College students are the most likely group to have their voter registrations rejected in Orange County, Fla., the Orlando Sentinel reported last Friday. Florida's new "no match, no vote" law requires Social Security and driver's license numbers of registrants to match those in government records. Areas around the University of Central Florida and Rollins College had the highest numbers of voter registration rejections in the county, due in part to students' "horrible" handwriting, Orange County Supervisor of Elections administrator Margaret Dunn told the Sentinel. It was also more difficult to match Social Security numbers when applicants used out-of-state drivers licenses, she said. Of the 846 rejected Orange County residents, 46 percent were Democrats, nine percent were Republicans and the remain did not have a party affiliation.
A new book, written by three George Mason University professors, examines whether college professors successfully mask their political beliefs from their students, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Friday. The book, "Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities," concludes that professors tend to hide their political beliefs. The book is based on a study of the 1,270 professors at 169 research universities surveyed in 2007. The study showed that 95 percent of professors surveyed claimed to be "honest brokers" among competing political views, 61 percent said that politics rarely comes up in their classrooms and 28 percent said that they let students know about their general feelings on political issues. The study, conducted by April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner, found that students were able to detect their professors' political beliefs even when professors did not specifically state their party preferences. Among 1,603 students studied in political science courses in 2006 and 2007, about 75 percent were able to correctly identify their professors' political leanings.
The abstract of a study conducted by the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and presented last week at the annual American Society of Anesthesiologists conference in Orlando, Fla., showed a promising new method for reducing the infection rate in hospitals by using new personal sanitizer dispensers, according to a DHMC press release. The dispensers clip to the clothing of health care providers. The dispenser can easily be attached to lanyards, belt clips, pocket clips and scrub clips and is intended to make hand sanitation easy and convenient and unobtrusive to the hospital's workflow. According to the DHMC study, conducted in a 26-bed intensive care unit, introduction of the dispensers resulted in significant reductions in healthcare-acquired infections.
