Variations on a Theme by Allan Bloom

STYLE ONE
Since its beginning as a monastic house of learning, the university has sought to educate its students in the liberal arts: studies of history, rhetoric, the visual arts. But in the 1960s, that focus on the liberal arts began to change. A slow but drastic drift in focus has begun to take place in universities, shifting from the broad liberal arts education to the specified and career-oriented training. This shift, due in part to student's awareness of the greater competition in the business world, is causing many students to suffer from a lack of cultural awareness and intellectual stimulation.

STYLE TWO
As a high school student - and even earlier in my public education - we learned that the more education you were able to receive, the more money you would be able to earn in your career. As we grew older, it became more and more clear that the type of education our teachers and counselors were emphasizing was a career-oriented one. This specialization would allow us to jump into our careers at a younger age, thus giving us an edge on the competition. Rarely did a counselor tell us that we should seek after learning simply for the sake of learning. Unfortunately, this focus on specialization in education has led students to suffer from a lack of cultural awareness and intellectual stimulation.

Faux Pas in Researching

I chose to pick three sources discussing the subject of stem cells.

"The new challenge of stem cell: Brain tumor therapy," F. Colleoni and Y. Torrente.
This first source is one I chose from an academic journal I found from the HBLL's website. The journal, called Cancer Letters, is a collection of academic papers covering studies that have been researched concerning cancer. This article in particular is one that discusses stem cell and its importance in cancer research. As it was written directly by researchers from the Stem Cell Laboratory, whose specialty is stem cell research, the information is the most likely to be accurate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/18/health/18stem.html
The second source is an article from the New York Times which is in danger of being a more biased source, as it's written by a columnist. These articles are written to argue their opinion, and so statistics are often taken out of context, or important details left out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell
The least reliable source is the article on stem cell research from Wikipedia.com. Although it would be useful to get an idea of the topic, because the article can be changed by anyone, it's not always the most accurate of information.