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Interview With Lawrence Goldstone, Author Of The Anatomy of Deception
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The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce, and Adventure
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Interview With Joseph Boyden, Author of Through Black Spruce
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Interview with Nino Ricci, Governor-General Award-Winning Author
With American tuition fees of roughly US$25,000, and many families strapped for cash, some American students are now taking their higher learning north of the border. Many Canadian universities are of an Ivy League caliber; however the total cost of attending the schools is markedly less. For international students, one year of tuition at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia is CDN$14,060, versus Boston University’s CDN$44,975. Not to mention housing expenses, etc. About 9,000 American students studied in Canadian Universities this year, versus roughly 2,300 12 years ago.
Students face the decision after graduation, however, about whether to move back to the U.S. or to stay in Canada. Read more…
ARMONK, NY–(Marketwire - February 14, 2008) - IBM today announced it is teaming with University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and North Carolina State University (NC State) in Raleigh to deliver new courses on programming languages that have become the foundation of the emerging web-based economy. These skills are critical for young people entering the global workforce today.
Businesses today are looking to the next generation of IT experts who understand the dynamics of the globally-integrated enterprise; who can work across geographically distributed teams; and easily utilize different open-standards technology assets to quickly develop enterprise mashups, plug-ins and other Web 2.0 resources.
As part of today’s announcement, IBM is working with UCLA and NC State to expose students to Web 2.0 technologies using languages such as Java and Groovy, in addition to programming platforms such as Eclipse and Ruby on Rails.
At UCLA, students in computer science class CS130 can opt to work with IBM mentors on Web 2.0 and Eclipse plug-in projects they themselves design. Meanwhile, graduate students at NC State in Raleigh have the first-ever opportunity to get their hands on Project Zero, a new IBM-created Web 2.0 development environment for creating enterprise mashups and rich web applications for a variety of business needs.
Later this year, IBM will release Lotus Mashups both commercially and at no charge to the academic community. Lotus Mashups includes an easy-to-use tool that helps individuals with no IT skills create and share any type of situational application on the fly. Using Lotus Mashups, business users can quickly assemble together components from across the Web and in the enterprise, including functionality built using Project Zero.
According to Connecticut-based labor demand research company Skillproof, the number of job openings for IT professionals in the United States increased by 45.2% from 2004 to end of year 2007, with open-standards and Web 2.0 development skills topping the list of job openings. Even as the number of IT jobs has declined from mid-2007 through early 2008, open-computing skills remain proportionately hot.
Choose Your Own Technology Adventure at UCLA
To help prepare students for the ongoing demand for open computing skills is a class project IBM pioneered for UCLA’s CS130 Computer Science class. “Choose your own (technology) adventure” operates on a simple principle — harnesses students’ interest-areas to shape the coursework rather than on standard textbooks and syllabi.
Selecting from open technology areas, students propose their own course projects, ranging from a mobile phone mashup that alerts users about local events — to an iTunes-like personal music player that lets users play music trivia games, share playlists and build communities. From start to completion, IBM experts provide hands on mentoring to students to boost their software engineering skills, improve team collaboration and gain exposure to best-case practices from IBM’s own development groups.
“Choose your own (technology) adventure is giving UCLA students a truly unique opportunity to learn software engineering skills from the best and brightest at IBM such as working in a team environment while learning collaboration, networking, rapid decision making,” said Professor Paul Eggert, who teaches the CS130 class in UCLA. “Throughout the project, they are researching and evaluating technologies and connecting with open source developers and industry experts. This method is helping us attract more students to learning about these key technology areas by making things like Java and Eclipse extremely relevant to their areas of interest. ”
With the help of IBM mentors Jeff Tan and his fellow students created an event planning application called “Bounce” as a part of their CS130 class last spring — a learning experience that has inspired Jeff to attempt other projects — such as a Web 2.0 gaming portal. “Web 2.0 — I barely knew what it was until that quarter, and now I see no way back,” he said.
Added teammate Gabe Nataneli: “From a software engineering perspective, coming up with a well-defined project is one of the biggest challenges. IBM’s course method helps us learn these crucial skills by putting a huge emphasis on project development and definition,” he said. “Students in our class liked working with IBM because of the freedom ‘Choose your own (technology) adventure’ offered. The result is a project we can show to prospective employers.”
Now on its fourth quarter at UCLA, over 50 students and 27 IBM mentors have been working together on mashups, Ruby on Rails and Eclipse plug-in projects.
Project Zero at North Carolina State University
At NC State, an IBM incubator project called Project Zero is being used to teach students to develop business applications by taking advantage of simplified programming methods, rich web interfaces, and enterprise mashups.
In this spring’s graduate level computer science class, students will be among the first group of developers to work with this new development environment. They will learn to use Project Zero with Groovy and Java to develop a time-slot signup system — a common type of situational business application — without the need for in-depth architecting.
The Project Zero incubator is being hosted at projectzero.org.
Bringing open computing skills to the enterprise
IBM’s latest efforts expand on its university programs — emphasizing both IT and business skills to meet the needs of a competitive, global workforce at over 2400 universities world-wide for over 2 million students. These initiatives include a series of mainframe programming skills for Linux taught at the University of Arkansas to a program designed for the University of Arizona to help students build, run and manage blogs, wikis and mashups.
This year, IBM’s Academic Initiative plans to dedicate resources world-wide to drive double digit growth of students reached over 2007. It also plans to increase the number of world-wide events to host local customers, software companies and universities on skills such as around large systems such as IBM System z — and associated open-standards based middleware.
“By collaborating with universities on new methodologies, the resources available through its Academic Initiative, IBM is poised to help faculty and students get an edge on the needs of the marketplace,” said Jim Corgel, general manager of IBM’s ISV & Developer Relations group. “The efforts now taking place at UCLA and NC State are just part of how IBM is helping universities adapt to the quickly changing world of technology. We accomplish this by exposing students to tomorrow’s technologies today and sharing best practices from IBM’s global development teams.”
For more information on the IBM Academic Initiative, visit: www.ibm.com/university
More information about the Project Zero community can be found at the community website: www.projectzero.org
BOSTON, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ — QAS, a part of Experian® specializing in address verification and cleansing products, announced today that 90 colleges and universities across North America have purchased QuickAddress software in the first two quarters of the company’s fiscal year, bringing its total higher education customer base to nearly 300 schools. This demonstrates tremendous year-over-year growth for QAS and is evidence that its address verification software is gaining rapid market adoption.
Of particular note in QAS’ new customer cache is the University of Maine System (UMS), which purchased QAS’ flagship product, QuickAddress Pro to outfit address entry points in admissions, finance, human resource and alumni departments across its seven statewide campuses. QAS will be used initially in conjunction with UMS’ PeopleSoft Campus Solutions application, which is a comprehensive suite of software specifically designed for student administration, and later with SunGard Higher Education’s Advance donor management system.
“We selected QAS because we felt it best addressed our need to manage duplicate addresses in the two databases where bad data costs us the most time, money, and quality service: Advancement and Admissions,” said Cindy Mitchell, director of Administrative Systems Development and Support for the University of Maine System.
Many of the schools adopting QAS products in the last six months intend to use them with PeopleSoft’s Campus Solutions. Among those are California State University at Los Angeles and Massachusetts Bay Community College.
Several of the State Universities of New York have also purchased address verification products from QAS in the past few months. SUNY Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome and Ulster County Community College both intend to deploy QAS’ products on campus in conjunction with SunGard Higher Education solutions, while SUNY Geneseo will utilize it specifically with SunGard Higher Education’s SmartCall telefundraising system in its annual fund call center.
Other schools new to QAS this year include Doane College in Crete, NE and Odessa College, in Odessa, TX, both Datatel institutions using QuickAddress. Odessa College purchased QuickAddress Pro and QuickAddress Batch in August and plans to deploy the software in all of its record processing departments. Datatel provides colleges and universities fully-integrated administrative software systems and e-marketing solutions.
According to Chuck Everett, director of Data Processing & Colleague Services at Odessa, QAS improves the data put into the school’s database while also speeding up data processing — in essence doing two jobs at once.
Several existing QAS customers have purchased additional address verification products and services to enhance their address verification strategy. The University of Ottawa, Canada’s university, became the first Canadian school to go enterprise-wide with QAS. The school was originally a customer in the alumni relations department but opted to expand its use after the school’s central IT group saw a need for address verification across campus. Additionally, the University of New Mexico extended its use of QAS to include QuickAddress Batch. This back-end data cleansing solution compliments the front-end address verification strategy already in place at the school.
QAS’ address verification products confirm addresses against official postal authority records improving overall data quality at schools. Unlike other address cleansing products, QuickAddress is a front-end solution in that it identifies and fixes address errors before they are entered into a school’s database. QAS works with any of the higher education administrative suites and can also be configured to verify addresses submitted through a school’s self-service application.
For more information on QAS’ suite of address verification products call (888) 727-8330 or visit http://www.qas.com/us
PRINCETON, N.J., Sept. 10 /PRNewswire/ — The makers of Trojan brand condoms today released their 2007 Sexual Health Report Card, the second annual ranking of sexual health resources at American colleges and universities. The study, conducted by Sperling’s BestPlaces on behalf of Trojan, finds a lack of access to information and resources may prevent some students from being sexually healthy.This year’s report card arrives in the wake of Trojan’s “Evolve” campaign (www.trojanevolve.com), a multimedia effort aimed at redefining the national dialogue on sexual health with an emphasis on responsible behavior and partners’ respect for one another.
In total, 139 colleges and universities representing each state and major NCAA Division I athletic conference were reviewed. Placing first and second, the University of Minnesota and University of Wyoming demonstrated “well- evolved” sexual health programs and were the most sexually healthy schools according to the study. While Ohio State and the University of Florida may have recently triumphed in sports, the Trojan Report Card indicates their sexual health programs have room to improve, as OSU and UF ranked 26th and 43rd, respectively.
Researchers polled student health centers and reviewed their websites to assign a grade point average (GPA) for sexual health resources across 11 separate categories:
-- Sexual health awareness programs
-- Condom & contraception availability
-- HIV testing
-- Other Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) testing
-- Student health center hours of operation
-- Drop-in vs. appointment-based service
-- Navigability and usability of Web-based sexual health information
-- Anonymous advice / newspaper columns
-- Lecture outreach programs
-- Student peer groups
-- Sexual assault programs
With a significantly expanded scope including more judging categories, more schools, and broader data collection methods like live health center interviews, Web reviews and student polls, the 2007 Trojan Sexual Health Report Card tells a different story from last year.
The University of Minnesota was the surprise standout, moving up to number one this year, from 54 last year. The University of Wyoming claimed second place, up from number 92. According to the report, both schools improved dramatically, making major enhancements to sexual health resources offered to students.
Availability of anonymous advice, free contraception including condom distribution, and separate sexual awareness programs were the biggest factors in differentiating the top ranked schools from the rest.
“We were quite surprised and gratified by our findings,” said Bert Sperling, president of Sperling’s BestPlaces, an independent research firm based in Portland. “The top-ranking schools made significant improvements to their programming-due in part, we hope, to last year’s study results — and they deserve to be commended.”
While only one Ivy League school cracked the top ten (Harvard, No. 10), all schools in the league placed in the top 40, posting the highest conference-wide GPA of 3.28 combined. Conversely, four schools in the Sun Belt conference fell into the bottom 10 (University of Louisiana, No. 138; Arkansas State University, No. 137; University of Arkansas, No. 136; Middle Tennessee State University, No. 131). No schools in this conference made it into the top 20 and the overall conference GPA was 2.23.
Yale University, which topped the rankings in 2006, came in at number 16 this year. Access to sexual health information and resources, including the schools annual Sex Week at Yale (SWAY), continue to be highly rated; however, the school’s lower ranking is a result of the expanded categories and schools considered. The 2007 Sexual Health Report Card examined 139 schools, nearly 50 percent more than last year, and judged several categories not taken into consideration last year, resulting in different rankings.
Highest- and Lowest-Ranked Schools
1. University of Minnesota (GPA 3.91)
2. University of Wyoming (GPA 3.91)
3. University of Washington (GPA 3.73)
4. Rutgers University (GPA 3.68)
5. Purdue University (GPA 3.64)
135. Villanova University (GPA 1.45)
136. University of Arkansas (GPA 1.36)
137. Arkansas State University (GPA 1.14)
138. University of Louisiana (GPA 0.91)
For the first time, researchers allowed students to weigh in with an online survey that generated more than 3,300 responses. This opinion poll did not factor into the rankings, but does point to the opportunity for health centers on campus to evolve how they meet the needs of their students.
While 66 percent said their health centers are “doing a good job,” 32 percent of respondents said they would not consider contacting their student health center for health concerns and 53 percent agreed their centers could improve overall.
“The fact is, college students are at serious risk for STIs and unplanned pregnancies,” said Jim Daniels, vice president of marketing, Trojan brand condoms. “It’s time to evolve the way we address the realities of sexual health and provide students with the practical resources they need to protect themselves. The Trojan Sexual Health Report Card helps students and their schools celebrate areas of excellence and focus on opportunities to improve.”
Information was gathered over an eight-week period beginning in the spring of 2007, and was collected via live student health center phone interviews. This data was then corroborated through visits to student health center Web sites.
More Americans trust the TROJAN® brand than any other condom. For more information visit www.trojancondoms.com and www.trojanevolve.com.
