collective decision.

"It's a bit hypocritical for institutions that tend to be focused on intellectual rigour to implicitly support and endorse a rating system that is really junk science," Naylor said.

Concern about the rankings has been building for years, with a number of universities "concurrently reaching a tipping point," he said.

The magazine, he said, has not been transparent and has been unwilling to respond to concerns about the methodology they use.

The 10 other universities are: Dalhousie University, McMaster University, Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge, University of Manitoba, Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa.

In a signed letter sent yesterday to Tony Keller, managing editor of special projects for Maclean's, the universities said their main problem has been how it combines and uses aggregate data across a range of programs to create a single ranking.

They described it as being akin to saying a general hospital is ranked first in obstetrics, tenth in cancer care with an overall ranking of fifth.

"For a patient seeking care in one of these areas, such a measure would be useless at best and misleading at worst," they wrote.

Maclean's magazine, however, remained defiant, saying its popular fall survey of 47 Canadian universities, one of the best-selling issues every year, will continue to be published with or without university co-operation.

Keller said a number of universities, not the majority, are uncomfortable with rankings and the magazine will seek other ways to find some of the information that is provided to them. He said it would contain all the information their surveys have previously had.

"Most students don't like to be graded," Keller said. "As long as universities are grading students, we'll be grading universities."

He said students are hungry for information about what will be one of their biggest investments. And while their survey may not be perfect, there's no denying it's useful, he said.

Keller said that while the magazine provides overall rankings, it also displays detailed variable data that can be of specific interest to students.

Indira Samarasekera, president of the University of Alberta, said she couldn't see how the magazine could provide data accurately without co-operation from universities.

"For example, they want average entry grades for all 6,000 students (attending the university this fall)," she said. "There's no way Maclean's can calculate that. ... They won't even come close."

Yesterday's letter follows an earlier letter sent to Maclean's by four universities that boycotted its University Student Issue in April, refusing to participate in a graduate survey.

The writer cannot afford to question his own essential nature; must have, as Marianne Moore says, 'the courage of his peculiarities.' But often it is this very nature, these very peculiarities - originality always seems peculiarity, to begin with - that critics condemn. There must be about the writer a certain spontaneity or naivete or somnambulistic rightness: he must, in some sense, move unquestioning in the midst of his world - at his question all will disappear.

'Underlying the hysteria is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that's plausible—and mostly wrong. "We haven't found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters," says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co- author of "How College Affects Students," an 827-page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don't systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don't. On two measures—professors' feedback and the number of essay exams—selective schools do slightly worse.

By some studies, selective schools do enhance their graduates' lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2 percent to 4 percent for every 100-point increase in a school's average SAT scores. But even this advantage is probably a statistical fluke. A well-known study by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale of Mathematica Policy Research examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.

...[Researchers] studied admissions to one top Ph.D. program. High scores on the Graduate Record Exam helped explain who got in; Ivy League degrees didn't.... One study of students 20 years out found that, other things being equal, graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissatisfaction. They may have been so conditioned to being on top that anything less disappoints.'

At the age of 17, Mr. Capote wangled a job at The New Yorker. "Not a very grand job, for all it really involved was sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers," he wrote years later. "Still, I was fortunate to have it, especially since I was determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom. I felt that either one was or wasn't a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case."

In 1963, the critic Mark Schorer wrote of Mr. Capote: "Perhaps the single constant in his prose is style, and the emphasis he himself places upon the importance of style."

...[A]n examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution [in the Duke University rape case] in the four months after the accusation yields a[n]... ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

...[I]n addition to the nurse’s oral description of injuries consistent with the allegation, Sergeant Gottlieb writes that the accuser appeared to be in extreme pain when he interviewed her two and a half days after the incident, and that signs of bruises emerged then as well.

...[The accuser] gave largely consistent accounts of being raped by three men in a bathroom.

...[In] Sergeant Gottlieb’s version of [a] conversation [about her attackers], her descriptions closely correspond to the defendants.

...[T]o read the files, with their graphically twined accusations of sexual violence and racial taunts, is to understand better why this case has radiated so powerfully from the edgily cohabited Southern world of Duke and Durham.

Blogs help police and expose false studies with which interest groups and partisans may attempt to counter the empirical work that undermines the factual bases of their positions. Academic experts regularly write for blogs and, unlike reporters, are well suited to subject empirical work to searching scrutiny. Recently, for instance, a group of prominent legal scholars has begun a blog wholly devoted to law and empiricism. Such developments will also force empiricists to be more careful and transparent about the discretionary decisions they make, such as their choices of time periods to include in their investigations, because their colleagues will be able to call them to account for misjudgment or bias more easily.


...Another policy imperative for advancing empiricism is to sustain the free flow of information that conveys research in useable form to the public. It goes without saying that any regulation of the blogs should be rejected. Unfortunately, some are already suggesting that blog postings should be considered in some circumstances a contribution to candidates and subject to regulation under the McCain-Feingold act. But it is precisely near elections that those with empirical data and expertise are most needed to critique the policies and platforms of candidates.

...[I]f a goodly number of top college athletes are going to go through the motions simply for the sake of maintaining their eligibility, why not put an end to the sleazy charade and give them the option of declaring their chosen sport as their major? Let them concentrate all of their time and energy on training, studying the playbook, practicing, traveling, playing and learning from their coaches with an eye toward a pro career.


...I just fail to see the value of forcing an academically disinterested athlete to take a full course load, especially when his school has more interest in his performance on the field. [The writer means "uninterested," not "disinterested."]

...This will remove the considerable pressure on professors to award inflated grades to superstars who sit at the back of the room picking their teeth, tossing paper planes or ogling babes, if they even bother to show up at all. It will also put a lot of term-paper ghostwriters and test-takers out of business, but so be it.

'Opinions
Our Take
Majority opinions of The Red & Black’s editorial board

The Rum & Black

More than a dozen University students were arrested on alcohol-related charges this past weekend. Will the student partiers’ punishment be to pick up trash after tailgaters, or will they merely continue partying downtown?

Almost all students who have ever lived on campus know just how easy it is to keep alcohol in their dorm room. Most Resident Advisers just look the other way from clinking backpacks and strangely cylindrical cargo pockets.

On football Saturdays, campus turns into one giant alcohol-soaked party. Good luck finding even one person not drinking.

What message is President Adams sending to the University by hardly doing anything to curb behavior on those select weekends?

If he thinks simply restricting tailgating to start at only — gasp — 7 a.m. on gamedays will help, he’s wrong.

University administrators are too hesitant to place behavior restrictions on football Saturdays because those partying donate thousands of dollars to the school.

The Red & Black [U Ga's student newspaper] covering alcohol consumption is not making the problem of a bad party culture on campus worse. It’s just an indication there is a problem.

The administration insults its students’ moral consciousness when it says The Red & Black stories about beer-drinking games encourage students to drink irresponsibly.

University students are adults who have the mental faculties to discern what’s right and wrong. After all, it’s the same students who were accepted to the University based on their grades and standardized test scores.

Thank you for boosting our self confidence, but we don’t control the entire 34,000-student campus.'

'A maths genius who won fame last week for apparently spurning a million-dollar prize is living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her £30-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed since December.


The Sunday Telegraph tracked down the eccentric recluse who stunned the maths world when he solved a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré Conjecture.

Grigory "Grisha" Perelman's predicament stems from an acrimonious split with a leading Russian mathematical institute, the Steklov, in 2003. When the Institute in St Petersburg failed to re-elect him as a member, Dr Perelman, 40, was left feeling an "absolutely ungifted and untalented person", said a friend. He had a crisis of confidence and cut himself off.

Other friends say he cannot afford to travel to this week's International Mathematical Union's congress in Madrid, where his peers want him to receive the maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and that he is too modest to ask anyone to underwrite his trip.

Interviewed in St Petersburg last week, Dr Perelman insisted that he was unworthy of all the attention, and was uninterested in his windfall. "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest," he said. "I am not saying that because I value my privacy, or that I am doing anything I want to hide. There are no top-secret projects going on here. I just believe the public has no interest in me."

He continued: "I know that self-promotion happens a lot and if people want to do that, good luck to them, but I do not regard it as a positive thing. I realised this a long time ago and nobody is going to change my mind. Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste. As far as I am concerned, I can't offer anything for their readers.

"I don't base that on any negative experiences with the press, although they have been making up nonsense about my father being a famous physicist. It's just plain and simply that I don't care what anybody writes about me at all."

Dr Perelman has some small savings from his time as a lecturer, but is apparently reluctant to supplement them with the $1 million (£531,000) offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for solving one of the world's seven "Millennium Problems."

The Poincaré Conjecture was first posed by the French mathematician, Jules Henri Poincaré, in 1904, and seeks to understand the shape of the universe by linking shapes, spaces and surfaces.

Friends say that evidence of Dr Perelman's innate modesty came when - having finally solved the problem after more than 10 years' work - he simply posted his conclusion on the internet, rather than publishing his explanation in a recognised journal. "If anybody is interested in my way of solving the problem, it's all there - let them go and read about it," said Dr Perelman. "I have published all my calculations. This is what I can offer the public."

Friends were not surprised to learn that he was living with his mother. The Jewish family - he has a younger sister, Elena, also a mathematician - was always close. One friend, Sergey Rukshin, head of St Petersburg Mathematical Centre for Gifted Students, gave Dr Perelman his first break as a teenager.

At 16, he won a gold medal at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, with a perfect score of 42. He was also a talented violinist and played table tennis. It was after gaining his PhD from St Petersburg State University that Dr Perelman first worked at the Steklov Institute, part of the Russian Academy of Science. Later, he worked in America before returning to the Steklov in 1996. Its rejection of him, three years ago, devastated Dr Perelman, said Mr Rukshin.

Although the two old friends still discuss life, music and literature, they no longer talk about maths. "It has become a painful topic for the doctor," said Mr Rukshin.'

'It has happened to us all. You are sitting in a PowerPoint presentation trying - and probably failing - not to yawn as slide after slide flashes across the screen.

You may blame your boredom on the speaker, but Edward Tufte has another explanation. Microsoft PowerPoint, he believes, is a badly designed medium for communicating the information people need to make informed decisions. That is why it is so dull.



...Whether or not you agree with him, Tufte cannot be dismissed as a crank who has endured one too many PowerPoint presentations. He is professor emeritus at Yale University, where he taught statistical evidence, analytical design and political economy, and the author of a series of influential books on the history of information design. The latest addition to the series, "Beautiful Evidence," is the product of nine years of research and writing in which Tufte applies many of his ideas about good - and bad - information design to the presentation of evidence, which he defines as "information used to explain something accurately."



...Tufte is an eccentric figure, who founded his own publishing house, Graphics Press, in the leafy Connecticut town of Cheshire, where he lives, rather than conform to the conventions of the publishing industry. The cover of "Beautiful Evidence" features photographs of his golden retriever, Max, diving, even though they are not discussed in the book. He has his critics; notably the digital design lobby, which has accused Tufte of being overcritical of computer-based design, although he doesn't seem to be any less scathing about shoddy design in print.

Entertaining as Tufte's tirades can be, the charm of his books is in his skill at identifying inspiring examples of good design, often in the least likely places. He is as excited by an intelligently designed railway timetable or police instruction manual as by an exquisite 16th-century Albrecht Dürer engraving. "Beautiful Evidence" is crammed with his discoveries.


...Tufte's own contribution to evidence design is the sparkline, a combination of words and graphs that illustrates complex changes over time. In "Beautiful Evidence" he contrasts the clarity of the sparkline, and his other exemplars, with poor evidence design.

One of his targets is Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the chart he drew to illustrate the development of Cubism and Abstraction with arrows indicating the influence of one artistic movement on another, such as constructivism on the Bauhaus. Tufte suggests that by adding double-headed arrows, Barr could have presented a fuller picture that would have allowed for the interchange of ideas.

But his prime target is Microsoft PowerPoint, the subject of an entire chapter titled "Pitching Out Corrupts Within." He rails against what he calls PP Phluff, the frames and logos that tend to clutter PowerPoint slides. But rather than simply attacking PowerPoint, Tufte has analyzed its shortcomings. The crux of his argument is that a PowerPoint slide is so much lower in resolution than paper or the computer screen that too little information can be included. An average PowerPoint slide contains 40 words, whereas people typically read 300 to 1,000 words a minute. No wonder we are bored.

Tufte reckons that the bottom 10 percent of speakers probably benefit from using PowerPoint because it at least "forces them to have points," and that the top 10 percent are able to overcome its limitations. As for the remaining 80 percent, he suggests that these speakers print their thoughts on paper handouts instead.'

'BLACKSBURG, Va. Authorities in Blacksburg, Virginia, say a sheriff's deputy has died from gunshot wounds he suffered today while searching for an escaped jail inmate.

The suspect in the shooting is William Morva, who's accused of killing another man -- a hospital security guard -- when he escaped county custody yesterday.

The campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg has been shut down today, and everyone has been told to stay inside because of the search. Authorities say Morva has reportedly been seen on the campus.


The first day of classes was canceled for the school's more-than 25-thousand students. The head of the campus police says people are being asked to stay in dorms and in academic areas.'