Aaron Edlin Applauds Obama’s Selection of Christina Romer

San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 25, 2008 by Tom Abate
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/25/BUT614B5LA.DTL&type=printable

“Christy Romer and Ben Bernanke are two of the world’s greatest experts on the Great Depression,” he said. Edlin, who spent two years on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, said Romer is an ideal pick to head this White House office charged with giving the president an unvarnished picture of the economy. “The CEA is traditionally the honest broker,” Edlin said.

David Kirp Reviews Book by Charles Murray, Real Education

The American Prospect, Nov. 24, 2008 by David Kirp
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=college_for_the_few

In Real Education, Murray turns the spotlight on higher education. He’s up to his familiar tricks: This time the provocation is that too many people go to college. Murray loves to make broad-brush, simple-sounding claims—welfare causes dependency, intelligence is inherited—and Real Education offers four of these “simple truths.”

Ken Taymor Criticizes Stem Cell Research Institute

Sacramento Bee, Nov. 24, 2008
http://www.sacbee.com/editorials/story/1422312.html

Taymor, who has been watching the institute’s operations for three years, noted that nearly everyone on the institute’s governing board—medical school deans, university officials—has some sort of financial interest in the grants being awarded. Even with officials recusing themselves, the board’s deliberations, he said, have the feel of “a club that was allocating money among themselves” based on preordained decisions.

Robert Berring Points Out Downside of Online Research

Boston Globe, Nov. 23, 2008 by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/23/group_think?mode=PF

In online searches, the researcher tends to follow hyperlink to hyperlink, in a journey that resembles “a plunge down a rabbit hole,” in the words of Robert Berring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied the impact of electronic media. “If you get to an index, a table of contents, you see the environment that surrounds it. In the culture of paper, a lot of these signals are important.”

Franklin Zimring Comments on Rarity of Child Murder Cases

Hollister Free Lance, Nov. 21, 2008 by Colin McConville
http://www.freelancenews.com/news/251099-expert-child-murder-cases-not-unthinkably-rare

The recent killing of 19-month-old Donna May Busch is “not part of an ordinary culture of violence,” said Frank Zimring…. The bottom line, though, Zimring said, is that kids can be subjected to their parents’ instabilities. “Children are hostages to the mental and emotional stability of the parents,” Zimring said.

Laurel Fletcher and Eric Stover Demand Investigation of U.S. Detention Policies

International Herald Tribune, Nov. 21, 2008 by Laurel Fletcher and Eric Stover
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/21/opinion/edsobel.php

The commission should determine what went wrong and who should be held accountable, and recommend ways to help those falsely imprisoned clear their names and recover from the abuses they have suffered…. Commission members should be armed with subpoena power, given full access to classified material and be able to conduct their work unhindered by presidential pardons or amnesties designed to shield the culpable from accountability.