At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40, he tweeted again: “It also counter­balances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . .” At 5.41: “. . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . .” At 5.44: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”

Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?’

… [O]n 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. “No, no, no,” he was told. “This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name.” …

Plus there’s about four inches of it on the ground.

But George Washington University’s open, so UD‘s currently attempting to get to campus in order to teach her class on James Joyce.

Later.

At the University of Alabama.

A university registrar who offered forged degrees to two women in return for spanking sessions has been given a suspended jail sentence.

Bristol Crown Court heard that Karl Woodgett filmed himself caning the women at a Bristol hotel.

The 37-year-old, of Ewell Minnis, Kent, worked at the University of Bath at the time of the offences.

He was given a nine-month sentence suspended for a year after admitting conspiracy to make fake degrees…

Via Andrew Sullivan’s site.

… papers.

A resident physician at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital apologized to faculty members over the weekend for posting a photograph of a former classmate giving two thumbs up next to a cadaver as state health officials said they would be looking into the matter.

In three separate e-mails, Erica Katz, who works in the emergency medicine unit at Stony Brook University Medical Center, told faculty members that posting the photo on her Facebook page was a mistake.

… Dean Richard Fine on Monday met with faculty members, who referred the matter to the committee on academic standards. That panel will make recommendations to Fine on what, if any, disciplinary action will be taken against Katz.

… The photo, which features [the classmate] wearing purple gloves and smiling over a cadaver with both of [the classmate’s] thumbs up, was taken during an anatomy class.

… Dr. Todd R. Olson, professor of anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists… [asked:] “Don’t you think … one has every reasonable expectation that you’re not going to show up with somebody holding two thumbs up over Uncle Dick on Facebook?” …

… but very much worth making.

… If you stay in an American hotel, you are more or less guaranteed not to be able to get a good cup of tea. I know that this is a major accusation to make against a whole culture, but it is, regrettably, quite true. Certainly you will find tea (in the form of tea bags) in your room, but how do you make it? The answer is that they expect you to make it in the coffee maker.

Now the problem with that is that if there are two flavours in this world that cannot – in any circumstances – be combined, it is tea and coffee. To make tea in a container that has been tainted with coffee is to ensure that the resultant tea is undrinkable. The flavour of coffee lingers in a vessel long after the last cup was brewed, and it is impossible to use that vessel for tea-making no matter how much it is washed. Try it. Put coffee in a vacuum flask and then, after washing it out thoroughly, try to use it for tea…

Alexander McCall, the novelist, says very clearly and forcefully something I’ve felt in a vague and submerged way for years… Something I’ve tried to explain to Mr UD as we enter hotel rooms and he points out to me, among other wonderful and elegant features, bags of good tea and a coffee maker. How can I explain that, as McCall says, tea brewed in such tainted circumstances is not merely undrinkable, but unthinkable?

Tea, for me, is one of the great subjects. It is a romantic trade, it does not pollute excessively, it has all sorts of health benefits, it calms and wakes you up at the same time. It promotes conversation.

UD‘s poetry and prose in praise of tea can be found here.

McCall with his tea and his cat.

A medical faculty is a dicey thing. Among this cohort of professors at your university, you’ve always got lurking a few ghosted writers, courtesy authors, research fakers, plagiarists, etc.

But your biggest problem these days, what with the money to be made from selling drugs for pharmaceutical companies, comes from corporate shills using their university affiliation to look respectable.

Take Leslie Baumann, pride of the University of Miami. Leslie’s in trouble with the FDA.

… [T]he Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on one of the most widely quoted cosmetic doctors, sending shudders through the ranks of opinion leaders in fashion publishing and vanity medicine.

The F.D.A. recently sent a warning letter to Dr. Leslie Baumann, a well-known dermatologist and clinical researcher in Miami Beach, citing the doctor for expressing premature enthusiasm in the media about Dysport, an injectable antiwrinkle drug the agency had not yet approved.

Dr. Baumann’s comments in the media in 2007 violated restrictions on drug promotion, according to the letter; the agency asked Dr. Baumann to explain how she intended to prevent similar violations in the future.

Under the Obama administration, the F.D.A. has stepped up scrutiny of drug advertising, dispatching many warning letters about misleading commercials and online marketing efforts. But this is believed to be the first time the agency has warned an individual investigator — a medical researcher who oversees a clinical trial — for apparently promoting an unapproved drug.

… Federal rules bar drug makers and investigators on their clinical trials from promoting a drug before the agency has approved the product. Dr. Baumann violated the restrictions, the F.D.A. letter said, because she was an investigator on a clinical trial for Dysport and promoted it well before the drug’s approval in April.

“Early data shows it may last longer and kick in faster than Botox,” Dr. Baumann told the fashion magazine Allure in 2007. She made similar comments that same year to Elle magazine and during an appearance on the “Today” show on NBC in January 2009.

… Dr. Baumann, a former professor of dermatology at the University of Miami medical school …

Former? Why is she still listed as a faculty member? And don’t you think she should update her Amazon.com bibliography?

I remember sitting in the back of Physics 1301 and 1302 and seeing multiple people watching whole movies in class which was pretty distracting.

A University of Minnesota student waxes nostalgic while commenting on “Laptop Dystopia,” an opinion piece in the campus newspaper.

The piece just came out. UD expects other commenters will join this one to add their own memories… But it’s not just the sweetness of old college days filled with watching other people’s movies that UD wants to evoke; it’s the phenomenology, if you will, of the wired classroom theater.

The closer we can get to the way it actually looks and feels in real time to have twenty screens pressing up against you on which endless random images jigger for fifty minutes, the better.

We need to understand the laptop in the classroom — not as an abstraction, as in Everyone knows that personal computers facilitate learning! but as a physical, intellectual, emotional reality.

The opinion piece is particularly good on the emotional part.

[I]t’s time to stop lying to ourselves. If all you’re doing is taking notes, by all means, carry on. But if you’re spending precious class time playing solitaire or checking Facebook, I’m losing my patience. And I’m not the only one.

In talking to students on campus about the issue of laptop misuse in class, I uncovered the root of the problem. “I check my Facebook during class, but I’m only hurting myself. If you choose to stare at my computer screen, that’s your problem,” said a sophomore. When those words rolled off her tongue, I had an epiphany. Classroom Internet surfers aren’t trying to bother anyone; they just think they’re invisible — or, rather, that they have every right to do as they please.

… [S]tudents aren’t always comfortable exercising what looks like control over their peers, and I don’t blame them. Though I’ve been an “adult” for quite some time, I’d rather people feel good about me while I sit and grimace internally than fight for my right to a clear visual field. Sad but true.

Come to the University of Minnesota and fight for your right to a clear visual field!

Good come-on for high school seniors.

The writer is describing that social reality, that thing, you sometimes see on subway cars and places like that … A person is behaving badly, annoying and maybe even alarming fellow passengers, but no one intervenes… Everyone sits there like sheep, trapped, and there’s no…

There’s no professor! There’s no one in the car leading passengers in some communal activity… Everyone’s scrunched down in their seat doing their thing – iPod, cellphone, Bible, laptop – and the conductor is some invisible presence way up there in car #1…

“Elementary school kids are better at policing themselves than we are,” said a student who works as a school bus driver. “All I have to do is look in the rear-view mirror and they tell each other to sit down and shut up. We, as adults, are afraid to question each other’s values.” She’s absolutely right, but we have to move past this. Our education is wildly expensive, and admissions are increasingly competitive. If we don’t speak up, the alternative is craning our necks in a front row seat or spending 75 minutes battling a dwindling faith in humanity.

“I’m the first one in my family to go to college, and I take it very seriously,” said a senior. “When I see someone surfing the Internet in class I get angry, like this opportunity means nothing to them.” Even if it were feasible to tune out the flashing light of scrolling screens, the sheer effort necessary to ignore such distractions breeds bitterness that detracts from the learning process. Other consequences can be purely subliminal.

“Extracurricular Web surfing sends a signal to everyone else in class that whatever is going on is unimportant and not worth attending to. Even subconsciously, this can influence others to zone out and become disengaged,” said Ben Denkinger, an instructor in the psychology department. Boredom is a demon that lurks in even the most fascinating lectures, but that’s no excuse to wage war on your classmates’ peripheral vision or to slowly erode your mental capabilities.

Right, so it’s more like a bus, where we can see the driver. Only now that we’re not children anymore, a strange ethos prevails in which some passengers ignore the driver in contemptuous and socially destructive ways, while other passengers, grimacing internally, afraid to question the others’ values, do a slow bitter burn and struggle with a dwindling faith in humanity.

What a triumph for the professor. I try to ensure that my students seethe with rage and lose their faith in humanity while I teach.

A few weeks ago, at a town dinner honoring Garrett Park‘s archivist, UD chatted with her friend Peter Benjamin about the Metro.

She mentioned the Metro to Peter because she vaguely recalled he had some position there, and because there’d just been some bad train accidents.

As she began talking about the system, she saw Peter assume the brace-for-impact position. He clearly expected — clearly often heard — angry complaints. But UD only wanted to say that despite its difficulties she loved the Metro system; that she was grateful, year after year, to live in a city with clean, well-lit, reasonably reliable public transportation.

Peter’s shoulders relaxed as she spoke; he looked astonished, elated.

That vague position of his in the Metro system has been clarified: He’s just been appointed chair of the board.

Peter Benjamin, a veteran engineer with 20 years of experience in senior positions at Metro, took the helm of the agency’s board of directors Thursday, stepping into a critical role as the agency faces the biggest budget and leadership challenges in its history.

… Over the course of 20 years, Benjamin, 67, a technocrat known for his grasp of the complexities of running Metro, served as the agency’s chief financial officer, director of planning and senior financial adviser.

Before that, he worked on technology development and program analysis for a decade at the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, now the Federal Transit Administration. In the early 1970s, he headed the DOT’s Urban Analysis Group. He served as mayor of Garrett Park from 1996-2000 and 2002-04…

That last bit’s the most important, of course, packing the most prestige…

*********************

Garrett Park’s scary tree canopy also made the Washington Post:

Being at work Dec. 29 was a good thing for Darren Welch and his wife, Joanna, because it meant a tree that had crashed onto their Garrett Park deck and tore down an electrical line that day hadn’t also crushed their cars.

“The deck was essentially destroyed,” said Darren Welch, whose house is on Kenilworth Avenue.

The tree caused power outages to 116 homes and damaged a gas meter, causing it to leak, according to Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service. A few Kenilworth Avenue homes were evacuated as a precaution. The tree, a mighty Northern red oak with sound wood, probably had no obvious signs of what the town arborist thinks was the cause of its downfall: root rot.

“For a tree to blow down without leaves on it like that — first of all, it was old, but it probably had root damage from construction or something that may have happened years ago,” said Phil Normandy, a Kensington horticulturist who consults with Garrett Park about the health of trees on town property.

A tree such as Welch’s, which was not in Normandy’s official purview, can thrive even though it has a weak root system, delivering nutrients without stability, Normandy said.

If that diagnosis is not a comfort to residents living under the shade of Garrett Park’s arboretum — a title that since 1977 has spurred Garrett Park to plant more than 400 trees and shrubs for beautification and education — perhaps this will be: Normandy, a tree specialist who has worked for 30 years at Brookside Gardens, checks the town’s trees once or twice a year for evidence of poor health. Trees he deems unstable are put on a removal list; rogues that might become dangerous are put on a watch list and get more regular checkups…

One tree that will be removed this year, a big willow oak on Montrose Road, had many residents concerned because it has a large cavity. Normandy poked around in the hole, “much in the way a dentist would check a cavity,” but couldn’t determine the health of the tree, which was still outwardly lush.

The town called Bartlett Tree Co., which has technology that can assess the extent of a cavity in a tree, and the decision was made to remove it.

“It still could snap, and it probably would make mincemeat of somebody’s house, so that one will be coming down this winter,” Normandy said…

House, deck, car — Aren’t we missing something here? Trees can make mincemeat of people too, you know…

… and has had to cancel this semester’s classes. 79 years old, Bloom has attempted to teach for the last few semesters, but illness and injury had him canceling most of them as well.

A stubborn old coot who has written angrily about the betrayal of literary values by people who think beauty reactionary, Bloom would have been a great blogger. And no, he doesn’t revile the internet.

If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.

I’ve been reading a lot of Camus today (the fiftieth anniversary of his death happened a few days ago), and what Camus says about discovering literature is very Bloomian. Here’s Camus, reading Jean Grenier’s Les Iles as a very young man:

A garden of incomparable wealth was opening up to me; I had just discovered art. Something, someone was stirring dimly within me, longing to speak. Reading one book, hearing one conversation, can provoke this rebirth in a young person. One sentence stands out from the open book, one word still vibrates in the room, and suddenly, around the right word, the exact note, contradictions resolve themselves and disorder ceases. Already, at the same moment, in response to this perfect language, a timid, clumsier song rises from the darkness of our being.

***************************

Bloom said this in an interview about ten years ago:

I have told the president of Yale, Rick Levin, who is a very splendid man, that I intend to be carried out of my very last Yale class in a large body bag, still talking, many years down the road. I–I will not retire. I don’t think they will wish me to retire. I don’t think they can or will make me retire. Obviously, if my health goes completely at some point and I cannot get myself into the classroom, if my mind goes and I can no longer think and articulate clearly, if I’m not capable of teaching well, then I will stop teaching. But otherwise–otherwise, I would hope to teach until I die. It’s–it’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done for 46 years. And I think I would go mad and feel worse than useless without it.

… Atlantic magazine.

Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance — especially the kind you can measure — is the best predictor of future performance [as a teacher]. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement” — a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising.

Knowledge matters, but not in every case. In studies of high-school math teachers, majoring in the subject seems to predict better results in the classroom. And more generally, people who attended a selective college are more likely to excel as teachers (although graduating from an Ivy League school does not unto itself predict significant gains in a Teach for America classroom). Meanwhile, a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.

UD discovers two higher education chicken stories:

1.) Some sort of fowl eludes captors at Glendale Community College.

2.) A Reed College student cancels a class he’d planned to offer in how to slaughter a chicken.

Action Poetry strikes again.

When [Ruth Padel] was [a poet in residence] at Somerset House, [she] plastered poems — “other people’s, not mine” she stresses — in the loos, the cafés, everywhere, so that passers-by could be “enticed or disturbed, hooked, emotionally drawn in”.