By Michael Levenson and Joshua Miller. Proposal includes money for higher education, drug treatment, rejects governor’s call for new taxes. House leaders released a proposed $36.2 billion budget Wednesday that increases funding for drug treatment, higher education, and local aid, but rejects Governor Deval Patrick’s push for new taxes and trims some of his priorities, including early education programs. The budget represented a cautious and incremental blueprint, with some targeted spending increases but no jarring policy shifts that could anger key constituencies in a year when members of the House are gearing up for reelection this fall. More...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? 
By G. Rendell. A common thought pattern in Environmental Studies students is that (un)sustainability is, at its heart, a population problem. This thinking hangs, in most cases, on the IPAT equation: (environmental) Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology. Part of the mindset that unsustainability is a population problem probably comes from the fact that the P multiplier is listed first. Read more...
By Eric Stoller. "What's your fax number?" It's a question that should never be asked. Period. We have to stop faxing. I know, it's not going to be an easy task. For example, certain campus departments are still fax fans. You know who they are...you might even work there. Human resources, contracts and accounts, and anyone who deals with reimbursements. Yes, I'm generalizing. Some of the above listed areas are quite modernized. However, some offices are still holding onto their fax machines with an embrace that is quite affectionate. Read more...
By Katie Shives. Today I submitted my very first grant application to the NIH. Funny thing is, until yesterday I thought I had 6 days to submit. However, I did not factor in early submission deadlines, so thanks to a well-timed reminder from our Grants and Contracts office I suddenly realized I had less than 24 hours to finish a grant package with all of the supporting materials or else all of my hard work would be for nothing. How did I get it all finished in time (other than lots and lots of coffee). Read more...
By Joshua Kim. First, before we tackle Bryan’s excellent essay Has Higher Ed Peaked?, I just want to let loose an an idea into the wild that Bryan Alexander should receive a MacArthur Genius Award.
Do you know anyone (save perhaps Barbara Fister or Audrey Watters) who would better use this money/platform more to change our ideas about higher education. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. Charles Barkley is the only professional sports talking head actually worth watching.
And Charles Barkley does not Tweet.
During the halftime shows for this year NCAA men’s tournament Sir Charles made a point of saying that he is not on Twitter. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. So, this week we heard that just about everything online that we thought was secure was actually vulnerable and we have to change our passwords, but not until platforms we’re using have fixed their SSL problem because if we change our password before the fix, the new password can be intercepted. We’ve had this gaping hole in our security for a couple of years. I’m not even sure how many things I signed up for and forgot about in that period of time. So far as I know, the NSA didn’t put this hole in the OpenSSL software library, but they have built small broken places into Internet standards that they can use to bypass privacy. Read more...
By Matt Reed. The final day of the AACC conference was incongruous in the way that big conferences usually are. It had a high-profile speaker -- in this case, Colin Powell -- and it had panels relegated to Scheduling Siberia, or 7:30 in the morning on the final day. It followed Vice President Biden’s announcement of the Registered Apprenticeship College Consortium, which is intended to spread the apprenticeship model to health care and IT, with a panel on the RACC that barely mentioned health care and ignored IT altogether. So it was inclusive, but with some relegated to the margins; it was a followup, but forgetfully. You could choose your own message. Read more...By Matt Reed. After the bitter shot of espresso that was the first day of AACC, I decided to split the second day between the official conference and the unofficial one. Academic conferences run parallel programs. The official program is what gets printed in the, well, program: panels, plenaries, and the like. The unofficial one is the people you bump into during the day. When the official program gets a little same-y, stuffy, or bitter, the unofficial one can redeem it. So a bit of each. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
