The sharp eye and the perfect title are all yours, RJO.
UD thanks you.
Herpes, HIV, rabies and influenza are a few of the diseases scientists at a laboratory in Fairbanks pin down by examining tens of thousands of specimens each year.
The work of the Alaska State Public Health Virology Laboratory helps the state track the spread of diseases, including the H1N1 influenza virus, also known as swine flu.
This year, the laboratory received new digs and new equipment. The $32 million facility has been in use for months but is being formally dedicated today.
It’s the most modern laboratory in Alaska, lab manager Terry Schmidt said.
And the timing of the new building couldn’t be better. The World Health Organization last week declared H1N1 influenza the first global epidemic in 41 years.
The building is on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus behind the Museum of the North. At 29,000 square feet, it is about twice the size of the old laboratory, Schmidt said.
… Virus-inspired metal art hangs in a hallway, and a sculpture has been commissioned.
… bloomed today. You can watch it.
This is better.
This University of Connecticut video is informative.
… but one takes one’s commemorations where one finds them.
[Come to] the 10th anniversary of the Agee Crash Bash Monday at the Clinton Highway bar that sits almost astride the very spot where James Agee’s father had his legendary fatal accident. [This crash inspired] the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiographical novel, “A Death in the Family.” … [W]e usually have readings and … local music stars to serenade us. The mythic “Cotter Pin of Destiny” will once again change hands for a year’s keeping by some thus blessed individual. It is currently in the hands of an actual second cousin of James Agee. This being the centennial of Agee’s birth lends some additional psychic heft to the event, don’t you think?
This is where we’ll be — the Checker Flag Sports Bar, 7428 Clinton Hwy, 947-8667. The bar is in a shabby little commercial strip in the southeast quadrant of the intersection of Clinton Highway and Emory Road in Powell.
Like the wife of Maryland’s governor many years ago, Easley will not be moved.
Bootsie wouldn’t leave the governor’s mansion, while Mary won’t leave her amazingly lucrative patronage job at North Carolina State University.
Is UD the only person who recalls Bootsie?
Bootsie Mandel, perhaps not everyone remembers, was the aggrieved First Lady of Maryland who, in 1973, refused to vacate the governor’s mansion when the governor (I remember her name but not his) [Marvin] declared he was maritally moving on. Needless to say, the standoff was a jolly media occasion, which ruined the forgotten governor’s career.
While Bootsie said many memorable things (“I don’t know what everyone’s talking about. The governor left my bed this morning.“), Mary’s kept absolutely silent as everybody screams at her to haul ass.
Leaders in the state’s university system moved publicly Monday to force the resignation of Mary Easley, the former first lady criticized over a $170,000-per-year position she holds at N.C. State University.
The chairwoman of the UNC Board of Governors, the president of the UNC system and the chancellor at N.C. State University all said Easley should give up her job.
While [Ezra] Merkin faces an intense legal onslaught, he also must cope with a thorny situation at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, where he serves as president and where his father was a co-founder. According to The Jewish Week, Mr. Merkin is slated to become chairman [Replacing Ira Rennert! Way non-stringent admissions criteria.] on Wednesday.
Although the title is largely ceremonial in most congregations, the promotion has infuriated at least some members, with one calling it “the height of chutzpah” for Mr. Merkin to stick around.
… is a man of the cloth. Or speaking for the cloth.
Peter Jennings, the press secretary to Archbishop Vincent Nichols, has apologised after he stunned guests by verbally abusing a 22-year-old student during the dessert course [at a university dinner], repeatedly calling him “a —-“.
He is also alleged to have called Matthew Tye, who is half-Vietnamese, “a peasant”.
The timing of the outburst threatens to embarrass Archbishop Nichols, who will be installed as the Archbishop of Westminster on Thursday. It also comes only one month after Mr Jennings called a Telegraph reporter “a total —-” for writing a story about letters sent by two English bishops complaining that Father Nichols would be a divisive choice for the job.
… The press officer has already been dismissed as a spokesman for the campaign for the beatification of Cardinal Newman, the 19th century Anglican cleric who converted to Catholicism.
The altercation unfolded at the college of Blackfriars during an event organised by the Aquinas Institute, a religious institution. Among the distinguished clergy to overhear the tirade was the British Ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, who gave a lecture on ‘faith and foreign policy’.
Mr Tye is a student previously known to Mr Jennings through a work placement with the Birmingham Oratory. In his letter to Archbishop Nichols, Mr Tye claimed he was called “a —-” by Mr Jennings more than twenty times as well as “a worthless piece of —-” and “a low-life peasant”.
Mr Jennings yesterday said he “deeply regretted the incident and any embarrassment caused” but said Mr Tye’s account was an exaggeration. “I may have called him a —- once or twice, I don’t recollect how many times…”
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Jennings’ proposed Newman campaign slogan:
Only a total shit wouldn’t think he’s a saint.
Academics at Oxford University have banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library – because of health and safety fears.
The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their “original historic location”.
Students travel to libraries as far away as London to view other copies.
… Books on the top shelves include tomes about art history and poetry.
… Laurence Benson, the library’s director of administration and finance, said: “The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location – where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the health and safety office.”
… magician??
Just who is David Lounsbury, international man of mystery?
… reveal the place to be just … a little different.
It’s being sued in federal court, but wants the suit thrown out since Clemson’s got sovereign immunity as an arm of the state.
Let’s listen in as the lawyers have themselves a little parley.
Clemson attorney Tom Bright cited a dozen ways Clemson is an arm of the state, including Clemson money being held by the state and Clemson’s budget being approved by the state Legislature.
“The state controls all manner of activities for Clemson,” Bright said.
Collins countered that Clemson officials for years have claimed it is a municipality with its own magistrate’s court and fire department.
Collins likened Clemson to Humpty Dumpty saying, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean, no more or less.”
He said Clemson wants to tell people it is a municipality but then say in court it isn’t.
Moreover, said Collins, seven of Clemson’s trustees are appointed for life, and the state constitution prohibits life appointments to state positions.
“If Clemson University is an arm of the state, all the life trustees are disqualified,” Collins said.
Under Clemson’s unusual charter, seven of its 13 trustees are appointed for life and choose their successors.
Clemson’s Bright said even though some trustees are called life trustees, “it doesn’t make them trustees for life.”…
Removing a Clemson Life Trustee can be done, but it’s tricky.
A Life Trustee may only be removed by action of the other Life Trustees. In the event four Life Trustees believe that another Life Trustee has failed to properly perform the duties required of all Trustees, the four shall present their concerns to the Life Trustee with the longest continuing service (“Senior Life Trustee”), exclusive of the Life Trustee whose actions are in question. In the event two or more Life Trustees have equal years of service, the Senior Life Trustee shall be deemed the Life Trustee whose last name appears first in alphabetical order. The Senior Life Trustee shall convene a meeting of the Life Trustees to hear the allegations and to render a decision. The Life Trustee whose failure has been alleged shall have the right to be notified seven days in advance of the meeting and shall have the right to present evidence in his or her own defense. The Senior Life Trustee shall establish procedural guidelines for the meeting, but in no event shall any attorney be permitted to attend the meeting for the purpose of representing any party involved. Once all evidence has been presented, the Life Trustee in question will leave the meeting and the remaining Life Trustees will deliberate and vote by secret ballot. In the event five Life Trustees vote to remove the Life Trustee, then his or her service on the Clemson University Board of Trustees shall be terminated. An action to remove a Life Trustee shall be effective immediately, unless otherwise specified at the time the action is taken.
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Update: Some more information:
Unlike situations at many other state public universities, Clemson’s inner workings have rarely undergone scrutiny. The state’s watchdog agency, the Legislative Audit Council, has investigated finances at other top state education institutions but never looked into Clemson’s financial practices, according to its Web site.
Unlike leaders at other colleges and universities, a majority – seven – of Clemson’s trustees are called life members and are self-appointed. They are not subject to direct oversight by the governor or legislature. The legislature chooses only six trustees.
At the state’s 12 other four-year colleges and universities, the trustees are picked mostly by the legislature. Clemson’s life trustees were a requirement set out in the will of Thomas Green Clemson, who died in 1888, leaving most of his estate to found the school.
Not that politician-appointed boards are a pretty thing! Look at Southern Illinois University, for god’s sake. But this here arrangement’s mighty weird for an arm of the state.
The Charleston School of Law in South Carolina held a party at which people misbehaved. That much seems clear.
The location was an aquarium. Preliminary reports indicate that a few of the pissed pissed in the otter tank.
Other, more lurid, behaviors are rumored. A spokeperson for the student body sent out to the school the following badly written email about it all:
I am going to take a minute to address the situation that has occurred today. It is regrettable that there is a situation that has occurred where someone decided to tell a news outlet about unsubstantiated rumors of what occurred at our Barrister’s Ball. I can say that these statements were rumors and that no one from the legislative community was assaulted nor was there a physical altercation of any sort between a legislator and a student. I urge anyone who says otherwise to come forward with details of such conduct. Additionally, there were no sexual relations between people at the Barrister’s Ball even though many of us heard something to the contrary. Both of these rumors were dealt with in a meeting with security for the event that occurred the Monday after the event. I can state with one hundred percent certainty that what you have read on the Internet is not true.
I can also tell you that action was taken immediately after the event between the parties involved, the administration and myself. These actions have however not been made public to the students based on the fact that we did not want to post until everything was finalized. An investigation was conducted and punishment has been considered by the administration. The SBA was planning on releasing today as part of the agenda that at our meeting this week we plan to address this situation. I urge each and every one of the students who care about this situation to attend. At the meeting we will be having a public apology by each of the individuals involved, as well as a release of the details concerning punishment…
Huh? Work your way through the thicket of words here to discover that the writer both alleges nothing happened and talks darkly of punishments and apologies. Otter tank pissing, UD gathers, did incontrovertibly take place, but you wouldn’t know it from this Kafkaesque missive, with its four uses of the word occurred and four uses of the word situation. The writer’s paragraphs contain an otter-tank full of problems — passive voice, vagueness, euphemism, redundancy…
UD doesn’t have her heart set either way on, er, sexual relations between people having taken place in aquarium toilet stalls. She merely reminds you that drunkards getting excited and doing each other in the loo is otterly routine.
Oregon Health and Science University issued a warning Friday evening after five monkeys escaped from its Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton.
One of those monkeys was captured around 8:00 p.m.
Jim Newman with OHSU said the group of males escaped while their cages were being cleaned around 1:00 p.m.
Newman said animal handlers had been tracking the Japanese Macaques on the Primate Research Center’s campus around SW 185th and Walker. The university decided to alert the public after the animals left the grounds of the campus and were spotted near the MAX line.
Newman said the monkeys are all about 20-35 pounds and were used as breeding animals to expand the primate population at the center.
Staff are using cages with food inside in the hopes of luring the animals inside.
According to Newman, “It is believed that the animals pose little to no threat to humans because they retreat when they are approached. However an animal that feels threatened could bite.”
The University also said the escaped monkeys haven’t been tested to see if they carry diseases that are low risk to primates but higher risk to humans.
Former UC Irvine Professor Ronald A. Sherman is making new headlines using an old technique: maggot therapy. Although the practice of maggot treatment dates back many centuries, recent scientific studies generated by Sherman have spawned a renewed interest in the procedure.
Maggots are selective eaters, so they will eat dead flesh while leaving the live tissue intact. This makes them excellent wound cleaners because they are able to remove dead and infected skin on open sores without slowing the growth of new skin.
A recent study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) compared maggot therapy to other mainstream treatments. The research team followed the progress of 270 leg ulcer patients and found that the maggots were actually able to clean out the dead skin faster than traditional ulcer therapy. However, they did not decrease the overall rate of recovery, and they seemed to be more painful.
“In people with leg ulcers, we didn’t find that larval therapy increased healing rates,” said Nicky Cullum of the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York. “It cleans it more quickly, but it didn’t heal it more quickly. It comes down to the aim of treatment. If for some reason rapid debridement is important, then you would choose larval therapy — for example if someone was having a skin graft.”
… Although some are disgusted by the idea of live maggots being placed on them, patients seem to be surprisingly receptive.
“One thing we did find is that patients were not put off … The patients were very enthusiastic,” said Pam Mitchell of BTER.