Lots of fancy schmancy hospitals here in the DC region – Hopkins, GW – are unhappy with this result, but they’re taking it seriously.

UD, as it happens, had her recent surgery at Holy Cross Hospital.

The place was clean, quiet, and well-run — at least during the day. Genial doctors and nurses trundled in and out of her room checking meds and machines and all.

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But things got weird in the wee small hours of the morning. At that point a rather frightened, inept group of nurses took over.

They wouldn’t give me an extra pain pill, though I needed one.

One of them moved in very close to me and said: “Tell me about this mole on your arm. I want to know. Were you born with it? How did it become like this?” She gazed at it as if she thought it had magical powers.

I called the nurses when my IV suddenly beeped and said AIR IN LINE, and when one finally moseyed in she didn’t know how to stop that from happening. She called another nurse in, who muttered, in answer to my question, that yes, well, you don’t want to let that sort of thing go on too long because it can kill you.

When they told me I could finally have a full meal, they neglected to tell me that I had to call a certain number and order it. Eventually I called the number, and the kitchen said they had orders to give me nothing. It took a good deal of work to get the nurses’ desk to tell the kitchen that I could eat.

So evenings at Holy Cross with the night nurses were unpleasant. With daylight, it became an award-winning hospital again.

We are paying to go to class, not to use a computer. We are paying for textbooks, not to print out documents we find on discussion boards… [My] grades drop when I bring my computer to school; I stopped taking it to prevent the distraction. Technology at school is simple: it sucks.

Rachel Ellis, University of Minnesota, Duluth

The trajectory from faculty to fatcat is often impressive and inspiring. To come up with original ideas that make you and other people rich can be very cool. Here a Nobel Prize recipient, William Sharpe, thanks Barr Rosenberg, once a Berkeley professor, now a financial titan, for his pioneering work in computer-based trading. Berkeley’s business school boasts of its graduates’ internships with the outfit that bears his name.

Barr has now been barred from the securities business.

[I]n late June 2009 a [Barr Rosenberg] employee discovered an error in the code of a complex automated optimization model that caused $217 million in losses in about 600 client portfolios. After the employee discussed his finding with Rosenberg and other employees, the SEC claims Rosenberg directed them to keep quiet about the error and not to inform anyone else about it.

Rosenberg also directed that the error not be corrected at the time.

… It is a hard fall for Rosenberg, a supremely wealthy man and widely respected academic, who pioneered the use of quantitative techniques to implement investment strategies for decades.

His clients lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Barr will pay a $2.5 million fine.

… the University of New Mexico, has finally fired football coach Mike Locksley. Can’t win a game; does all sorts of embarrassing shit when not losing games.

Why did it take them so long?

After New Mexico completed another 1-11 season last year, the Lobos decided to retain him — in part because they could not afford the $1.4 million buyout to his contract.

But take heart, UNM. Dave Schmidly is still president!

Mr UD’s father – on the far right –
behind Le Corbusier.

Paris. Around 1947.

A quiet Sunday. Time for some old photos.

Here’s UD‘s mother, Mitzi, taking part in
the 1966 Garrett Park July 4 parade.

She carries many signs.

Click on each picture for a bigger view.

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Little UD pretending to enjoy the fact that her
parents insisted the family always go camping. 1970.

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Also 1970. UD has deep roots in Maryland.

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Also 1970. Kitchen. Mother. UD. UD‘s ‘thesdan
playmate, David Kosofsky, lurks in the background.

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Moving right along in Saudi Arabia.

… the University of Rhode Island – routinely admit people who riot at the drop of a hat. These schools are big sloppy drunks.

First out of the gate this academic year is the storied URI:

[S]everal students were injured while fighting with broken beer bottles by smashing [them] over one another’s head. Students milled about throughout Fraternity Circle, with bystanders coming to watch the fights break out.

The URI officer stationed at the event called for backup and all on-duty URI officers responded — a lieutenant, sergeant and six officers parked in the streets, but students refused to disperse.

URI officers began using pepper spray on the crowd to get students to disperse, and several students were attended to by EMS for related injuries.

…a Nation Institute Fellow who uncovered apparent conflict of interest and, ultimately, undisclosed outside income at the New York Times.

The Times Jerusalem bureau chief was also – until he dropped it as a result of Blumenthal’s article – a client of an Israeli speakers bureau. The firm pitched stories to the bureau chief, some of which he covered.

This was bad enough by way of giving the appearance of less than total objectivity on the part of a reporter covering an incredibly contentious part of the world. But Blumenthal’s piece also had the effect of uncovering other delinquency.

[Ethan Bronner] did not tell his editors about his relationship with Lone Star … because he did not think joining a speakers bureau had to be disclosed. Indeed, the ethics guidelines do not specifically require it. But the guidelines do require Times staff members to provide an accounting to editors if they earn more than $5,000 of speaking fees in a year. Mr. Bronner acknowledged he was “delinquent” in failing to do this, saying he believed he was obligated to account only for any single speech for which he was paid more than $5,000, another requirement of the policy.

Wow. So this guy believed that if he gave a bunch of speeches in a year, each of them pulling in five thousand – with a yearly total payment of, say, $150,000 – he didn’t have to declare this income to the Times because no one speech paid more than five thou.

He’s running a news bureau?

… has been eyeing with interest the story of a University of Connecticut student robbed at gunpoint inside a campus building.

It’s really rare for people with guns to rob people inside of academic buildings. UD‘s been blogging about universities for years, and she can’t recall a case.

The student has now admitted making it up.

… an email a law professor sent to one of his or her students.

UD should say that there’s no sourcing on this email. The blog Above the Law doesn’t identify its origins – school, professor, student. But someone sent the email to the blog, and the blog wrote about it, and I’m going to assume that the incident and the email are for real.

Background: A tenured law professor at an American university said some things in class that a student found offensive. The student complained to the Dean of Students. The professor now writes to the student:

I got an email yesterday from the dean that a student in this class complained that I have not been letting you out of class promptly at 10:20 and that I made off-handed, non-PC references to Parkinson’s and ADD. First, let me say that I will try to be more aware of both these matters.

But seriously – did you really have to go to the dean to complain? Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do but don’t you think you are old enough to fight your own battles? Don’t you think I am receptive enough to be addressed directly? Are you going to go to momma and poppa if a partner at a law firm treats you wrongly? Seriously??

SOS says: This email begins promisingly enough. The writer is straightforward, direct, non-pretentious. Non-PC is a bit on the defensive side, but let it go. The professor is good enough to try to be more aware, etc.

As with the press release from the nightclub (see the post directly below this one), the writer should have stopped here. Good writing is in part about getting out while the getting’s good. One way to think about this is: What exactly do you want to say to the person or group reading what you’ve written? What exactly? Otherwise, what do you want to get off your chest? Take out all of the chesty stuff. Write with your head voice, not your chest voice.

A professor might legitimately want to convey to a student the importance of fighting your own battles. But this – and, actually, everything else in this email – would have been better conveyed in person.

I mean, if the point of this email is that the student should deal as directly as possible with human conflict, why is the professor making matters worse by writing this down? If the professor wants to claim that he/she’s “receptive enough to be addressed directly,” why not extend that courtesy to the student, and simply talk to him/her after class or something? Inevitably, an email from a professor is going to be more intimidating than sitting down and chatting like a human being.

But the really big bad in this email, of course, happens here:

Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do…

UD hates the word inappropriate. But this is so that. All the professor does here is betray his/her anxiety/grandiosity… I’d call it infantile…. A sort of nyah-nyah. Not exactly the sort of thing to reassure the student that this professor is receptive.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The day after a university athlete is killed inside your apparently overcrowded nightclub, go ahead and write your own press release if you’d like. But before you release the release, have someone who knows how to write one read it over.

If you don’t, what you issue may be a rambling defensive statement rather than the terse acknowledgement of the event/pledge to work with the police that it should have been. It may include the strikingly bad proposal that the same club host a party in memory of the person killed there.

Come and support this young man and his life at the A-List Lounge, dates to be announced.

A burqa-wearing Frenchwoman has declared her intention to run for the presidency against Nicolas Sarkozy.

Kenza Drider styles herself the Freedom Candidate.

Her campaign literature shows her in her full veil standing in front of a line of police – an act made illegal by French legislation banning the burqa in public in April.

This memory of Robert Wilson, a physicist who in 1969 testified, in front of a congressional committee, on behalf of a proposed particle accelerator.

[Senator John Pastore asked] Wilson — a veteran of the Manhattan Project — … “Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?”

… “No sir, I don’t believe so.”

“Nothing at all?” Pastore asked.

“Nothing at all.”

Pastore pressed further: “It has no value in that respect?”

… “It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

The incident introduces an essay in Scientific American about “the sheer joy of discovery, of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, as essential a component of the human spirit as the greatest works of art, of music, of literature.”

… even for the inside guys.

Former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, his heart aching over the death of Dave Gavitt, Big East founder and his best friend, went on ESPN and WFAN the other day with all emotional guns blazing. He said college athletics is controlled by football, money and greed. He called it absolute chaos. He said that until two years ago he would have argued that college presidents had loyalty and integrity. Not anymore.