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The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education.

Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.

The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. Hacker is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of the acclaimed study “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,”

We have carried out a three-part study comparing the research performance of Indian institutions with that of other international institutions. In the first part, the publication profiles of various Indian institutions were examined and ranked based on the h-index and p-index. We found that the institutions of national importance contributed the highest in terms of publications and citations per institution. In the second part of the study, we looked at the publication profiles of various Indian institutions in the high-impact journals and compared these profiles against that of the top Asian and US universities. We found that the number of papers in these journals from India was miniscule compared to the US universities. Recognizing that the publication profiles of various institutions depend on the field/departments, we studied [in Part III] the publication profiles of many science and engineering departments at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of Technology, as well as top Indian universities. Because the number of faculty in each department varies widely, we have computed the publications and citations per faculty per year for each department. We have also compared this with other departments in various Asian and US universities. We found that the top Indian institution based on various parameters in various disciplines was IISc, but overall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.

The comparison groups of institutions include MIT, UMinn, Purdue, PSU, MSU, OSU, Caltech, UCB, UTexas (all from the US), National University of Singapore, Tsing Hua Univerrsity (China), Seoul National University (South Korea), National Taiwan University (Taiwan), Kyushu University (Japan) and Chinese Academy of Sciences.

... [T]he number of papers in these [high impact] journals from India was miniscule compared to [that from] the US universities. ... [O]verall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.

Statistical Literacy Why take this course? We are misled by numbers and by our misunderstanding of probability.

Our world is shaped by widespread statistical illiteracy. We fear things that probably won’t kill us (terrorist attacks) and ignore things that probably will (texting while driving). We buy lottery tickets. We fall prey to misleading gut instincts, which lead to biases like loss aversion—an inability to gauge risk against potential gain. The effects play out in the grocery store, the office, and the voting booth (not to mention the bedroom: People who are more risk-averse are less successful in love).

We are now 53 percent more likely than our parents to trust polls of dubious merit. (That figure is totally made up. See?) Where do all these numbers that we remember so easily and cite so readily come from? How are they calculated, and by whom? How do we misuse them to make them say what we want them to? We’ll explore all of these questions in a sequence on sourcing statistics.

two disconcerting articles crossed my computer screen, both highlighting the increasingly sorry state of higher education, though from very different perspectives. The first is “Ed Dante’s” (actually a pseudonym) piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled The Shadow Scholar. The second is Gregory Petsko’s A Faustian Bargain, published of all places in Genome Biology.

There is much to be learned by educators in the Shadow Scholar piece, except the moral that “Dante” would like us to take from it. The anonymous author writes:“Pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.

The point is that plagiarism and cheating happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the existence of people like Mr. Dante and his company, who set up a business that is clearly unethical and should be illegal. So, pointing fingers at him and his ilk is perfectly reasonable. Yes, there obviously is a “market” for cheating in higher education, and there are complex reasons for it, but he is in a position similar to that of the drug dealer who insists that he is simply providing the commodity to satisfy society’s demand. Much too easy of a way out, and one that doesn’t fly in the case of drug dealers, and shouldn’t fly in the case of ghost cheaters.

Another long-standing myth is that we allow one negative referee to determine the rejection of a paper. On the contrary, there were several occasions last year when all the referees were underwhelmed by a paper, yet we published it on the basis of our own estimation of its worth. That internal assessment has always been central to our role; Nature has never had an editorial board. Our editors spend several weeks a year in scientific meetings and labs, and are constantly reading the literature. Papers selected for review are seen by two or more referees. The number of referees is greater for multidisciplinary papers. We act on any technical concerns and we value the referees' opinions about a paper's potential significance or lack thereof. But we make the final call on the basis of criteria such as the paper's depth of mechanistic insight, or its value as a data resource or in enabling applications of an innovative technique.

controversies over scientific conclusions in fields such as climate change can have the effect — deliberate or otherwise — of undermining the public's faith in science.

One myth that never seems to die is that Nature's editors seek to inflate the journal's impact factor by sifting through submitted papers (some 16,000 last year) in search of those that promise a high citation rate. We don't. Not only is it difficult to predict what a paper's citation performance will be, but citations are an unreliable measure of importance. Take two papers in synthetic organic chemistry, both published in June 2006. One, 'Control of four stereocentres in a triple cascade organocatalytic reaction' (D. Enders et al. Nature 441, 861–863; 2006), had acquired 182 citations by late 2009, and was the fourth most cited chemistry paper that we published that year. Another, 'Synthesis and structural analysis of 2-quinuclidonium tetrafluoroborate' (K. Tani and B. M. Stoltz Nature 441, 731–734; 2006), had acquired 13 citations over the same period. Yet the latter paper was highlighted as an outstanding achievement in Chemical and Engineering News, the magazine of the American Chemical Society.

A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation.

When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel's Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side.

Yet, partisan politics aside, why should it matter that there are so few Republican scientists? After all, it's the scientific facts that matter, and facts aren't blue or red.

Cleantech companies just can’t seem to get it right. At least, that’s the notion Peter Thiel — a co-founder of PayPal and president of Clarium Capital — subscribes to when he looks at cleantech companies as potential investing opportunities. He made the comments at a Commonwealth Club event in San Francisco Wednesday.

That’s not because he doesn’t believe in the technology — he just doesn’t like the way the companies are run, he said. “Most of the people who run cleantech companies are sales people, not engineers,” Thiel said. “Something seems to have gone quite wrong with cleantech.”

most cleantech companies that try to develop alternative energy forms are building power sources that are more expensive. Solar panels, for example, are still not a cost-efficient way to generate power because companies have made the assumption that people will pay more for more environmentally friendly ways of producing energy, Thiel said. “We need something cheaper, not more expensive,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if the energy is cleaner, it doesn’t work if it’s more expensive.”

in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term: J. C. Penney. The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the planet’s largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to millions and millions of online shoppers.

A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.

The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for “dresses” in the United States at 11.1 million a month, an average based on 12 months of data. So for “dresses” alone, Penney may have been attracting roughly 3.8 million visits every month it showed up as No. 1. Exactly how many of those visits translate into sales, and the size of each sale, only Penney would know.

Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.

he ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety.

Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.

Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.

Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).

wrote a piece about James Delingpole's unfortunate appearance on the BBC program Horizon on Monday. In that piece I refered to one of his own Telegraph articles in which he criticizes renowned sceptic Dr Ben Goldacre for betraying the principles of scepticism in his regard of the climate change debate. That article turns out to be rather instructional as it highlights perfectly the difference between real scepticism and the false scepticism commonly described as denialism.

It appears that James has tremendous respect for Ben Goldacre, who is a qualified medical doctor and has written a best-selling book about science scepticism called Bad Science and continues to write a popular Guardian science column. Here's what Delingpole has to say about Dr Goldacre: Many of Goldacre’s campaigns I support. I like and admire what he does. But where I don’t respect him one jot is in his views on ‘Climate Change,’ for they jar so very obviously with supposed stance of determined scepticism in the face of establishment lies.

Scepticism is not some sort of rebellion against the establishment as Delingpole claims. It is not in itself an ideology. It is merely an approach to evaluating new information. There are varying definitions of scepticism, but Goldacre's variety goes like this: A sceptic does not support or promote any new theory until it is proven to his or her satisfaction that the new theory is the best available. Evidence is examined and accepted or discarded depending on its persuasiveness and reliability. Sceptics like Ben Goldacre have a deep appreciation for the scientific method of testing a hypothesis through experimentation and are generally happy to change their minds when the evidence supports the opposing view. Sceptics are not true believers, but they search for the truth. Far from challenging the established scientific consensus, Goldacre in Bad Science typcially defends the scientific consensus against alternative medical views that fall back on untestable positions. In science the consensus is sometimes proven wrong, and while this process is imperfect it eventually results in the old consensus being replaced with a new one.

The attackers just needed a little bit more information: they needed a regular, non-root user account to log in with, because as a standard security procedure, direct ssh access with the root account is disabled. Armed with the two pieces of knowledge above, and with Greg's e-mail account in their control, the social engineers set about their task. The e-mail correspondence tells the whole story: From: Greg To: Jussi Subject: need to ssh into rootkit im in europe and need to ssh into the server. can you drop open up firewall and allow ssh through port 59022 or something vague? and is our root password still 88j4bb3rw0cky88 or did we change to 88Scr3am3r88 ? thanks

Thanks indeed. To be fair to Jussi, the fake Greg appeared to know the root password and, well, the e-mails were coming from Greg's own e-mail address. But over the course of a few e-mails it was clear that "Greg" had forgotten both his username and his password. And Jussi handed them to him on a platter. Later on, Jussi did appear to notice something was up: From: Jussi To: Greg Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit did you open something running on high port?

From: Jussi To: Greg Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit hi, do you have public ip? or should i just drop fw? and it is w0cky - tho no remote root access allowed

I picked a fairly specific term, in “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I checked prior to publishing yesterday’s post, and there were just a shade under 29,000 Google results for that term.  This is important because you need to pick the most specific term as possible, because this will result in less competition, and (if you’ve picked the right term for you) it means you will be more likely to get the ‘right’ kind of traffic.

Second, I made sure the term was in the title and mentioned a couple of times in the post.  I also made the term “Social Media Crisis Management” at the front of the post title, I originally had the title as “A No-Nonsense Guide to Social Media Crisis Management” but Amy wisely suggested that I flip it so the term I was targeting was at the front of the title.

when I published the post yesterday at 12:20pm, there were 28,900 Google results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I tweeted a link to it at that time.  Fifty minutes later at 1:10pm, the post was already showing up on the 3rd page for a Google search of #Social Media Crisis Management”:

Google adds more functionality to Social Search Google has made a few tweaks to Social Search, integrating it with Twitter and Google accounts for personalized and relevant results.

Google says it aims to combine the "goodness of Google" with the opinions of people the users care most about. These results could be based on whether your friends publish their information on their blogs/websites, YouTube or Flickr accounts and more.

he social results will no longer appear at the bottom of the page, but will be mixed with the regular search results depending on their relevance to the user. These results will be annonated, marking it as a social result. It will also include links people have shared on Twitter and other social networking sites. The new search also allows users to privately link their Twitter accounts.

from the earliest years, education should be based primarily on exploration, understanding in depth, and the development of logical, critical thinking. Such an emphasis, she says, not only produces a citizenry capable of recognizing and rooting out political jingoism and intolerance. It also produces people capable of questioning authority and perceived wisdom in ways that enhance innovation and economic competitiveness. Nussbaum warns against a narrow educational focus on technical competence.

a successful, long-term democracy depends on a citizenry with certain qualities that can be fostered by education.

The first is the capacity we associate in the Western tradition with Socrates, but it certainly appears in all traditions -- that is, the ability to think critically about proposals that are brought your way, to analyze an argument, to distinguish a good argument from a bad argument. And just in general, to lead what Socrates called “the examined life.” Now that’s, of course, important because we know that people are very prone to go along with authority, with fashion, with peer pressure. And this kind of critical enlivened citizenry is the only thing that can keep democracy vital.

The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.The Guardian was given exclusive access to churnalism.com prior to launch. It revealed how all media organisations are at times simply republishing, verbatim, material sent to them by marketing companies and campaign groups.

The creation of churnalism.com is likely to unnerve overworked journalists and the press officers who feed them. "People don't realise how much churn they're being fed every day," said Martin Moore, director of the trust, which seeks to improve standards in news. "Hopefully this will be an eye-opener."