Tuition fees gain allure in cash-hit European campuses. Education: In a special report we find university administrators warming to charging students as governments cut grants. [Guardian Unlimited]

Back at Humboldt University, meanwhile, where the ghost of Karl Marx still hovers, students yesterday pondered what had happened to his legacy. “It's good for society for people to be educated,” Thomas Sieron, a 27-year-old historian, said: “Soon though education will just be for the rich.”

here calpundit shows that many planks of a typical republican platform are downright scary.

I Am A: Chaotic Good Human Fighter Ranger

Alignment:
Chaotic Good characters are independent types with a strong belief in the value of goodness. They have little use for governments and other forces of order, and will generally do their own things, without heed to such groups.

Race:
Humans are the 'average' race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live 'for the moment'.

Primary Class:
Fighters are the warriors. They use weapons to accomplish their goals. This isn't to say that they aren't intelligent, but that they do, in fact, believe that violence is frequently the answer.

Secondary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Deity:
Tymora is the Chaotic Good goddess of luck and good fortune. She is also known as Lady Luck, and also Tyche's fair-tressed daughter. Followers of Tymora believe in the tenent that, 'Fortune Favors the Bold,' and will throw caution to the wind and trust to luck to work things out for the best. Tymora's symbol is an unmarked silver disk.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)

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unsurprisingly i usually play a ranger or a bard, but i've not played in a while. usually i don't play human though, half-elf is more my type. but inarguably i almost always play chaotic good.

Your Homeland Security Dollars in Action. Dan Hughes of TheyBlinked points us to a story about his brother and his fiance. Here's the intro to the article: The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills. They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat's son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in love and want to get married in June. But when Hughes' fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed—even stripped of her diamond engagement… [Joho the Blog]

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Well all is not well as usual, fiance comes to visit fiance, has the wrong color skin gets bureaucratically abused, etc. I should note that I don't think they should feel that this was particularly different from other experiences, it probably happens hundreds of times each day. nonetheless, it is not the sort of thing that should happen. One of the problems is that we've put highly problematic, and probably underskilled people, in positions of power and while they think they are operating appropriately and optimally they can only perform at their own capacity, which lends itself to situations like this.

Apple powers college supercomputer. A US college has been able to build a supercomputer by hooking up hundreds of Apple G5 computers. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

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news travels slow in this case, no. this is probably the last major note on the g5 supercomputer here at tech.

Amaizing waistlines. You are fat because there is too much corn. [NYT, forfeit of first-born son required] I love good old-fashioned materialism, and Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire) scores one for the team with this article on the economics of corn production. Are we fat because New Deal agricultural policy was overturned in the 70s by Rusty Butz? Now there's a trailing question we can all enjoy. [MetaFilter]

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so you wonder about the obesity problem, perhaps there is a cause. perhaps this is it, maybe not though.

Connexions project. The Connexions Project produces open-access content for online education and facilitates its collaborative development. Browse the extensive Content Commons to see what is already developed and available, and check out the open-source tools. (Thanks to Darius Cuplinskas.) [Open Access News]

A Matrix of Weblog Uses in Education.

Scott Leslie, an educational technology researcher and emerging
technology analyst, is working with Dr. Bruce Landon and the Western
Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) on the
Edutools.info project. The  project participants are researching
course management systems. Scott has developed an interesting matrix of  possible uses of weblogs in education.

He describes the project in his October 9, 2003 weblog post.
[via James Farmer's incorporated subversion]

[Ohio Edublogging] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

TeleRead. TeleRead
http://www.teleread.org/

TeleRead is a nonpartisan plan to get electronic books and other educational resources into American homes–through a well-stocked national digital library system and small, sharp-screened computers that eventually could sell for under $100 or even $50. The same idea could apply to many other countries, and in fact TeleRead has advocates as far off as India. Supporters have ranged from William F. Buckley, Jr., to the founder of CompuServe's forum on Afro-American culture, and the proposal appears in an information science collection from The MIT Press and the American Society for Information Science. Unlike most educational plans, TeleRead would aid business directly and even reduce commercial and federal bureaucracy somewhat. In effect it would help shift resources from paperwork to learning, not just smarten up the workforce for the long run. [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker]

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this sounds like an interesting project, i hope it takes off.