Teachers’ union shuns Obama aides at convention

For two years as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama addressed educators gathered for the summer conventions of the two national teachers’ unions, and last year both groups rolled out the welcome mat for Education Secretary Arne Duncan. But in a sign of the Obama administration’s strained relations with two of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled to speak at either convention this month, partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling, reports the New York Times. The National Education Association meeting opened in New Orleans July 3 to a drumbeat of heated rhetoric, with several speakers calling for Duncan’s resignation, hooting delegates voting for a resolution criticizing federal programs for “undermining public education,” and the union’s president summing up 18 months of Obama education policies by saying, “This is not the change I hoped for.” “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the union, told thousands of members gathered at the convention center. Obama and Duncan have supported historic increases in school financing to stave off teacher layoffs, but they’ve also sought to shake up public education with support for charter schools, the dismissal of ineffective teachers as a way of turning around failing schools, and other policies. That agenda has spurred fast-paced changes, including adoption of new teacher evaluation systems in many states and school districts, often with the collaboration of teachers’ unions. But it has also angered many teachers, who say they are being blamed for all the problems in public schools…

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To stop cheats, colleges learn their trickery

As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech, educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down, reports the New York Times. The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating might be at the testing center of the University of Central Florida: No gum is allowed during an exam, because chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cell phone to an accomplice outside. The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desktops, so that anyone trying to photograph the screen to help a friend who will take the test later is easy to spot. Scratch paper is allowed, but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later. When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence. Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s third-largest campus by enrollment, said cheating had dropped significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered during the spring semester. “I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out about it,” Ellis said. This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to select roommates and courses, some colleges—Duke and Bowdoin among them—are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before they can enroll. And anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business: 55 percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey…

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Lobbyists try to reframe distracted driving issue

Responding to moves by state legislatures to restrict motorists’ use of cell phones and other devices, a major electronics industry trade group and a Washington lobbying firm have been pushing separate efforts to reframe the debate over the dangers of distracted driving, reports the New York Times. The efforts have angered public safety advocates, some legislators, and the Secretary of Transportation, who say such restrictions would save lives. A document that has been circulating over the last week from a Washington lobbying firm, the Seward Square Group, has fueled the tension. The document, a copy of which was posted by the web site FairWarning, says the distracted driving issue has been “hijacked” by national transportation authorities and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, who has encouraged motorists to pledge to put down their devices. The document says that the auto and technology industries have become “collateral damage” in the debate. Babak Zafarnia, a public relations executive hired by Seward to be the coalition’s spokesman, said the idea was to emphasize driver education and to focus on broad driver-distraction laws, rather than focusing on the use of particular technologies. “You can’t anticipate every possible scenario. Distraction is distraction, period,” he said, adding: “Why don’t we modernize the education curriculum to teach drivers to deal with all in-vehicle distractions?” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who received a copy of the document from a public safety advocate, said he was “alarmed” by what he interpreted as an effort to undermine the creation of tough laws aimed at discouraging drivers from using electronic devices behind the wheel. The chief distraction problem, he said “is caused by people using cell phones and BlackBerrys, and to correct the behavior, you have to have tough laws with good enforcement.”

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In faulty-computer suit, window to Dell decline

After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations, reports the New York Times. Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and small businesses…

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Last day of ‘Rubber Rooms’ for teachers

Monday was the last day of school for the city’s 1 million students. But at the “rubber room” on West 125th Street, it was also the end of an era. For the last several years, teachers accused of incompetence or wrongdoing have been forced into rubber rooms, formally called Temporary Reassignment Centers, where they receive a full salary but do not work while they wait for the Department of Education or a hearing officer to decide their fate, reports the New York Times. But in April, city officials and the teachers’ union agreed to eliminate the rooms, which had been a source of embarrassment for all. Beginning in the fall, those teachers will perform administrative duties or be sent home if they are deemed a threat to students. So Monday was the last day for the roughly 700 teachers and administrators spread among seven reassignment centers, where they were sent after being accused of transgressions as small as persistent tardiness and as serious as sexually harassing students…

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Broadband availability to expand

The Obama administration is seeking to nearly double the wireless communications spectrum available for commercial use over the next 10 years, an effort that could greatly enhance the ability of consumers to send and receive video and data with smartphones and other hand-held devices, reports the New York Times. President Obama will sign a presidential memorandum on Monday that aims to make available for auction some 500 megahertz of spectrum that is now controlled by the federal government and private companies, administration officials said Sunday. Most of that would be designated for commercial use in mobile broadband and similar applications, though aspects of the plan will require Congressional approval…

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Online bullies pull schools into the fray

Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from barrages of teasing texts to sexually harassing group sites, reports the New York Times. The extent of the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as “willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected. Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from barrages of teasing texts to sexually harassing group sites. The extent of the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as “willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected…

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Troubled urban school is turned around, but cost gives pause

Locke High School in Los Angeles has seen significant progress since it was taken over by a charter school group in 2008, but the gains have come at a considerable cost, reports the New York Times. As recently as 2008, Locke High School was one of the nation’s worst failing schools and drew national attention for its hallway beatings, bathroom rapes, and rooftop parties held by gangs. For every student who graduated, four others dropped out. Now, two years after a charter school group took over, gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward. Newly planted olive trees in Locke’s central plaza have helped transform the school’s concrete quadrangle into a place where students congregate and do homework. Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation’s failing schools. The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Education Department (ED) web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort. But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that ED has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience might be too costly to replicate…

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Computers make strides in recognizing speech

For decades, computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence (AI)—but in recent years, rapid progress has been made in machines that can listen, speak, see, reason, and learn, reports the New York Times. The AI technology that has moved furthest into the mainstream is computer understanding of what humans are saying. People increasingly talk to their cell phones to find things, instead of typing. Both Google’s and Microsoft’s search services now respond to voice commands. The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years, to 150,000. Meanwhile, translation software being tested by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is fast enough to keep up with some simple conversations. With some troops in Iraq, English is translated to Arabic and Arabic to English. But there is still a long way to go. When a soldier asked a civilian, “What are you transporting in your truck?” the Arabic reply was that the truck was “carrying tomatoes.” But the English translation became “pregnant tomatoes.” The speech software understood “carrying,” but not the context. Yet if far from perfect, speech recognition software is good enough to be useful in more ways all the time. Take call centers: Today, voice software enables many calls to be automated entirely. And more advanced systems can understand even a perplexed, rambling customer well enough to route the caller to someone trained in that product, saving time and frustration for the customer. They can detect anger in a caller’s voice and respond accordingly—usually by routing the call to a manager…

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On new iPhone, a mystery of dropped calls

Apple’s touch-screen smart phone has been a sensation since Day 1 three years ago, and many who own the device believe it to be almost perfect—if only it worked better as a phone. That might be the case with the new iPhone 4 as well, reports the New York Times. What surprised many of the new phone’s earliest adopters as they tested the phone after its June 24 launch: The precious little bars that signal network connections inexplicably disappeared when they cradled the phone in their hands a particular way. Sometimes, but not always, the cradling resulted in dropped calls. In the hours before Apple weighed in on the problem, iPhone fans turned to one another on the internet in a zealous exercise in crowd-sourcing for answers to the mystery. They were all the more baffled because the iPhone 4 was designed to have better reception. A metal band that wraps around the edges of the device is supposed to pull in a stronger signal; software is supposed to choose the section of the signal with the least congestion. Late on June 24, an Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, acknowledged that the issues experienced by users were real but played down their importance. “Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, depending on the placement of the antennas,” he said. “This is a fact of life for every wireless phone.”

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For-profit colleges find new market niche

The for-profit online institution Kaplan University has an offer for California community college students who cannot get a seat in a class they need, reports the New York Times: Under a memorandum of understanding with the chancellor of the community college system, they can take the online version at Kaplan, with a 42-percent tuition discount. The opportunity would not come cheap, however; Kaplan charges $216 a credit with the discount, compared with $26 a credit at California’s community colleges. Supporters of for-profit education say the offer underscores how Kaplan and other profit-making colleges can help accommodate the mushrooming demand for higher education. At the same time, government officials have become increasingly concerned that students at for-profit colleges are far more likely than those at public institutions to take out large loans—and default on them. For better or worse, the tough times for public colleges nationwide have presented for-profit colleges with a promising marketing opportunity. “We thought, in light of the budget crisis and the number of community college classes which are being canceled, if we have that same class here, we would give students the opportunity to take it at Kaplan,” said Greg F. Marino, president of Kaplan University Group, a profit-making business owned by the Washington Post Company…

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Phone software takes the taps out of typing

A new technology called Swype allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard of their mobile phone to spell words, rather than tapping out letters, reports the New York Times. Back in the 1990s, typing out “hello” on most cell phones required an exhausting 13 taps on the number keys, like so: 44-33-555-555-666. That was before inventor Cliff Kushler, based in Seattle, and a partner created software called T9, which could bring that number down to three by guessing the word being typed. Now, there is a new challenge to typing on phones: More phones are using virtual keyboards on a touch screen, replacing physical buttons. But pecking out a message on a small piece of glass is not so easy, and typos are common. So, Kushler thinks he has a solution once again. Swype’s software detects where a finger pauses and changes direction as it traces out the pattern of a word. The movements do not have to be precise, because the software calculates which words a user is most likely trying to spell. Kushler, who is chief technology officer of Swype, estimates that the software can improve even the nimblest text-messager’s pace by 20 to 30 percent…

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