Author Archives: Josh Macdonald

It’s finals week again, which means it’s time for me to let you in on this quarter’s tailored justification for not studying or working on that paper. I hate to overhype this quarter’s excuse, but I think it just may be the best I’ve ever thought up. I recommend trying it out on friends, family […]

Sometime in the next week, a judge is scheduled to rule on the legality of Proposition 71, passed in 2004 to allot $3 billion to stem cell research in California. The ruling will not only affect the future of human health, but the future of students intent on finding medical and bio-research jobs in California. […]

Much can be said about the incompetence of the current U.S. government, but it’s hard to argue that they don’t seem to have the well-being and security of the American people in mind. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush made it clear that his thoughts on the disaster, however limited, were focused on […]

There’s a crucial turning point in every student’s life. It hits around 3 a.m., eight pages into a 15-page paper, or when you’ve finally found the results to a lab experiment that took four times longer than it should have. It suddenly occurs to you: “How much longer till I get paid for this?” That’s […]

The idea behind General Education requirements is worthy: Give students a well-rounded education and the opportunity to explore subjects outside of their majors. But if the promise of general education is to encourage interested, ambitious students to explore different fields in order to enrich their major coursework, then UCLA’s current system doesn’t live up to […]

A new trend has developed in the validating of religion ““ pseudoscience, the attempt to veil subjective religious beliefs with objective scientific theory. Intelligent design proponents have been filing lawsuits across the U.S. to get the theory taught in high schools alongside evolution. In October 2005, a lawsuit was filed against the University of California, […]

Since the advent of the original Napster in 1999, big entertainment companies have fought Internet piracy by going after the technology and software that makes it possible. But Napster’s shutdown in 2001 only paved the way for future file-sharing programs with new technologies more resistant to litigation. The social mind-set and technological capacity for Internet […]