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Tuesday, May 16, 2006 |
A Benton Headline:
ONLINE DEGREE PROGRAMS TAKE OFF
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Lois Romano]
An extraordinarily fast-growing number of students nationwide and
worldwide are turning to online degree programs to complete or
advance their educations while they work, decisions that are driven
by economics as well as by a society that is increasingly mobile.
Congress passed a law in March that drops the requirement that
colleges offer at least half their courses face to face to receive
federal student aid. The new law will undoubtedly attract more
students and schools into the fledgling online industry. Online
enrollment, including multiple courses taken by a single student,
jumped from 1.98 million in 2003 to 2.35 million the following year,
accounting for 7 percent of postsecondary education, according to
Eduventures, a Boston firm that studies trends in education. Another
study, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, reports that 65
percent of universities offering face-to-face graduate courses also
offer graduate courses online. By early 2008, Eduventures predicts,
about one in 10 college students will be enrolled in an online degree
program.
5:37:23 PM 
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US reporters under surveillance.
Looks like the Bush administration is tracking reporters' phone calls. Also, the FBI admits that it uses the Patriot Act to obtain journalists' phone records in an attempt to determine to whom they have been speaking.
Read more here and here, from an ABC News reporter who has received some "attention" from the government. [Emergent Chaos]
7:20:41 AM
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Lawmakers Clash on Phone Records. Everyone agrees data brokers should be prohibited from selling your phone records to private eyes and others. But Congress is hung up over who gets to enforce new legislation. By Audrey Hudson. [Wired News: Top Stories]
Compare with the responses on new of the NSA's traffic analysis undertakings.
7:10:12 AM
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SCOTUS to Patent Holders: No, No, and Also No.
Peter Kaplan has a Reuters story (here on the Washington Post) covering the Supreme Court decision in the eBay/MercExchange patent battle. As Kaplan paints it, the SCOTUS decision comes out rejecting a bunch of things decided by lower courts.
For one thing, MercExchange lost its injunction. The lower court now has to reconsider the injunction request, but on different grounds. For another thing, the Justices rejected a lower court's notion that there is a general right by patent holders to injunctions against infringers. Finally, they appear to have soundly rejected the US District Court's opinion that failure to use a patent (by manufacture or license) is grounds for losing the injunction right. I don't think that SCOTUS expressely addressed the notion of "patent trolls" but Kaplan points to a concurring opinion signed by four Justices that expresses sympathy with the concerns of companies - particularly in high tech - that feel they are being held hostage by patent holders who have no function other than to sue everyone in sight.
[Copyfight]
7:06:12 AM
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Tenure, Costs, Workloads.
. . .
. . . . What you can’t buy, for the moment, is all the invisible work that keeps an institution running. It’s not even clear that you can buy it with tenure: some tenure-track faculty do that kind of work dutifully, some do not.
The uneven distribution of those workloads is not a cost that you can quantify. It’s not going to appear in a white paper for a federal commission. It’s not even going to be discussed when faculty convene to talk about planning. Faculty talk about workloads, but it can be awfully difficult to find out what anyone means when they use the word. Just as it can be unsatisfying when people complain of the costs of tenure: I’m not often convinced that they’ve gone deep into the guts of the problem to think it out. [Easily Distracted]
7:05:51 AM
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