Boston College professor of political science Robert S. Ross gave a lecture titled "The Fading of Taiwan's Independence Movement and the Prospects for Cross-Strait Relations" on Thursday evening to a crowd of students, faculty and community members. According to his Boston College faculty website, Ross's research "focuses on Chinese foreign and defense policy, with an emphasis on China's use of force and deterrence strategies, China's security policy in East Asia and U.S.-China relations." The subject of his speech was drawn from his recently published paper, "Navigating the Taiwan Strait: Deterrence, Escalation Dominance and U.S.-China Relations."
Leo Zacharski of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center led a six-year study that found that if patients begin reducing the amount of iron in their blood at a relatively young age, they reduce their risk of vascular disease later in life. Every six months for six years, researchers at veterans' medical centers around the country bled half of the 1,277 men and postmenopausal women between 43 and 87 years old who were involved in the study. They found that among the participants between 43 and 61 years old, the group with iron-reduced blood experienced 54 percent fewer deaths than the control group with no iron reduction. In the older age group there was no significant difference in the number of deaths across the board, suggesting that iron reduction to prevent vascular disease is more effective when begun earlier in life.
In January, members of the history department at Middlebury College voted unanimously to ban students from citing Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia website, in exams and papers. Wikipedia entries can be written by anonymous people whose knowledge of the subject matter is not necessarily factually correct. While various studies have found Wikipedia entries just as accurate as other printed and peer-reviewed encyclopedias, the Middlebury history department released a statement explaining, "Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors."
