By John Warner. In his recent address, President Obama has made it clear that he wants colleges and universities to “compete” with each other. Through a series of yet-to-be-specified metrics, institutes of higher education will be measured not on inputs (as the U.S. News and World Report rankings work), but on outcomes like graduation rates and job placement. The intention is determine the institute’s “value,” so that matriculating students can make better decisions. Ultimately, these metrics may be tied to Federal carrots like Pell Grants, with students being restricted to lower amounts for poorly performing schools. Presumably, schools will compete with others in the same category, so community colleges aren’t asked to measure themselves against the Ivy League. Read more...

By Matt Reed. The new academic year is about to start.  Every year, around this time, I reflect on how I’d like to see community colleges work. In my perfect world, a community college would be a collection of mad scientists experimenting with the best ways to help students learn.  They’d hail from all sorts of disciplines, and presumably some of them would have better grooming than the traditional mad scientist, but they’d share the excitement and focus on the task at hand.  The college would be a constant cauldron of experimentation and communication of results.  In this view, academic freedom exists to enable experimentation.  Over time, as results accumulated, the effects for the students would get progressively better. Read more...

Legend has it that Apple’s rainbow-coloured logo showing the apple with a bite out of it is in homage to Alan Turing “the father of modern computing”. Turing died of cyanide poisoning on 7 June 1954, two years after being convicted of homosexuality and accepting chemical castration instead of prison. A half-eaten apple was found next to him, and one theory is that he’d laced it with cyanide, his own homage to the wicked queen in Snow White, his favourite Disney cartoon. Another theory is that he died accidentally after inhaling cyanide fumes from apparatus he had in his bedroom for electroplating spoons. A third explanation is that he really did commit suicide, but set up the apparatus so his mother would think it was an accident. The coroner didn’t test the apple for cyanide, so we’ll never know for sure.
If there are doubts about Turing’s death, his life is fairly well-known, or at least some aspects of it. His most noteworthy exploit for the general public was helping to break the code of the Enigma machines the Germans used to communicate with their submarines during the Second World War. If you’d like to get some idea of how he did it, take a look at the excerpts from the “Enigma Paper” in Alan Turing, His Work and Impact, just published by Elsevier. Cryptography is the second of four parts of this thousand-page overview presenting Turing’s most significant works from the four-volume Collected Works along with comment, analysis and anecdote from leading scholars. The other three parts are on Turing’s contributions to computability, artificial intelligence, and biology. Read more...