… UD allowed her students today to persuade her to use the enormous monitor superimposed over the whiteboard in her way-smart classroom (it has all the techno bells and whistles) in order to show them a short YouTube.

This is her honors seminar in modernism and postmodernism (main text), and she was talking about postmodern music – specifically Michael Daugherty’s Dead Elvis.

She was reluctant to do things this way, though she could see how watching it while talking about it together had its attractions; and she was reluctant mainly because she was convinced simply getting the thing going would waste class time. But this guy in class just strode up to the podium, pushed a button and then another button, and there it was on the screen.

And UD will admit that it was rather wonderful watching this ten-minute performance with her class and being able, in real time, to talk about the elements of Daugherty’s composition. She had sent the students the YouTube earlier that day, but there hadn’t been enough time for everyone to see it; and even if there had been, there’s no denying that watching it together was a good thing.

So I suppose I’ve broken a techno-barrier.

Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hold, telling how it pass’d
O’er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent summer dealt.
Dear friends, together in the glimmering eve,
Pensive and glad, with tones that recognise
The soft invisible dew in each one’s eyes,
It may be, somewhat thus we shall have leave
To walk with memory,–when distant lies
Poor Earth, where we were wont to live and grieve.

… as the title of that great book had it, is a real mystery. But one thing UD can conclude from following universities like Ole Miss is that the whole idea of democracy doesn’t seem to have penetrated very far. There was the state rep who in 2011 introduced Mississippi House Bill 1106:

AN ACT TO AMEND SECTION 37-115-1, MISSISSIPPI CODE OF 1972,
1 TO PROVIDE THAT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI SHALL BEAR THE
2 NICKNAME “OLE MISS REBELS”; TO PROVIDE THAT THE UNIVERSITY’S
3 MASCOT SHALL BE “COLONEL REBEL”; TO REQUIRE THAT THE UNIVERSITY’S
4 BAND SHALL PLAY “DIXIE” AND “FROM DIXIE WITH LOVE” AT HOME AND
5 AWAY FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL GAMES AT WHICH THE BAND, OR SOME
6 PORTION OF THE BAND, IS PRESENT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

YOU VILL PLAY DIXIE OR ELSE, YOU HEAR?

And now there’s the letter just sent to all Physical Plant employees by the Director of said plant, in which he excoriates an employee who was found to have been rooting, electronically, for LSU during an Ole Miss/LSU football game. See, you’re in Mississippi. Ain’t none of your high and mighty “free speech” here…

[T]he posted [pro LSU] comments have been viewed negatively by the administration and have brought into question the individual making the comments and his ability to make sound and wise decisions.

Oh, and another thing.

[U]nder no circumstances should an employee don any clothing while on the clock that is not reflective of support for the University of Mississippi.

Bit of linguistic ambiguity there, eh? Can you just, uh, wear clothing? Or is every day on the clock an adventure in Ole Miss worship?

Anyway. If you’re on the Old Miss campus, just check this UD post for what you can sing, wear, and say.

On the up side – You can drink anything.

******************
UD thanks Marcie.

Just in time for Halloween, this surreal photo from Austin, Texas, where this blog’s administrator (aka UD‘s niece) lives. It was taken this morning during a huge rainstorm, and shows, just south of the river, the city’s statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

But it’s all so trivial.

If things get any hotter for Paul on the plagiarism front, UD recommends his team dig up the spokesperson for Newt Gingrich during his presidential campaign. That guy really knew how to defend his guy.

… in and that’s the kicker, ain’t it? I mean, lots of people are on them; but do the little buggers actually work?

The New York Review of Books (scroll down) has for awhile been the go-to place for essays by writers who question the utility of antidepressants for many (not all – some people do benefit from some antidepressants) of the people prescribed them; but obviously, as The Guardian‘s headline suggests, the subject – as vast stretches of Europe and America chomp down on them – is very much out there.

If the very question as posed seems to you outrageous, impossible, obscene, consider for a moment the way antidepressants are made. Not that you really want to know. It’s like the thing about how sausages are made. Better not to go there.

But let’s go. Let’s ask why Louisiana’s attorney general is suing Pfizer, maker of Zoloft. For $987 million. Or so.

Attorney General Buddy Caldwell claims Zoloft is barely more effective at treating depression than a placebo, but Pfizer has persuaded doctors and consumers otherwise…

Long before Zoloft was approved by the FDA, Pfizer knew it had “serious issues with efficacy” because in early Zoloft trials, the placebo group actually had better results, the state claims.

“These early trials showed that ‘placebo still seems to be the most effective group’ and that “there is still no striking evidence of beneficial drug effect with placebo often being the superior treatment,'” the complaint states.

“Nonetheless Pfizer chose to go forward in attempting FDA approval.”

The attorney general claims that to do this, Pfizer published only information that pertained to Zoloft efficacy, and suppressed conflicting studies.

Pfizer then engaged in a “ghostwriting program to misleadingly enhance Zoloft’s credibility,” the lawsuit states. [Note: Most American med schools have no policies at all on the practice of ghostwriting among their professors.]

… Louisiana claims that despite numerous studies that show that Zoloft is “no more effective than a sugar pill at treating depression,” Pfizer’s ad campaign included a large sales force that visited healthcare professionals on a routine basis, took them out to luxurious diners and events during which salespeople promoted Zoloft.

Laissez les bons temps roulez! And as for those sad sacks – let ’em eat expensive sugar pills.

*********************

One more note: Pfizer will settle. A thousand million dollars is nothing to Pfizer. Cost of doing business.

La Kid, in Galway, with
a pinkhaired Irish friend.

La Kid is apparently a bat.
But I also think she looks
a little like Amy Winehouse.

[Steven] Cohen’s fund, SAC Capital Advisors, has reached a deal with the government to plead guilty to securities fraud.

That simple sentence, in today’s New York Times, says it all.

One of this nation’s great Ivy League universities has cleaved to and passionately defended its highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, ever since people began asking why this massive cheater, this embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America’s rancid hedge funds, sits in a position of influence and respect on a great university’s board of trustees.

If this were Yeshiva University, currently seeking trustee replacements for Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, UD could understand. But although Brown’s last president was one of the Goldman Sachs trustees who approved Lloyd Blankfein’s breath-taking bonuses, it has not, until now, looked like ridiculously corrupt YU.

And speaking of Merkin: UD can only assume Cohen is consulting with him on how to unload your art when your stink bomb of an investment fund implodes. Today’s New York Times article on Cohen is mainly about his having to sell some of his more significant pieces to pay off the billion plus fines he’s got coming from the SEC. Which brings back memories of Merkin – also pursued for hundreds of millions by all sorts of private and government entities – dismantling his Rothko room.

It’s a poignant picture for sure – these art lovers sitting among the ruins of their collections while awaiting the collection agents from the government. But while Merkin has lost his university trusteeship, Cohen still sits among those women and men tasked with the moral welfare of one of America’s most prominent sites of higher learning. At least he’s got that.

Yes, test taking in the era of online courses is just like being in a classroom with a professor on exam day. Only the person quoted in my headline forgot to fill in the online anti-cheating picture:

Having a camera watch you;

having to answer a series of personal questions before you can begin writing.

And the good news is that as cheating becomes big business (there are now firms that will simply take entire courses for you; I gotta believe there’s money to be made in faking the work of the online professor, so she fills up her semester’s roster of courses while snorkeling in Cancun — I remind you that I can already outsource all my grading), anti-cheating technologies continue to evolve. We’ve rigged up the eye and the hand… surely our authentication techniques can become more … intimate. I mean, not just in the sense of asking probing questions, but… probing other body parts…

And yes, it’s really impossible to detect any difference – though this does rather smack of Big Brother – between this 1984 scenario and the totalitarian nightmare I lay on my students at the end of every semester, while I sit in the front of the room during the time that they write their final exam…

Although… here’s one difference! Students are permitted to approach me in all my Stalinist splendor — IF THEY DARE — and ask how to spell words or ask to be reminded of the full names of characters or whatever… And I guess it’s that whole he loved Big Brother thing, because they DO approach me… THEY DO NOT SEEM TO FEAR THE CRUSHING REPRESSION I AM CAPABLE OF UNLEASHING UPON THEM …

Yes, there’s no doubting it. Getting your body rigged up, getting fingerprinted, getting tracked, and getting surveilled by a camera inches from your mug is not only an ideal scenario for the act of independent thought that constitutes education, but is in fact superior to face to face. Game, set, and match.

************************

And why would our students complain? After all, this is their world:

I called Kevin Haggerty, a criminologist at the University of Alberta, to learn about “surveillance creep,” the gradual expansion of the zone of scrutiny. We started, he explained, by electronically tracking the dangerous and the vulnerable — inmates, terrorists, Alzheimer’s patients, pets, and our own children — and we’ve wound up putting radio-frequency chips in students’ and employees’ IDs. Haggerty and I didn’t discuss the pernicious activities of the National Security Agency, which evolved over the same period of time, but the scariest endpoint of surveillance creep, it seems to me, will have been reached when the government’s yottabyte farms no longer strike us as sinister or illegal.

And there’s another, possibly even more insidious, consequence of eavesdropping on our offspring. It sends the message that nothing and no one is to be trusted: not them, not us, and especially not the rest of the world. This is no way to live, but it is a way to destroy the bonds of mutual toleration that our children will need to keep our democracy limping along.

… frightens us with a robotic future.

Leana Wen, a doctor at George Washington University Hospital, introduces herself to patients like this:

“I’m Dr. Leana Wen. I’m your doctor. I belong to an initiative called ‘Who’s My Doctor?’ that aims for transparency in medicine. I accept no money from drug companies or device companies.

“I do not make any more from ordering more tests or procedures on you, and I also don’t make more for ordering less. I’m telling you this so that you can be sure that everything I do for you is in your best interest.”

A bit awkward as an opening gambit, to be sure, but part of the anti-conflict of interest, full disclosure movement of which Wen has been a part since med school (Wen was president of the indispensable AMSA). As a faculty member at a university whose hospital was recently so rife with conflict of interest at the top that it became a national scandal – it was even put on probation for reasons probably related to its distracted-by-money managers – Wen could not be better placed to draw attention to the still COI-mad profession of medicine.

The major power players of Washington DC are of course particularly prone to market corruptions, as in the latest case of a high-ranking professor/FDA chairwoman having to be pulled back from an embrace with industry:

Dr. Lynn Drake, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and current chairwoman of the panel that advises the FDA on drugs to treat skin and eye conditions, is scheduled to speak at a conference whose stated aim is to help companies “walk away with strategies to successfully present before a committee and avoid potential roadblocks.”

In a letter sent on Thursday to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, founder of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, called on the agency to either require that Drake not attend the meeting, or remove her from her position as chairwoman of the Dermatologic and Ophthalmic Drugs Advisory Committee.

… Wolfe said Drake’s participation in the conference, which is being sponsored by PharmApprove, a consulting company, and costs up to $2,199 to attend, “raises concerns that the advisory committee member is approaching the work of the committee from a pro-industry perspective.”

… It is urgent that the FDA develop and articulate a written policy applicable to all advisory committee members to avoid repetition of this type of shameful episode, which could undermine public confidence in FDA advisory committees and in the agency itself,” he said.

Wolfe also drew attention to Drake’s curriculum vita, which is posted on the FDA’s website and which he said contains 32 items that are redacted under an exemption designed to protect trade secrets and other confidential business information. He said he has made a Freedom of Information request for an unredacted copy of the CV, “because the full CV may further elucidate Drake’s background and relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.”

Drake says she had no idea what she was signing up for.

“Either she is naive and signs up for things without knowing very much about them or she actually didn’t know the title of the session she was going to be a speaker on,” [Wolfe] said. “Those things are not really very likely.”

I mean, it’s pretty clear she got caught because Wolfe happened to read a promotional brochure for the conference (which will cost you two thou to attend… or maybe less now…)…

********************

UPDATE: Things don’t look much better these days at GWU’s med school.

Among schools with the weakest [Clinical Conflict of Interest] policies: Saint Louis University School of Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medical College, University of Nebraska College of Medicine, and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Yeshiva University. A gem of a place. Once again it is fighting with all its might against doing the decent thing: Offering a reasonable settlement to the 31 men sexually abused as boys by its educator of the year, under the watch of its president.

— Putting Syracuse University’s Orange Madness to shame.

It’s a little over the top, but there’s a basically well-written take down of a popular band by Chris Richards in The Washington Post.

[T]his is rock music that lazily presumes life on the digital plane has made us so numb, so unable to feel for ourselves, that the only way to reach our hearts is by applying a pneumatic hammer to our classic rock pleasure centers. Bowie! Springsteen! Talking Heads! Blam-blam-blam! Bludgeoning and vacant, “Reflektor” is an album that both condescends and sells itself short, over and over again, for 76 insufferable minutes.

Again, this is pretty good, but editing it down to make it tighter – and its emotion of disappointment and contempt more focused – would have helped:

This is music that presumes digital life has made us so numb we can only be reached via pneumatic hammer. Bowie, Springsteen, Talking Heads: Blam, blam, blam! Bludgeoning and vacant, “Reflektor” condescends and sells itself short, over and over again, for 76 insufferable minutes.

Yet better examples of the absolute dump review are two from the New York Times that Scathing Online Schoolmarm has already featured on this blog: A 2008 Jon Pareles description of a Sarah Brightman concert, and, in 2012, Alastair Macaulay reviewing Russia’s Eifman Ballet. Click here for hilarious details.

******************

UD thanks her sister for
the link to the Post review.

Maybe they’re waiting for a less corrupt, violent, and generally disgusting program with which to affiliate themselves. UD finds it strange that local booster-journalists think everyone will come out to celebrate morally despicable teams. Because, you know, often they won’t.