College Online Cources

Officials at one university have a mystery to solve:

School officials at the California University of Pennsylvania have found an old love letter, which recently arrived in the mail room, postmarked February 20, 1958.

The intended recipient, Clark Moore, is believed to be living in the Indianapolis area, according to university officials.

Pining for Clark, the Pittsburgh-area sender ended the letter with, I still miss you as much as ever and love you a thousand times more. Please write me real soon. Love Forever, Vonnie.

University officials still hope to find Clark Moore and deliver his mail even if it is a few years late.

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Sierra College trustees have named Bill Halldin to serve on the college governing board until the next election for board members in November 2012.

Halldin replaces Elaine Rowen Reynoso who stepped down a few weeks ago. Rowen Reynoso was severely injured in a car crash a year ago when she and her husband, former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, were broadsided by a Hummer while on vacation in Virginia.

Halldin, who owns a public relations company in Roseville and has served on the board of the Sierra College Foundation, represents Area 4, which includes Rocklin, Granite Bay, Loomis and Newcastle. He lives in Rocklin.

The state wants the ability to borrow $1.7 billion from the University of California and California State University after slashing nearly a quarter of state funding for the beleaguered systems.

Legislation moving through the Capitol with scant notice, Senate Bill 79, would establish a new investment fund for UC, CSU, California Community Colleges and the Judicial Council. If necessary, the state could use that money to retire short-term loans from Wall Street or pay bills, while giving the universities above-market interest rates until a future payoff date.

UC plans to transfer $1 billion of cash reserves into the fund, while CSU will shift $700 million, according to officials at the two systems. The deal does nothing to relieve CSU or UC of the $650 million in cuts each system will absorb under the budget enacted nearly two weeks ago.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Finance and Democratic lawmakers said AB 79 is necessary to persuade Wall Street to lend California money at competitive rates.

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A school decided to charge a student with plagiarism even though it couldnt find where he supposedly copied from.

While a student at the Harper College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University, Jonathan Katz was required to complete a term paper for a history course.

Katz waited until just 10 days before he handed in the paper to pick his topic, and his professor described the quality of its vocabulary and syntax as uneven. She also said the manner in which the paper deftly linked a variety of complex doucments suggest[ed] the analytical ability of a professional historian. In addition, she reported that Katz was unable to discuss the paper intelligently at the time he submitted it.

The professor referred the matter to a committee on academic honesty, which unanimously concluded Katz had plagiarized it. He was assigned a failing grade for the course.

A court upheld the finding, rejecting the argument that the charge should not have stuck because the school never identified the source of the alleged plagiarism.

It didnt have to, the court said.

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Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe and why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe’s creation.

Positronium is made up of an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. It has applications in developing more accurate Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans and in fundamental physics research.

Recently, antimatter made headlines when scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, trapped antihydrogen atoms for more than 15 minutes. Until then, the presence of antiatoms was recorded for only fractions of a second.

In the lab at UC Riverside, the physicists first irradiated samples of silicon with laser light. Next they implanted positrons on the surface of the silicon. They found that the laser light frees up silicon electrons that then bind with the positrons to make positronium. < Read more…