The Detroit Free Press defends their home town against mischaracterizations in the national press with the first installment of The Truth About Detroit What was said: “Government employees and their overbearing unions have been on a decades-long crusade to defraud the taxpayer and unjustly enrich themselves. When everyday Americans are struggling to find job security and […]
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Making ethics training memorable
Over at Freakonomics, a story about The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, a compendium of tales of misconduct, used in ethics training by the DoD.
Beaumont ISD and the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Will Baude linked to a post by Univ. of Texas Law prof Joey Fishkin about a redistricting fight going on in Beaumont that piqued my curiosity. Prof Fishkin writes: The Beaumont case thus provides a particularly clear case [emph added] of the effect of the demise of Section 5: under Section […]
Going-away party fajitas and the power of enzymes
The lab tradition is that when someone leaves, they get to choose the food for the party at our house. In the past, people have chosen burgers, paella, and lasagna among others. Yesterday, Nathan and John were leaving and the plan was fajitas, which I’ve never made despite living in Texas for more than 20 […]
WP PubMed Reflist
One of the reasons I started my old blog was to use it as a front end for managing our department website. Prospective graduate students generally don’t think my friends at MIT haven’t published for the last 5 years based on their website, but people with bicoastal biases might actually believe that about Texas A&M. […]
Tenure surprises
Via Jonathan (@phylogenomics) Eisen on Twitter: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article on fear and loathing among the untenured. Overall, the content is good, common sense stuff: mentor your junior faculty, hire with the expectation of promotion, give frequent feedback, don’t discourage creative teaching by overemphasizing numerical student reviews. What led me to […]