Among the several Facebook groups dedicated to the mad squirrels of the University of Florida is one titled UF SQUIRRELS ARE PLOTTING MY DEMISE.
Laptops. The view from Boston.
… [MIT] professors complain about students trading stocks online, shopping for Hermès scarves, showing one another video clips on YouTube — leading some faculty to call for the unwiring of all lecture halls.
“Students are totally shameless about how they use their computers in class,’’ said David Jones, an MIT professor. “I fantasize about having a Wi-Fi jammer in my lecture halls to block access to distractions.’
… Jonathan Zittrain, a [Harvard] professor and Internet law specialist who cofounded the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has banned laptops and all mobile devices from his first year torts class since 2004.
“If you sit in the back of the room and see what’s going on, it’s so demoralizing,’’ Zittrain said. “It’s not just poker or Minesweeper, they’re shopping for shoes as you’re talking about some fascinating Supreme Court case.’’
… I always wonder, ‘Why are they in class?’, because it’s clear they are not paying attention,’’ Jones said…
UD‘s buddy Bill Gleason has a honey of a post up about homeopathy and the University of Minnesota.
Love calls us to the things of this world, say Augustine and Wilbur.
Pablo Neruda says the same thing. Perhaps we would rather escape the earth or transcend it or ignore it. But (MacNeice this time) the earth compels.
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Pablo Neruda
Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.
Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.
You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.
[trans. William O’Daly]
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Neruda wrote only in green ink – color of earth’s plants – so we’ll do that too… Here you have a hard-hearted person, dead to the light of the world, estranged from his own memories, living under a dull pelting rain. Let’s say he’s the poet himself, impervious to what used to be the sources of his aesthetic energy.
Confusingly and compellingly, however, the earth’s outburst on this day amounts to a kind of visitation: the bell-like rain now echoes with the remembered rain of the poet’s childhood, and this sets going a welcome, tentative, awakening in him. As opposed to the old morning/noon/night story the sun begins each day to tell, there’s a particular “slant” here, an edginess that’s the poet’s own. Now can he live and write?
Not quite. Kissed awake by the kiss of mud the rain kicks up, the poet concludes with a love song to the earth, mysterious origin of his physical and spiritual life. But how to love this dark lady? The sun’s old clarity might be a bore; but this deeper, truer, carbon-coated body, this muffled vehicle of song, frustrates and exhausts the muse.
So the muse simply has to keep at it. The earth compels. “I must still uncloud my earthly duties.”
… [In] South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley, a Tea Party favorite, tossed out Darla Moore, a longtime member of the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees who had given money to one of the Democratic candidates for governor. Haley said she wanted “a fresh set of eyes.” This would not be all that big a deal except that Moore is the biggest donor in the university’s history. She has given at least $70 million to the school, which would seem to be worth one heck of a lot of sets of eyes.
Moore is being replaced by Thomas “Tommy” Cofield, a lawyer and Haley supporter …
In recent years, York University in Toronto and Florida State University have had to fight off efforts to establish chiropractic programs in their medical schools. (Here’s an excellent review of these failed efforts, especially the Jeb Bush-approved effort at FSU.)
At Mr UD‘s university, the University of Maryland, no such campaign has occurred, but something more insidious is happening, about which Steven Salzburg, a computer science professor there, has written in Forbes. Salzburg’s attacks on creeping anti-intellectualism at UMD are indispensable elements of the permanent watch professors everywhere must keep over the university’s integrity. You can’t count on presidents and trustees to keep watch. These particular proposed programs, for example, always come with huge gifts from in-search-of-legitimacy chiropractors, and administrators tend not to be able to see past the money. Only professors have the combination of empiricism and disinterestedness – and tenure – that can hold back the pseuds.
So Salzburg’s going after his reputable university’s housing of disreputable ideas and methods in its Integrative Medicine center, which features, among other absurdities, homeopathic approaches:
[H]omeopathic treatments are just water. Or rather, water dropped onto a sugar pill, and sold at stores such as Whole Foods, which has a section devoted to homeopathic remedies.
(A spectacular new Whole Foods just opened up down the street from UD‘s house, and she and Mr UD have joined the appreciative ‘thesdan crowds there. UD always avoids what she calls the Medieval Aisle. Too depressing.)
Salzburg concludes:
By providing a respectable home for these pseudoscientific practices, UM Medicine is undermining its own scientific and educational missions. But when the money is coming in, the administration seems quite happy to support it.
Who knew they didn’t already have one? Kentucky is one of our nation’s sleaziest sports factories, and UD‘s been assuming it comes equipped with everything sleazy, including the vast non-stop advertising machine that is the Adzillatron.
But no.
The existing video boards, which were installed in July 1999, use Cathode Ray Tube technology which proves difficult to maintain, according to a project summary on the council’s April 28 agenda. The boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country,” Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart said in a written statement.
The two new boards would use Light-Emitting Diode technology, along with “ribbon boards” — aimed at increasing ad revenue — on the upper deck sidelines and suite corners. Barnhart said that the new boards will offer fans more access to statistics, scoring updates from games, video replays and closed captioning.
“As importantly, the boards will generate increased revenue through the sales and marketing of video advertising,” he said.
The factory will spend millions and millions of dollars on fan ad-bombardment and, you know, the UK faculty is upset. No raises for years, what’s left of the educational side of things looking like a 1999 Cathode Ray Tube… Sad.
If you happen to be the state of Minnesota, and if you happen to close down one of these diploma mills, you will be accused of failing to understand the beautiful educational synergy of online technology and fifteen year olds.
The Minnesota Department of Education has taken an unprecedented move to close an online charter school accused of graduating students improperly.
The department notified the West St. Paul-based BlueSky Online School on Thursday that it would sever the school’s contract with its overseer, a recourse the state has under recent charter legislation.
Don’t you love the idea of giving an online school the name BlueSky? It’s the one thing you’ll never see – you don’t even get to take short walks from one classroom to the next. Prison would be more like it.
Actually, prison’s an improvement. At least you get a cellmate.
Oh – and in its defense BlueSky says the following:
BlueSky has said the charges reflect a lack of understanding of online instruction.
Yes, let’s all get on board for the proper understanding of online high school instruction.
You take a teenager, see, isolate her in a room with full access to games, Facebook, YouTube, music, and the rest of the internet, and watch her learn algebra.
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UD thanks Michael for the link.
A new entry for the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Background here.
… can the ghostwriters on our universities’ medical faculties be far behind?
Background here.
Four at once. Attention, Fulmer Cup!
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The Art of Recruitment
This one’s about Duke:
[Tyree] Glover is the fourth promising player from Duke coach David Cutcliffe’s first full [football] recruiting class that signed letters of intent in February 2009 to find himself in trouble with the law.
The other three — all from Georgia — were booted off the team in January 2010 after being arrested on firearms charges.
… at George Washington University.
Conservative media figure Ann Coulter likened potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to a children’s birthday party entertainer in a speech on Wednesday night.
“I think Trump is a clown,” Coulter said during an appearance sponsored by Young America’s Foundation at George Washington University.
[click on the picture for a bigger view]
Joanna Soltan, Curator, School of the Museum of Fine Arts (she’s the person talking to the audience), at Kidding Around with Patti Smith at the MFA. (Patti Smith is on the far left.)
The University of Wisconsin Pain and Policy Studies Group has decided to stop taking drug money. This decision, apparently motivated by an exposé in the local paper, coincides with a huge new federal attack on prescription drug abuse. The Wisconsin group has taken about
$2.5 million over a decade from companies that make opioids. The money came while the group pushed for what critics say was a pharmaceutical industry agenda not supported by rigorous science: the liberalized use of narcotic painkillers for non-cancer chronic pain…. The UW Pain Group may have helped pave the way for OxyContin’s widespread use.
Oh, and
… research papers and medical articles written by UW Pain Group officials often did not disclose the group’s funding from drug companies or that those individuals were paid personally by drug companies.
…on the scourge of the laptop in the classroom.
Yes, it’s one of many such pieces UD links to on this blog. Eventually laptops will disappear from the college classroom. This blog is chronicling their disappearance.