Category: News

Cook College has been debating what to change its name to as a result of the reorganization of undergraduate education at Rutgers. My favorite paragraph of the story was as follows:

“I’m not going to speak of which way to go, one way or the other, but the student perspective is that we don’t want our name to be changed at all,” said Cook College Council member Chris Bylone, a senior. “Just like Harvard and Yale have one name and are known for something, Cook is known for something right now. We are known across the country as Cook, so why change something that is good?”

Trust me when I tell you that on the name recognition scale, Cook College is not in the same league as Harvard or Yale.

The liberal blogosphere has been alight over the Dick Cheney shooting (Cheney shooting someone else, not the other way around). Quite honestly it’s like looking for a tempest in a tea pot. Do we need to manufacture what was an unfortunate event poorly handled in to a “huge scandal” when there are enough serious issues on the table?

RU beats Marquette on a crappy day in central NJ, as the team attempts to steady itself coming off a series of losses and injuries. The most interesting aspect of the game was that head coach Gary Waters was trapped in Ohio due to the weather, preventing him from returning for the game. No doubt this will only fuel more speculation on his fate, as associate coach Fred Hill stepped in to fill Waters’ shoes. Having coached the team to a win, the RU “faithful” may push for a change even more next year.

What’s most amusing about reading this Targum article about the proposes changes is the arguments for a resedential college model as something new. All Douglass is today is a resedential college, albeit one with the ability to set its own degree requirements. Changing the degree requirements only solves one aspect of the issue. What makes the whole thing even more absurd is, if you read the admissions discussion, students are admitted based on a checkbox. So, as a student (a female one at that), if you pick all three, you get placed based on where the admissions gods slot you.

As for the RU Screw, the issue isn’t that you have centralized departments, but that you have some aspects (Registrar, Housing, Financial Aid) centralized and others (student adivising, activities and clubs, degree requirements) not standard. Why would you design a system where the entity offering the courses and managing registration is separate from the entity that defines the degree requirements? Why is residence life specific to each campus, each with its own training, codes, and rules college-specific, yet the housing department is centralized?

The whole system is ridiculous and needs to be fixed.

Talk about a trip down the rabbit hole.

I glanced into the room while McFadden was talking, and there, plopped in the middle of about five other inmates, sat Slobodan Milosevic. His hair and casual clothes were rumpled, a piece of sheet cake sat on a paper plate in front of him, and he was holding a bite halfway to his mouth on a plastic fork. Right next to him at the low table, also sitting on the hard plastic seat of an elementary-school-style chair, was one of the tribunal’s most prominent Bosnian Muslim defendants. And I thought to myself, the Yugoslav people, to the extent they ever existed at all, have vanished from the face of the earth. But somehow an ersatz version lives on within the walls of this high-tech jail, where Slobodan Milosevic—the Serb once known as the Butcher of Belgrade—can now share a quiet piece of cake with a Bosnian Muslim at a farewell party for their mutual friend.

Coming soon – my weekend in Houston.

Sony kills production of its robotics unit, further demonstrating the lack of vision that is so prevalent in business these days.

The worst part is this could actually work.

I thought the American Jobs Creation Act was a crock, too, especially once I heard who some of the companies were that were taking advantage of the law.

Network neturality is one of those topics that helps the individual by not creating artificial (i.e. greed-based) mechanisms that impede access to all network participants, and thus hurt corporations. As a result, look for this principle to fall by the wayside during the upcoming rewrite of the nation’s telecommunications laws.

You know we’re in trouble in Iraq-Iran when you read something like this.

Inside Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps runs a one month training and indoctrination course for members of the Iraqi Shiite militia the Badr Brigades, paying them 75 cents a day during training and 82 dollars a month once they return to jobless Iraq. The Badr Brigades is the militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) political party. The SCIRI is one of the largest parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, which won a plurality in the December 15 elections and will control the largest bloc of seats in the new national assembly. On December 13 Iraqi border police seize a tanker truck filled with thousands of forged ballots that had just crossed over from Iran. Mr. Bayan Jabr Solagh of the SCIRI and Badr Brigades is the Iraqi Interior Minister, controlling Iraqi police and police commando units, which are thought to be heavily infiltrated by Badr Brigades fighters. Secret detention and torture centers and death squads, targeting Iraqi Sunnis, are all linked to the Interior Ministry. U.S. troops encounter sophisticated, factory-made devices utilizing armor-piercing explosively-formed projectile (EFP) technology, identical to those employed by Iranian-backed Hezbollah against the Israelis in Lebanon, in the hands of Sunni insurgents in Iraq.