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By Alya Mishra and Yojana Sharma. Britain and France announced a host of higher education and research joint ventures with India during high-level visits to the country last month led by British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President François Hollande. Both leaders were accompanied by their higher education and research ministers.
Cameron’s 18-20 February visit generated more excitement and media coverage in India than Hollande’s presence a week earlier, but experts felt that India was in a win-win situation in relations with both countries.
With a number of letters of intention and other agreements signed by their respective higher education ministers, Geneviève Fioraso and David Willetts, France and Britain announced several big-ticket collaborations.
A joint statement by India and France released on 14 February announced “an ambitious education plan, including twinning of higher education institutions, mutual recognition of degrees, research collaborations and training of teachers”.
The UK now boasts research collaborations with India valued at a total of £100 million (US$152 million) compared to £1 million just five years ago, it was revealed during Cameron’s visit. Read more...

By Geoff Maslen. A decade-long project by researchers in Australia and Latvia has resulted in an automatic authorship detection system that has provided new evidence about who actually wrote two famous texts: the US Federalist Papers and Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament.
The researchers say the system is now freely available for others to use and could be adapted for different types of text and for languages other than English.
Led by Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide’s school of electrical and electronic engineering, the six-member team used advanced software techniques to analyse author styles based on commonly used words and their frequencies in the text. Read more...

By John Aubrey Douglass. Once again, the US Supreme Court is reconsidering nearly four decades of legal precedent – essentially, allowing public universities to use race and ethnicity as one among many factors when considering student admissions.
As in previous affirmative actions cases, a Euro-American student filed a lawsuit against a highly selective public university, in this case the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). The plaintiff, Abigail Noel Fisher, claims overt racial discrimination when UT rejected her freshman application in 2008. Her lawyers filed the case that same year, and it wound its way through lower courts. Read more...