antimeria

At least my alma mater isn’t firing half its faculty or selling the Logan Museum.

Peter French, Brandeis’s chief operating officer, explained that the university’s situation is far more dire than it appeared in news accounts… He objected to the word “bankrupt,” but what would you call an institution with a projected deficit of $79 million over the next six years, a tapped-out reserve fund, a shrunken endowment and “quite a number” of big donors hit hard by the Madoff scandal?

Brandeis has already cut expenses and staff this year and last, and raised tuition and fees. French said the alternative now was either a drastic shrinking of the university or selling the art. Faced with the prospect of closing 40 percent of the university’s buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent, or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members—any of which, French said, would drastically change the university’s mission and essentially cripple it—“We’d rather use Rose.”

HT: The Daily Beast

Researchers evaluating a new technique for locating and removing objects accidentally embedded in the body say they may have uncovered a new form of self-mutilating behavior in which teenagers intentionally insert objects into their flesh.
[...]
One patient had inserted 11 objects, including an unfolded metal paper clip more than 6 inches long.

The study, presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, is the first to report on this type of self-inflicted injury among teenagers, the researchers said. They call the behavior “self-embedding disorder.”

Some of the items included “needles, staples, wood, stone, glass, pencil lead and a crayon.” Blargh. And, contrary to my first guess, it’s not related to stalking/pestering people (a la embedded journalists).

Radiologists uncover, label new teen affliction (HT, of sorts: Boing Boing)