Building prisons does seem to lower crime rates – at least if you put criminals in them. Similarly, despite this NYU student’s insistence that suicide barriers at places like NYU and Cornell are pointless, there’s evidence that they can dissuade some people from jumping.

… discover what we already know; but it’s important to get this confirmation. Makers of anti-psychotic drugs (scroll down for all posts) target Medicaid psychiatrists in DC.

Medicaid psychiatrists …received a disproportionate, share of industry largesse, receiving two-thirds (66%) of gifts and payments. In 2008 (the most recent data available), antipsychotic use by Medicaid recipients was especially high in the nation’s capitol, with approximately 1 in 10 recipients receiving a prescription — a rate five times higher than the total national population.

A large proportion of Medicaid recipients are children under the age of 18. Antipsychotics can cause sedation, weight gain, diabetes, and other adverse effects.

It’s an absolutely perfect storm from the manufacturer’s point of view. A large vulnerable population. Doctors who may not be among the most highly trained.

“Antipsychotics are clearly being used in patients who are not psychotic,” said Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD.

It’s given the Right Livelihood Award to Sima Samar, an Afghan, and a high-profile opponent of the burqa.

Swedish-German philatelist Jakob von Uexkull founded the donor-funded prize in 1980 after the Nobel Foundation behind the Nobel Prizes refused to create awards honouring efforts in the fields of the environment and international development.

For this reason, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation oftens calls its distinction the “alternative Nobel prize.”

Through laws like the one in France, and through high-profile awards like this one, the woman- (and child-) smothering burqa gradually assumes its place as an artifact of the past.

… “the most abundant and best studied bird in North America,” but this is the first time I’ve seen it around these parts. Pictures here.

What I mainly see around here are mourning doves, nuthatches, bluejays, robins, cardinals, wrens, starlings, grackles, owls, chickadees, woodpeckers, thrushes, catbirds, and hummingbirds. Never seen a red-winged blackbird before this afternoon.

With his NIH colleague, Tibor Borsos, he wrote a book about complement.

Now immunologists at Cardiff University who study complement are under investigation for research fraud. Image manipulation, among other things.

Imagine a male professor up for tenure at Amherst who was found to have been, from his dissertation on, a plagiarist. Would the article about it in the campus newspaper write sympathetically of his “struggles and insecurities with writing”? The commenter I quote in the title of this post is struck by the same thing that strikes UD: We’re supposed to soften our response to this person – a person about to be promoted to Amherst’s senior faculty – because “writing is hard for some of us.”

Women won’t get far in the face of this sort of sexism.

Paul Campos, a friend of this blog, gives great interview. He’s talking here about his new e-book, Don’t Go to Law School.

In order for things to change, “legal academia has to get its collective head out of the sand and stop being so piggish (I am mixing my metaphors).” He compares wildly overcompensated law school professors to French aristocrats: “[L]egal academia right now is France in 1780, and my lord doesn’t care to hear about the supposed troubles of the peasantry.” He quotes Upton Sinclair (“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”). He does all he can to make absolutely clear that people shouldn’t make $250,000 a year for graduating hundreds of unemployable people with $200,000 of debt.

But he also recognizes that law school professors themselves will do nothing about their culture of entitlement. They will have to be tossed and replaced by reasonable people if the schools are to survive.

The most straightforward short term solution is to return to the faculty student ratios and faculty compensation structures of three decades ago. This can be done through not replacing people who leave and buying out others. The alternative for universities is to simply close schools altogether…

Among the schools Campos considers to be in existential trouble: American University, down the street from UD‘s GW.

One must have a heart of stone to read this account without laughing.

These are the sorts of empty words one expects from the Knight Commission, whose function is to move athletics-related statements around in the air and on the page.

“Otherwise,” Charles Curtis goes on to warn in The American Prospect, “something more drastic will have to be done to change collegiate athletic culture.” Ooh, what?? By whom??

… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.

Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.

The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.

[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.

He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.

“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.

He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.

“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.

Richard Friedman’s “call for caution” on the use of anti-psychotic drugs in the American population comes a bit late in the day. Professors like Joseph Biederman remain at places like Harvard.

… Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.

Friedman doesn’t even talk about the grotesque over-prescription of these drugs for children.

The professors putting together the upcoming edition of the DSM are also doing their bit, pathologizing moods like “mild emotional discomfort” so that everyone will feel comfortable medicating them with powerful anti-psychotics.

Reviewing my University of Tennessee posts in light of the most recent event there – an alcohol enema party that almost killed someone – I find myself pretty overwhelmed by the comprehensive degeneracy of that school. Other universities in America are pretty disgusting (the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for instance, has a large drunken violent student body), but UT has a special combination of corrupt sports teams, corrupt coaches, indifferent leaders, and desperately alcoholic students that makes it truly madly deeply disgusting.

When you’re a student reporter at the University of Pennsylvania, and when the subject is the Wharton School’s scads of insider traders, you have to do a lot of digging. There’s a history here, and it’s pretty impressive.

Another reporter goes farther back:

[L]ast week’s conviction of a prominent Wharton MBA alum [was] the biggest insider trading case since the 1989 conviction of junk bond king Michael Miliken, another Wharton grad.

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UD thanks JND.

… here’s a post I wrote last year about a passage in The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s grave is just down the Rockville Pike from UD‘s Garrett Park house.

… reveals that for whatever reason a number of people are searching for this 2008 post of UD‘s, titled Better Living Through Consciousness: Why You Should Take Your College Education Seriously. There’s the link to it, in case you’re having any difficulty finding it. It appeared at UD‘s other blog, at Inside Higher Education.