From The Economic Times, India:

Robert Bruner… the dean of Darden School Of Business at the University of Virginia … has one of the most readable blogs I’ve seen in a long time. His posts are fairly frequent and most of them are so original, well thought out and sincere (as opposed to cynical) that they may actually be called ‘wise,’ a term that’s very seldom used in its true sense these days. Bruner’s posts come with innumerable quotes from literature and his erudition touches subjects ranging from leadership and ethics to innovation and work-life balance, often linking them to contemporary events.

… “A blog is like a huge chalkboard that everyone can read — it helps me extend the reach of my teaching well beyond the classroom,” says Bruner. “I also do it because it allows me to inform my audience, frame an agenda and shape discussion. That’s something leaders need to do.”

… A high grade blog is obviously a time consuming process and Bruner’s advice to busy executives who would be bloggers is to slow down occasionally and make time to reflect on “what it is that delights or pains them most,” when they choose their subjects. “Great writing starts from the heart,” he says. “But then, you have to educate yourself a bit on the subject before you write or else you might express an opinion that has no basis. Finally, when you write, it’s best to pretend you’re speaking to a friend or a sympathetic acquaintance.”

Though he’s been blogging for years now, Bruner never uploads the first draft of his posts — he still takes care to re-work and edit his writing before sending it into the blogosphere. It takes time, but it’s obviously worth it.

“Intellectuals love to blog,” he says. “The blogs of the famous intellectuals constantly refer to each another and contain very stimulating debate. Take Paul Krugman or Gregory Mankiw, economists at two ends of the spectrum. Their arguments are at a level of detail that average readers won’t find interesting, but they do it anyway.”

Academics like Bruner find themselves pulled into the blogosphere in part because their net-savvy students demand it of them. “Once these students graduate into the outside world, they will expect the same thing from the leadership there,” says the dean…

Complete list of this year’s Ig Nobels, from BBC News:

Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

Peace: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

Biology: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant pandas.

Medicine: Donald L Unger of Thousand Oaks, California, US, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand but not his right hand every day for more than 60 years.

Economics: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa (and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy).

Physics: Katherine K Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, Daniel E Lieberman of Harvard University and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, all in the US, for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over.

Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M Castano of Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for creating diamonds from tequila.

Literature: Ireland’s police service for writing and presenting more than 50 traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country – Prawo Jazdy – whose name in Polish means “Driving Licence”.

Public Health: Elena N Bodnar, Raphael C Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, US, for inventing a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks – one for the wearer and one to be given to a needy bystander.

Mathematics: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.

The University of West Georgia student newspaper did the best it could when a secretary in the music department hanged herself last Wednesday, “during class hours in the Humanities building.”

Since the death occurred in a very public place on campus, it was a news story and had to be reported that way. “The Humanities building was announced as an official crime scene, and everyone was evacuated from the building while classes were in session.” The police needed to make sure she wasn’t murdered.

She was thirty years old. A diabetic, she’d been told by her doctors that parts of her limbs would have to be amputated.

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Her friends speak of her with eloquent simplicity. “[I] spent all day thinking about her as she was when we were younger.”

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It’s a good article, finding a balance between reporting how she died and evoking the person she was. Yet many on the comment thread are upset and offended; for them, the act was private, and reporting on it only increases her family’s anguish.

SOS absolutely knows what they mean; and yet she agrees with the dissenting commenters:

I’m glad the article was written because before the rumored reason for her death was due to a love affair gone bad. This seems much more appropriate.

If she wanted her suicide to remain private, she would have chosen a more secluded location. The West Georgian reports news that relates to the campus, and it is doing its job.

From the Burlington Free Press:

Charles Houston, the Burlington polymath who climbed K2, studied the effects of high altitude on the body and taught medicine at the University of Vermont, died Sunday. He was 96.

… He was a one-time director of the Peace Corps in India and of the Medical Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., before moving to Burlington in 1966 to join UVM’s medical school.

Sometimes called the “father of high-altitude medicine,” Houston was an expert on pulmonary edema, hypoxia and the effects of altitude and the resulting diminished oxygen.

His expertise stemmed from personal experience. In 1935, his first year of medical school at Columbia near his childhood home, Houston asked the dean if he could skip the last six week of classes to hike in the Himalayas.

The dean obliged, and when Houston again returned the following year, he reached the summit of Nanda Devi, a 25,645-foot mountain in India. At the time, it was the highest mountain ever climbed — a record that would stand until a 1950 ascent of Annapurna in Nepal.

His affair with climbing burned hot until the mid-1950s. Houston was part of two expeditions that attempted to summit K2, the world’s second highest mountain. The 1938 trip, whose climbers reached 26,000 feet, would produce a map to the top that was used 16 years later by the first team to summit the mountain.

… Houston’s daughter, Penny Barron, said his health had declined over the past decade. Macular degeneration left him virtually blind…

Ben Littenberg, a professor of medicine at UVM and Houston’s neighbor, wrote the article on Houston in Wikipedia. His wife, Anna Marie Littenberg, said that after Houston lost his sight, she read to him for an hour a day five days a week — “everything from Churchill’s history of the English speaking peoples to the “Raj Quartet,” she said.

… Houston also had medical students come to his house to read him journal articles so that he could stay current.

… “Several analyses have shown beyond question that the increasing cost of health care is due in large part to the desire of doctors to make higher incomes,” he wrote in a [newspaper opinion piece just two months ago]. As an antidote, he pointed to Grand Junction, Colo., where doctors contain costs by pooling their resources “without jeopardizing one of the good reasons for going into the health care profession: the fact that it is a healing activity which has been universal for centuries and can be restored.” …

Here’s an excerpt from a nice bit of writing by a student at Louisiana State University.

His first class of the day is history. The class is mind-numbingly boring. Hardly anyone bothers to attend on a regular basis, and today isn’t any different. By 8:40 a.m., the classroom in Lockett Hall is only a third full.

Today’s topic has something to do with the Great Depression. It’s a topic everyone should probably care about — especially in light of today’s economic climate. Unfortunately, the professor is an old curmudgeon with absolutely no technological understanding. He even takes pride in the fact he doesn’t know what the devil this “Moodle” thing is. There’s no PowerPoint. No overhead. Just little old Mr. Magoo, droning away.

Half the students are snoozing. The other half are surfing the Internet, either updating their Facebook statuses or watching the latest Youtube hit. And, of course, there’s the creepy guy in the back corner of the room, glaring at his laptop intently. His enormous headphones are sagged around his neck, and his right hand is conspicuously submerged within his tattered corduroy pants, tugging ever so gently.

… At 9:49, after making the marathon walk from Lockett to Patrick F. Taylor, Saul walks into his accounting class. The professor is a young guy — probably a grad assistant. He’s the complete opposite of Saul’s last professor. A total tech geek. He even attempts to make a joke about Saul showing up late and walking right in front of the PowerPoint projector. A few brownnosers awkwardly chuckle.

For the next 30 minutes, Saul’s accounting professor steamrolls through more than 59 extravagant PowerPoint slides without giving any sort of coherent explanation. Saul can tell the guy feels a bit embarrassed about his lack of teaching ability. He even tries to cover it up by making a few jokes at his own expense.

But these self-deprecating jokes start getting a little depressing after a while. The insecurity is palpable. He might as well just ask, “Do you guys like me?”

Finally, Saul makes his way into his last class of the day — biology. His professor is a middle-aged woman with a load of personality. But her PowerPoint prowess leaves a lot to be desired. And so do her explanatory skills. It’s obvious to Saul this professor was forced by her department to utilize PowerPoint, even though it’s way out of her comfort zone.

As the last few seconds drain off the clock, Saul begins to reflect on what he’s learned today. The answer is a bit depressing — nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Lois DeFleur, SUNY Binghamton’s president, has fired her athletic director, ordered an external audit of the sports program, and ordered disgraced basketball coach Kevin Broadus to draw up a “recruitment and supervision plan for the program’s future.”

UD thinks Binghamton will also try to get rid of Broadus, despite the fact that – just before the shit hit the fan – they renewed his contract to 2010. Getting rid of him will therefore be very messy and very expensive, since Broadus will certainly sue if they don’t give him all the money they’ve promised.

Of course, at any given time five or ten university coaches are suing their employers over contractual matters, so this won’t be any novelty. It’ll just be ugly and expensive for the taxpayers of New York.

It’s so simple, as Tom Lehrer said in another context; so very simple.

If you want to get paid for plugging the newest, most expensive, least tested drugs on the market, lose the white coat, put on a suit, and start gilding the Lilly.

If you want to be a university professor at a medical school, a person who pursues and represents legitimate research, you’re going to have to sacrifice the $30,000 you make each year by reading aloud from Eli Lilly powerpoints.

Eric Campbell, who researches the medical speaker’s bureau scam, and whose words provide this post with its headline, calls the lucrative practice of professors doing pharma’s bidding “a complete violation of the hallmark of academia: independence. … [Don’t be a drug salesman] under the shroud of academia.’’

The Carlat Psychiatry Blog alerted me to the article in the Boston Globe that quotes Campbell and others (including Daniel Carlat himself) on pill promo circuits and the doctors who love them. Carlat points out that although salesmen may claim their presentations are independent of the drug companies paying them, they’re clearly following orders. In response to one doctor who protests that he chooses the order of the slides he presents, Carlat writes:

The fact that [this drug company speaker may choose] the order of his Lilly-boosting slides hardly constitutes compliance with [his hospital’s] policy that the “lecture’s content, including slides and written materials, are determined by the clinician.’’ [The presenter] might argue that he follows the letter of the rules because he, in fact, determines which among a menu of Lilly slides he uses in his presentation. But this is a hollow argument, because he didn’t write the menu.

Here’s an analogy. If my son comes home and says that for lunch he ate a cheeseburger and french fries, I might express my dispeasure and ask him to make healthier choices in the future. “But there was nothing else on the menu,” he might respond. “Where did you go for lunch?” “McDonalds!” If you choose to go to McDonald’s for lunch, your “choice” of food is severely limited. Similarly, if [this doctor] chooses to go to Lilly for his medical information, every slide on the menu will be Lilly-friendly, meaning that his defense that he “chooses” what to teach is meaningless. His only choice was to become a promotional speaker, and he checked his academic independence at the door.

… at George Washington University.

La Kid’s on the phone with me: “My class right now in Funger has been cancelled and people are coming out of the building. They’re closing off streets. There are police cars and police everywhere.”

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Update: From the radio: Foggy Bottom Metro and surrounding streets – and some buildings, I guess – had been shut down due to a suspicious package. They’ve now reopened. The package was examined and is not dangerous.

… but she often attended his lectures, and listened to his conversations with other professors and students [at the Warsaw Academy] on a range of issues related to modern art. She was inspired by his fresh and open attitude to art, his nonhierarchical approach to the applied arts, and his enthusiasm for his students. Abakanowicz came into closer contact with Soltan after her graduation, when he granted her permission to use studio space at the academy and encouraged her to submit her painted fabrics to interior and industrial design shows in the mid-1950s. His integrationalist philosophy, which tried to destroy the traditional division between ‘art’ and ‘craft,’ helped convince Abakanowicz that her textile work belonged within the language of contemporary art.”

UD’s late father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, was an important influence on the sculptor Magda Abakanowicz.

UD smiled and remembered the many books about her in his Cambridge house when she read this article from The Daily Princetonian:

The nine-foot headless guardians of McCormick Hall have vanished. The collection of statues by 79-year-old Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, titled “Big Figures,” has been on loan to the University Art Museum for the past five years and was taken down this summer.

“We were sad to see the work go,” art museum director James Steward said in an e-mail. “It was a great piece to have for that length of time, and now we have a new opportunity to site something there that makes dynamic use of the space.”

… “Big Figures” — which is made up of 20 unique, bronze, headless, armless, backless, hollow human forms that each weigh 600 pounds — is only one work in a series of metal headless figures done by the artist, according to Abakanowicz’ website. In total, she has created more than 1,000 figures, which are displayed in museums and private collections in Italy, Australia, Venezuela, Japan and Israel, among other nations.

… The disappearance of the bronze statues has elicited a mixed response from students.

“I find it difficult to give good directions this year,” Rivka Cohen ’12 said. “I can’t say things like ‘Walk straight until you pass the extraordinarily disturbing visages of potentially modern art. When you’re level with the leftmost column of the giant, headless bodies, turn right.’ ”

… “They always seemed sinister and depressing to me,” [Avital] Hazony said. “It would be nice if [the art museum] had something as striking, but more positive, instead, since it is such a central location.”

Abakanowicz said she intended for “Big Figures” to be unsettling, though.

“It happened to me to live in times which were extraordinary by their various forms of collective hate and adulation,” Abakanowicz told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in 2004, when the figures were originally installed.

“Marchers and parades worshipped leaders, great and good, who turned out to be mass murderers,” explained Abakanowicz, who lived through the occupation of Poland during World War II and the Soviet regime. “I was obsessed by the image of the crowd, manipulated like a brainless organism and acting like a brainless organism. I began to cast human bodies in burlap to finish in bronze, headless and shell-like. They constitute a sign of lasting anxiety.’’…

In particular, the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project, which has successfully defended Lucia Joyce scholar Carol Shloss against venal, vindictive Stephen Joyce, who controls the Joyce Estate, and has blocked her work.

The Stanford scholar who wrote a controversial biography of James Joyce’s daughter has settled her claims for attorneys’ fees against the Joyce Estate for $240,000. The settlement successfully ends a tangled saga that has continued for two decades.

As a result of an earlier settlement reached in 2007, consulting English Professor Carol Loeb Shloss already had achieved the right to domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship the Joyce Estate had forced her to remove from Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003). She also had achieved the right to republish the book in the United States with the expurgated material restored. After that settlement was reached, Shloss asked the court to award the attorneys’ fees and costs she had incurred in bringing her suit, and the court granted that request. The parties eventually settled the amount of the fees and litigation costs Shloss and her counsel were to receive at $240,000.

… Shloss said that the suit is a game-changer because now literary “estates know they can get hurt.”

“They know that scholars have resources now. They just can’t be bullies,” she said. “We’ve established that if you don’t pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers the copyright laws protect, you might have to pay something as the Joyce Estate has had to pay.”

In a tartly worded Feb. 24 filing to determine attorneys’ fees and costs, Shloss and her legal team argued that “the cost of litigating this case, which was substantial, was a direct result of the Estate’s assiduous and energetic efforts to prevent Shloss from exercising the rights the U.S. copyright laws encourage, and its ‘scorched earth’ approach to litigating the early stages of the case to see if it could bully Shloss into capitulation.”

The whole account is worth reading.

… about Tony Harrison, is now up.

… plagiarizes his papers.

The New York Times wrestles with this question.

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Update: A commenter notes that Cohen has taken the post down. Maybe he’s revising. I don’t know whether it’ll appear again.

… about the British poet Tony Harrison, first recipient of the PEN/Pinter prize.  I’ll let you know when it’s up on the site.

Florida’s universities never disappoint. This blog would be a bore without the bizarre stories coming out of the sunshine state almost on a daily basis.

Here’s one, from the University of South Florida, a goldmine of the grotesque.

USF Health officials are reviewing the actions of a University doctor who withheld evidence from authorities in a murder investigation, said USF Health spokeswoman Anne DeLotto Baier.

Dr. David Ciesla, associate professor of surgery and director of the trauma/critical care division for the USF medical school, kept a bullet he discovered while performing surgery April 21 on murder suspect Thomas Ford McCoy, Jr.

Ciesla, who is still a USF employee, was sentenced to two years’ probation and 100 community service hours Aug. 17.

… Dr. Sergio Alvarez, a second-year plastic surgery resident at USF, assisted Ciesla while he performed surgery on McCoy, who was shot by a deputy U.S. marshal.

Alvarez said in an interview with Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) agents that Ciesla saw the bullet near the liver during the operation and said, “There it is.”

After Alvarez spotted the bullet and agreed, Ciesla said, “No, it’s not.”

Alvarez said Ciesla took his eyes off the patient, looked at him, and said, “You didn’t see a bullet.”

Alvarez told the FDLE agents he did not continue the conversation, but had his eyes on Ciesla during the entire surgery because he was “a little taken by the whole incident.”

As Ciesla was preparing to leave the operating table, Ciesla said, “Oh, I almost forgot. This is what we do with bullets.”

Ciesla reached his hand into the patient’s abdomen and withdrew the bullet, Alvarez said to the FDLE.

“I saw him push the (bullet) into the palm of his right hand,” Alvarez said. “I saw him place what he had in his right hand into his right pocket.”

After the surgery, Ciesla told agents who had been assigned to collect evidence in the operating room that he did not remove a bullet from McCoy during surgery, according to FDLE reports.

“There were two (agents) in the operating room and one outside the door,” said Susan Shaffi, a third-year surgery resident at the time who also assisted Ciesla the day of the incident.

Shaffi said to FDLE agents that she heard Ciesla tell agents after the surgery, “They’re in the liver. We don’t go after bullets in the liver.”…

He’s his department’s representative to the USF faculty council…. UD likes to think of him giving updates to the assembly while rattling all the bullets in his labcoat …

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Update: More on pockets.

As pressure mounted during the summer from an all-consuming admissions scandal, University of Illinois President B. Joseph White carried in his pocket a motivational card reminding him to “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

White has resigned.