Biology professor Kevin Peterson resigned this term as faculty adviser to the humor magazine the Jack-O-Lantern because he found some content in the latest publication offensive. Peterson, who had advised the group since 2001, mostly took issue with several fake ads in the magazine that joked about September 11. "I was so thoroughly disgusted, I didn't want to be associated with the publication anymore," Peterson said. "Anyone who thinks there's any humor in 9/11 doesn't understand humor. My mother would be so embarrassed to have my name associated with this stuff." Fred Meyer '08, editor-in-chief of the Jack-O-Lantern, said that Committee on Student Organizations adviser Eric Ramsey warned Jack-O-Lantern writers that they had potentially violated copyright laws by including a link to a real website and a working phone number in the same issue. "I wonder if the copyright thing was a pretext to give out a warning to a publication that's gone too far," Meyer said. Ramsey said that the Jack-O-Lantern didn't violate any copyright laws, however, and Peterson said his resignation was independent of whatever problems members of the Jack-O-Lantern had with COSO.
Last April, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center experienced a false alarm of the whooping cough following false positive results from highly sensitive molecular tests. Almost 1,000 health care workers were tested, 142 people were told they had contracted the disease, and thousands of health care workers were given antibiotics and a vaccine to protect themselves and their patients. Eight months later, tests of bacteria showed there had been no actual cases of the cough. When faced with a possible epidemic, doctors often use quicker yet less accurate molecular tests in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading. For now, "the big message is that every lab is vulnerable to having false positives," infectious disease specialist Cathy Petti told The New York Times.
Carolynne Krusi, dean of the Class of 2008, announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the College at the end of Winter term to work on a project with Oakland public school students. Dean Krusi will be helping two Oakland high school students and a "diverse group of younger students" to publish a collection of their observations on life, she wrote in an e-mail. Assistant Dean of First-Year Students Emily Holt Foerst will assume Krusi's position come Spring term.
