Category Archives: Current events

Three cheers for Dr. May!

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A reader made sure I saw this today. (Thank you, reader!)
From Brian May’s website:

Yes. It’s done, and after about 37 years, I am finally a doctor. The oral examination of my thesis, and of me, lasted about 3 hours, and then I retired with Prof Rowan-Robinson, for a few moments, for my two examiners to confer. After only a couple of minutes they called me back into the room and offered their hands in congratulations. Yes, my category was number 2. I understand pretty much nobody gets a 1st category – which is “This is perfect – here’s your PhD.”

Congratulations to Dr. May on a job well done!

Thoughts on the passing of Leona Helmsley.

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Perhaps you’ve heard the news that Leona Helmsley died yesterday. Her obituaries have noted the the “Queen of Mean” came to be viewed as the embodiment of the greed of the 1980s (at least as it played out in the world of Manhattan real estate).
The public didn’t like her much.
I have no real basis for making a judgment about whether she was a nice person deep down, whether she became a nicer person after doing jail time for tax evasion, or whether she was kind to animals. But I would like to have a look at something she was widely reported to have said (but denied saying):
“Only the little people pay taxes.”

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If you pay us to put your name on our college, what are you expecting us to give up in return?

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The Des Moines Register reports a bit of a to-do at the University of Iowa about whether the College of Public Health will be accepting a “naming gift” from Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Some objections have been raised on the basis that a giant of the health insurance industry might have (or be seen to have) significantly different values and goals than a college of public health:

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UCSF sued by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine over treatment of lab animals.

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Today a number of doctors affiliated with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) filed suit against the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) alleging that state funds are paying for research that violates the Animal Welfare Act. Among the big concerns raised in the suit:

  • Experiments that were “duplicative” — i.e., whose outcomes were essentially known before the experiment from experiments already conducted.
  • Experiments where there was no documentation that the researchers had considered alternative that would minimize the animals’ distress.
  • Experiments where the justification given for the animal distress (gaining insight into how to alleviate Alzheimer’s disease) is problematic, because the neural system under study in the animals is not involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

You can read the AP’s story here and the PCRM press release about the lawsuit here.

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Lessons from the Ward Churchill case.

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The news today from Inside Higher Ed is that the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill. You may recall that in May 2006, a faculty panel at the university found that the tenured ethnic studies professor had committed repeated, intentional academic misconduct in his scholarly writings. You may also recall that the close scrutiny of his writings was sparked by an outcry at some of the political views he voiced (especially that the September 11th attacks were an instance of “chickens coming home to roost”).
The mix of factors here — a movement to remove a tenured professor at a public university because his views are judged politically objectionable, plus a finding of real problems with the integrity of his scholarship, not to mention a whole set of issues around shared governance and the appropriate process within university hearings (which I will leave to the people with a much better feel for org charts) — have made the Churchill case a Rorschach test. How people interpret what the case was about, and how they will judge the outcome, probably tells us more about their priorities and anxieties around higher education than it necessarily tells us about Ward Churchill himself.

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Science in the courtroom: is ‘made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar’ false advertising?

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The July 9 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (alas, behind a paywall — but worth checking to see if your library has an institutional subscription) has an interesting piece [1] on the recently-settled trial in which the makers of Equal (an artificial sweetener based on aspartame) sued the makers of Splenda (an artificial sweetener based on sucralose) over their claim in advertisements, “Splenda is made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” The makers of Equal (a company called Merisant) asserted that this claim was deceptive.

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