Going to college is hard enough. How about going to a fake college?

Administrators at Reed University are alarmed because someone has copied much of the university’s information (included pictures of faculty) and placed it on a website for a fictitious school called “Redwood University”.

This is not some school kid prank. It appears scammers are targeting potential students in Asia and elsewhere. The fraudsters are looking to falsely collect enrollment fees over the web.

Unsuspecting applicants will learn the hard way that cheating is part of this school’s curriculum.

Check out more about this story from Wall St. Journal.

Thanks to Wikicommons.

In Wisconsin, as well as other places across the nation a battle line has been drawn. The issue: public employee unions (such as those for teachers).

This is an issue which has been highly politicized. But what is behind the attempts to restrict unions ability to negotiate (and as a result, their power)?

Robert Barro, whose opinion appears in the Wall Street Journal, attacks unions noting that

For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

On the other side of the line Hendrik Hertzburg, in an article for the New Yorker, argues that unions are

the only truly formidable counterweight to the ever-growing political power of that top one-thousandth [wage earners]

Many Americans, as Paul Krugman notes, agree with Hertzburg as

while people don’t necessarily love unions — hey, I personally don’t necessarily love unions — most people apparently see them as having a legitimate role.

However, the role of unions as a political balance may be coming to a close . Mickey Kaus notes that

The Internet has already empowered organizations like MoveOn.org to provide both dollars and volunteers to Dems through a structure that need not have anything to do with organized labor. … Why picket when you can click it?

No matter the end result in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) Nancy Folbre for Economix argues that the protesters time was not wasted as

the committed progressive activists of Wisconsin have raised the level of news organizations’ attention to state politics and broadened the public debate over the fiscal crisis.

So no matter what your beliefs are, don’t be afraid to stand up for them (especially if that means posting a comment).

A recent IEEE Spectrum article, Teaching Machines About Madness, mentions the research of CSEE alumnus Vince D. Calhoun (Ph.D. 2002) and his mentor Professor Tülay Adali on developing a machine-learning system that can distinguish between people with schizophrenia and those with bipolar disorder using multiple functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans. These conditions can be difficult for doctors to distinguish and require different treatments.

Dr.Calhoun is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Neurosciences, Psychiatry and Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. You can find our more about this and related research on the Web site of the Dr. Adali's Machine Learning for Signal Processing Laboratory.