A memorial for Matt Watson
When I started out at Centennial High School in the fall of 2001, I met my longtime friend Matt Watson in band class. Exactly one year ago, Matt was killed by a drunk driver at the intersection of Metzerott Road and University Boulevard. Matt was a sophomore at this university, a proud member of Theta Chi fraternity, a person who cared about those around him and just a funny guy. In our new surroundings freshman year, we spent hours hanging out in his room in Ellicott Hall. On my desk, I have a picture of Matt. Not a day goes by that I don’t look at that picture and wish he were alive, making his sarcastically inappropriate jokes.
In honor of Matt, I want to issue a motherly warning to all of you out there. Yes, the weather is getting nice, low-cut clothing is making its reappearance on the campus and classes are close to being over, but please drive carefully. Be responsible, do the right thing and don’t speed. Life can change in an instant for you and everyone who knows you. Life without Matt hasn’t been the same.
This Wednesday, those of us who knew Matt will be celebrating his memory at Cornerstone Grill and Loft. A cover of $1 will be going to the Matthew W. Watson Memorial Scholarship Fund, which will provide a scholarship for an incoming freshman or transfer student coming to College Park from our high school. I encourage all who are of age to come celebrate his memory with us, and then to get back home safely.
Josh SwannerSouth Campus Commons LegislatorStudent Government Association 2007-2008
The numbers on sexism
This is in response to Stephanie Baker’s letter to the editor, “Sexism is quite common” (May 1). There are two things wrong with her letter. First is the author’s use of statistics. Despite its many flaws, I suggest a read of “Behind the Pay Gap,” a study published by the American Association of University Women available at http://www.aauw.org/research/upload/behindPayGap.pdf. As of 2006, the gap between the total earnings of men and the total earnings of women is only 19 percent, and hasn’t been above 25 percent since 1997. But that’s a very different claim than the one Baker makes – rounding 81 cents to 75 cents could be acceptable, but claiming men and women work the same jobs and quoting that number is not. There are countless decisions men and women tend to make differently that impact their salaries, and that study, after accounting for many of those decisions, claims that a woman makes 95 cents to a man’s dollar. They miss factors known to correlate with income like height, but it’s instructive that at least 75 percent of the difference between men’s and women’s pay comes from the choices that men and women make.
Next is her approach to “playing the victim.” It’s useful to look at this like a statistician trying to decide if something is random or not – set your threshold too low and you get a lot of false negatives; set it too high and you get a lot of false positives. But in both cases, false negatives and positives will occur. All we can do is modify the ratio. There’s some optimal level of reporting sexism that balances the damage done by fake reports and the damage done by reports that never get made; whether we’re above or below that level is up to personal opinion.
Matthew GravesSophomoreEconomics and physics
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