Oh, Your Red Sox Matches Your Eyes …

You closed your cover before striking
Father had the shipfitter blues
Loving you has made me bananas!

Watching the Red Sox game on Sunday made me think of that song, which I used to hear on the Bob and Ray Show. A couple of the Boston players were wearing red contact lenses, which are supposed to cut down on glare. Not a good shot of them here, but during the game the camera got a close-up of Matsuzaka and the red in his eyes was kind of creepy.

But not as creepy as Master Po’s eyes in Kung Fu:

Updating two previous posts:

On WikiTruthiepedia:

rrgirl: it’s research paper season, and I get regular updates from the college kids. professors are generally advising them not to cite wikipedia as a source. I’ve suggested using it as a subject overview, but to use more reputable sources where it counts.
we were talking last night about actual library research, and the newt keeper told a story about hoarding books to prevent other people from using them. she was having trouble finding books on her topic and discovered that a table full of people had taken over two shelves-worth of books while they worked together. she dragged six books out of the library, just for spite. kids.
oh, and the newts are fine. they’ll be visiting in a couple weeks.

CP: Wikipedia is a great concept. Self-correcting, yes, but it may take awhile. They require login when an entry is being vandalized so they can track IPs; they will lock editing if it is real bad. Too bad some people have nothing to do but slam and flame the work of others.
PS-They even list their own weaknesses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia

Newts get to go on spring break?

Wikipedia’s been in the news again, with one of their house experts turning out to be some young fellow passing himself off as a Ph.D. Not a bad idea to verify the credentials of their contributors, although I agree with the sentiment that the quality of a person’s work should count more than his or her credentials.

The big trick when I was in college was for students to check out reserve materials (selected books and journal articles that profs would set aside in the library) for hours and hours on end, thereby keeping them out of the hands of their competition. Another trick was for pre-meds to sabotage classmates’ lab experiments.

Not exactly what Keith means by moral force.

After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees
March 12, 2007
By Noam Cohen

After an influential contributor and administrator at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was found last week to have invented a history of academic credentials, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and globetrotting advocate, called for a voluntary system for accrediting contributors who say they have advanced degrees, like a Ph.D or M.D.

The details of how Mr. Wales’s system would work are still being bandied about, and include the idea of having users fax copies of their diplomas to Wikipedia’s offices, or relying on a “circle of trust,” whereby a trusted individual would be in charge of verification. Mr. Wales said he thought that some version of his proposal would begin on the site “in a week.”

But reaction within the fiercely egalitarian Wikipedia world has not been universally favorable. Many writing on Mr. Wales’s user page seemed dumbstruck at the idea of Wikipedia spending its time to verify academic authority when the site’s motto is “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

Florence Devouard, Mr. Wales’s successor as the head of Wikimedia Foundation board, the parent of the many Wikipedias in scores of languages, said she was “not supportive” of the proposal. “I think what matters is the quality of the content, which we can improve by enforcing policies such as ‘cite your source,’ not the quality of credentials showed by an editor,” she added.

Mr. Wales was reacting to the public fallout from the revelation that a contributor and Wikipedia administrator named Essjay who claimed to be a tenured professor in Catholic law was in fact Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old from Louisville, Ky. Mr. Wales said that the Essjay controversy was evidence of “growing pains” for the site, a worldwide phenomenon that has become a default research tool for nearly everyone who uses the Internet.

And while he said “the moral of the story is what makes for a good Wikipedian is not a good credential,” he added that it was important that the general public not think that Wikipedia is “written by a bunch of 12-year-olds.”
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Follow up to Skinny White Girls and Short White Boys:

DP mentioned last week that Shaquille O’Neal passed a message along to Steve Nash via Michael Wilbon saying that the “tainted” comment was taken out of context and he was not disrespecting Nash’s two MVP’s. Which works for me. I don’t think Shaq’s a bad guy and I certainly don’t think he’s racist.

DePauw University is severing ties with the It Is Better To Look Good Than To Be Good sorority.

On March 1, Delta Zeta’s national officers said they were cutting off communication with news organizations.

Can you say “stonewall?” I knew you could ….

The Delta Zeta people could also stand to learn how to give a better apology, or cover up with the I Was Joking defense.

After Evicting Members, Sorority Is Itself Evicted
March 13, 2007
By Sam Dillon

DePauw University severed ties yesterday with a national sorority that evicted two-thirds of the university’s chapter members last year in what the sorority called an effort to improve its image for recruitment, but which the evicted women described as a purge of the unattractive or the uncool.

“We at DePauw do not like the way our students were treated,” DePauw’s president, Robert G. Bottoms, said in a letter to the Delta Zeta sorority. “We at DePauw believe that the values of our university and those of the national Delta Zeta sorority are incompatible.”

The sorority evicted 23 members of its DePauw chapter in December, and half a dozen other women later quit in protest. The action greatly diminished the chapter’s diversity. The women the sorority allowed to stay were all slender and conventionally pretty. Those evicted included some overweight women, and several minority members were evicted or left the sorority on their own.

In an interview, Dr. Bottoms said that beginning this fall Delta Zeta would no longer be permitted to house students in its Greek-columned residence on the DePauw campus in Greencastle, Ind. Only a handful of undergraduates are currently living in the Delta Zeta house, and four of them are seniors, Dr. Bottoms said, adding that the university would help any women who had been planning to live in the residence next year to find alternative housing.

The sorority’s actions were the subject of an article in The New York Times on Feb. 25 and received widespread news coverage . On March 1, Delta Zeta’s national officers said they were cutting off communication with news organizations.

A woman who answered the telephone yesterday at Delta Zeta’s national headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, said that Cynthia Winslow Menges, the sorority’s executive director, was busy with a conference call. But Ms. Menges did not afterward respond to a message seeking comment.

Delta Zeta has chapters on 165 campuses nationwide. Its chapter at DePauw, a rural campus 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis, is one of its oldest.

In a message posted on its Web site this month, the sorority said: “Delta Zeta National apologizes to any of our women at DePauw who felt personally hurt by our actions. It was never our intention to disparage or hurt any of our members during this chapter reorganization process.”

That apology, however, did not bring reconciliation at DePauw.

“It’s like a thief who’s sorry that he got caught, rather than for what he did,” said Rachel Pappas, a junior who left the sorority before the evictions and organized a campus protest about it last month.

In addition to the apology, the sorority posted on its Web site statements critical of the women forced out of the DePauw chapter and of faculty members who supported them. In the letter sent to Delta Zeta yesterday, Dr. Bottoms cited the sorority’s decision to publicize that criticism as contributing to his decision.

“The arrangement we have with Greek organizations is that they’re guests of ours and we expect them to live up to university standards, and in this case Delta Zeta did not,” Dr. Bottoms said. “This means that sorority can’t exist on our campus as an organization beginning in the fall.”

Robert P. Hershberger, the chairman of DePauw’s modern languages department, who earlier this year circulated a faculty petition criticizing Delta Zeta’s treatment of the women, said yesterday in an interview: “This was the right thing to do. I doubt there will be many people here upset about this.”