Joseph Brownstein from ABC News forwarded me this article that absolutely infuriates me:

Copyright Silliness on Campus

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren’t expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies

…

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have bribed so many members of Congress that the house committees responsible for education and copyright have decided to bend over backwards and practically ask universities to expel students for copyright violations.

Congress constantly complains about America losing its technical superiority. Maybe if our universities receive the proper funding and are ask to concentrate on the things that really matter, we wouldn’t have this problem?

Once again, ARML has come and gone. This year marks the 10th consecutive ARML that I’ve attended. It was really fun seeing old timers and meeting so many great kids for the first time. I even met a few really cool kids from Dalton and Horrace Mann! :) Of course, then there’s the usual suspects from Stuyvesant and Hunter… but we all know those schools suck ;)

NYC Math Team did very well this year, and placed third nationally. Taoran Chen from NYC Math team even took top honors at ARML, and placed first individually!

I of course, will always have a soft spot for Baltimore’s team, which once again improved significantly in its rankings under Raymond Cheong. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if Baltimore wins it all within the decade ;).

Florida also did very well, and I’m really happy to see Chenyu Lin kicking ass at ARML after all the work he’s put in!

Incidentally, I had written an earlier post about ARML’s financials being questionable. This year, ARML actually disclosed fairly detailed financial information to all the coaches and asked for approval. Personally, I still don’t think ARML is running as financially lean as it could (and some of its expenses are kind of odd), but I really appreciate its new efforts in increasing transparency. Given what I do, It’s probably true that I expect organizations to run much tighter ships than normal.

I’ve actually been thinking about making this year the last ARML that I attend, and quitting all math competition related endeavors by next year. This year’s ARML is definitely making my decision much harder….