Hospitals are also notorious sources of oxycodone. This blog has written about hospital personnel – medical students, nurses, doctors, other employees – who steal the stuff. The latest story involves a Staten Island oxycodone ring.
One of the suspects, Angelique Sestito … works as a nurse at Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton, though it’s not clear if she used her position to obtain drugs, the sources said.
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And the most entertaining form of plagiarism is plagiarism committed by men of the cloth.
Here’s an especially good example.
Tennessee Temple University’s president stole an entire chapter of his book, Jesus is Awesome, from another preacher because, as the guy he plagiarized explains:
“He told me that he had read my book in college, liked it, and was under the impression that I had passed away or that it was no longer in print when he used it.”
Hell, I thought you was dead.
Plus no way that chapter’d be in print anymore – nobody’d recognize it ‘cept you and, hyuk, you’re dead…
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PLUS, as the plagiarist himself explains:
“I didn’t know copyright laws at the time.”
— or make that a Flory of emails, from friends and readers, about some fallout from David Flory’s prostitution arrest.
Apparently a former president of the University of New Mexico was a partner in Flory’s online business, and has also been arrested. Details when I get a chance to catch my breath.
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More, from local tv news.
Garcia was also vice-president of the American Political Science Association.
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This is kind of a ho-hum scandal for UNM, though. Remember Mistress Jade?
More here.
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No one human being can keep up with all the sex and sports scandals at UNM. But UD has tried. See these pages.
… Charles Dickens’ endless murky description of existence as a sad and murky predicament, figures in John Roberts’ opinion against Anna Nicole Smith’s heirs today.
[Roberts] began with a quote from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House detailing long-running litigation in which the original parties have “died out of it.” Smith died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2007. Her husband’s son, E. Pierce Marshall, died from an infection in 2006. Dickens wrote of a “long procession” of judges and a suit that “drags its weary length before the court.”
“Those words were not written about this case,” Roberts wrote, “but they could have been.”
The spectacular opening chapter of Bleak House, with its evocation of a fogged-in, hopeless, and sinister world, is here.
You can read the novel in the way Roberts does, as what a University of Maryland professor calls the “ultimate indictment of law, lawyers, and the legal system in the English language.”
The novel’s institutional world indeed paints us as “litigation-fever” dupes, pinning our greedy and grandiose hopes on the outcome of this or that legal case. Equally greedy lawyers, however, systematically draw those very cases out to infinity, so that we die – our pockets emptied by legal fees — long before the cases are decided.
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There’s something Kafkaesque in this portrayal of life as a matter of almost comic futility, and plenty of critics read Dickens’ novel as an anticipation of modernist absurdity and nihilism.
More intimately, the pathos of Smith’s, and her son’s, bleak prescription pain pill lives makes these abstractions real. In the opera based on their lives, the character of Smith’s son says nothing at all, Anthony Tommasini notes, until after he dies:
The only lines that Mr. Rowntree has come after Daniel has died, when, his head peering from a body bag, he sings a litany of drug names.
This is the punishing reality – surreality – of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, the starkest imaginable presentation of our credulity, our vulnerability, our predicament.
Hear them sing it? Ten years in the courts…
… about a high-profile University of Melbourne professor of psychiatry accused of … well, you know the list from our homegrown … troubled professors of psychiatry:
… over-medication of drugs, consultations of 30 seconds and a conflict of interest involving pharmaceutical companies…
Curious, too, because you just know, from looking at his cv, that this guy is the real thing. Start with his acronyms:
AO, KCSJ, BSc, MB, ChB, DPM, MD, FRANZCP, FRCPsych, MRACMA, Dip.M.Htlh.Sc (Clinical Hypnosis), FAChAM.
Do you have that many acronyms? UD has… let’s see… BA, MA, PhD, CIA (can’t talk about that), NSA (ditto) NS (Navy Seals, can’t talk about that), MY (Mother of the Year)… That’s seven after-the-name acronyms. Graham here has… I’m counting twelve, but I’m thinking we could break down Dip.M.Htlh.C into two probably… So make it thirteen.
Then (stand back): There’s this:
He has published more than 650 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author or editor of more than 95 books, including the Handbook of Anxiety Disorders and the Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry and has contributed chapters to approximately 190 other scientific books. He serves on the editorial boards of 30 international and Australian journals.
Consultations of 30 seconds! His patients should be honored to get five seconds! Do they have any idea who they’re dealing with??
Trudo Lemmens talks to Paul Thacker about med school professors who put their names on ghostwritten, industry-sponsored scientific articles.
Nothing says finger-lickin’ dignified like having your university graduation ceremony at KFC YUM!
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And now you got some reporter complaining about Rutgers University in this here headline:
CORPORATE SALES OF STADIUM NAMING RIGHTS FURTHER SULLIES COLLEGE ATHLETICS
First off, I think we can agree that big-time college athletics has long since reached sully-saturation, so let’s lose the further.
Second, High Points Solution is an information technology firm! That’s classy! It ain’t Kentucky Fried Chicken! Rutgers should count its lucky stars.
… who cannot seem to keep their names out of the papers.
Their universities continue to praise them to the skies — see here, here, and here — and yet the New York Times and various United States senators and various university colleagues are constantly writing in very negative terms about these guys, sending them angry letters, suggesting they’re corrupt and destructive…
Biederman, Nemeroff, and Zdeblick aren’t the only controversial high-profile medical school professors in America; but no other professors have been so enduringly under attack – for conflict of interest, for suppression of negative evidence, for personal greed – by the media, professional organizations, and Congress. All three men, for years and years and years, have been accused of serious misbehavior. Their names are always in the papers, and always for the wrong reasons.
Zdeblick is -for the umpteenth time – in today’s headlines.
When does a university decide that a prominent, grants-getting, journal-editing, mover-shaker on its faculty has become so compromised that he or she should go? Emory University let Nemeroff go, but the University of Miami immediately panted after him, and has worshipfully adored him ever since… I mean, you have to wonder: Do the leaders of these universities even know they have a problem?
In the midst of Preet Bharara’s crackdown on insider trading, the future denizens of Wall Street have one burning question for the hard-driving federal prosecutor: What can we still get away with?
During his tenure as U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District, Bharara has made the rounds at the country’s best business schools, lecturing on ethics and compliance in what he calls his version of Scared Straight.
His audiences, though, are far from frightened. Instead, students invariably ask him how close they can get to the line without crossing it.
And it’s adorable! To watch Tom and Charlie consort with one another year after year despite all the conflicts and penalties and sanctions and recusals and rules and everything!!!
[Charles Nemeroff] repeatedly contacted [Thomas] Insel for help with NIH grants, including attempts to renew and relocate his work at Emory.
Plus!
At Miami, [conflict of interest will be] handled by the medical school’s dean, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, who hired Dr. Nemeroff after conferring with Dr. Insel. The dean subsequently said that he understood the concern over Dr. Nemeroff’s track record, and that he would be “scrutinizing his activities” to be sure he reports all future income from outside companies.
Dr. Goldschmidt was found last month to have underreported his income from service on the boards of two outside companies.
A fun fact about the football coach at Eastern Michigan University.
EMU is one of many pathetic Division I schools in these here United States. But even by the standards of that tawdry deluded crew, EMU stands out.
Further facts, from a long article by Pete Bigelow:
The athletic department reported $19.8 million in revenues in 2009. Of that amount, $14.9 million came from direct institutional support and $1.6 million came from student fees.
That $16.5 million represents 83.4 percent of the school’s athletic budget, the highest percentage of direct institutional support any athletic department received among the Mid-American Conference’s 13 member institutions.
Athletes make up 2.5 percent of EMU’s overall student body, but receive more than 20 percent of the university’s financial aid budget. The athletes’ share amounts to approximately $6.7 million.
NCAA rules stipulate a school must average 15,000 fans per home football game to remain in Division I. Eastern Michigan, which averaged 6,401 fans per home game in 2010, uses $150,000 from a distribution contract with Pepsi to purchase tickets from itself at a rate of $3 apiece to remain NCAA compliant.
We buy tickets from ourselves!
Very pomo. Très simulacral. Doesn’t do anything to hide the empty stands, however.
It helps, when trying to understand the Division I losers, to imagine the presidents of these schools as Blanche DuBois, and the big football victory that will turn it all around as Belle Reve.
David Flory, a Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor, seems also to run a pretty big-time prostitution ring. He calls the activity “a hobby,” but there’s the matter of its illegality. Details of his arrest are here.
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UPDATE:
Three limericks.
This one’s from a UD reader:
In Albuquerque, New Mex,
A professor whose hobby is sex
brought people together,
without asking whether
they’d succeeded in skirting the lex.
This one’s from another UD reader:
A physics professor named Flory
Has a website that’s ever so whore-y
He’s not in it for money
Just loves spreading honey
At least that’s his side of the story.
And one from UD:
We offer the cheap Standard Model:
She’ll coo and she’ll kiss and she’ll coddle.
But those special patrons
With extra-Large Hadrons
Can launch one of our rocket bottles.
… Marcia Angell highlights the corruption of academic psychiatry:
Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them…
[T]here are no objective signs or tests for mental illness — no lab data or MRI findings -and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that…
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Also related. If you can read this article without wanting to vomit, you’re a better man than I am.
Once the medical establishment started buying into the idea of bipolar kids in the 1990s, the diagnosis gained unusual force. In 2000 the National Institute of Mental Health convened a roundtable of researchers in pediatric bipolar disorder and financially supported several controversial propositions, including the practice of asking bipolar adults to date the origins of their own disease. The creation of a new source of funding generated frenetic activity among university psychiatrists, and in a twinkling it created stakeholders in the diagnosis.
From an interview with Julian Young, in Figure/Ground.
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What makes a good teacher today? How do you manage to command attention in an age of interruption characterized by attention deficit and information overflow?
It is very difficult to give a general answer to this question, for teaching, like love, is an intuitive business that cannot properly be articulate[d] in rules and procedures. (That is why one should never go to a ‘teaching-improvement workshop’.) One thing to do is to stop complaining about students. Sure, they suffer from ADD but one needs to get into the habit of liking them, of not regarding them as the enemy, patients, cannon fodder, or a necessary evil. Students tend to respond well to someone they sense wishes them well. Never let students think that your real life is research – work that happens out of the classroom – try to make it the case, so far as possible, that (as in the nineteenth-century) your research and teaching are one and the same. Do not pander too much to the demand for ‘visual aids’. Do not teach in a darkened classroom and, especially, do not structure you[r] lecture around a set of ‘bullet points’ projected onto a screen. Remember that bullet points are discrete while thought is continuous so that what bullet points represent is, in fact, the death of thought…
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UD thanks Dirk for the link.
