A Japanese fraudster managed to convince that country’s largest newspaper that he’d injected reprogrammed stem cells into people with diseased hearts and dramatically improved their functioning.
In a poster presented at a meeting of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, [Hisashi] Moriguchi – who claimed to work at Harvard Medical School and the University of Tokyo – described results from a trial in which cardiac muscle cells were grown from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and transplanted into six US patients with severe heart failure.
The embarrassed newspaper has issued an apology.
SO glad to be able to reuse this, one of UD‘s greatest post titles. The original post, from 2010, described Israel’s endless efforts to pry Kafka’s manuscripts out of the hands of Max Brod’s girlfriend’s daughters, who hoarded them or sold bits of them off.
A judge has now ruled that Israel gets them. They will be placed in a special library, and they will be scanned and put online. So we will all be able to read these new Kafka works.
Now that all the legitimate scientists have left the state of Texas’ Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, the state can breathe a sigh of relief. Three billion dollars for funding distribution is a lot of money, and the cronies and profiteers will be able to get at it much more easily. All the powerful people who care more about peer review than money have left in disgust.
Gilman’s resignation [he was chief scientist] followed a decision by the institute’s oversight committee to set aside scientific grant proposals and rush approval of an $18 million commercialization grant led by the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Ah, M.D. Anderson, domain of fuck-conflict-of-interest Ronald Pinho!
Occasionally, as in the recent University of Virginia trustees rebellion, you get a glimpse of what matters most to some of the people entrusted with the integrity of an intellectual institution.
For the chair of the University of South Florida trustees, the win/loss record of the football team is paramount. Minutes after the team’s latest loss, he fired off an email to the president’s chief of staff.
Disgusting and unacceptable.
Imagine the roiling emotions that set going the email now heard ’round the world. Imagine the Boone Pickens-like intensity of this man’s desire. Imagine what he’ll write to Judy Genshaft when the team finally wins one.
Oh Judy Judy Judy! I can hardly catch my breath! We’ll be topping the Shanghai Ranking this year!
As sophomore Ryan Gall of Grosse Point, Mich., said of Ole Miss, “I understand why people fail out. I don’t understand why people transfer. If [coach] Hugh Freeze starts winning more games, this place will become the No. 1 destination of the SEC.”
A Columbia University student, on the laptop in the classroom.
Take, for example, an instance of tweeting while listening to a lecture: It’s tempting to think that we can divide our attention between a professor’s analysis of the Cold War and a clever 140 characters, but it would be more accurate to think of this as a series of micro-episodes, as we alternate brief bursts of attention between the two possible stimuli to which we may attend. Each one is a distraction that impedes our performance on the primary task.
… along various backyard paths I’ve
made, I discovered one of these:
(I found this cleaned-up button here.
Mine is soaking in soap and
warm water.).
It’s a vintage Post Office Department
button, dating anywhere from the late
nineteenth century to 1940.
Here’s one in the Postal Museum.
Since his arrest in Italy, [Mark] Weinberger, [a plastic surgeon found guilty of fraud,] has been locked up at the city’s federal Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he claimed to cook meals for inmates and teach yoga classes, according to the Chicago Tribune. In addition, Weinberger conducted a class on non-violence in which he “personally scripts Socractic dialogues taking place between various historical figures,” the paper reported.
Kaleigh Robins, a 21-year-old [Indiana University] student, said the atmosphere at tailgates has changed — in part because of an increased police presence.
“I’ve never been ID’d before at a tailgate before now,” Robins said.
Students also are banned from playing music at the tailgates, and she said there are no longer any “handles” — half-gallon bottles of liquor that are staples at college parties.
“It’s kind of sad,” she said.
Kristi Tan, a 23-year-old recent IU graduate, agreed.
“It’s like old glory died down…”
The Harry Potter language suggests that the most outrageously scandalous loser among American universities – SUNY Binghamton – got that way due to evil visited upon it by outside forces. But SUNY was the architect of its own doom, having waged a cynical and greedy campaign for Division I glory. Now it gets to enjoy years of pathetic budgets and vile publicity.
The local newspaper grapples with the amazingly violent University of Massachusetts student body.
The dean helps the reporter understand this profoundly complex problem: Why do so many of the young men the school has admitted destroy neighborhoods and physically attack the police? It’s in their nature. Look to the developmental spectrum. It’s all part of the price of doing business for the university. Boys will be boys, and we admit them knowing they can’t help where they are on the spectrum.
We’ve got it all – the article written before the stabbing (one of several fights) at our first basketball event of the season (“We have the best fans in college basketball!”), and the article written after the place was evacuated and the stabbed guy was taken to the hospital (“We were saddened to learn…”).
Students and administration at Syracuse seem to be taking a lot of comfort from the fact that the guy who was stabbed, and the guys in all the other fights (“[The police] received multiple reports of fights breaking out in the concourse areas near the concession stands prior to receiving a report of the stabbing…”), weren’t students, but so what? If your university has created perfect conditions for riots (the event is free and open to the public and being shitfaced is de rigueur), you’re not going to be impervious to the weaponry by virtue of having a student i.d.
*****************
The solution won’t be to change the nature of the event. The event recruits fans who will purchase tickets, and the school needs the money. The solution – a familiar one, adding delight to these free-spirited celebrations – will be to turn the arena into a police state.
… at play.
I wonder what in their admissions essays must have made Berkeley decide to admit them.
I hope, in my legal career, to have an opportunity to torture, behead, and play with the dead bodies of birds.
**************
UD thanks David.
More on Cardale Jones the truth-teller:
His tweet, if inartful and perhaps ill-advised, was actually correct on the merits: he was not given a scholarship to play school.
For background, go here.
