NewMexiKen

From AP via the San Francisco Chronicle —

College grades have been creeping steadily upward for 30 years, but Princeton University may try to break the trend by rationing the number of A’s that can be awarded. The proposal has academics wondering already about the possible impact at other schools.

In what would be the strongest measure to combat grade inflation by an elite university, Princeton faculty will vote later this month on a plan that would require each academic department to award an A-plus, A or A-minus for no more than 35 percent of its grades.

A’s have been awarded 46 percent of the time in recent years at Princeton, up from 31 percent in the mid-1970s. Since 1998, the New Jersey school has been encouraging its faculty to crack down, but marks have kept rising. Finally, Princeton administrators decided that the only solution would be to ration top grades.

From the San Francisco Chronicle —

Close your eyes and transport yourself back, for a moment, to a more hormonal time.

You’re a senior in high school, you invite all the cool kids over because your parents are out of town and only the dorks from the Physics Club show up.

That’s been the mood at the Scott Peterson double-murder trial for the last three months. What was anticipated to be a star-studded journalism affair has slowly turned into Just Another Trial, populated mostly by the same old faces from the local media.

Since pretrial motions began at the Redwood City courthouse in February, there’s been no Geraldo Rivera, no Greta van Susteren and no Dominick Dunne. (A few sort-of-familiar faces from CNN and MSNBC have shown up sporadically — the celebrity journalism equivalents of free acts on the county fair concert schedule.)

From the Baltimore Sun Administration wages war on pornography:

Lam Nguyen’s job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other “computer forensic specialists” like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department’s operation to rid the world of porn.

In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO’s long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.

Read more.

Compromise May Restrict ‘Morning-After’ Pill

The distributor of the emergency contraceptive “Plan B” and the government are discussing a compromise that would place some restrictions on proposed over-the-counter sales of the “morning-after” pill — an outcome that critics say would be based more on election-year politics than on science.

Although a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted 23 to 4 in December in favor of making the drug available on drugstore shelves, the proposed compromise would ignore important elements of that recommendation, said several people familiar with the negotiations but not allowed to speak on the record.

The application to give Plan B full over-the-counter status has been sharply criticized by social conservatives who say it would lead to increased teenage promiscuity.

The ongoing talks have focused on possibly setting a minimum age for purchasers and keeping the drug behind drugstore counters so pharmacists would control sales. As word of the possible restrictions has spread, critics have stepped up a campaign to try to persuade the FDA to approve the application without restrictions.

Read more.

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Read what the creator has to say here. Scroll down to April 7.

Kevin Drum misses April Fools Day by a week.

I’d like to see videotaping required for all police interviews, and in return I’d suggest that the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination be discarded. If police interviews are all recorded and trials are all held in public, it’s not at all clear to me what value the 5th Amendment right to silence has anymore.

Sure, it’ll never happen. But with Star Chambers a thing of the past and videotaping preventing coerced confessions, I really do wonder if the self-incrimination clause of the 5th Amendment has enough value left to make it worth the problems it causes. I suspect it doesn’t.

Read Drum’s whole post.

An excellent article from The Washington Post on the people building the World War II Memorial. It begins:

Construction workers have had the National World War II Memorial to themselves for more than 21/2 years, laboring behind construction fences to transform a mostly grassy expanse of the Mall into what promises to become one of Washington’s most-visited sites.

Next week, possibly as early as Monday, they’ll share their work with the public. The construction fences are coming down around the site between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and visitors will be free to explore 7.4 acres that make up one of the largest memorials in a city that’s full of them.

Almost all of the workers will move on to other jobs, but many say they’ll be taking some vivid memories with them when they go. Some say they remember seeing an airplane flying toward the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Many anxiously watched floodwaters rise within inches of a ruinous setback during Hurricane Isabel. They’ve labored through two unusually harsh winters. They’ve mourned the death of their lead construction supervisor. A couple of them fell in love with each other and plan to marry. Almost all of them have watched tourists poke their heads through gaps in the construction fence and ask, What are you building in there?

Read more.

See also The Makings of the Memorial.

Thanks to Jill for the pointer.