Free Republic

A fascinating new paper comparing global warmism to past scares concludes this one is much like the rest - just as dodgy and just as likely to peter out. It’s the work of South Australian academic Dr Kesten C. Green and American forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong: We summarize evidence showing that the global warming alarm movement has more of the character of a political movement than that of a scientific controversy. We then make forecasts of the effects and outcomes of this movement using a structured analysis of analogous situations—a method that has been shown to produce accurate forecasts...

New York University formally notified the union representing its graduate students yesterday that it would no longer bargain with it. In June, the university said it was moving toward severing its relationship with the five-year-old union when its contract expires on Aug. 31. In a memorandum distributed late yesterday to N.Y.U. students and faculty and in a letter to the union, university officials said they decided not to negotiate a new contract. Jacob J. Lew, N.Y.U.'s executive vice president, said in the memo that grievances filed by the union over issues like who would be assigned as graduate teaching assistants...

The temperature hits seventy and, just as Armavirumque predicted, students at Columbia University took to the streets. As that great hacky-sacker Karl Marx once said, "Students of the World, unite on the quad for Ultimate Frisbee." The cause this season? Graduate student unionization. Two years ago the graduate students at Columbia voted on whether to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board. The vote count---as at other schools--was never released due to court appeal by the University. About four hundred graduate students on Monday walked out of class and refused to grade papers in protest of this action. That's the...

<p>ANN ARBOR -- Graduate assistants at the University of Michigan walked out Monday morning to protest the lack of progress in contract negotiations with the university.</p> <p>Negotiators for the university and the Graduate Employees Organization, which represents 1,600 graduate student instructors, negotiated until 4 a.m. Monday.</p>