One is Donald Roberts, her brother-in-law. This film features his voice instruction.

Another is a close friend of the family, the artist Paul Laffoley. This film features Paul explaining his work.

… is the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey. Ever since UD opened up shop, UMDNJ has been a little slice of Sicily right here in America.

When it comes to criminal proceedings, UMDNJ has a kind of rolling admissions policy — there’s always something happening. The latest is the indictment of the guy who used to run the physical plant. This guy told a local contractor that he wanted a Cadillac Deville, a deck, a sun room, and a cell phone, and that if the contractor would give these things to him, he would give the contractor millions of dollars in campus construction work.

But this is small potatoes for UMDNJ. Historically, it’s more into big potatoes, like Medicare fraud.

From Newsday:

… I’m not … sure the word obscene is a gross enough word to describe what the University of Kentucky, a taxpayer-funded institution, is offering John Calipari to become its basketball coach. According to several reports, Calipari is mulling over an 8-year, $35 million offer. That contract would make him the highest paid coach in the history of the game, surpassing Florida’s Billy Donovan, who makes $3.5 million a year.

…The state of Kentucky is in so much fiscal trouble that Gov. Steve Beshear declared in December that he planned to take a 10 percent salary cut, dropping his annual pay down to $111,945.

Calipari will make more than that much per game with an annual salary of $4.3 million. What’s more, the University’s board of trustees just approved a five percent tuition hike for undergraduates. I guess they’re going to have to get the money from somewhere, and it’s clear that this is a school and a state with priorities.

Now, I know I am going to get inundated with comments and e-mail talking about just how much money the basketball program brings into the school. My question is this: Just how much of that money goes to the English department, or engineering department or education department? …

From Temple News.

Plagiarism is never tolerated. But for poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it is always on the tip of his tongue.

“You should go steal questions from other interviews,” Goldsmith said. “I’ve got a thousand interviews online. Seriously, take the best one, and put your name on it.”

It’s not the most common advice, especially from a college professor, but in Goldsmith’s class at the University of Pennsylvania, students are directed to transcribe, plagiarize, thieve and appropriate, all in the name of learning to write.

And his works are no different.

“The old type of creativity really isn’t very interesting,” Goldsmith said. “So by being uncreative, you form a new type of creativity.”

“His approach to teaching is completely bizarre and pisses a lot of people off, including his students,” said Nick Salvatore, one of Goldsmith’s former students. “But by the end, everybody is really happy with it.”

… He’s just finished reciting a police interview and singing misunderstood lyrics at Temple University Center City campus as part of the university’s Poets & Writers series. It’s all part of the process he calls “uncreative writing.”

“If you look around at what’s held up as creative, most of the time it really isn’t,” Goldsmith said. “I don’t want to be that. I wasn’t always uncreative. I tried to be creative like everyone else. I failed. But it’s the failures that make things happen.”

And things have certainly happened.

Goldsmith is the author of 10 books of poetry. His most recent work is unofficially titled American Trilogy. It consists of “The Weather, Traffic and Sports,” which are respective transcriptions of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game with the ads included.

Other works include a transcription of every word he spoke over the span of a week, every move he made throughout a 24-hour period and the retyping of every character from an August edition of the New York Times into a 900-page book.

… When he’s not stealing others’ words, Goldsmith works on his other projects. Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb, an online archive of all things avant-garde. He is also the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU-FM and a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.

“Look how easy it is to make a mark in literature,” Goldsmith said. “It’s a pathetic field we’re in.” …

You go, boy.

Oh how this sort of thing makes UD homesick.

Contents of gift bags at a fundraiser for the Washington Humane Society.

A card for $1,000 off a Cartier purchase of $5,000 or more, Shiseido lip gloss, gourmet tea, lotion, Luna bars, a bottle of SmartWater, dog treats, and a slew of gift cards. Guests grabbed pink-and-blue outfits printed with “I shop at Tysons Galleria” for their dogs…

… leadership for stifling free speech.

… [T]he administration informed the ethics committee that if [Senator Grassley’s] aide spoke, no administrator would be allowed to partake in the [conflicts of interest] panel. As students at Tufts, it is crucial for us all to recognize the administration’s misstep. While it is understandable that Tufts wants to avoid any conflict regarding the investigation, it seems unreasonable that the topic could not be avoided for the educational purposes the event could provide.

The symposium is intended to provide the audience with multiple views and stances on the medical issues of today. Mr. Thacker has firsthand knowledge and experience about a subject that would have provided a unique and fresh viewpoint at the conference. His voice differs from the professionals of Harvard or Tufts, allowing for some diversity and debate at the symposium itself.

Possibly most outspoken on the issue is ethics committee co-chair Sheldon Krimsky, who removed himself from the issue and the organization of the event when the decision was passed. We praise Krimsky for standing behind his belief and the purpose of the ethics committee as a whole…

Background here.

… when she lived on Capitol Hill, died too soon.

But before he died, Judge Graae had a chance to do something brave and important.  He had the guts to put the DC housing authority in receivership, and many, many people benefited from this.

The drama at Clemson University, starring a retired French professor, is kind of like that.   John Bednar has obviously decided, at an advanced age, to do something brave and important.   He has very publicly accused the Clemson administration of serious corruption, and he continues to do so.

For this, he has been pilloried by Clemson’s leadership, and by many in the Clemson community.

We should all be so lucky.

John Montague,  Independent.ie:

“The urge to comprehend is so deep. … It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done. Then you try to make a shape out of it, in a poem or a story. Also, it’s a kind of judgement, you sit on yourself — the things that I’ve done that I can’t stand over and can stand over — accepting it all. You’re trying to emulate the divine vision.”

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

Beryl Bainbridge, Guardian:

“I went to a psychiatrist in my thirties. I didn’t realise that you did all the talking and they just sat there, so I got embarrassed and just kept talking and making things up. After about six visits he looked very solemn and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’m emigrating to Canada.’ And I said, ‘Oh, lovely!'”

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.

… Fatiguée, as Nigella Lawson notes, is what the French call greens that have lost their crispness, from sitting around too long, or from too much dressing.

Writing can be wilted in the same ways – from sitting around too long, or from being drizzled with too many words.

The problem of tired writing compounds when your subject is itself superannuated.

Yet most subjects are old.  Not much crisp under the sun.  The point of being a good writer is taking something new to the plate.  Plumping things up so people see some aspect of the world fresh.

Consider, for instance, a seasonal problem.

Everyone knows big time university basketball is a rank enseamèd dish, stew’d in corruption.  Every March sports writers get up on little ladders and scrounge in their pantries for the canned indignation.

But why?  Why do that?  Limp writing makes nothing happen.  It’s mere ritual.  It’s filing a story because you’ve got space to fill by Tuesday.  Jim Calhoun has a job to do, and so do you.

But if you had the scruples whose lack you attack in Calhoun, you wouldn’t inflict this sort of futility on your readers.

… From showcase summer camps, to AAU tournaments, to street agents, to runners from professional agents, this is the landscape schools live in. This is the basketball culture, and for all of the NCAA’s attempts to control it, it always seems to get worse, a cesspool of inherent corruption. To the point where the NCAA recently ruled that a seventh-grader is now regarded as a “recruitable” athlete.

Think about that for a second.

Which is not to say that all schools break the rules.

It is to say, though, that this is the basketball world all schools operate in, to the point where virtually all big-time programs are fragile, a deck of cards that has the potential to crumble at any minute, whether it’s off-campus problems, allegations of recruiting violations, rumors of being carried academically, or other supposed atrocities that highlight the fact that players often are not like the other students on campus, regardless of the hype to try to convince people that there are.

Suffice it to say there are no virgins here.

Let’s scathe through that, shall we?

“From showcase summer camps, to AAU tournaments, to street agents, to runners from professional agents, this is the landscape schools live in. [The list’s okay, though all the tos are a bit awkward. Ending on in is weak; remember that you always want to end your sentence on a strong word.   And keep an eye on that landscape metaphor.] This is the basketball culture, [This is. This is. Repetition can be effective, but in this case it feels weak, in part because the language is so blah. We begin to doubt the writer’s conviction.]  and for all of the NCAA’s attempts to control it, it always seems to get worse, a cesspool of inherent corruption.  [It gets worse because the NCAA doesn’t attempt to control it, so here the writer signals his refusal to take on the heavy labor of actual critique. Things get more tired by the minute.   And a cesspool of inherent corruption tells you everything you need to know about l’écriture fatiguée.  Forget the quick transmutation of a landscape into a cesspool, and think instead about the lazy effort to lend a lifeless salad some life by suddenly spicing it way up.  Cesspool is a big ol’ word, way out there. You want to reserve it for something really big, like your suicide note (“Dear World,” wrote George Sanders, “I am leaving because I am bored.  I feel I have lived long enough.  I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.  Good luck.”), or for a piece of your best writing, in which you demonstrate conviction.]

To the point where the NCAA recently ruled that a seventh-grader is now regarded as a “recruitable” athlete.  [Dump the quotation marks.]

Think about that for a second.

Which is not to say that all schools break the rules.

It is to say, though, that this is the basketball world all schools operate in, [Note the clumsy wordiness, the overuse of the to be verb, the ineffective repetition.]  to the point where virtually all big-time programs are fragile, a deck of cards  [Dead metaphor.]  that has the potential to crumble at any minute, whether it’s off-campus problems, allegations of recruiting violations, rumors of being carried academically, or other supposed atrocities [Tone problem.  What does he mean by calling these things supposed atrocities?  I don’t get it.] that highlight the fact that players often are not like the other students on campus, regardless of the hype to try to convince people that there are.  [There instead of they.  Mistakes will occur when you’re doing automatic writing.]

Suffice it to say there are no virgins here.  [Off we go to another dead metaphor.]”

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

Update:  UD is grateful to James, a reader, for pointing out that both of her fatiguées take an extra e.

No, James.  You are not a pest.

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

Another Update:  This is more like it.  The guy actually cares.

Four New York University freshmen reportedly have dismantled a secret marijuana den called “Narnia” that was entered through a hole in the back of a wardrobe.

By the time it was dismantled last week, hundreds of students allegedly had visited the den, crawling through a large hole carved in the back of a university-issued wardrobe placed to hide a doorway to an alcove, the New York Post reported Sunday.

The 10-by-8-foot alcove on the seventh floor of the Hayden Hall dormitory was decorated with Christmas lights, a set of bongos, a stuffed raven and a poster of Narnia’s Prince Caspian, the Post reported.

Narnia is the kingdom in the C.S. Lewis novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” in which three children enter an enchanted land through an old wardrobe…

… for Nicholas Hughes. It’s at my other blog, at Inside Higher Education.

… What must KU faculty members think about the steady and successful efforts by the sports side of the university to raise millions of dollars while about all the academic side of the university can talk about is cuts in state support and the harmful consequences those cuts have on the university, its students, faculty and the state?

… [Current candidates for chancellor] must wonder about the relationship or level of emphasis and importance at KU between athletics and academics. Who or what runs the institution and what is the indebtedness of the athletic department?….

Lawrence Journal-World

“Emanating Connections” by renowned artist Chakaia Booker was unveiled Thursday in front of New Theater.

Booker explained artwork is never completely alive and finished until everyone has experienced looking at it for themselves.

Her sculpture has finally found a resting spot in the art corridor by New Theater. It has been two years since she was first approached to bring her artwork to Indiana State.

“I visited in the summer so it (the area) was more lush, more organic-ness,” Booker said.

Booker recycles old tires and turns it into art, whether it is a sculpture or wall relief.

“Michelin Tires donated the old tires,” Booker said. “I usually use radial tires, but not for this piece,” Booker said.

A person might see Booker walking along the streets of New York, where she lives, or out at her studio in Pennsylvania looking for useful materials.

“If I see something, I pick it up,” Booker said. “It may be at a gas station for less quantity or along the street.”

The idea for the recycled sculpture has to do with connectiveness, forms and shapes. The sculpture brings to life a reverse motion on a wheel, Booker explained.

Paul Reed, director of ISU Recycling Center, said recycling was about used and abandoned materials and expanding its lifestyle.

Reed also stated the artwork makes us all stop and ponder our own feelings.

Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett also attended the dedication.

“What’s interesting about this community is its diversity,” Bennett said during his address to the large audience. “People feel like there is something unique.”…

… and St. Olaf College won the annual Rube Goldberg Machine contest.

The annual competition aims to bring to life Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s drawings of complicated machines and gadgets that accomplish simple tasks. Using as many whimsical, counterintuitive steps as possible, the machines must complete a task determined each year by contest organizers.

This year’s task was to replace an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient light-emitting design, and the Oles designed a machine that broke a light bulb and replaced it with 150 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that spell out “St. Olaf.” They began working on the machine in September as part of a course taught by Assistant Professor of Physics Jason Engbrecht, and devoted thousands of hours — and almost every weekend this semester — to preparing it for competition.

… Team members built a record player from scratch that, as it spins, allows lasers to fire through pre-drilled holes. The lasers are picked up by light sensors, which trigger several other steps and eventually enable a gate to open and release a ball.

The team also constructed a Gauss rifle, a mechanism that uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a metal ball at a very high speed, and a simple harmonic oscillator, a system that employs simple harmonic motion and magnetic induction to trigger the start of a car moving along a track. They even turned an ice auger into an Archimedes’ screw that caught pool balls and took them from the machine’s lower level to an elevated track…