Tag Archives: news

Everyone hates NCLB

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Via Kevin Drum, I read this Economist poll about the popularity of No Child Left Behind. A rather overwhelming plurality of those surveyed said that it has hurt our schools. I don’t think I’ve met a single person who likes the law, although I chalked that up to the general political leanings of my friends. Perhaps repealing it would be something that can get “bipartisan support.”

On another note, the Wikipedia article says that people pronounce NCLB as “nicklebee.” Really? I have never heard that before. (Brandy, I’m looking at you).

broadband tidbits

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Despite all of the talk about the Comcast/NBC merger, they only filed a supplemental economic report last week, says FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The public comment period will begin soon.

The National Broadband Plan will be unveiled next week.

I thought all the talk about broadband accessibility was about rural areas, but the FCC is talking about people with disabilities as well.

My hometown, together with the U of I, won a 22.5 million dollar grant to connect “40 K-12 schools, 17 social service agencies, 14 healthcare facilities, nine youth centers, four public library systems, and two higher education institutions” and bring high speed internet to low-income neighborhoods.

Noose at UCSD Library

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A noose was found at the UCSD library, and the campus police have issued a report calling it “[h]anging a noose with intent to terrorize.” It’s unclear if the incident is related to the recent outcry over the off-campus “Compton Cookout” party. During a recent teach-in, there was a massive walk-out by students angry at the school’s response. There are going to be new protests today over the noose incident.

update: I say that it’s unclear if it is connected but what I really mean is that it’s not clear if the party organizers are involved. The timing is too close for it to be unrelated. I would not be surprised if it turns out to be some idiot’s bad idea of a “joke” or “site-specific provocative art.”

update 2: A student has contacted the police and confessed to placing the noose. No other news, however.

update 3: Students are occupying the chancellor’s office.

update 4: More updates here.

McGill’s policy on “harmful consequences”

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McGill University is contemplating ending “a requirement that any professor receiving research support from the military indicate whether the research could have ‘direct harmful consequences.'” The proponents of striking the measure say that all research should be scrutinized for harmful consequences, whereas the opponents say that it opens the gates for the US defense industry to shift the Canadian (Canadien?) research agenda.

I’m surprised they even had such a provision in the first place, given the existing injunctions against secret/classified research.

This reminds me a discussion last night at dinner, where my friend told us about a book by UCSD professor Chandra Mukerji called A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State, which talks a bit about science is dependent on state (and military funding) and how the state views scientists as a kind of “reserve force” of experts whose knowledge may become crucial later.

US drones’ video feed was wiretapped

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From Bobak I saw that US drones in Iraq have been hacked because “the remotely flown planes have an unprotected communications link” but “there was no evidence that they [insurgents] were able to jam electronic signals from the aircraft.”

This illustrates nicely the difference between eavesdropping and jamming. However, a nice by-product of anti-jamming codes using shared encryption keys (here they can be easily agreed upon before the drone takes off) is that sometimes you can get both eavesdropping and jamming protection at the same time.

NPR on the end of privacy

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NPR’s All Things Considered is running a 4-part series on privacy issues in the modern digital era. Since I’ve started working on privacy research (specifically related to privacy in machine learning problems and in medical databases) these popular news stories are a good insight into how people in general think about privacy. The first segment is on data companies and their increasing lack of disclosure, and today’s was mostly about facebook. I’m looking forward to the rest of it — I’ve already had one or two nebulous research ideas, which is always a nice feeling.

Privacy for prescriptions

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The NY TImes has an article on how the information on our prescriptions is “a commodity bought and sold in a murky marketplace, often without the patients’ knowledge or permission.” I was informed by UC Berkeley in the spring that some of my information may have been compromised, although only “Social Security numbers, health insurance information and non-treatment medical information,” and not “diagnoses, treatments and therapies.” But in that case it was theft, not out-and-out sale. The Times article suggests that the new health care bill will tighten up some of the information leakage, but I am unconvinced.

Of more interest is the second half of the article, on privacy in the data mining of medical information, which is a topic which is a strong motivator for some of the research I’m working on now. I’m not too comforted by pronouncements from industry people:

“Data stripped of patient identity is an important alternative in health research and managing quality of care,” said Randy Frankel, an IMS vice president. As for the ability to put the names back on anonymous data, he said IMS has “multiple encryptions and various ways of separating information to prevent a patient from being re-identified”

IMS Health reported operating revenue of $1.05 billion in the first half of 2009, down 10.6 percent from the period a year earlier. Mr. Frankel said he did not expect growing awareness of privacy issues to affect the business.

There’s no incentive to develop real privacy-preservation systems if you make money like that and don’t think that pressure is going to change your model. As far as the vague handwaving of “multiple encryptions and… separating information,” color me unconvinced again.

I think it’s time for a new take on privacy laws and technologies.

Students = lemmings?

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Apparently students are lemmings:

But a new study by a trio of international researchers finds that college undergraduates let their peers influence their choice of major, often leading them into careers that were not best suited to their skills — and ultimately diminished their income… if the study’s results hold up, students might be encouraged to think for themselves.

The whole thing seems a little suspect to me, and I’m not sure it really generalizes to the US. They studied business students at an Italian university with two choices only (business or economics) and then had a number of group divisions like “ability driven” and “peer driven” to divide them. It just sounds like way too many variables to control for.

However, reading the article reminded me of the game Lemmings, which was awesome in that early 90s way…

tax hikes and tax preparers

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There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Obama’s proposed tax increase on people earning more than $250k. The fact of the matter, as Daniel Gross points out, is that the increase is on the money made above $250k, so that you get taxed at the higher rate only on (your income – $250k). Nevertheless, there has been some handwringing (reported on TV) from people who are near this magic threshold, saying they are going to try to earn less so they fall below $250k, which leads to thing like this:

That dentist eager to slash her income from $320,000 to $250,000 would avoid the pain of paying an extra $2,100 in federal taxes. But she’d also deprive herself of an additional $70,000 in income!

I was puzzling over why these people seem to have no idea of what the tax change means for them when I heard Jeremy Hobson (who went to Uni High with me!) on the radio this morning:

About 60 percent of Americans still go to a professional for their tax needs. That includes chains like H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt — and CPAs. The other 40 percent do their taxes manually — with the majority of those people heading online.

I’m betting the percentage of people making above $250k who don’t do their own taxes is even higher than 60%, which explains it all — those people don’t need to know how the tax system works. And so they all go running to Grover Norquist.

Managing science funding

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Inside Higher Ed has a short article on how the additions to the NIH and NSF budgets in the stimulus pose a challenge for program administrators:

One need only look back to the aftermath of the doubling of the NIH budget, Cicerone said, when we “got into a pickle now where they’re oversubscribed [in terms of demand for grants] now that we’re back to level funding.” The agency arguably financed too many projects that required longterm funds to sustain, and many universities built up their research programs in ways that put them in a bind when the flow of funds slowed.

Also worth looking at is a book review of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment by Michèle Lamont.