AUT expected to boycott e-learning elite
The Association of University Teachers is today expected to boycott online courses run by an elite group of universities around the world. The union’s executive will discuss a motion calling on academics not to become involved in Universitas 21, an international alliance of top universities, which has an MBA ready to start in 2003. The union’s main concern is that academic standards will be compromised.
( The Independent , Education, review)
Ofsted chief: train teachers to manage violence
All trainee teachers should be given lessons in behaviour management techniques to help them to control violence in the classroom, Mike Tomlinson, the outgoing head of inspection agency Ofsted, said today.
( The Independent )
Tennant to step down at academy
Sir Anthony Tennant is to step down as chairman of the Royal Academy Trust as soon as a successor is found, following a Times report that a group of artists were calling for his resignation in the light of the auction house price-fixing scandal.
( The Times )
Physicist dies
Victor F. Weisskopf, an acclaimed physicist who helped to develop the atomic bomb and later advocated arms control, has died, aged 93.
( The Times, The Independent )
Baked and fried foods are a ‘cancer risk’
Alarmingly high quantities of a substance believed to cause cancer have been found in baked and fried foods such as bread, biscuits, crisps and chips, Swedish scientists said yesterday. The scientists at Stockholm University and Sweden’s National Food Administration deemed the find so important that they decided to go public before the publication of the research in an academic journal.
( The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times, Daily Mail )
Careers ‘make women miserable’
Women have become unhappier as a result of concentrating more on their careers than on their families, according to a new book. Professor James Tooley of Newcastle University suggests in The Miseducation of Women that many professional women would have been more contented staying at home.
( The Daily Telegraph )
House-husbands more likely to suffer heart attack
House-husbands and female executives are more likely to suffer a fatal heart attack than men and women whose careers follow more traditional gender patterns, American scientists have discovered. Men who consider themselves “house-husbands” are more than 82 per cent more likely to die over a ten-year period than those who work outside the home.
( The Times, The Daily Telegraph )
Couch potato, moi?
The Office for National Statistics has released a study on how Britons spend their time. The nation spends 50 per cent more time watching television than doing paid work. Household chores accounted for less than 10 per cent of people’s time, and women spend more than twice as long as men cleaning the home.
( The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Financial Times )
‘Three women pregnant with clones’
Severino Antinori, the fertility doctor who is attempting to clone a human, yesterday claimed on an Italian chat show that three women were now pregnant with clones.
( The Guardian )
Tasmanian wins Commonwealth literature glory
Australia’s rich literature of rogues and tale-spinners continued on its world-beating path last night when Richard Flanagan, from Tasmania, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Gould’s Book of Fish , the story of a convict-turned-painter, beat a shortlist of three international stars including Ian McEwan.
( The Independent, The Guardian )
Our mousy relative
Scientists claim to have discovered the earliest known mammal, a mouse-like creature that lived 125 million years ago and could be our earliest ancestor. A team at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, US, found a fossil that contained traces of fur in northeast China.
( Daily Mail )
Cambridge’s commercial blues
Cambridge University tries to clarify its intellectual property rules.
( Financial Times )