A few moments ago, fed up with a female downy woodpecker at work on my house just outside my office window, I got up, went to the window, and stared at it, inches away, as it drilled. Its terribly black eyes suddenly locked on to me; and, just as suddenly, it went flying.

Now, finally, it’s quiet around here.

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UD pecked about in vain for a good poem, image, whatever, to accompany this post.

James, a reader, found one.

UD is grateful.

… the forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the absolutely immense text packed with every imaginable psychological permutation.

Allen Frances, editor of an earlier DSMV, cautions against what some are calling psychosprawl:

The greatest problem in the past 15 years of psychiatry has been diagnostic inflation and the over-treatment of people who really don’t need it. This misallocates scarce resources away from those who do most desperately need and can most use our help. I fear DSM-5 because it threatens to further medicalize normality and spread psychiatry too thin.

… if you’re looking for morally compromised faculty.

The student newspaper knows it.

…UD loved to read a blogger calling himself Fenster Moop. Fenster was witty, wise, and very well-informed about academia.

Fenster left the web for awhile, but he’s back with this new blog.

Ol’ T. Boone must be pissed. I mean, this is Oklahoma State, people! T. Boone who, with all his money and influence, really runs the team … really runs the school… endows OSU with yet another amazing gift: a huge new stadium! And the team is winning games!

But they can’t sell out the stadium.

… B-School Boys.

A good lecture or seminar has its foundation in words but gains its texture and flow from countless other subtle cues and interactions in the classroom. These include the body language of the students that an alert instructor will observe and use in modulating the pace and content of the discussion, the pauses and inflections in student questions that would escape capture by a microphone, and the dynamism that occurs because each student, sitting among different neighbors at a unique location in the room, experiences and engages with the class slightly differently.

A course is also made effective by the unscripted interactions that occur as students gather before and after the class, and by the simple fact that the physical act of getting to class requires at least some investment of time and energy.

A UCLA professor says the obvious about trashy online ed.

What… that dipshit? He couldn’t find his ass with both hands and an assmap.

(UD is trying to imagine what Great Neck North High School administrators must have said in their conversations leading to the arrest of a group of students on criminal charges of cheating on the SATs.)

And talk about the burden of intellect! Here’s poor Eshaghoff “[flying] home from college primarily to impersonate two students and [taking] the SAT twice in one weekend.” The one guy with a brain is always on call.

… physical campus. It is one of her Online Makeover schools, schools so laptopped, over-crowded, and adjunctified that they should admit the obvious and fold as non-virtual locations.

But there’s a special additional reason for U Mass Amherst to cease operations. It is extremely violent and dangerous. It’s been a markedly nasty campus for years (UD has followed the riots), but now, just three weeks into the new school year, things have gotten totally out of hand.

The first weekend of school, police tried to disperse a large party, at a house on Meadow Street, and the students responded by throwing bottles at the cops.

The following weekend, one man was beaten and two students were stabbed at a party …

This weekend, police made 168 arrests and broke up a party of 500 to 700 people …

How long do you keep pretending you’re a university, when what you are, mainly, is a strain on police resources?

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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