Friday morning links

We’re on Fall Break right now and the living is easy — if you count being a temporary stay-at-home dad with two girls under 4 “easy”. So in lieu of real content for the time being, here are some links for you.

• At Ars Technica’s Apple section, Jeff Smykil is wondering what the deal is with the shrinking size of Apple’s educational discounts. I’ve noticed this phenomenon too. They don’t offer discounts on iPods any more, and the discount for the forthcoming OS X Leopard is just $13 for the single-user license. Even Amazon.com is offering it for less.That’s a far cry from when I bought my iPod and Mac mini a couple of years ago, when I seem to remember getting a discount of something like 15%. (I should note that TUAW is reporting that college bookstores will be selling Leopard for around $69, and that Apple is moving away from offering educational discounts online, where it’s hard for a person to identify themselves as a bona fide member of an educational community. Great, but what if your bookstore doesn’t sell Apple stuff and the closest Apple store is 90 minutes away?)
• Referring to the recent incident at Columbia University where a noose was found attached to the office door of a faculty member, John McWhorter has suggestion for how to handle incidents like this: Ignore them. (This was pretty much my approach to handling class on the morning of September 11, 2001, too.)
• Homeschool2.0 gives us the heads-up and the trailer for a new documentary called Two Million Minutes. Sounds like an interesting premise and project; I hope it’s not too depressing for us Americans.
• Here’s an Australian wondering whether college is suited for everyone and whether the university system wouldn’t do better with a lot less students.
• By contrast, here’s an op-ed in USA Today suggesting that the Federal government should step in and force universities to spend a certain percentage of their endowments on tuition reduction so that more people can go to college. And here’s a response to that op-ed. I think the writer of the op-ed should listen to the guy from Australia.

Finally, not a link but a long-range announcement: I’ll be attending the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics in March 2008. I’ll be submitting a talk on wikis in upper-level mathematics major courses and generally soaking up anything I can learn. Also soaking up that wonderful San Antonio atmosphere (and food). If you’re planning on going, let me know and maybe we can have a blogger meet-up.