George Washington University Misrepresented Its Admission Policy

Every once in a while, a student newspaper scores a great scoop: That's the case with the story dropped today by The GW Hatchet, the independent student newspaper of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The paper reports that for years the university has been misrepresenting its admissions policy. As the paper points out, the university went from claiming to run a "need-blind" admissions policy in which they said financial aid requests do not affect admissions decisions, to clarifying that they have had a "need-aware" admissions policy. The university, reported the Hatchet, was still telling prospective students it was a "need-blind" university during an informational session on Saturday.

The issue here is that while they said they were "need-blind," the university was wait-listing some students based on their inability to pay full tuition. On the hand, it was admitting some more wealthy students who could afford full tuition but would have ended up on the wait list.

The Hatchet reports:

"Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, called GW's past claims 'dishonest.'

"'It's misleading,' said Vedder, who is also an economics professor at the Ohio University. 'Need-blind would mean, "We don't pay a bit of attention to financial considerations in making admissions decisions," and GW clearly does.'

"University spokeswoman Candace Smith argued that GW's characterization of the University's admission policy as need-blind or need-aware was not 'intentionally misleading.'

"'It's still the same process, but it's a matter of one person defining it one way and one person defining it another way,'" Smith said.

The university issued a statement about the story, earlier today. It read in part:

"It is important to note that consideration of need occurs at the very end of the admissions process. The first review of applications is need blind and admissions committees recommend candidates for admission with no knowledge of need. Some admissions professionals use the phrase "read need blind" to describe a process like ours where the admissions committees do not have access to the amount of need of an applicant.

"The Hatchet story suggests that the university's practice of need aware admissions automatically disadvantages students with need. Quite the contrary, our need aware admissions policy enables the university to provide more attractive aid packages for students with financial need while staying within our aid budget. More than 60 percent of our students receive grants from the university."

Gawker counters:

"The really ugly part of 'need-aware' admissions is the concurrent rise of merit aid, or scholarships tied to an applicant's academic profile, which overwhelming accrue to the wealthiest applicants. In September Washington Monthlytraced this phenomenon back to a collection of Ohio colleges attempting to poach the others' most desirable applicants. The resulting dynamic—if a college refuses to grant merit aid, the 'best' applicants will flock to a school that does—presently affects all but the oldest and most moneyed universities. (Which already overwhelming educatethe world's most elite tier.)

"GWU's deception is uniquely terrible, however, because the school traded on a hope that it had literally zero intention of fulfilling. 6.5 percent of its students qualify for Pell grants! This is a school largely dedicated to attracting and educating students who are already wealthy. Which is fine, if not especially admirable. But you can't advertise yourself as open to educating disadvantaged kids when you discriminate against them for not having as much money as the next applicant."

The university said that it decided to change the way it described its process, following the departure of Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Kathryn Napper.

Napper retired in December, a month after U.S. News & World Report removed G.W. from its rankings, after the university admitted it had inflated the credentials of its incoming freshmen.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/21/239277520/george-washington-university-misrepresented-its-admission-policy?ft=1&f=1001
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Netflix's outlook, user gains reinforce growth hopes

By Lisa Richwine

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Netflix Inc gained more subscribers than expected at home and abroad, helped by original series like "Orange is the New Black," and predicted additional growth this quarter, sending its shares surging 9.4 percent to a record high on Monday.

Netflix, the biggest gainer in the S&P 500 in 2013, quadrupled profit in the third quarter as it added a higher-than-expected 1.3 million subscribers to its subscription video streaming service.

The company, which has invested heavily in original content such as political satire "House of Cards" to draw in subscribers, said it had 31.1 million U.S. streaming users in the third quarter. It expects to end the year with 32.7 million to 33.5 million users, accelerating that momentum.

"That keeps the view alive that this company has a larger subscriber base and has pricing leverage in its corner to extract more value," said Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible, who rates Netflix a "buy".

Netflix's shares rose to $388.50 in after-hours trading, compared with their close of $354.99 on the Nasdaq. The stock has racked up successive life highs since September, as investors bet on its growth prospects.

During the quarter, Netflix released critically acclaimed prison drama "Orange is the New Black," part of its investment in exclusive original programming to keep and attract customers to its $8-a-month movie and TV streaming service.

Its original series slate attracted buzz during the quarter, with 14 Emmy nominations and three wins for shows including "House of Cards."

The company said it will double investments in original programming in 2014, when it will air second seasons of both "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black."

MOMENTUM

Wall Street also singled out the company's strong growth abroad. It added 1.4 million customers in international markets, bringing its reach in foreign territories to 9.2 million.

Netflix reported earnings-per-share of 52 cents, beating the average of 49 cents projected by Wall Street analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Net income for the quarter reached $32 million, up from $8 million a year earlier, Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders.

Standard & Poor's equity analyst Tuna Amobi said Netflix appeared to be gaining traction in some of its newest markets, and noted that "Orange is the New Black" will end the year as the company's most-watched original series.

"There is not a whole lot not to like. There is a whole lot of momentum behind the story," said Amobi, who has a "hold" rating on the stock. "They appear to have turned an important corner for potentially sustained subscriber growth."

(Additional reporting by Liana B. Baker in New York; editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/netflix-adds-1-3-million-u-streaming-customers-202315085--finance.html
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Obamacare: It's Worse Than We Know

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Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2013/10/21/obamacare_it039s_worse_than_we_know_318312.html
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Life after the shutdown: Don't expect a lot progress

Americans wishing for a Grand Bargain this Christmas are likely to be disappointed.

The bipartisan conference committee established by last week’s 11^th-hour agreement to re-open the government and raise the debt ceiling probably won’t produce a truly groundbreaking bipartisan deal that would end the nation's debt problem once and for all, nor are the members aiming that high.

At best, the budget resolution that comes out of the committee may serve as a "down payment" on that debt and provide Congress an opportunity to fulfill its most basic function of setting spending levels so the appropriations committees can fund the government.

In other words, it is literally likely to be the least lawmakers could do — which for this unpopular, Do-Nothing Congress, would be quite an achievement.

As part of the agreement to temporarily keep the government open, the House and Senate have appointed 29 lawmakers to a conference committee tasked with reconciling the House and Senate budget proposals that passed earlier this year. The panel's leaders, Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who each chair the Budget Committees in their respective chamber, must report back to Congress by Dec. 13 with the final version of the budget.

When the new conference committee members held their first meeting last Thursday, both sides kept expectations low.

“Chairman Ryan knows I’m not going to vote for his budget. I know that he’s not going to vote for mine,” Murray said at the Thursday meeting. “We’re going to find the common ground between our two budgets that we both can vote on. That’s our goal.”

“Our job,” she added, “is to make sure that we have put forward a spending cap and a budget path for this Congress in the next year or two or further if we can.”

That common ground, as one aide close to Ryan described it to Yahoo News, would amount to little more than “small things.”

At the end of these formal negotiations, Republicans want modest changes made to the nation’s entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare — the primary drivers of U.S. debt — which they say are necessary to keep those programs sustainable for future generations. Democrats want sequestration eliminated, or at least reformed to give federal agencies more flexibility to find savings.

And yes, there is some common ground on this.

Unlike in years past, this time Ryan won’t insist that Democrats hand over the Holy Grail of Republican entitlement reform, a controversial plan to transform Medicare into a system that provides vouchers for seniors to buy health care on a private market. (Sound familiar?) Instead, as Yahoo News reported earlier this month, Ryan intends to seek more realistic tweaks to entitlement programs that Democrats, including Obama, already have proposed.

Ryan outlined some of his ideas in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. Although he wrote the piece in the context of the ongoing debt limit debate at the time, aides close to Ryan say it revealed how he plans to approach the budget conference.

“We could ask the better off to pay higher premiums for Medicare. We could reform Medigap plans to encourage efficiency and reduce costs. And we could ask federal employees to contribute more to their own retirement,” Ryan wrote. “Rep. Dave Camp (R., Mich.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) have been working for more than a year now on a bipartisan plan to reform the tax code. They agree on the fundamental principles: Broaden the base, lower the rates and simplify the code. The president himself has argued for just such an approach to corporate taxes. So we should discuss how Congress can take up the Camp–Baucus plan when it's ready.”

As part of the deal, Republicans appear willing to loosen up the tight reins of sequestration, which is their strongest piece of leverage.

“The sequester offers that nice opportunity,” to make structural changes to entitlement spending, a Ryan aide told Yahoo News. “In [Ryan's] mind, it's how he can do everything in his power to forge a good down payment on this debt. If you're just cutting government agency spending you can't get much, but if you go into entitlement programs, that’s where the bigger structural problems are.” 

The opportunity is indeed a long time coming. This year marks the first time both the House and Senate have passed budget resolutions since 2009.

Since the passage of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, both chambers are supposed to pass their own resolution that sets spending levels, then each side appoints members of a conference committee to negotiate their differences. The resolutions are not technically law — the president, who submits his own budget annually, never “signs” a “budget” — but they serve to reveal priorities, force Congress to regularly re-examine its spending and set spending levels for appropriators. For most of President Barack Obama’s time in office — and during three years under former President George W. Bush — Congress has instead funded the government through a series of stopgap bills that set the spending levels for short periods of time

The government currently operates based on spending levels set by the Budget Control Act of 2011, the law that ushered in sequestration, which indiscriminately cut billions across most of the federal government. Democrats outright hate sequestration, and despite many Republicans who give sequestration lip service because it reigned in spending, plenty of them can’t stand the defense cuts.

In March, the Republican-majority House passed its version of a budget resolution, which cut enough spending to balance the federal budget in a decade. The Senate responded two days later with its own resolution (after Republicans threatened to withhold lawmakers’ pay if they didn’t.)

But then seven months passed and nothing happened. Senate Democrats called repeatedly for a budget conference, but Republicans resisted, saying that there was too much disagreement between the parties for formal negotiations to begin. Democrats, who had spent the past four years getting hammered by Republicans because they hadn’t passed a budget resolution of their own, were furious. Finally last week, as the nation neared its borrowing limit, Republicans agreed to talk.

Striking a deal this year would help the government avoid yet another bout of brinkmanship over a shutdown when the latest round of short-term government funding runs out in January.

But here’s where the hope for a final resolution could fall apart: Traditionally, Congress only really acts when it must. Like schoolchildren and journalists, politicians need deadlines and severe consequences for not meeting them. (Think back to the ominous-sounding “Fiscal Cliff,” “Government Shutdown,” and “Taxmageddon.”)

In this case, there are no hard deadlines for the budget committee.

Yes, the agreement hashed out last week asks the panel to report back to Congress in December, and if they fail, perhaps they’ll find coal in their stockings from Santa Claus at Christmas. Hopefully the potential for an agreement is more than just a figment of our imagination.

• Politics & Government
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/grand-bargain-budget-2013-032011344.html
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Matias Laptop Pro Keyboard

Wireless keyboards are great. Mechanical keyboards are great. Wireless mechanical keyboards are almost nonexistent. Maybe it's because gamers (who often prefer mechanical keyboards) are concerned about wireless lag, or because mechanical key switches are more expensive and bulkier than the membrane switches used in most wireless keyboards, but there are nearly no wireless mechanical keyboards out there. Matias, a Canadian peripherals company, offers one of the few in the Matias Laptop Pro keyboard. It's a Bluetooth keyboard with mechanical switches, which sounds great on paper but suffers from two major flaws. First, it's more expensive than most wireless and mechanical keyboards at $169.95 direct. Second, it has a Mac layout.

Design
The keyboard is a silver-colored, gently curved plastic slab just large enough to hold all keys (including function buttons, arrow keys, and page-up, page-down, and delete keys) in a compact configuration. It's 13.3 inches wide, just thin enough to comfortably fit in a bag large enough for a laptop, and weighs a fairly light 2.1 pounds. The rechargeable battery is completely internal, charged through a full-size USB port on the back with the included male-to-male USB cable. Two USB ports on the sides let you charge your phone or tablet from the keyboard, but that will drain the 1,600 mAh battery much faster than the six months Matias says the keyboard can last. Two clear feet flip up on the bottom of the keyboard to lift the back.

The keys use mechanical keyswitches, but they're not Cherry MX switches, the brand found on most high-profile mechanical keyboards like the Das Keyboard. They're much quieter than the usual Cherry MX Brown and Cherry MX Blue switches often used, and they aren't as satisfyingly "clacky" as Cherry MX Brown or Cherry MX Red switches. We can't be as sure of the lifespand or long-term build quality of the switches, but they offer soft, fairly deep keypress and feel comfortable to type on despite the lack of clacking.

Unfortunately, the keys aren't just mysterious. They're Mac. Instead of Alt and Windows keys on most keyboards, the Matias Laptop Pro has Option and Command keys. More importantly, the Command, Control, and Option keys register differently for PCs, so you'll need to memorize option key placement again if you want to use it with your computer. Matias notes that it's for the Mac, iPad, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android devices, and doesn't support it for the PC. It's still functional when paired with a PC, but the command keys are mixed up. I had no problem pairing the keyboard with my iPad and Google Nexus 7.

Performance
The keyboard feels comfortable to type on, with a keystroke similar to a quiet Cherry MX Red switch. It's almost disconcertingly quiet, but it picked up my words without dropping anything. I found some major lag and some dropped keystrokes when when I used other Bluetooth devices (a wireless mouse in the same room and a UE Boom speaker streaming music on the same table), but that's a factor with any Bluetooth keyboard when you have several devices clustered together.

The Matias Laptop Pro keyboard is a unique and welcome addition to the world of keyboards, as one of the very few (the only one currently available in retail channels, I've found) wireless mechanical keyboards. Unfortunately, it's too expensive at $170, and its Mac key layout holds it back from being a functional non-Apple laptop supplement keyboard. If you really want a wireless keyboard for your laptop or tablet, the Logitech K810 is a more flexible, functional, and affordable model, and the Logitech TK820 adds a touchpad at the expense of illuminated keys. If you want a keyboard just for gaming or heavy typing, the CM Storm Quick Fire Stealth provides mechanical keyswitches and Das Keyboard-like style in a slightly more compact, though wired, package.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/VANspnQUwiU/0,2817,2425362,00.asp
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Kenyan morgue: 2 'boxes' of body parts from mall

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Officials in Kenya say two boxes of charred body parts have been delivered to the city morgue from Westgate Mall and that four AK-47 assault rifles were found alongside the remains. Gunmen stormed the mall on Sept. 21, killing more than 60 people.

A city morgue official told The Associated Press that the two boxes arrived Thursday, and that a team of foreigners padlocked the boxes Friday.

A security official said one of the four gunmen seen in security footage is a Norwegian-Somali whose last name is Dhuhulow and the first or middle name is Abdi. The official said four AK-47 rifles, 11 AK-47 magazines and one RPG were recovered at the mall Thursday.

Both officials insisted on anonymity because they couldn't speak publicly.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kenyan-morgue-2-boxes-body-parts-mall-094010417.html
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Early George Lucas Contract Reveals $2,500 Payday (Photo)

George Lucas' path to movie billions began rather humbly and can be seen in the hidden vaults of Warner Bros. Corporate Archive, a facility kept away from most prying eyes deep in the Valley.

Lucas first joined Warners' payroll when Francis Ford Coppola brought his friend on board as an assistant on 1968's Finian's Rainbow. Studio payroll memos highlight how Lucas was getting paid $110 a week and was even bumped up to $125 per week.

Warners' internal memos between executives highlight the young Lucas' interest in sci-fi. A year later, Warners came aboard to distribute Lucas' THX 1138, paying him $2,500 in installments.

PHOTOS: Inside Warner Bros.' Chamber of Secrets

The financial memo was among the movie treasures The Hollywood Reporter saw as it was allowed an extremely rare peek into the workings of the little-known but hugely important division, whose facility houses decades' worth of costumes, props, scripts, correspondence, memos and animation art -- almost anything to do with a Warners movie and, more recently, a Warners-made television show -- is saved and stored.

Among the other treasures: a slew of batmobiles, replicas of agent Smith from The Matrix, puppets from Gremlins and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, and George Clooney's batsuit from Batman & Robin (seriously!)

See a behind-the-scenes video here and photos from the archives here.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/news/~3/ZaT-rihyS1Y/early-george-lucas-contract-reveals-649370
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