ÎPride' needs to take a lesson from USC band

As much as I would like to say how great the Pride of Arizona is, I must disagree with Ms. Avrahami in her assessment of the "energy and animation" that the band shows. I attended the USC football game and was blown away by how our band allowed the Trojan band to essentially take over our own stadium!

I was literally sitting right in the middle between both bands and USC consistently drowned out the UA band despite having only half the number of members in attendance! [Read article]

Much of the talk at Thursday's Arizona Board of Regents meeting centered on why Arizona's universities rank so low in national college rankings.

But the discussion seemed to focus too much on why the rankings are skewed toward private universities rather than on their value when it comes to attracting potential students, and on what can be done to solve the problem.

And it is a problem.

Administrators and regents can't dismiss the low rankings as reflective of a bias in the ranking system. Though the bias may be real, those rankings serve a powerful persuasive purpose when it comes to attracting top high school students. [Read article]

Last summer I had the opportunity to be a research assistant for the Analytic Services Institute for Homeland Security. Most of my research involved threat and vulnerability assessments in the event of biological terrorism or other sorts of attacks. The major case study we used was on the anthrax attacks of 2001, which followed shortly after Sept. 11's terrorist attacks.

In analyzing the governments' response to the anthrax attacks, our team concluded that our country ÷ federal, state and municipal ÷ was completely caught off-guard and was incapable of handling this situation in a coherent way. The report can be found at http://www.homelandsecurity.org/bulletin/Anthrax202001.pdf. [Read article]