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Many classes have an enrollment limit or "cap" that helps ensure that the class size is appropriate for the goals of the course. Occasionally it happens that a student who needs a class or wants to take a class for a special reason may not be able to register for it because the class has reached its enrollment cap.
A few spaces in some classes are reserved for students to request entry by submitting a Permission and Petition Form. The petition is submitted to the instructor of the class on a form that is available at the Registrar's Office. On this form the student can communicate the reason for wanting to enroll in the class.
If the instructor of the class decides to admit the student to the class, the signed petition form is sent to the Registrar's Office and the student is registered for the class. Petitions may be submitted at any time during the registration process.
Click here for a list of courses with petition seats for the Fall 2019 semester.

subset: commoncrawl


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Flightless birds' history upset by ancient DNA
Ancestors of kiwis and elephant birds didn't just drift with the continents
Kyle Davis and Paul Scofield/Canterbury Museum
Madagascar's elephant birds — which weighed as much as three or four people and went extinct several hundred years ago — turn out to be the closest known relatives of New Zealand's chicken-sized kiwi.
This genealogical surprise is "a slap in the face" to a long-standing idea of how many flightless birds evolved, says evolutionary biologist Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide in Australia. Realizing that continents moved around, biologists in the 1970s debated whether ostriches, kiwis and the rest of the flightless wonders called ratites arose when flightless common ancestors drifted apart by riding along on land masses that fragmented and separated.
In 1992 Cooper raised some doubts about the continent-riding idea when he and his colleagues extracted ancient DNA from bones of New Zealand's hefty flightless moa, now extinct. As fellow travelers, moas and kiwis should have been close relatives. But they weren


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Thibodaux Regional Medical Center staff celebrated ranking in the top 5 percent of hospitals in the nation for patient safety Wednesday.
Thibodaux Regional Medical Center staff celebrated ranking in the top 5 percent of hospitals in the nation for patient safety Wednesday.
The hospital received the HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award for 2011, the only hospital in the region to do so, said HealthGrades Regional Account Executive Mollie Virden.
"This is not an endpoint. This is a part of a journey to excellence," said Thibodaux Regional Medical Center CEO Greg Stock. "But it's nice to know that we're top in the country. We will stay committed to providing the best care for our patients."
Hospital staff celebrated the award with music, skits on patient safety and a lunch.
HealthGrades is a private company that evaluates medical practices and safety in hospitals nationwide. More than 200 million patients have used HealthGrades' website to compare hospitals and doctors, Virden said.
The group's Patient Safety Excellence Award uses Medicare inpatient data and patient safety quality indicators from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to score hospitals on patient safety.
HealthGrades looks at hospitals' rates of problems such as bloodstream infections after surgery, foreign materials left behind in patients after a procedure and deaths after what is normally a low-mortality procedure.
Patients generally come into the hospital during a stressful time, such as when they're having a medical emergency, Virden said. An award like this is comforting because it shows the hospital "is really taking care of patients and cares about safety."
If all hospitals performed as well as Thibodaux Regional did on patient safety, Stock said, there would be 46 percent fewer of these types of patient safety problems. In addition, there would be about 20,600 fewer deaths each year, and hospitals could save $1.8 billion in excess health care costs.
Stock said the hospital has taken a number of steps across the board, small and large, to improve patient safety.
That includes everything from encouraging hand washing by asking patients if staff members washed their hands before seeing them to spending $300,000 to acquire CT scanning machines that put out less radiation.
Stock said excellence in patient safety requires "being accountable, not making excuses and leadership at all levels."
At the same time, the hospital strives to make sure patients feel comfortable and welcome, he said.
"When people leave this place, we want to make sure that they not only were cared for clinically in the best way possible, but that they also feel good about their time here — that they feel like people cared for them," Stock said.
Thibodaux Regional received a number of other awards in 2011, including the J.D. Power and Associates Distinguished Hospital Award for providing an outstanding inpatient and outpatient experience.
The hospital was also honored with the Louisiana Hospital Capstone Quality Award and the Louisiana Home Health Quality Award.
Nikki Buskey can be reached at 857-2205 or firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Michele Bachmann Comes Out Against PROTECT IP
from the interesting-developments deptWhatever you might think of Rep. Michele Bachmann, she certainly gets attention, and as a bunch of folks have just sent over, she's just come out against PROTECT IP. In a letter responding to someone asking her opinion, she stated:
Thank you for taking the time to contact me with your opposition to S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act. As your Representative for the 6th district of Minnesota, your views are very important to me and I appreciate hearing from you.This is likely as a result of recent Tea Party concerns about the bill as well, since Bachmann is often associated with the Tea Party.
While I understand the importance of safeguarding Americans' intellectual property rights, I have serious concerns about government getting involved in regulation of the internet, and about ambiguities in this legislation which could lead to an explosion of destructive, innovation-stalling lawsuits.
The interesting bit here is that it certainly sets things up for some more vocal opposition of PROTECT IP. Supporters of the bill had been arguing that it would just be "the usual suspects" who were against PROTECT IP, and would talk about how they had bipartisan support for the bill. But we're seeing more and more people in the House begin to express concerns about the bill... and do so on both sides of the aisle. Intellectual property issues, for better of for worse (and I think, for better) have never been a really partisan issue, and I do hope it stays that way, but Bachmann's opposition puts up another roadblock in place to getting PROTECT IP passed. We'd heard that the House version of the bill was supposed to drop today... (after a couple months of being told "in the next two weeks"), but then late yesterday heard that it was pushed back again. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that Bachmann taking a position on it is part of the delay. At the very least, this is going to mean that PROTECT IP won't be able to sail through as supporters expected, and (most importantly) there is likely to be a lot more public scrutiny of a bill that is nothing but a favor to the MPAA/RIAA.
In the end it's good news that people elected officials are increasingly realizing that IP issues aren't as simple as has been put forth by the entertainment industry for so long. The fact that entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and top technologists have already vocally expressed their concerns about PROTECT IP hindering innovation, it's nice to see that these voices are starting to be heard. Maybe, just once, the entertainment industry won't get away with a bill to prop up their failing business models without everyone else just letting it happen.
Filed Under: censorship, copyright, internet, michele bachmann, protect ip, regulation