| A Shaky Season for Student Loans
Shortly after New Year's Day, Pat Watkins, financial aid director at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., placed a worried call to National Education, a student loan company she has been working with for nearly two decades. She had heard rumors that the company was no longer funding federal Stafford and PLUS (Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students) education loans, but had received no official word from the company. She found out that the phone of National Education's local rep had been disconnected. Later she learned that Chicago-based National Education was not planning to accept applications for new loans for the spring semester after Jan. 15, though they planned to fund disbursements for students who received loans for the fall. Federal Loans Lose Funders That was the first surprise.
A long-kept Md. secret: interest-free college loans
Undergraduate and graduate students are eligible. There's no age limit. Recipients range from age 17 to 61. To qualify for a loan, you must apply for federal financial aid. You need to have a grade-point average of at least 2.0 on a scale of 4. And you must have a co-signer for the loan so that if you don't repay it, the co-signer would be on the hook. Central Scholarship will begin accepting applications for the 2008-2009 academic year in January. The deadline is May 31. For more details check out the nonprofit's Web site at www.centralsb.org. .
Financing options urged for bridges
FRANKFORT, Ky. -- Transportation Secretary Joe Prather said yesterday that the state's road fund can't pay for the $4.1 billion Ohio River Bridges Project and other large highway ventures, and he supports finding new ways to finance them. Prather stopped short of endorsing a specific source of additional money, although his remarks came weeks before the state Transportation Cabinet expects to issue a report evaluating whether tolls are feasible for the Ohio River project. .
Advertising giant Grey Global re-launches in Cairo by op...
Born in Aswan, Abdel Dhaher has both Nubian and Saeedi roots. Although he left Aswan as a child and came to settle in Cairo, Abdel Dhaher never really left Egypt's most magical city. “My painting style is social realism. I paint the reality of life in the South. I've loved to paint the daily life or the environment in the South ever since I was a student of Fine Arts," he says. Armed with a sketch pad at all times, Abdel Dhaher quickly draws everything he sees, a zir (water jar), a cousin feeding the chickens, another cousin feeding the ducks, his nephews' double wedding, or the belly dancer and zammar (flute player) at a wedding. Few people have heard of a Saeedi painter. It's not that Upper Egyptians aren't blessed with artistic talent. They are. It is just that those painters who originally come from Upper Egypt more often than not tend to stray away from their roots and try to become urbanized.
A Spirited Disposition Debate
Supporters of a traditional curriculum have argued that evaluating students based on their commitment to social justice is an inherently subjective practice with ideological undertones. Late last year, the National Association of Scholars filed a complaint with the Education Department saying the accreditor encourages standards that violate students' First Amendment rights. Arthur E. Wise, president of NCATE, has argued that the “disposition" component of evaluation helps education schools measure how their students would respond in a classroom setting. On Monday, as Wise sat before the Education Department’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which has the power to extend the council’s authority or set the agenda for changes, a set of critics raised the issue once again.
ALEXANDER: "I'm not quitting" over donor crisis
When people face the danger of a criminal prosecution under the 2000 (Elections) Act then normally you step aside from your position so you can concentrate on clearing your name, if that's what her intention is." Lord Maxton, the former Glasgow Cathcart MP, and Baroness Adams, who was Labour MP for Paisley North, have written to the police urging them to investigate whether the Sunday Herald broke the law by revealing they had given money to Ms Alexander's campaign. They claim that, as the donations were less than £1000, their anonymity should have been protected. Last night Sunday Herald editor Richard Walker said: "Of all the issues facing the Labour Party just now, the one that should be the least concerning them is how matters of legitimate public concern get into the public domain." Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission has given Ms Alexander until tomorrow to provide it with information about her donations.
Bloggers and Twitter
I started tweeting a couple of days ago and am quickly getting addicted. I thought I’d share some of my early impressions of Twitter. Twitter seemed rather pointless to me from the outside. I figured there would be a lot more noise than signal and perhaps if you’re following the general public there is going to be too much noise to wade through. On the other hand if you can use a little discretion when choosing who to follow you’ll find a lot more signal than you might think. I’ve seen a number of posts over the months about Twitter and had signed up sometime awhile back, but a few recent posts convinced me to start tweeting. A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners 75+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter It was probably the weight of all the posts I’ve seen in recent months, but they all reached a tipping point within the last week.
|
