… search for Anthony Galea at the University of Toronto. He says he’s on the medical faculty.
Galea’s in trouble with the law, here, there and everywhere.
… The F.B.I. investigation of Dr. Anthony Galea, a sports medicine specialist who has treated hundreds of professional athletes across many sports, follows his arrest on Oct. 15 in Toronto by the Canadian police. Human growth hormone and Actovegin, a drug extracted from calf’s blood, were found in his medical bag at the United States-Canada border in late September. Using, selling or importing Actovegin is illegal in the United States.
Dr. Galea is also being investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for smuggling, advertising and selling unapproved drugs as well as criminal conspiracy…
At first it looked like an open-and-shut case of two female basketball players beating up on a male cheerleader who complained about their noisy partying.
Now it looks as though they were all friends and all partying together when a fourth person complained about noise, and things somehow got out of hand.
I mean, the details aren’t clear. They rarely are when everyone’s drunk as a skunk. But the guy’s nose is definitely broken. And everyone’s been suspended from their team or their squad.
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UD thanks David for the Smoking Gun link.
… is featured in Politico today.
… The 19-year-old sophomore at George Washington University has become the Washington press corps’ independent fact checker, copy editor and link distributor extraordinaire. His e-mails almost always lead off with a soupçon of praise, such as “In your excellent article today,” followed by a link to the story and polite notification of a mistake, anything from a broken hyperlink to a misspelled name. He offers the correction — “It’s ‘Haass,’ not ‘Haas,’” he wrote in regard to the president of the Council on Foreign Relations — and often a link as proof. He signs off coolly: “Best, Daniel.”
… On an average day, Lippman says he’ll read about 80 articles in just a couple of hours — which seems like a conservative estimate. He’s quick to note that he does not let this interfere with his studies. To that end, he decided not to bring his laptop to his classes this year, as it was becoming a distraction.
His connections to professional journalists began a couple of years ago, when he started firing off e-mails with corrections to The New York Times. For a while, Lippman kept tabs on his successes by bookmarking them on his computer.
“I like accuracy a lot,” he says…
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Not bringing your laptop to class, eh?
A distraction, eh?
Bomb her house.
While she, her mother, and her daughter, are in it.
The chair of Tulane University’s Department of Pharmacology died Saturday evening, after driving through floodwaters and into a canal on the Westbank.
On a night when heavy rainfall flooded streets across the city, investigators say the Tulane University professor and his wife detoured onto Marr Avenue from Gen. DeGaulle.
But with so much water covering the roadway, Agrawal drove into the Donner Canal.
The couple managed to get out of their car, but police say Agrawal disappeared while trying to help his wife get to higher ground…
… at 94.
Excerpts from the New York Times obituary:
… His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade.
… His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”
… He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago. “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses.
The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned.
“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”
… In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor.
Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. [Robert] Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”…
The Financial Times reviews a new book.
… The excesses of college football have hit new levels of absurdity since the 1990s, writes Michael Oriard in his new book Bowled Over. Colleges throw money they don’t have into football. “From any reasonably objective perspective,” says Oriard, “the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy.” Oriard knows his stuff. He played football for Notre Dame University and in the NFL before becoming an English professor at Oregon State University…
He excels at identifying the sport’s abuses. Some players leave university illiterate, having played football nonstop. They are unpaid, and yet colleges still manage to blow fortunes on tuition centres, airfares around America, and sometimes on “recruiting hostesses” who entice promising youths to the right college. The great majority of colleges lose money on athletics, yet most football teams overshadow their universities. And the craziness worsens each year.
The boosters’ arguments for college football are probably bogus. Football doesn’t seem to persuade alumni to give to a university’s academic work, and doesn’t attract better students. Indeed, donors have recently given “to athletics at the expense of academics”, says Oriard….
Good thing these guys aren’t in positions of responsibility at universities.
I
… Michael Gross [is] a prominent member of Britain’s Jewish community, a long-time donor to Ben-Gurion University (BGU) and a member of its international board of governors.
After seeing [a television program shaply critical of Israel] last month, Gross emailed Professor David Newman – a British-born lecturer who has emigrated to Israel – and wrote: “I saw your disgusting contribution to the Dispatches programme. I will use whatever influence I have at BGU to have you thrown out… I hope you perish.” In a second message, he said: “The sooner you are removed from BGU and the face of the earth, the better.”
[After his email produced a furor among Israeli academics, Gross said] : “I am not going to apologise to him, because he deserves what he gets.”
… In his appearance on the programme, Newman, a political geographer who is editor of the international Journal of Geopolitics, did not directly criticise Israeli policy. In fact, after seeing the programme, he said he regretted having taken part. In a column for the Jerusalem Post several days after its broadcast, he said that the programme had been very one-sided…
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II
After getting into a public squabble with a CUNY trustee at a groundbreaking event on Tuesday, City Councilman Charles Barron wants him out. According to the Daily News, the controversial Council member told an audience at Medgar Evers College (a CUNY school), “The Board of Trustees has to change… This is a racist, rednecked right-winger who’s sitting on the Board of Trustees. Make sure you write a letter and say he must be removed.”
Barron was referring to trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who called Barron a “disgrace” at the Tuesday ceremony because Barron was complaining that he wasn’t allowed to speak earlier and that he was given a seat in the audience, instead at the front with other officials. Their exchange devolved into a shouting match with Barron yelling, “You just be quiet. Ain’t nobody talking to you. Whether you like it or not, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. You sit there. You shut up!” and Wiesenfeld later calling Barron a “thug” and a “hater.” (The News points out, “Wiesenfeld was appointed to the CUNY board by Gov. George Pataki in 1999, despite allegations he referred to blacks as ‘savages’ and Hasidic Jews as ‘thieves.'”) It got so bad, “young children were escorted away” from the event.
Athens University rector Christos Kittas, who was injured by hooded assailants who stormed onto the university’s main administration building (Propylea) last Sunday, submitted his resignation to the university’s faculty senate on Thursday.
Kittas was hospitalised for treatment after the attack, while also suffering a mild heart attack…
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Several dozen people ran through a parking lot between Giannini Hall and Tolman Hall, wearing hoods…
Not Athens. Berkeley, last night.
… of peer review.
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UD thanks Barney for sending it.
It’s not only Greek university students who think bludgeoning professors and administrators makes political sense. We’ve got a few like that here.
As many as 70 protesters, many carrying torches and smashing windows, attempted to storm UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s on-campus residence late Friday in a violent act condemned by university officials and student activists alike.
Eight people, including two UC Berkeley students, were arrested on suspicion of rioting, threatening an educational official, attempted burglary, attempted arson, felony vandalism and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, the university said.
Some protesters threw incendiary objects at the house in an attack that left the chancellor and his wife fearing for their lives.
The group was apparently protesting student fee hikes and budget cuts. The demonstrators chanted “No justice, no peace,” as the chancellor slept. His wife woke him up about 11 p.m. …
Details and many comments at the Berkeley campus paper.
UD‘s nervous and excited about singing in a Messiah chorus this year.
She’s done plenty of singalong Messiahs at the Kennedy Center (The night I brought my mother to this event has become one of my best memories.), and has sung bits of the thing in school and church choirs, but she’s never been in a big actual chorus that sings the thing through (not all of it, but a lot of it) with soloists and orchestra and all. She’s already described her first rehearsal.
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Last night at the Garrett Park Town Hall
UD didn’t sing anything from Messiah.
This was the annual Garrett Park holiday singalong
(here’s a post about the 2007 singalong),
and she sang a little solo from I Wonder as I Wander.
She wondered as she wandered whether she’d
actually hit the F sharp. And she did, she did hit
it, twice, thanks to the three sips of Nalewka
Kresowa Orzechowa she took before leaving her
house.
As always this event got UD going emotionally.
Even more this year than earlier years. Not sure why.
The very large audience sang its heart out, so that was
part of it. The accumulated years of the event, the deeply
known faces in the chorus around me, and in the audience
in front of me, all of us moving right along timewise, sharing
a long town past…
Pile on top of that the deep holiday memories everyone
sang from, the way you could stand there and look at
their faces and see exactly what this modest village event
meant to them, and you don’t have to read Thomas Hardy
to understand the dimensions of the thing.