British higher education students go elsewhere

Maastricht University student Theresa Bullock at a cafe in the city.

Not a bad idea but one wonders about the relationship between tuition fees and quality of education.

"British students are learning that it pays to take their degree abroad"

With UK tuition fees ready to soar as high as £9,000 a year, school-leavers are choosing to go elsewhere

by

Tracy McVeigh

March 6th, 2011

The Observer

Carnival preparations are taking over the Dutch city of Maastricht. Multicoloured ribbons, clown masks and streamers bedeck lamp-posts and windows. Trucks are delivering beer kegs, and kiosks that will sell paper cones of chips and waffles are being set up. Revellers are arriving from miles around.

"I can't wait to see what it's going to be like," said Theresa Bullock, 19, who is in her first year at Maastricht University. She is looking forward to a break, not just from her computer science studies but from a new role that she is starting to adopt – that of an unofficial adviser. With tuition fees about to triple in Britain, more and more UK students are looking to study abroad and Maastricht, with most of its degree and master's courses entirely in English, is at the vanguard of European universities eager to net the best.

Bullock, who blogs on being a student abroad, is being inundated with emails from parents and prospective students. "Most people are worried about the language, but you can live here and never use a word of Dutch," she said.

Bullock, who comes from Redditch, Worcestershire, admits her family were baffled by her decision to study in the Netherlands. "They were a bit worried. I did also apply to Liverpool Uni to keep my mum happy as a backup plan, but I told her Maastricht was closer than Scotland; it's only three to four hours away by train. I knew this was what I wanted." It also helps, she said, that her annual tuition fees are just €1,672 – about £1,450.

The coalition government's plans to triple UK university tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year are about to have a side-effect it didn't bank on – an exodus of students abroad. Maastricht, whose fees are kept low because of Dutch subsidies, is already processing more than 200 applications from the UK, six months before the deadline for the next academic year, and expects many more.

With more than 2,400 courses available in English in the non-English-speaking parts of Europe, the trend will extend beyond the Netherlands. The universities of Valencia and Milan are also seeing a rise in UK interest. It has traditionally been hard for overseas universities to prise undergraduates out of the UK, but last year a record number, 22,000, were studying for degrees abroad. "The Ucas system in the UK is so stressful and so many people don't get through that it seems really unfair. I like that the Dutch give people a second chance," said Bullock. "If you do badly in your A-levels you can still have a go. In England you just won't go to university if you get a C, which is a bit tough when you are so young.

"Financially it's going to make a big difference to me. I have a cousin doing a master's at Manchester who will leave with £40,000 of debt. I hope to leave with none."

With a part-time job sorting post and being within easy distance of Brussels, Düsseldorf and Cologne, Bullock is making the most of student life. "I do feel a lot more European than before," she said. With its cobbled city centre crisscrossed more by bicycles than cars, its open squares lined with trees and tolled over by the bells of its historic churches, Maastricht is already a border town of linguistic diversity. It sits in the odd teardrop in the southern Netherlands that rolls into Belgium and Germany, and is versed in English as well as Dutch, German and French. While it is likely to be the economics that will bring a British invasion here, the only thing mystifying the university is what took them so long.

Professor Teun Dekker, vice-dean of University College, said they had been actively looking to bring in native English-speakers to enhance the faculty for everyone. "The idea of internationalism became the goal of many universities, to maximise the experience for the students. Maastricht has always been keen to follow up on this; it's a very natural idea here because of the geography. British students have always been very reluctant to go abroad for even part of their education and there is this imbalance in the exchange of students.

"Cross-pollination that comes out of an international group of students is very valuable. When you have a lecture-based system it doesn't matter what nationality anyone is, but with our discussion-based learning it's very valuable to have people from different backgrounds. English has been the medium for education here for years, it's embedded.

"The UK higher education market is very stratified and I think parents can have a hard time placing us in the hierarchy. Of course, it has very good universities of its own. Now though, with tuition fee rises, it will be different.

"We love David Cameron," he joked, "His policies are doing a great thing for European integration!"

He and fellow vice-dean, Dr Mark Stout, are passionate about their college and, with 94% employment rates for students within six months of graduation, the results support them.

"Our mission," said Stout, "is to bridge that gap and let UK students and their families know that there is an alternative here. Maastricht is comparable to most Russell Group universities. It's not Oxford but on a level with Edinburgh or St Andrew's. There are so many opportunities here for young, dynamic students who are prepared to dip their toe into the water of an education abroad and say OK, our parents didn't but we can."

A major difference between the Dutch and UK systems is who gets in. In the Netherlands, entry requirements are low to allow everyone a chance. The dropout rate is initially high, then quickly drops.

"In the UK, getting into university is very difficult but staying there is easy," said Dekker. "In Holland, getting in is very easy but staying is difficult. You have a chance but it's down to you to make a success of it. It's a political decision but very democratic. We often find that people who didn't excel at school do excel at university. It's sink or swim once they get here but at least, unlike the UK, we let everyone into the pool."

Both vice-deans emphasise that cheaper fees are not the only plus for Maastricht – a claim backed by John Birrane, 20, a psychology student from Co Mayo, Ireland, who is here for a year. "I came here expecting windmills and marijuana but my course is just cutting edge, great," he said. "All the research papers are hot off the press. I just can't believe how good it is.

"The career grid you're given is a list of Irish universities and the entrance requirements and then it's 'Oh, you want to study abroad? That's a bit revolutionary.' So most English-speaking people don't dream of applying for a European university. But now I'm here, I can't understand why anyone from the UK wouldn't want to come here."

Birrane has enrolled on a Dutch language course and has even bought the obligatory bicycle. "I'm coming back here for my master's," he said.

Geoff Lucas, general secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC), an association for heads of the UK's leading public schools, visited Maastricht earlier this year. "In terms of value for money and the quality of the student experience, the high contact education and the career opportunities, it's impressive. Word is most definitely spreading.

"This government's higher education policy is in an utter mess and this is a side-effect they didn't see coming. It will certainly test all their heated rhetoric about how we live in a global economy when our universities suddenly have serious competition."

Shysters challenged by computer software

It's about time that the lucrative money bubble of attorneys be burst.

"Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software"

by

John Markoff

March 4th, 2011

The New York Times

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.

“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds “call me” moments — those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.

“It doesn’t use keywords at all,” said Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder. “But it’s a means of showing who leaked information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an S.E.C. filing is being edited an unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways, by an unusual type or number of people.”

The Cataphora software can also recognize the sentiment in an e-mail message — whether a person is positive or negative, or what the company calls “loud talking” — unusual emphasis that might give hints that a document is about a stressful situation. The software can also detect subtle changes in the style of an e-mail communication.

A shift in an author’s e-mail style, from breezy to unusually formal, can raise a red flag about illegal activity.

“You tend to split a lot fewer infinitives when you think the F.B.I. might be reading your mail,” said Steve Roberts, Cataphora’s chief technology officer.

Another e-discovery company in Silicon Valley, Clearwell, has developed software that analyzes documents to find concepts rather than specific keywords, shortening the time required to locate relevant material in litigation.

Last year, Clearwell software was used by the law firm DLA Piper to search through a half-million documents under a court-imposed deadline of one week. Clearwell’s software analyzed and sorted 570,000 documents (each document can be many pages) in two days. The law firm used just one more day to identify 3,070 documents that were relevant to the court-ordered discovery motion.

Clearwell’s software uses language analysis and a visual way of representing general concepts found in documents to make it possible for a single lawyer to do work that might have once required hundreds.

“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the specific set of documents or facts that are relevant to the specific question? It’s not about search; it’s about sifting, and that’s what e-discovery software enables.”

For Neil Fraser, a lawyer at Milberg, a law firm based in New York, the Cataphora software provides a way to better understand the internal workings of corporations he sues, particularly when the real decision makers may be hidden from view.

He says the software allows him to find the ex-Pfc. Wintergreens in an organization — a reference to a lowly character in the novel “Catch-22” who wielded great power because he distributed mail to generals and was able to withhold it or dispatch it as he saw fit.

Such tools owe a debt to an unlikely, though appropriate, source: the electronic mail database known as the Enron Corpus.

In October 2003, Andrew McCallum, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, read that the federal government had a collection of more than five million messages from the prosecution of Enron.

He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said.

The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication.

Now artificial intelligence software has taken a seat at the negotiating table.

Two months ago, Autonomy, an e-discovery company based in Britain, worked with defense lawyers in a lawsuit brought against a large oil and gas company. The plaintiffs showed up during a pretrial negotiation with a list of words intended to be used to help select documents for use in the lawsuit.

“The plaintiffs asked for 500 keywords to search on,” said Mike Sullivan, chief executive of Autonomy Protect, the company’s e-discovery division.

In response, he said, the defense lawyers used those words to analyze their own documents during the negotiations, and those results helped them bargain more effectively, Mr. Sullivan said.

Some specialists acknowledge that the technology has limits. “The documents that the process kicks out still have to be read by someone,” said Herbert L. Roitblat of OrcaTec, a consulting firm in Altanta.

Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

“Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” he said.

Natalie Portman...neuroscientist and actress--and other entertainers

This is a bit unusual and I can only think of a few Congressmen [whose names escape me] and a member of the rock group Queen... Brian May .

"Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist"

by

Natailie Angier

February 28th, 2011

The New York Times

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

Ms. Portman is one of a handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials — awards, degrees, patents and theorems in their name.

Hedy Lamarr, the actress habitually regarded as “that most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.

Danica McKellar, who has appeared on such shows as “The Wonder Years,” “The West Wing,” “NYPD Blue” and “Young Justice,” graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she helped devise a mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields — a theorem that bears her name along with those of her collaborators. She also writes popular books about math with clever PG-13 titles like “Math Doesn’t Suck” and “Kiss My Math.”

As a teenager in the 1990s, Mayim Bialik starred in the title role of the hit kid-com “Blossom.” Now she appears in another hit sitcom aimed at slightly older kids, “The Big Bang Theory,” playing the adorably frumpy-nerdy Amy Farrah Fowler, a neurobiologist and sometime love interest for the adorably nerdy germophobic physicist Sheldon Cooper. The actress is pleased with her new role. After all, Dr. Bialik has a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. in ... neurobiology. “I tell people, I am a neuroscientist, and I play one on TV,” said Dr. Bialik.

That relatively few screen stars have a scientific back story may seem surprising, given the immense popularity of the science fiction genre and evergreen narrative devices like the mad scientist, not to mention all the doctor shows and “CSI” spinoffs. Yet most actors who take on techie parts, tackling scripts that may be written with the help of scientific consultants, freely admit they simply mouth the lines without necessarily understanding their sense.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.”

Acting and science may simply appeal to very different personalities. If you’re eager for attention, fans and face recognition, scientific research is not for you. With few exceptions, even the most illustrious researchers in the world are utterly unknown to the wider public, an obscurity captured brilliantly in an Onion spoof about “the reckless throngs of photographers that relentlessly hound America’s top scientists.”

“Just because I’m a scientist,” one string theorist complained in the article, “doesn’t mean I have to completely surrender my privacy.” Moreover, if extreme good looks score you big points in a screen career, they can detract from being taken seriously in science.

Hedy Lamarr complained bitterly that people would look at her face and assume there was nothing behind it. Perhaps it was a case of projection. “When you see a very beautiful face, it’s stunning, and you yourself become stupefied,” said Lisa Heiserman Perkins, who has completed a documentary about Lamarr. “So you project your own stupidity onto the person you’re looking at.”

For her part, Dr. Bialik doesn’t see science and show business as being entirely immiscible liquids. In both cases, she said, “a large ego is necessary.” Everybody’s a pastry chef serving up humble pie. It’s humbling to audition for parts, and, said Dr. Bialik, “there’s nothing like being a graduate student to bring you to tears.”

Still, she loved the research, on the brain chemistry of patients with a genetic condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, and she loved being “hooded” for her doctorate while she was “very, very pregnant” with her second child. “Better pregnant and getting a doctorate,” she said, “than pregnant at your high school graduation.”

If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.

Whether as a student in her class or a research assistant in her lab, said Dr. Baird, who is now an associate professor of psychology at Vassar, “Natalie never once asked for an extension or to be excused from her responsibilities.”

If she was scheduled to appear on the Letterman show, for example, she would finish her paper early. “She’s sincerely confident and has a good grasp of her strengths and weaknesses,” said Dr. Baird, and she is wise beyond her years. “One of things she said was: ‘It’s weird that there are so many people at Harvard who do amazing things outside the classroom. It just so happens that people like to watch what I do.’ ”

You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV.

More on Moore

Patrick (Alfred Caldwell) Moore, English amateur astronomer, writer and broadcaster. He was educated at home due to childhood illness, from which time he acquired his interest in observational astronomy. Moore is best known as the enthusiastic and knowledgeable presenter of the BBC TV programme The Sky at Night, which he began in 1957. With a half-century of broadcasts, this is the world's longest-running television series, and it remains so with the original presenter. Moore has written over 60 books, including The Amateur Astronomer (1970), The A-Z of Astronomy (1986), and Mission to the Planets (1990). As an accomplished xylophone player, his interest in astronomy also shows in the title of one of his musical compositions: Perseus and Andromeda (1975).

Patrick (Alfred Caldwell) Moore [Wikipedia]


Sir Patrick Moore--British amateur astronomer and more

Free book...

A Guide to the Stars

Remedial educational costs and who is at fault

It is obvious that the core of the problem lies at the high school level...it has been a problem for years and probably won't get any better.

"CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students"

by

Lisa W. Foderaro

March 3rd, 2011

The New York Times

The City University of New York has long spent much of its energy and resources just teaching new students what they need to begin taking college-level courses.

But that tide of remedial students has now swelled so large that the university’s six community colleges — like other two-year schools across the country — are having to rethink what and how they teach, even as they reel from steep cuts in state and local aid.

About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000.

The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling new statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, that number was 23 percent.

Many of those graduates end up at CUNY, one of the nation’s largest urban higher-education systems, which requires its community colleges to take every applicant with a high school diploma or equivalency degree.

To bring thousands of students up to speed, those colleges spent about $33 million last year on remediation — twice as much as they did 10 years ago. They are expanding an immersion program that funnels hundreds of students exclusively into remedial classes.

But there is concern that the effort is diverting attention from the colleges’ primary mission.

“It takes a lot of our time and energy and money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things, but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them, too.”

At LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where 40 percent of the math classes are remedial, faculty members like Jerry G. Ianni have been increasingly dividing their time between teaching those classes and teaching courses for academic credit, prompting worries that professors are becoming de facto high school teachers.

“Most students have serious challenges remembering the basic rules of arithmetic,” Dr. Ianni said of his remedial math class. “The course is really a refresher, but they aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.”

On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen students in that class prepared for a test, called a Compass exam, that would allow those who passed to start studying college-level math. Without college math skills, students cannot graduate. Seventeen others in the class had not even qualified to take the test; they will have to repeat the course until they qualify or they give up, as history shows many have.

The knowledge gap at community colleges is increasingly being recognized as a national problem. About 65 percent of all community college students nationwide need some form of remedial education, with students’ shortcomings in math outnumbering those in reading by 2 to 1, said Thomas R. Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Nationwide, as at CUNY, fewer than half of students directed to take one or more remedial classes — “developmental education” is the term administrators prefer — complete them.

“Many, many community college presidents will say that math developmental education is the most difficult problem they’re facing,” Dr. Bailey said.

On Monday, the Obama administration began a series of “community college summits” at campuses across the country to gather ideas on how the schools can produce more graduates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged up to $110 million to improve remedial programs at community colleges.

At CUNY, the biggest concern is the students who badly lag in the three subjects.

“These students have a really low probability of success, and it’s hard to know how to work with them,” said Dr. Logue, the provost. “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”

Students are often surprised to learn that they still have hurdles to clear before they can begin college-level work. As a freshman at LaGuardia, Angel Payero, 18, took the necessary assessment tests in August and discovered that he was deficient in reading, writing and math.

“Throughout high school, I was a good math student, and to find out that it was my lowest grade of all three was really surprising,” said Mr. Payero, who graduated from the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry.

Neither of his parents, who are from the Dominican Republic, attended high school, he said. Yet Mr. Payero yearns for a career in psychology. “I feel like I can really understand people and where they come from,” he said.

Remedial classes require commitment. Fees for part-time students typically range from $560 to $910 per class. For full-time students, the $1,650 paid in tuition each semester covers remedial instruction, but none of the classes offer academic credit. Financial aid can help, but drawing from those resources could leave students with less to cover the cost of college-credit courses.

Further, many students, remedial or not, will never graduate. CUNY officials say that only about 25 percent of full-time students at the community colleges graduate within six years, though the university does not track students who transfer to another college. A recent nationwide study that followed community college freshmen over six years found that only 35 percent earned any sort of degree.

LaGuardia’s president, Gail O. Mellow, said she was encouraged by the immersion program that CUNY began more than a year ago.

Normally, remedial students juggle those courses and college-level classes over several semesters. But in the immersion program, students take only remedial classes for one semester, spending up to 25 hours a week in the classroom, for a flat fee of $75. More than 70 percent of students have passed the program, compared with 50 percent of those in the regular remedial classes, university officials say.

The university plans to expand the immersion program, which now has about 350 students, to 1,000 next fall.

“I embrace developmental education because it pivots lives,” Dr. Mellow said. “If students get an associate’s degree, they can become nurses, making $85,000 a year. If they don’t make it through that developmental class, they’ll barely make minimum wage.”

Still, as government financing has eroded in recent years, Dr. Mellow has had to trim some support services available to remedial students, reducing the number of tutors and cutting math lab hours. She said she was determined not to raise the average class size beyond the current 24 students.

The New York City Department of Education is also trying to help reduce the ranks of remedial students. It has begun tracking how each high school’s students go on to perform in college, and starting in 2012, it will include measurements of a student’s college readiness in its annual school progress reports. The city and CUNY are working together to align their academic standards and curriculums.

CUNY administrators point out that the academic prowess of students in their four-year colleges has risen: the percentage of freshmen at the five most selective colleges with combined scores of at least 1,200 on the SAT reasoning test has almost tripled in 10 years — to 24 percent this year. At the community colleges, the proportion of new students who need remediation has fallen slightly during that time.

But because of growing enrollments, the number of students requiring remediation has climbed. In 2001, 3,041 students needed remediation in three subjects; last fall, the number rose to 4,168.

For Dr. Ianni, that means more time spent teaching high school math. But working with marginal students has its rewards: all of his students who took the Compass exam passed.

“They didn’t really realize that they had it in them,” Dr. Ianni said. “For those who make it to the exit line, to see the beam on their faces is really incredible.”

Motor Breakers of China...a dismal life

The author of the following article suggests that the people who disassemble scrap electrical motors are better off than a college educated friend of his and at the same time being "green". Being "green" is a social/philosophical concept that scrap workers could care less. They are more concerned bringing in money to feed families and pay bills. "Better off"...I don't think so. I have done this type of reclamation [and still do] and it is hard and sometimes dangerous work.

"The Motor Breakers of China"

by

Adam Minter

February 27th, 2011

The Atlantic

SHANGHAI, China -- I thought long and hard about how to do justice to Jim's generous invitation to guest blog, and finally settled on doing what I occasionally do at my own blog: throw some trash around and try to convince my readers that I haven't. My hope is that, by the end of the week, this will sound a little less mad than it does at the beginning.

Below, a photo of a woman recycling a piece of imported American scrap metal inside of an industrial-scale motor scrap recycling (and copper smelting) operation south of Shanghai.


When I show this photo to American and European audiences, it often generates -- initially, at least -- feelings of pity on behalf of the presumably exploited woman, and (for lack of a better term) the "white guilt" of the audience on behalf of itself. So what I want to get straight via this post and the remaining six posts that I intend to do this week, is that guilt and pity are the wrong responses to this photo and others like it.


First, workers, like this woman, skilled in efficiently breaking apart complicated pieces of American throwaways into their recyclable components, are highly sought by China's vast and thriving scrap metal industry (which accounts for roughly 25% of Chinese aluminum production, 40% of copper production, and 15% of steel). On China's East coast, she can expect to earn roughly RMB 3500 - or nearly US$500/month, and choose her place of employment. That's better pay than the average Chinese university graduate (for example, I'm acquainted with a 28-year-old Shanghainese mechanical engineer with a Canadian master's degree who earns "under RMB 4000/month"). He doesn't have the job security of the motor breaker's co-workers.

Second point. What she's doing is good for the environments of both China (where she's doing it) and the United States (where that armature was tossed into a recycling bin). The only profitable way to recycle a motor armature into its constituent parts is to "break it" manually; in the US, with its expensive labor, that's just not possible as a business proposition. As a result, US scrap motors either sit idle (prior to China's commodities boom, you could find whole piles of the things in farm fields on the outskirts of any US city), or are too expensive to recycle (minimum wage won't cut it for this kind of work) ... or they get shipped to China where they're recycled completely, providing a relatively clean alternative to mined, virgin materials.

Current project.

220 volt, four phase, 25 horsepower motor. [It weighs about 200 pounds.]

Armature and case are steel. End pieces and "pecker box" are aluminum. And of course the copper core and wire.

Those rare trees of age

INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF FORESTS

My colleague Tim sent me some information and a photo of the "Homon Sugi" on Japan's Yaku Island. The estimated age of this tree is 7,200 years. This made me wonder what the oldest living things on Earth are. Well, according to Urban Titan, here they are...

Homon Sugi tree of Yaku Island, Japan

Imagine living for many centuries before the ancient Babylonians even existed, then carrying on through the developments of the Greek and Roman empires, the births of religions like Christianity and Islam right up to the present day, and still being alive to bear witness. Such an organism, which could be the oldest livng thing on the planet, is the Jhomon Sugi tree, of Yakushima in Japan. This awesome living fossil could beas old as 7,200, which would make it the oldest by far. With a girth of 16.4mtrs it could also be as young as 2,170 years. The inner growth rings of the tree are too rotten to be absolutely certain.

Sav-e-Abarkooh Cypress tree of Iran

The Sarv-e-Abarkooh is a 4,000 year old Cypress tree located at Abarkooh, in Iran. Also known as the ‘Zoroastrian Sarv’, this holds a special place in the hearts of all Iranians, with strong religious connotations. Another truly ancient example of living tree is the Llangernyw Yew, in Wales. Yew trees are common in cemeteries and known for their longevity but this is an extreme example.

‘Alerce’ Patagonian Cypress Tree of Chile

Another tree which is known to have been around for 35million years – the oldest today being a youthful 3,600 years of age – is the Patagonian Cypress, also known as the ‘Alerce’. So valuable was the wood of this tree to the Chilean locals that they used roof shingles made from it as money.

Jardine Juniper Tree, Lgan, Utah

Outside the city of Logan, Utah, USA, you will find The ‘Jardine Juniper’, again the oldest, at 3,200 years, of its kind anywhere in the world. Perhaps one of the most impressive of long-lived tree species is the Giant Sequoia, native to California. These gigantic trees are commonly found to be several thousand years old. Indeed, the ‘Chicago Stump’, felled in 1893 for the World’s Fair, was established by tree-ring count at 3,200 years.

‘Patriarca de Floresta’ Tree of Brazil

Yet another ancient S. American resident is the ‘Patriarca de Floresta’ tree of Brazil. One of the biggest trees in the Atlantic Forest, there are some old trees in Santa Rita do Passa Quatro and near Petrópolis. This one is thought to be at least 3 000 years old, almost certainly the oldest deciduous tree on the continent.

‘Chestnut Tree of 100 Horses’ , Mount Etrna, Sicily

The oldest known Chestnut tree in the world can be found on the Linguaglossa road, in San D’Alfio, on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. This ‘Tree of 100 horses’, as it is known, is indisputably the largest tree od its kind to be found anywhere on the planet, and thought to be somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old.

‘General Sherman’ Giant Sequoia, USA

One of the youngest of these ancient trees is also the biggest in the world by volume of wood contained within it. The ‘General Sherman’, a Giant Sequoia that stands 275ft tall and measures 102ft in circumference at the base. It can be found in the Sequoia National Park. As of 2002, the trunk volume was measured at about 1487 cubic meters. It is believed to be between 2,300 and 2,700 years old.