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I have a few things to say, both about your choice of major and choice of school.

Choice of major Electrical Engineering is a practical field of study, so it trains you to become a tinkerer, as opposed to theory majors like Math, Physics and Computer Science that train you to become a thinker. If you've always been a tinkerer, you should consider being trained as a thinker, so go for a theoretical science major.

Choice of school You should decide your school by merit, not by reputation. CMU is a great school for Computer Science. For example, Chronicle's Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index 2005 is a helpful guide (the link shows ranking for Computer Science, but you can find ranking for other disciplines). As faculties are productive with the help of their graduate students, that means you get better education from both professors and teaching assistants (who are typically graduate students).

What you may have considered as "safety" school might, ironically, rank higher in that index. Remember that any ranking (especially well-known ones) will be subject to political maneuvering, so you should not take these seriously. When you turn on the radio, do you think their "weekly top 100 chart" reflects listener interest, or record labels PR interest?

A better way to rank the school is by visiting the school, attending a few classes if you have the time. This way, its environment and facilities make it a more personal appeal to you, and you are more likely going to be a happier college student that way. As always, you should only consider a school an option if you're accepted.

Good to see people in the field questioning 'breakthroughs'.

"...While the Lancet numbers are shocking, the study's methodology is not. The scientific community is in agreement over the statistical methods used to collect the data and the validity of the conclusions drawn by the researchers conducting the study. When the prequel to this study appeared two years ago by the same authors (at that time, 100,000 excess deaths were reported), the Chronicle of Higher Education published a long article explaining the support within the scientific community for the methods used.

"....And even as the Associated Press reported mixed reviews, all the scientists quoted in its piece on the "controversy" were solidly behind the methods used."

So yes, it was eviserated by some spin meiesters and morans who think they know statistics because they can count till twenty without taking their shoes off.

Various well know academics/statisticians have gone over the study. I have not heard a single voice say the sampling/logic/methodology of the cluster analysis was flawed. Quite to the contrary, every on has said the study is solid.

Despite the limitations of both data sets, several findings are of interest. The poverty rate is 28 percent among the Hezbollah militants and 33 percent for the population. In terms of education the Hezbollah fighters are more likely to have attended secondary school than are people in the general population (47 versus 38 percent). The results suggest that poverty is inversely related, and education positively related, to the likelihood that someone becomes a Hezbollah fighter.

Similarly, Claude Berrebi, a graduate student in economics at Princeton, has studied the characteristics of recent suicide bombers in Israel. From information on the Web sites of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, he was able to paint a statistical picture of suicide bombers. He compared that to survey-based data on the broader Palestinian population of roughly comparable age. His results indicate that suicide bombers are less than half as likely to come from impoverished families than is the population as a whole. In addition, more than half of the suicide bombers had attended school after high school, while less than 15 percent of the population in the same age group had any post-high-school education.

Study Finds Most Bombers Are Educated

The study, released this month by an Israeli think tank, looked at the 163 Palestinians -- 155 men and 8 women -- who killed themselves while attacking Israeli targets between September 2000 and December 2005. It found that almost a quarter (37 individuals) graduated from college and another quarter (39) from high school. There is no clear information about the education level of 76 of the suicide bombers, but researchers at the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which published the study, assumed that many of these terrorists also had achieved high levels of education.

"This illustrates what we have been saying for years, which is that the chief motivating factor for suicide terrorism is ideology, a conviction that the cause is just, and not simple-mindedness or economic distress," said Yoram Kahati, senior research fellow at the center. Palestinian suicide terrorism, he said, is typically a product of a combustible combination of militant ideological fervor and a personal or collective sense of hopelessness. "These are people who are not stupid, yet are absolutely convinced that they are doing the right thing by sacrificing their lives," Kahati said.....

"This corresponds with the worldwide pattern" of the typical suicide bomber "and shatters a lot of our simplistic assumptions that if we cure the world of poverty, terrorism will go away," said Bruce Hoffman, a leading counter-terrorism expert who heads the Rand Corporation's Washington office. Suicide terrorism "is a much more complex phenomenon, not amenable to any simple cause or simple solution," he said.

Even for Shoe Bombers, Education and Success Are Linked

THE fifth anniversary of 9/11 passed with a great deal of hand-wringing over all the people who want to kill Americans. Especially worrisome is the apparent rise of terrorists whose origins seem far from fanatical.

These terrorists are not desperately poor uneducated people from the Middle East. A surprisingly l

3) I don't allow any web based content to be a primary resource (stand alone), nor am I interested in seeing papers based on encyclopedias (only) either.

I agree with your other problems, but depending on your field, this one may be a bit short-sighted. In my field I would certainly accept a site like this papyrology database or the only existing translation of a 10th-century encyclopaedia to be a primary source, even though they're standalone. Of course it's always easy to find exceptions :-)

But obviously Wikipedia isn't a primary source, or even secondary: it's a tertiary source, as Halavais correctly points out in this transcript of an online chat with him, which strangely TFA doesn't link to (I find it much more informative than TFA itself).

John Barrie, the creator and owner of the Turnitin service, responded to issues of student ownership of their creative works in the May 17, 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, freely available online. He syas, in response to the charge that "students feel coerced into submitting their papers to the service, and . . .that they objected to handing over their work because doing so would undermine their legal rights":

"Mr. Barrie responds that professors can explain to students why that assertion is wrong -- as he argues -- or just tell them, 'Write as much creative stuff as you want -- just don't do it at this institution.'"

Seriously, what kind of idiotic advice is this? For that reason alone, I will not use Turnitin, even though the University where I teach has just purchased a license. We are currently debating how it will be used on our campus, which I won't mention here (though you could find it easily enough I suppose; it's probably in my profile).

He was also the guy behind the Ann Coulter plagiarism story a few months back. When her editor wanted his evidence, he told them they'd have to subscribe to his service. When others did look into it, plagiarism was found, but his handling of it is the work of an attention-seeker, at best (a scam-artist at worst).

These charlatans have hit about most of them.

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm

You are adaptively self-programming software running on adaptively self-replicating hardware. TFA is more of a hardware issue.

Me, I'm just another steam engine trying to contain the pressure.

Unfortunately that is easier said than done. If MySpace is consuming almost all of the resources available at computer labs, the departments need to block it.

Some are already doing so.

I was rather puzzled by this comment, given that in the mid 1990's, Gates focused on acquiring the digital rights to lots of content around the globe. Encarta, Corbis, the acquisition of the Bettman Archive, were all parts of this strategy. Here's a good take on this I found from The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998:
http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/ issue-33.dir/33a03301.htm.

Perhaps they just weren't capable of monopolizing sufficient content to make it a viable business strategy.

Back when I worked as a television researcher in the 80's it was becoming clear that content holders had more and more leverage over distribution channels as the networks' oligopoly was challenged. At the time I thought that content would be king. Now, I'm not so sure. Perhaps the real power these days are services like eBay or Google that repackage content in useful ways. Of course, in 1981 we couldn't see the Internet coming, so information flow was still pretty much unidirectional. The Internet enables providers like eBay to repackage content provided by its customers; essentially the audience has become the advertisers. To me, the fact that the Internet has destroyed this type of top-down information flow is one of its most revolutionary characteristics.

Of course, that's not to say that those wedded to the top-down model won't do everything they can to stop these trends, be they the MPAA, the New York Times, or the government. In the long run, though, I don't think they'll succeed.

http://chronicle.com/colloquy/98/suicide/backgroun d.htm

I'm sorry, but I must respectfully disagree. I DO get it, and have been following this issue for some time. The article leaves out very important information regarding a recent FCC clarification regarding higher education. Here is a quote from a March 10 article in the "Chronicle of Higher Education"

The Federal Communications Commission has clarified how it wants colleges to comply with an order to re-engineer their computer networks so the government can monitor online communications. And the agency's explanation is heartening for colleges, which had feared having to spend billions of dollars on new systems to meet the government's surveillance needs.

In a brief filed last week in federal court here, the FCC indicated that colleges would need to redesign their networks so the government could monitor e-mail messages and other electronic communications flowing into and out of campuses, but not within campuses.

You can see the full article here: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i27/27a03002.htm

Ironically, the University of Michigan runs their course management (35,000 students) on the Sakai Project, which is offered under a version of an OSS license, AND they are a contributing member of the A-HEC site. Would UMich argue that OSS is 'not ready for prime time'? I doubt it. The fact is that there are several OSS packages being used in schools, for example Kuali (kuali.org) which runs financial software for 'Carnegie Class Institutions'. An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education website (http://chronicle.com/free/2004/08/2004083002n.htm ) mentions that 46% of 257 Nacubo members surveyed see OSS offerings as viable alternatives. Thus, something (either the report or the article we are discussing) is clearly not looking at all the facts available in higher education.

Apparently UNC has been requiring students to have laptops for years now. http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i04/04a03101.htm http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/fspnisapi5a77.html

The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes the six schools involved:

Over the past year, Apple has worked with six institutions to test the service: Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Universities also have the option of integrating the with local directory and authentication systems, requiring users to authenticate before use. This way, content can be restricted only to people affiliated with the university, students taking a particular class, or the general public.

During the test phase, this project was codenamed "Indigo". The service also features tools for easily creating, aggregating, and deploying content to the iTunes "store" for each school. It's a very attractive service because it takes advantage of a service many students are already familiar with (iTunes and iPod), uses an emerging technology that is perfect for continuously updated audio or video broadcasts on a topic (podcasting), and makes it easy for participating institutions to publish their content without having to build a service themselves or maintain infrastructure.

I would agree with you, but my personal experience has shown me different. I also know a guy who recent received a lower grade for expressing his "conservative" views in class. This was not just on one assignment. He was consistent treated differently and graded lower than others in the class.

Here is an article for you to read

To clarify: the vulnerability that the Georgia Tech student found was in the Blackboard Commerce Suite, not the Academic Suite.

The Commerce Suite was a product line purchased from AT&T several years ago, and is mostly seperate from the Academic Suite. This merger mostly affects the Academic Suite.

When it came to global warming and hurricanes, Kerry A. Emanuel used to be a skeptic. In fact, as one of the foremost theorists who studies such storms, Mr. Emanuel helped write a paper last year dismissing the idea that climate change would make hurricanes significantly more dangerous.

That paper will soon be published in a meteorological journal. But Mr. Emanuel's name will not be on it.

While looking at historical records, the atmospheric physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the total power released by storms had drastically increased -- more than doubling in the Atlantic Ocean in the past 30 years. The evidence was so overwhelming that he could not stand by his earlier statements.

"I wasn't even looking for it," says Mr. Emanuel. "The trend was just so big that it stood out like a sore thumb."

He withdrew his name from the forthcoming paper that plays down global warming's influence on hurricanes. Then he published a new study in Nature last month, proclaiming the opposite conclusion.

http://chronicle.com/free/2005/09/2005090803n.htm

I would like to know how you can assert that "the upfront costs 'U' are fairly high and run in the thousands for amature(sic) books and much higher for more proffesional(sic) books that are generally used in colleges." Do you have actual figures?

I honestly can not produce any real numbers as to how much the author's costs are or how many copied a textbook typically sells, but I find it easy to believe that the cost per book is not a substantial part (>10%) of the sticker price. If you could produce some numbers I'd appreciate the information.

If the publisher expects to sell 20,000 copies, (Number of copies taken from an example here, assuming first year cost recovery only) then if the $80 book still carries say $60 worth of "U" costs (Because R is essentially 0 for electronic formats) then that's a total of $1.2M paid for the production of the book. Any publisher that blows $1.2M putting a book together probably needs to be audited by the feds. Plus, that's only $400k in profit.

So how much does a publisher buy the rights to a book for? You are asserting that it's relatively high, so please provide a source.
=Smidge=

The Dept of Education is planning on creating a national database too. This database is for college students across the country with "unit-level" records for each student. What does this mean? The government will collect every class a student enrolls in and measure that student's performance. So far, this is gonna be for the undergraduate level, but can be expanded for all levels of college.

More details are available here... http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i14/14a02201.htm

Is this something worth being shocked about? Not really, student data is shared all the time in the academic system. This includes everything about that student and their families.

Personally, I say "eh!". The government (and everyone else with your info) has been doing it for 50+ years, so having one more is no biggie. I think these things are hyped a little too much.

Do you have a link to some documentation for that the original thought behind copyright was?

• The Framers, Viewing Intellectual Property As Monopoly, Sought To Constrain It
• Guiding the Path of Intellectual Property
• Copyright as Cudgel
  ...
  James Madison, who introduced the copyright-and-patent clause to the Constitution, did not engage in absolutist "property talk" about copyright. He argued in terms of "progress," "learning," and other such classic republican virtues as literacy and an informed citizenry. When President George Washington declared his support for the Copyright Act of 1790, he proclaimed that it would be a step toward "teaching the people themselves to know, and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority." Thomas Jefferson -- author, architect, slave owner, landowner -- had no misgivings about protecting private property. Yet he expressed some serious doubts about the wisdom of copyright, based on his suspicion of concentrations of power and artificial monopolies.

Oh, and I figure I work about 20 hours/week/course, plus 5-20 hours for advising and administrative duties. Given my school's teaching load, that's 45-80 hours a week while classes are in session. And 25-30 when they aren't. These numbers are very typical, I think, based on talking to many professors at many kinds of institutions, from community colleges to the Ivies. Tenured professors do have job security, but most people who teach college courses are not tenured. Some faculties are unionized, but many (I would guess a strong majority) are not, and unionization of the faculty is illegal at some kinds of institutions. In short, you're making a good point about the differences in professorial attention to writing, but you have no bloody idea what you're talking about regarding the professional lives of college teachers.

I basically agree with the sentence, "If a professor does not care enough to read my papers, then to hell with him." (Or her.) But students can generally avoid disaster scenarios by choosing institutions and professors within institutions who value careful teaching. Some institutions punish professors for putting a lot of time into teaching. Many others (including mine, a small liberal arts college) reward careful teaching first. Here, a professor grading with a computer algorithm would be scandalous. And in any institution, a little snooping around in advance helps a lot.

Shakespeare described their plight best

Or, as Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics at Stanford University and a 1998 Nobel laureate in physics, said recently:

Physical law cannot generally be anticipated by pure thought, but must be discovered experimentally...

The world we actually inhabit, as opposed to the happy idealization of modern scientific mythology, is filled with wonderful and important things we have not yet seen because we have not looked, or have not been able to look because of technical limitations. The great power of science is its ability, through brutal objectivity, to reveal to us truth we did not anticipate. In this it continues to be invaluable, and one of the greatest of human creations.

"Brutal objectivity" is what limits most people, even the smartest. It is easy to become comfortable in our view of the universe and forget the uncomfortable process that brought us to this view in the first place.

In fact, a comfortable view is almost a warning. When things fit together too well, there must be something wrong.

Harvard tries to make up for it by giving away good grades to practically everyone.

... or has Harvard just lowered the quality of its graduates by inflating everyone's grades?
The stories about it may be completely bogus but if they are giving out that many A's then something is definately wrong.

I submitted this same story with a lot more detail (but not the InformationWeek link) 28 hours prior to the timestamp on this story. It was rejected. Sure, mod me off-topic if you think I'm whining.

I posted my write-up in my journal for posterity's sake. Replies are welcome on this post in regards to the actual news story. Comments as to why you think the submission was rejected should only be posted in the journal. (You don't want to be off-topic, right?) Did I submit at the wrong time of day? Was the submission too long? Ok... enough whining.

I won't make you do unnecessary clicking, so here are some of the relevant links that I found:
Penn State's own news article
Chronicle of Higher Education article
ZDnet article

The journal entry also has comments taken from a PSU IT personnel listserv, as well as other links.

'"It seems like a natural fit: Encarta has a long-standing commitment to furthering education, and I've had a lot of kids tell me that watching me on "Jeopardy!" has made reading and learning seem just a little cooler," Jennings told Microsoft in an interview.'

http://chronicle.com/free/2000/08/2000081501t.htm

Video Games With a Political Message
Georgia Tech professor devises interactive ways to look at campaigns and policy debates

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Atlanta

Playing video games can persuade voters to change their minds on important political issues.

Startling but true, says Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His passion for analyzing and designing video games has made him a hot commodity for political campaigns bent on creating interactive games that drive home a political message.

Video-game designers have been creating a plethora of interactive games this campaign season for or about political candidates. Many simply let players vent their frustrations. There's a game called John Kerry: Tax Invaders, which has President Bush's head firing at targets meant to represent taxes that would be imposed by Senator Kerry if he were president, and another game that allows a player to control a donkey that kicks an image of Mr. Bush.

But Mr. Bogost is one of the leading designers working to make such games more sophisticated and informative.

A video game on the issue of health care that Mr. Bogost designed for the Illinois House Republican Organization, for example, shows a colorful map of a small town, dotted with icons representing hospitals and other buildings. A bustle of animated characters roam the map, with indicators of how healthy they are displayed above their heads. Players must decide which characters to move to which hospitals. They also have to adjust the amount of money spent on medical research and adjust the cap on damages paid to victims of medical malpractice. The virtual medical system collapses if the cap is too high -- driving home the value and importance of limiting malpractice claims, an argument made by Republican candidates in the state.

Mr. Bogost argues that games like this, that espouse a policy or political agenda, have the potential to influence voters far more than television advertisements or political debates. In five years, video games will be a staple of political campaigns, he says. Interactive games distributed on the Internet will let politicians "get their message out in a much more effective and engaging and cost-effective way."

He says the involvement of players is what makes the games so powerful.

"You've got a player who is learning to understand principles by performing them himself rather than hearing someone talk about them idly in casual conversation," says Mr. Bogost.

'Cultural Artifacts'

At Georgia Tech, Mr. Bogost is teaching classes in computing and digital media, and designing courses and doing research in the field he calls "video game rhetoric and criticism," as a member of the university's School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. Political games, he says, can be seen as "cultural artifacts, akin to film, art, and literature," and can be analyzed to see how they influence people's opinions.

To foster more discussion on the impact of games with a political or social agenda, he maintains a blog, called Watercoolergames.com, with a friend and fellow designer, Gonzalo Frasca, who recently joined the Center for Computer Games Research at IT University of Copenhagen. Several times a week the two critique games on such far-flung topics as saving whales, pedophilia, and fitness.

In a September posting to his blog, Mr. Bogost suggests a change to the game Tax Invaders. He says the game's message might be stronger if players controlled Senator Kerry, who would shoot tax increases

Photocopiers are being used en masse to steal books.

For India, $88 million is high cost. India has many hungry, suffering kids. $88 million could feed a lot of kids.

That Indians would waste $88 million on a space adventure while Indian kids are malnourished speaks volumes about the inferiority of Indian culture. Consider also the skewed ratio of male babies to female babies in India. In 1998, the ratio was 1.11. It has risen to 1.20 in 2004. The normal ratio is 1.05, which is exhibited by Western nations like Japan, Canada, the USA, etc.

Comparing the ratio of the size of the US economy to that of the sum of the sizes of the countries currently in the EU, you will see that this ratio was much greater than one (say, 1960) and is less than one now; the US relative advantage has disappeared.

I believe "cultural exports" includes movies (e.g. Disney) and music; I am not proud of a lot of our "cultural exports."

When I was in Pisa in June, 2002, a Euro was worth (about) US$0.86. In July, 2003 in Germany, a Euro was worth (about) US$1.14. Right now the Euro is even stronger (US$1.30 ??).

I did not notice any ill-will toward individual Americans.

As the "leader" of the world, the US has extra responsibilities.

I read an interesting article today that discussed shame and the law that is right along these lines.

There is nothing illegal or even intrinsically wrong about taking your image in public. Just ask the press. And if you live in an urban environment, chances are video cameras are watching you routinely, if not almost continuously in some areas. On the urban campus of my alma mater, for example, there are over 400 such cameras.

MIT has been known to revoke degrees (temporarily) for non-academic reasons. See Chronicle of Higher Education.

And why do they lack the desire? It is because American culture does not truly value learning. Sure we say that school is important, but most parents and students don't act that way. Look at who we revere in this country: actors and athletes. I'll bet most Americans couldn't name a single Nobel prize winner.

This is not new. We have an anti-intellectual streak that goes back to the time of the Puritans. (Here is an interesting reflection on this phenomemon.)

One need only look at the disproportionate educational achievements of Asian and Jewish immigrants to see what a difference it can make when the culture of the community really values learning.

As with so many rare finds, the real question is How to not contaminate or destroy what we've found, while still getting access to the knowledge we want.

On the other hand, there is this article, about the Rio Tinto in Spain, which supports life despite a pH of around 2. It might not be totally separate or isolated, but that's a pretty alien environment. (another similar story, including a brief discussion of astrobiology, is here.

I found the article referenced by Arts & Letters Daily.

It's like the mom who gives her kid candy: "My mom is cool."

Yeah, but she's a lousy mom!

This, or something very similar, has been in the works at the University of Toronto since last year.

An article about this can be found, and the McLuhan Center's current projects page has some more information.

This old (Jan 2003) article has some relevant points to the Gates humor piece in The Register:

The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

We're almost there...with bluetooth interfaces to implanted cochlear implants, and to visual cortex direct neural simulation stimulators, we can do away with the clumsy spinal taps with which Neo and friends have to put up.

Now, if we can just figure out how to teach the damn things to be suspicious of new acquaintances, we can beat the Borg via free-market alternatives to the one, monopolizing collective!

I got these sites from:
http://door.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rank_biblio.html

A message from stanford to US News to stop publishing their shit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/961206gcfallow.html http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/970418rankings.html

This an article from an education consultant:
http://www.washingtonparent.com/articles/9712/rank ings.htm

This article goes over the false assumptions about rankings:
http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/99 /collrank.html

A page from petersons declaring college rankings irresponsible:
http://www.petersons.com/about/ranking.html A page on the ucla server giving tips on choosing a university:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/mm/cc/info/choosing/eval .html

Articles from the chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i02/02a06701.htm http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i11/11a00101.htm

Article from columbia:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/vying.h tm

Slate articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/34027/ http://slate.msn.com/id/34278/

A law school's article on rankings:
http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/usnwr.htm

A law school association to ask to stop ranking:
http://www.aals.org/ranknews.html http://www.aals.org/validity.html

Law school admission counsel:
http://www.lsac.org/LSAC.asp?url=lsac/deans-speak- out-rankings.asp

AMU's response to their high ranking:
http://www.tamu.edu/new/vision/where.html

I got these sites from:
http://door.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rank_biblio.html

A message from stanford to US News to stop publishing their shit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/961206gcfallow.html http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/970418rankings.html

This an article from an education consultant:
http://www.washingtonparent.com/articles/9712/rank ings.htm

This article goes over the false assumptions about rankings:
http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/99 /collrank.html

A page from petersons declaring college rankings irresponsible:
http://www.petersons.com/about/ranking.html A page on the ucla server giving tips on choosing a university:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/mm/cc/info/choosing/eval .html

Articles from the chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i02/02a06701.htm http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i11/11a00101.htm

Article from columbia:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/vying.h tm

Slate articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/34027/ http://slate.msn.com/id/34278/

A law school's article on rankings:
http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/usnwr.htm

A law school association to ask to stop ranking:
http://www.aals.org/ranknews.html http://www.aals.org/validity.html

Law school admission counsel:
http://www.lsac.org/LSAC.asp?url=lsac/deans-speak- out-rankings.asp

AMU's response to their high ranking:
http://www.tamu.edu/new/vision/where.html

...be sure to check out http://chronicle.comIt is the web site of the The Chronicle of Higher Education. It often includes articles on topics just like this one. The Chronicle is not just about colleges and includes MAJOR coverage on the job market for those with advanced degrees, both in academia and the corporate sector. HTH.

Just google for "grade inflation" and read a couple of the articles. For your convenience I've listed a couple of articles that I found off the top. There's pretty strong social pressure on professors to "give" the students the grades even though the students may not have earned them. And that lottery money being used for merit based scholarships? A waste of effort. Taxpayers would do better to simply allocate funds to the schools instead of giving it to the kids as a scholarship.

• Grade Inflation: The current fraud
• Fiscal Policy Effects on Grade Inflation
• A call for an end to grade inflation
• HOPE Scholarships Transform the University of Georgia
• Grade inflation becoming problem at Vanderbilt
• Students studying less, receiving higher grades

Maybe this post is a little late, and maybe the case cited is more of an avoidance-of-major-loss rather than an actual victory, but small non-commercial internet broadcasters appear to have managed a compromise on the royalty issue.

See this article from the Houston Chronicle.

I'm sure many a Slashdot reader's favorite stream is not necessarily rejoicing, but at least this looks workable.

Penn State has its paws (ha!) in everything else in the state of Pennsylvania. Might as well start selling music... Just another revenue stream, right? Anyway, for those who are interested in the finer details that were glossed over by the article, here is a transcript of the discussion... (Disclaimer: I have a B.S. and an M.Eng. from Penn State, and I think Spanier is a complete buffoon. But I think he's onto something here.)

You should have linked to this instead of your broken crap...

(BTW: a working link)

scoring each sentence and facial expression on such measures as disgust (-3), affection (+4), whining (-1), and contempt (-4).

Aargh! They've discovered the Slashcode 3.0 moderation system! Someone stop them before it's too late!

Login Failed
Access to much of this site is restricted to registered Chronicle subscribers.

HOWEVER, if you follow the "free" links on the site, you can read it, here.