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Can You Learn in Your Sleep?

I was once in a relationship with a young woman who said that the resolutions to some of her biggest unresolved problems at her school came to her while she was sleeping. She would simply think about the problem that was bothering her while she was getting ready for bed and resolved to find the solution, and it would invariably come to her in some form during her dreams. I attempted to do this as well but found that no resolutions ever came and that I was always dreaming about unrelated subjects — I suppose that finding solutions to problems was just a talent that she had, or somehow she trained herself to be able to do this. I still can’t do it, sadly. However, I am fairly excited to try out something not entirely different and seemingly a bit more grounded in science fact than this dream problem solving ability.

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Paterno as Sandusky Enabler: Now We Know at Penn State, Football was More Important than Morality

The Penn State child abuse cover up just got worse this morning with the not-so-unexpected revelation that Joe Paterno — and his beloved football program — were more important to the university than the welfare of innocent children:

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims,” said Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the F.B.I. who oversaw the investigation. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.”

Freeh’s investigation — which took seven months and involved more than 400 interviews and the review of more than 3.5 million documents — accuses Paterno, the university’s former president and others of deliberately hiding facts about Sandusky’s sexually predatory behavior over the years.

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Michigan State University Cuts Off Alumni Email to Spite Their University Brand

Sometimes you read things that make such utter nonsense that you wonder how a major institution like Michigan State University manages to remain open and competitive and viable in the modern world with such archaic, Old Worlde, and utterly wrong, notions:

Michigan State University has announced that it will stop providing full-service e-mail accounts to alumni who graduated more than two years ago, a cutback that will affect 117,000 people. Some of them are complaining, but officials say it is a necessary cost-cutting measure.

David Gift, vice provost for libraries and information-technology services, said that the policy had always been to discontinue full-service accounts two years after a student’s last class, but that the university simply had not enforced it. He doesn’t know of any other university that still offers full-service alumni accounts indefinitely; most terminate full e-mail accounts within a year after graduation, or turn them into forwarding accounts. The change will take effect on August 31.

Keeping all those alumni accounts running was costing Michigan State about $600,000 a year, said Mr. Gift. They amounted to about 45 percent of all university e-mail accounts. The money saved can be used to upgrade services for current students, he said.

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The Vanishing Stigma of Earning Degrees Online

My best friend and his wife visited me last weekend and, while catching up, he told me about how well things were going for him since getting his Master’s degree in Library Science from the University of Pittsburgh — online. I met him while we were both at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and he went on to get a Master’s degree from Columbia University — both fully in person, mind you. I was quite impressed with his accomplishment and how the perception of online universities has changed in the last decade. It brought to mind a conversation I once had with an associate that told me that online universities would never be taken seriously by employers — my best friend would beg to differ as he has a job that required the Library Science degree and they took his degree just as seriously as one the University of Pittsburgh would have awarded to a person who had attended all of their classes in person.

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The Permeable Threat to the Digitized Being of Us

What’s going on with the latest rash of online password thefts?  What is the thrill in posting this information on the internets?  Is possessing the passwords of other people an ego boost or a public rant against insecure information stored on the web?

First LinkedIn, then eHarmony, and now possibly Last.fm. As the number of sites falling victim to password hackers continues to grow, the questions are flooding in: are these incidents all connected? And, perhaps more importantly, who’s next?

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