JoeWindish.com

The New York Times reports...that the Obama Administration's student-loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public treasury to private corporations through a sweet deal of locked-in profit margins and guarantees that taxpayers will make good on loan defaults. Because the loan bill, having passed the House of Representatives last year, has been held up in the Senate for months pending the resolution of health care, that's given private banks and loan companies plenty of time to take some of the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds they've received in the past and use them to hire lobbyists and former Congressional staffers to advocate on behalf of receiving additional tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds in the future. Because the United States Senate is no longer a functioning democratic institution, they might get their way.

Republicans say Dems are in the pocket of the trial lawyers. I note this line: "The Tea Party movement is growing up," said Judson Phillips, a Nashville-based criminal defense lawyer who organized the National Tea Party Convention.

New research takes a close look at what happened when one institution, Brigham Young University, experimented with granting free access to the content of some of its distance-education courses. The study examined the cost of opening up those materials and the impact their publication had on paid enrollments, a concern for institutions worried that giving away free courses could cannibalize their ranks of paying students.

The data suggest they needn’t worry. Opening the courses “provided neither a large positive marketing effect that boosted enrollments nor a large negative free-rider impact decreasing enrollments,” wrote Justin K. Johansen, who conducted the study... “Really, the OpenCourseWare ended up serving as an advertising tool.” ... But Johansen cautions that the limited length of the pilot study meant that a “statistically significant” measure of the impact of opening the classes on paid enrollment “was not possible.” DOESN'T THE LAST LINE MAKE THE POINT OF THE STORY MOOT?

THE DEFINITIVE TAKE ON BLOGGING FROM THE HIGH PEAK OFF THE BLOGOSPHERE: A blog, for those who don't know, is a journal or log that appears on a Web site. It is written on line, read on line, and updated on line. It's there for anyone with an Internet connection to see and (in many cases) comment on. The entries, or posts, are organized in reverse chronological order, like a pile of unread mail, with the newest posts on top and the older stuff on the bottom. Some blogs resemble on-line magazines, complete with graphics, sidebars, and captioned photos. Others just have the name of the blog at the top and the dated entries under it. You can find blogs by doing a regular Google search for the blog name (if you know it) or by doing a Google Blog search using keywords....

FROM MY SEARCH ON WHAT THE BLOG USED TO BE: "Here's what blogs are not: (1) the super-personalized news filters that social critics fretted would splinter the nation into a million tiny interest groups, or (2) the Drudge Report. Blogs don't limit your news intake, break stories or promulgate rumor, at least not intentionally. They have an only seemingly more innocent agenda. Blogs express opinion. They're one-person pundit shows, replete with the stridency and looniness usually edited off TV.

How does the Copyright Office remedy DRM, DMCA & copyright? Not very well...

Accused of plagiarizing tweets for using headline and bitly shortening. Ridiculous!

GAWKER BREAKS IT DOWN: Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart's case: A lot!

None I want but cool what's happening in the marketplace as the megapixel race winds down: "reviews of nine answers to that question. Most are small, attractive, competent little machines with 12 megapixels, 3-inch screens and hi-def video capture.

All have image stabilization and face recognition, for sharper, better exposed shots. The Panasonic, Fujifilm, Canon and Casio models have unusually wide-angle lenses for capturing vistas — but can also zoom in 10X or even 12X. "

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

Duncan: "I’ve posted some free software that allows you to run a high resolution webcam. The application lets you connect a DSLR or digital camera (with ptp) to the web and upload photos at a given interval. It’s basically a web connected DSLR intervalometer that uses Amazon S3 for online storage."

A vitally important article. An excerpt doesn't capture the tiniest fraction of it: "I’ve always taken exception to the constant reference to “stimulus” as the policy objective, because implied in that word is the idea that all one needs to do is to undertake one or more relatively short term spending sprees...and that this will somehow return the economy to its pre-crisis state, putting it on a path of what economists like to call “self-sustaining growth.” I maintain that in the present environment there is no such thing as a return to self-sustaining growth. There will be no return to the supposedly normal conditions, which were in fact, from a historical point of view, highly abnormal, of the 1990s and 2000s. What one needs is to set a strategic direction for renewal of economic activity. We need to create the institutions that will support that direction. Those institutions are public institutions, which create a framework for private activity. This is the way it is done."

EXCERPT: "Today...our only public mourning takes the form of grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen. Some commentators in Britain sneered at the “crocodile tears” of the masses over the death of Diana. On the contrary...this grief is the same as the old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity their individual losses. As a saying from China’s lower Yangtze Valley (where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.” When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus. Our version is more mediated. Still, in the Internet age, some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online grieving communities, establishing virtual cemeteries, commemorative pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared."

NOW THAT'S MORE LIKE IT: " the information we’re hearing is that Apple is thinking much larger for another version of the product, maybe all the way up to the 15.4″ size that it currently uses for one version of the MacBook Pro. If you think that would be way too big for an iPad, we’re also hearing that this other tablet would be quite a bit different from the one revealed last week. Namely, it could run a version of OS X much closer to the traditional version that runs on Macs.

If there is any truth to that, we could learn something as soon as Apple’s WWDC event this year, which will likely take place in June (just as it does every year)."

Oxytocin is the most important social-bonding hormone, present notably between mother and child but also in just about any interaction involving pair bonding, social affiliation, and trust. More specifically, it’s involved with the gaze between infants and mothers. Researchers at Azabu University in Japan found last year that the dog’s gaze at its owner increases the owner’s oxytocin level.

No one believes, in his conscious mind, that the dog is a person. But that may not matter. The oxytocin study, while providing the key to understanding the myriad health benefits of dog ownership—oxytocin is a serious stress reducer—also makes scientifically clear what’s obvious anecdotally: The dog is an honorary human, accorded many of the same considerations.

Last Sunday, Reed biology major was supposed to lead a demonstration on “how to properly slaughter, clean and dress a chicken.” In his mind, the course was supposed to help students build a closer connection to their food and understand how to eat poultry in a more responsible fashion, with an eye toward sustainability. “In Portland, there’s a great movement toward urban agriculture and urban homesteading,” Holt said. “Freshman year, I lived in a co-op on campus and got into gardening. When I moved off campus, I had my own garden at the house. Then, the summer after my sophomore year, I got chickens and started taking care of them to get fresh eggs. There’s a point where chickens stop laying eggs, though. … Between my housemates and me, we’ve collectively killed five to eight chickens.”

He used store nought chickens instead. And believes animal activists stole his chickens.

WHAT'S THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE TERM "CAREER COLLEGE?

Students who attend for-profit colleges have comparable and often higher retention and graduation rates than those at other institutions, according to the findings of a study released on Wednesday by the Imagine America Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides research and support for career colleges.

Advocates of for-profit colleges point to the study's results as further evidence of the sector's relevance within higher education.

On Monday, Australia's Daily Telegraph reported that a woman had been the victim of an "online sexual assault" while playing the Playstation game, Home. The story broke after her roommate complained on the game's online forum: "This morning I learned that my roommate was sexually assaulted near the Festive Tree ... She would move and the harasser would follow. Each time trying to get behind her and use the crouch gesture ... The harasser was warned multiple times and laughed at the thought that someone might report him for his actions, which was eventually done." The woman's roommate went on to suggest that Playstation institute everything from virtual restraining orders to Home Jails to "automatic tomato guns" to deal with virtual assaults.

On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.

The results were dispiriting...

In the latest clash of copyright law and instructional technology, the University of California at Los Angeles has stopping allowing faculty members to post copyrighted videos on their course Web sites after coming under fire from an educational media trade group.

The policy, enacted earlier this month, has been planned since last fall, when the Association for Information and Media Equipment — a group that protects the copyrights of education media companies — charged the university with violating copyright laws by posting the videos to the password-protected course Web pages without the proper permissions.

Bill Gates praises the potential of online learning today in his annual letter about the priorities of his foundation, which has a $34-billion endowment.

STUNNING STORY: "The last thing I want to do is continue to keep building beds," he says, standing inside one of the cells. "I think there should be some opportunities to release them, put them back into society, allow them to go to classes and go back to work and report for trial when the trial date comes."

But as he's about to walk out of the cell, Gutierrez, who has been elected in three landslide victories over the past 11 years, pauses. He knows the risk for any politician to suggest such an alternative — even if it means taxpayers save money, even if it means victims will get restitution, even if it means the only reason he can fill this new jail is because the people filling it are poor.

Intuit blocks feature -- "IN the digital age, filing income tax returns should be a snap. The important data from employers and financial institutions have already been sent to the government’s computers. Yet taxpayers are still required to perform the anachronistic chore of preparing a return from scratch. And, in many cases, they pay a software company for the privilege."

The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.