Michele Dufault, an astronomy and physics major at Yale, has been killed in a freak accident that occurred while she was using the university’s spinning lathe. Apparently her hair got caught in the machine and it pulled her in.

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A dangerous machine. This person survived because people around him turned off the machine. Was Dufault alone in the shop?

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The Yale Daily News has details.

From comments on the YDN story:

This young woman encouraged me not to give up on an astrophys course we took together, helped me as a bewildered freshman through problem sets, sent me emails to check up on how I liked this or that course, all because of her passion for what she studied and her generous nature.

… today, my post about him one year ago.

With the second case of apparent plagiarism on the part of a German politician noted for sticking DR. in front of all mentions of her name, we have to ask whether this behavior is general over there. When will one of the DR.s blurt out, in a moment of frustration, Everyone does it ?

In the aftermath of four student suicides, and, most recently, a professor’s suicide, at the extremely competitive Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, students and faculty are calling for changes. In particular, they want the punitive fee system (you pay a lot more if your GPA starts slipping) ended.

[T]hose who failed to get a grade point average better than 3.0 out of the total 4.3 faced up to 6 million won ($5,520) in fees from the second semester. For international students, the system was implemented from their third semester.

Of the total 7,805 students enrolled last year, 1,600 students, or 12.9 percent, paid an average of 2.45 million won. And the figure has been on the rise recently, with 4.9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2009.

The school’s president isn’t handling things well – he seemed at one point to be accepting this and other reforms aimed at cooling the competitive intensity, but has changed his mind.

Meanwhile, John Rodgers, an English language teacher in Seoul, reviews the startlingly high suicide incidence in Korea generally, and suggests that the country take advantage of the attention being paid to the deaths at KAIST to begin reckoning with aspects of the culture that contribute to the problem.

The shades are gathering.

Ghostwriting businesses that serve as go-betweens for drug companies and university thought leaders, writing articles and books that promote the drug company’s pills, and then putting the thought leaders’ names on the articles and books in order to make the publications look legitimate, live a fitful existence. They flicker in and out of public awareness.

Mainly they’re hidden, minor divisions of a pharmaceutical industry in no hurry to disclose a strikingly deceptive – and destructive – form of self-promotion.

But it’s kind of a problem for the ghostwriting firms themselves: You want the world to know about you and your work, but you … don’t want the world to know about you and your work.

The schizy quality of the biz was captured rather beautifully this week by Ed Silverman of Pharmalot, who noticed that one ghosting company had suddenly taken down a website page showing all the scientific books they’ve produced. One of these books was featured in a recent New York Times story about ghostwriting.

Silverman called the head of the company to ask about the elusive webpage.

“Thanks for the inquiry,” he responded abruptly, “but we don’t display that kind of stuff on our web site.” We replied by noting that the info had been there previously, but then we heard a loud… click. Perhaps, he realized that listing the book as a portfolio product does not easily square with the [American Psychiatric Association] position [the APA published the book] that ghostwriting did not take place. And taking down the product portfolio might also make it more difficult to scrutinize other [ghosted] work. Given how fast he hung up, though, one might have thought we uttered the magic word: “Boo!”

… Chicago State.

Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica.

[Somehow from Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Words­worth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without [his personal] synthesis of gloom and angst, we could never have had his “Aubade,” a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counter­poise between the stoic philosophies of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.

Aubade.

Professor Rappaport (UD‘s father was born Herbert Rapoport – could UD be related to this dude?) offers some wild and crazy extra credit.

Kind of a mild version of that Northwestern University professor’s session with the device.

Rappaport’s Rate My Professors page is a trip. You have to go the extra mile to get a 4.3 Easiness rating.

… doing in a bribery scheme like this?

… and stubborn as a damn mule about it. The country runs a disgraceful state university system, but won’t give equal rights to private universities because it knows a monopoly when it sees one.

Many of the private schools are better than the state schools.

This is not hard to accomplish.

“The way [the private schools] operate reveals to Greek parents the ills of universities,” [the head of a group of private colleges] said, referring to the crowded classes and lax monitoring of student attendance often complained about in the state sector.

… “No other public sector university environment in the E.U. is as self-centered as Greece’s,” said Jens Bastian, a senior fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He said lack of competition had hindered innovation and led to many outstanding students and academics continuing their careers abroad.

“When did you last hear of a stand-out Greek research paper?” he said.

The EU has had it. They just sent the Greeks a letter saying they’re going to sic the European Court of Justice on them if they don’t join the rest of the world.

Kaplan [has a] sprawling network of for-profit “universities”…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm dislikes quotation marks, but these work.

[The Washington Post, whose parent company owns Kaplan, is now] in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes… [C]orruption and abuses … pervade the for-profit education industry in general and Kaplan in particular (saddling poor people with debt in exchange for nothing of real value).

Since Kaplan gets virtually all of its money from federal dollars, it’s got to suck up to the government. Greenwald points out that this need doesn’t do much for claims of journalistic independence:

How can a company which is almost wholly dependent upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. Government possibly be expected to serve as a journalistic “watchdog” over that same Government? The very idea is absurd.

We’ve seen this before, at Caltech.

Caltech, like this school, also featured a professor’s suicide.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

[T]he Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of the most academically-challenging and prestigious universities in South Korea, is in the media spotlight after the suicides of four students since January, with the fourth occurring last week. And over the weekend, a KAIST professor also killed himself.

All of the Caltech students were Asian Americans.

A commenter in the Cornell University newspaper welcomes another name to the pantheon.

… Pretty.

Every time they’re near me I just can’t get enough.

Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychoanalyst, died in Scotland (he’d been invited to lecture there) in 1937. His family traveled to Aberdeen for his funeral, but didn’t bring his ashes home.

The Honorary Consul of Austria for Scotland has, with great effort, tracked them down, and is having them brought back to Austria.

UD finds his explanation of Adler’s fate well worth pondering.

“In a sense he wasn’t lost because he was where he had always been, it’s just that no-one knew he was there.”