Teenagers are bad for your wallet

Everyone knows teenagers are expensive...they want to spend your money. But did you know that they can actually decrease your income as well? Using data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates (from the U.S. Census Bureau), researchers have shown that having children ages 12 to 18 has a statistically significant correlation with earnings. Specifically, librarians earn 19.9% less per teenager. So if
you have 5 teenagers, you should just quit your job since you will only be earning 0.5% of your coworker's salary, which is surely below minimum wage. This study focused on librarians, but the trend may apply to other occupations as well.

Sweeper, D., & Smith, S. A. (2010). Assessing the impact of gender and race on earnings in the library science labor market. College and Research Libraries, 71, 171-183.

Federal judge rules that cheerleading is not a sport

Judge Stefan R. Underhill says in his 95-page opinion, "I hold that the University's competitive cheerleading team does not qualify as a varsity sport for the purposes of Title IX."

Quinnipiac University (in Connecticut) was trying to include cheerleaders in its tally of female athletes to show that it had provided equal athletic opportunities to women and men. The judge didn't buy it and ruled that the University had "discriminated on the basis of sex during the 2009-10 academic year by failing to provide
equal athletic participation opportunities for women."

To those cheerleaders who feel that cheerleading is a sport, the judge provides this bit of hope: "Competitive cheer may, some time in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX; today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students."

Dirty Dr. Potti

Dr. Anil Potti would be a great subject for this blog just for his name. But, it gets even better: Cancer genomic researcher Dr. Anil Potti falsely claimed to be a Rhodes scholar in a grant application to the American Cancer Society, which awarded him $729,000 in research funding.

So he lied on the grant application. Maybe he also falsified research data. Thirty-one of his colleagues recommended ending three cancer trials based on his work because of "serious errors" in his science. The other researchers were not able to reproduce his results in their own labs. Enrollment in the trials has been halted and Dr. Potti has been suspended as an associate professor at Duke University.

News flash: Being a student involves attending class

If you want to pass your classes, it helps if you read the syllabus and actually show up for class. You would think that this student would have figured that out, given that his past classes have often had attendance policies (and syllabi). He must be a slow learner.

Actual email from a college student to a professor:

It has come to my attention that you have an attendance policy for our class of which I did not know because I did not read all of the syllabus before now. I object to this policy as it will hurt my grade and I want to protest that to you in very strong words. This has happened to me many times before that these policies exist and I do not read about them until I have skipped to many classes which is why I am so upset that this has happened to me again. It feels like all the teachers at this school are out to get me because everyone has the policies and it always sticks it to my grade in the end. So in this case I would hope that you would think of me the student and not use this policy on me since its been used so many times before already in other classes with other teachers. Its just not fair to keep it up on me.