My ESPN content from the past seven days:
* My 2004 redraft, going back to that year and redoing the draft with the benefit of hindsight.
* And a companion piece looking at the 2004 first-rounders who didn’t work out.
* How the Rangers should respond to Fielder’s injury.
* My SEC tournament wrapup.
* Friday’s Klawchat.
My next mock draft goes up Tuesday, and I’ll have a pro prospect ranking update later in the week as well, because I don’t have enough going on right now.
I left Alabama a little earlier than expected, since the 3 pm game on Friday didn’t include anyone I needed to see, but I did stop by Octane in Homewood for an espresso and a bag of beans (Rwandan, since I enjoyed the Four Barrel beans from that country). The space is bigger and brighter than the Octane I visited in Atlanta, too.
And now, this week’s links, with two extra today since I went a little heavy on the vaccine topic.
- Vaccines are not associated with autism. A meta-study covering over a million kids found, once again, that water is wet and vaccines don’t cause autism. Link goes to an abstract for a subscriber-only journal article.
- Delaying the MMR vaccine may increase seizure risk. Granted, this is small potatoes compared to, you know, getting the actual measles, but it’s just another reason to vaccinate fully and on schedule.
- Antivaccine activists attack and bully high school filmmakers. Just in case you didn’t realize vaccinutters were dangerous, evil zealots.
- And one more on vaccines – why showing someone their belief is false doesn’t work. It’s more complicated than just disproving a dumb idea.
- From the NY Times, a long column on why counting reducing calories won’t help you lose weight. The authors have hypothesized that it’s a combination of factors behind our national weight gain: We eat too many refined carbohydrates that drive up insulin levels, and storage of excess glycogen as fat actually reduces the amount of energy available for the body to use – so we eat more.
- Chef Dan Barber talked to NPR about his new book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
, which continues Barber’s long-running interest in food security and sustainability. His main message is still the same, though: Our choices at the market and the table have consequences for everyone.
- Haverford commencement speaker lambasts students. They mounted a protest against the original speaker, former Cal-Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, causing his withdrawal. Some of this stuff happened when I was in college, although it was more likely students would refuse to stand or would turn their backs to the speaker. The idea of petitioning to cause a speaker’s removal has the whiff of sport, not political activism, and the actual speaker, former Princeton president William Bowen, makes several excellent points on the imbroglio.
Keith,
I think Scott at LGM had a better take on the entire commencement thing. After all, this is not just about free speech – commencements are largely platitudes after all. Considering how much the university often compensates these speakers – money that could be used for more productive things – they are honoring these speakers and students and faculty darn right have a voice here. There is a lot of “get off my lawn” in the comments you reference: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/05/deep-thoughts-condi-rice
Hi Keith, As the father of a beautiful little girl with Autism I appreciate you banging the drum against the antivaccine people? Any thoughts on GI issues and Autism? I have heard respected doctors say they think ASD is a gastrointestinal disorder and I do not think that to be the case.
@Jim: That might be a causation/correlation confusion. I know a lot of people with ASD do have GI issues, but that doesn’t mean the GI issues caused the autism, of course. Also, don’t many people with ASD eat fairly limited diets? I know that can be true with more severe developmental disorders.
I was at the Haverford commencement (my brother was graduating), and I was very disappointed in William Bowen’s speech, for a number of reasons:
1) This is meant to be a ceremony celebrating the achievements of the 300 or so young men or women graduating that day, and a scolding in front of their parents aimed at the actions of about 40 of them (though addressing them all) is neither particularly appropriate nor particularly fair to them. The way the papers played it up (and it was played up a bit) was completely predictable, and given that several people have already brought it up with me, I’m sure it’s something they’ve had to deal with. That should not be the lasting memory of one’s college graduation. The way you’ve expressed it here, Keith, is a perfect example of this – when you say “they mounted a protest…” it sounds like it’s the whole class or most of it, not a small portion of it. When I heard the speech, I didn’t know any details about the situation, and I assumed from the way Bowen talked that it was a much bigger group than it actually was.
2) Bowen was speaking from a pretty biased point of view – a former university president, receiving an honorary degree, speaking about a former university chancellor who was supposed to be receiving an honorary degree. If you’re coming from that point of view, you need to be critical of all sides in a fair manner. The university clearly could have done more to get input from its student body before inviting Birgeneau as speaker, but that was not mentioned. Birgeneau backed out with a curt email after 40 out of 1200 students at the school presented him with this “list of demands” (and let’s remember, these are 22 year olds) – this is hardly the way to present yourself as a leader, especially at an institution of higher learning. He came in for a sentence of criticism – ‘I do think he should be here’ – while the students were lectured, with at times much harsher language, for the rest of the speech. If you’re going to call the students’ actions “immature” and “arrogant,” shouldn’t you say Birgeneau acted like a petulant child? The overall point – let’s approach these matters in ways that promote openness and discussion – was a good one, but I think the manner he approached it likely kept it from being effective for those it was most aimed at.
3) I think it’s particularly rich for a 70 year old white man to lecture anyone on the proper way to protest. Oh, and “look at the way we did it at Princeton” hardly helps with that image.
A couple extra notes – I do think this was about activism, not sport; after all, the issue at the heart of it was Birgeneau’s role in the forceful breakup of the Occupy protests at Berkeley, which could understandably be an issue close to the heart of students. Furthermore, while they may have petitioned to have him removed (I don’t know), the cause of this imbroglio was a list of demands (requests? if he ignored them, they were just going to wear pins saying ‘Ask me about Birgeneau,’ apparently) that Birgeneau apologize for and address his role in the breakup of the protest.
Lastly, the papers are all saying he got a standing ovation – I would say about 2/3 of the audience stood, and I didn’t see a single graduate standing – which I, at least, found telling.
Great, great read about the Haverford speaker.
I’m enjoying the feedback on the Haverford speaker piece, too. I only know of it what I read in that story, which made it sound like Bowen castigated the original speaker more than Preston reports that he did.