Sunday, July 05, 2009
Much ado about nothing - sniffing around for scandal with new UC Davis chancellor and not finding any
Well, it seems that despite the attempts of California State Senator Leland Yee nobody has found anything of any interest in the background of the incoming chancellor of UC Davis Linda Katehi. The worst that has been dug up so far is an email that she forwarded while provost at U. Illinois that could be interpreted as applying subtle pressure to get a child of a well connected person admitted to the school (see New UC Davis leader denies wrongdoing in inquiries about student in previous job - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee). I guess we will just have to wait and see but I personally really hate corruption and abuse of power and would not want anyone to be the UCD chancellor if they seemed to be part of something untoward. But so far, all I can see if Sen. Yee trying to get publicity for himself by throwing mud and really very little if any of the mud seems to stick. This crusade of his is starting to sound like some of the right wing "holier than thou" crusades of recent times. A bit to vocal when nothing much seems to be there
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See Isolation and sequence-based characterization of a koala symbiont: Lonepinella koalarum Paper based on PhD thesis work of Katie Dahlha...
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I have a new friend in Google Scholar Updates I have written about the Updates system before and if you want more information please see... -
Just got this press release by email. I am sick of receiving dozens of unsolicited press releases, especially those in topics not related ...
Hi Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteI'm a researcher at the institute for Genomic Biology on the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, which is where the 'clout list' scandal is mainly taking place. The scandal is pretty serious, but so far I haven't seen anything mentioning Linda Katehi's direct involvement, just that some emails popped up that don't appear to indicate any involvement. That was about 2-3 weeks ago.
My take is, unless something more serious pops up, it's really much ado about nothing (except nasty unfounded political mud-slinging, of course).
Off-topic, but I was just wondering/exploring opinions:
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of the notion that lateral gene transfer 'destroys' the tree of life concept?
It seems to be creeping up a lot lately...
Thanks cjfields for the info
ReplyDeletePSI - There is no single bifurcating tree of life. We have known that for many years. The question now is - how much reticulation (branch crossing) is there --- a question I think is still open.