Grand news agency

U. of Miami Offers to Take More Students From Devastated Italian Campus

The University of Miami, one of two American universities with study-abroad programs at the University of L’Aquila, plans to open its doors to more students from the Italian university, which was badly damaged in an earthquake this week.

Miami will encourage L’Aquila to send more students to study on its Florida campus during the 2009-10 academic year, said Elyse M. Resnick, assistant director of international education programs and exchanges. Miami typically accepts five L’Aquila students each year through an exchange program.

Ferdinando di Orio, L’Aquila’s rector, had appealed for help in finding places for the university’s 27,000 students after the campus was “practically destroyed” in the earthquake. At least four students were killed when a dormitory collapsed, Time reports.

No Miami students were studying at the Italian university this semester, Ms. Resnick said. Miami, which has had an exchange program with L’Aquila since 2002, will see how rebuilding goes before deciding whether to send students next spring.

Meanwhile, Georgetown University officials said they did not yet know how the earthquake would affect its summer study-abroad program at L’Aquila. The Hoya, Georgetown’s student newspaper, reports that 10 students at a time typically study abroad there. —Karin Fischer

More »

Swedish Technology Institute Conducts Math Exam Worthy of Kafka

The customary presumption that problems on a test can be solved proved the undoing of some students in an advanced mathematics course recently at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. The episode turned an optimization-theory examination into an exercise in existential angst when several of the questions turned out to be insoluble, according to The Local, an online newspaper.

“One thinks as a student that it is you that is wrong and the exam that is correct,” The Local quoted one student, Emelie Baedecke Yllner, as saying. “I was counting away like a madman, but it just wouldn’t work,” she said.

Anders Lindquist, chairman of the institute’s math department, acknowledged today that typographical mistakes — a plus instead of a minus sign in one case, the number 1 instead of the number 2 in another — had rendered three of the examination problems impossible to solve.

He pointed out that the approximately 120 students who took the exam were informed of the errors midway through the five-hour test. But more important, he noted, even in the realm of hard numbers, trying to solve insoluble problems can be worthwhile.

“When you go out in the world, you find lots of problems that don’t have solutions, so even with errors like this, you can still find out what a student knows,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think it is so serious. Students should be able to detect if a problem has a solution. You’re still testing the students.”

Mr. Lindquist, who holds the institute’s chair of optimization theory, hastened to add that “I didn’t write the test and I certainly didn’t read it. It is not my job to check typing errors.”

Students who demonstrated their grasp of the material were credited accordingly when the exam was graded. Those who still failed to make the grade will have an opportunity to take another exam in June. With luck the preparation of the test will this time be fully optimized. —Aisha Labi

More »

Student Aid Contributes to Ballooning Tuition, Report Says

Increased federal student aid, especially to middle-class families, is contributing to the rising cost of higher education, a report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity says.

The report concludes that federally backed loans should be offered to only low-income families, not expanded to help more middle-class families, and that “the expanded tuition tax credits in the 2009 stimulus bill are probably a step backward.”

The reason, says Andrew Gillen, the report’s author and the center’s research director, is that colleges are engaged in an “arms race” to outspend one another, and any extra money that comes in from federal student aid only encourages them to spend more. Right now, colleges have access to students’ financial information from Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, so they know how much each student can afford to pay and can therefore charge each student the highest amount possible without causing that student to have to drop out.

Colleges do this, Mr. Gillen says, because higher spending often helps them raise their prestige through rankings such as U. S. News & World Report ratings that are in part based on spending per student.

Mr. Gillen makes several suggestions. First, he writes, the government needs to determine student need in a simpler way than it does now and without telling colleges what it finds. It then should determine the cost of educating a student — the Delta Project recently concluded it costs about ,000 at a community college and ,000 at a four-year college — and the student should be given a “super Pell” grant that makes up the difference.

Colleges would then have an incentive to keep costs closer to the ,000-per-year range, leading to more students’ being able to afford college without federal aid. —Megan Eckstein

More »

Federal Agency Urges Researchers to Tread Carefully With New Genetics Law

Washington — When scholars ask people to donate genetic samples for scientific research, they should be sure that the donors understand the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, a federal law that was enacted last year.

That, in a nutshell, is the message of a new guidance document from the federal Office for Human Research Protections. The document, which was announced today in the Federal Register, urges scholars — and the human-subjects committees that oversee their research — to make sure that potential genetic donors understand the limited protections offered by the new law.

The act generally prohibits health insurers and employers with more than 15 employees from using genetic information to make decisions about health coverage, insurance premiums, or employment. The employment provision will take effect in November 2009, and the health-insurance provisions will take effect between May 2009 and May 2010. Once the provisions take effect, employers and health insurers will be forbidden to ask about (or make decisions based upon) any genetic data, no matter how long ago the data were collected.

But the law does not prohibit genetic discrimination by small employers or by issuers of life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term-care insurance. Because of the risk of discrimination in those contexts, the new guidance reminds scholars of their obligations to protect subjects’ privacy and to maintain the confidentiality of data. If research participants request information about their personal genetic data, they should be aware that after the data come into their hands, life-insurance companies and small employers might have the right to ask them about the information.

In The Chronicle Review in January, Christopher Shea wrote about sociologists’ rising interest in genetic data. In 2007 the National Institutes of Health published ground rules for the use of the central federal repository of human genetic data. —David Glenn

More »

Brigham Young U.’s Student Newspaper Is Pulled After Embarrassing Typo

The student-newspaper staff at Brigham Young University removed some 18,500 copies of the paper from the campus yesterday, and reprinted nearly the entire press run, because an embarrassing typo in a front-page photo caption appeared to offend key leaders in the Mormon hierarchy, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.”

Rich Evans, editorial manager of The Daily Universe, the student paper, told the Tribune it was “the worst possible mistake.” BYU is owned and run by the church, as the Mormon Church is formally known.

The error was an accident: A student had misspelled the word “apostle,” and the article’s editor chose the wrong word from among the options offered by spell-checking software.

The newspaper was reprinted with a correction, and its staff issued an apology to the apostles of the Mormon Church. —Beckie Supiano

More »

Court Ruling Vindicates Willed-Body Program at U. of California at Irvine

The California Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a willed-body program at the University of California at Irvine that was accused of losing track of a donor’s body, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The court ruled unanimously on Monday that the plaintiff, Evelyn Conroy, had failed to prove that the university had violated its donation agreement with her husband, James Conroy, when his body went missing.

The court found that state law “does not impose a duty” on the university “to conduct its teaching and research in such a way as to safeguard the sensibilities of the surviving family members” when a person wills his or her body. The also found that there was no evidence “that James Conroy’s body was used in a clandestine private tutoring class, transported or dismembered for profit, or used in any manner other than that specified in the donation agreement.”

The University of California system has settled with plaintiffs in numerous lawsuits over alleged abuses in the willed-body programs at its Los Angeles campus and at Irvine. The system announced in January 2005 new safeguards for the management of the programs.

The decision, which ends litigation over Irvine’s willed-body program, is also expected to influence the outcome of several pending lawsuits against the University of California at Los Angeles’s willed-body program.

Ms. Conroy’s lawyer, Paul M. Mahoney, said people considering donating their bodies for science should be careful. “People in this state now know that before they donate their bodies to research, they should get a lawyer and negotiate very clearly the terms of the donation,” he said. —Katherine Mangan

More »

First Boards Awards Winners

First Boards Awards Winners

More »

PSST!3

The first six films from PSST!3 are online to watch

More »

Walter Robot - Death Cab for Cutie

Walter Robot has directed a new music promo for Death Cab for Cutie.

“I have been an admirer of the beautiful art of Walter Robot from afar for a while, ” says Death Cab bassist Nick Harmer. “Working with them on this video is an amazing dream come true and I am in awe of the stunning video they have made for us.”

More »

Rhett on Twitter

Ok, i don’t know why, but Twitter has been getting some massive exposure over here in Australia for the last few months. I put it down to the incestuous whoring of information between research lacking media channels (That’s an example of a Twitter rant right there). So when I hear it mentioned on breakfast TV it makes me feel like it has jumped the shark but I guess the average person would just see it as hitting the mainstream.

I’ve been on it for over a year now and it’s still a difficult question to answer when someone asks, “So what is Twitter”. There are many sites and videos dedicated to that sole question. But I think, “Twitter in plain english” is by far the best video explanation if you want to know what it is basically about.

Here is my Twitter page if you are interested in following my rants: http://twitter.com/rhett

More »