Dave Giegerich ’88, a well known Baltimore-Washington area musician, has passed away. Giegerich founded the Hula Monsters, and had played at the White House and the Kennedy Center.

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

Thanks to Wikicommons

We all know College is expensive for students…

But spending on campuses may be even more painful for the state governments that fund public universities.

For this reason, global tuitions have been on the rise during this recession.

Students in the United Kingdom have shown the most outrage to these hikes, but American scholars are also feeling the pinch.

Despite the out-cry of students (who are seeing more than their pizza funds at risk) rises in tuition may be the right thing to do.

At least this is what Nobel laureate Gary Becker and author Richard Posner argue:

Charging low tuition to everyone, as public colleges do for residents of the state in which the college or university is located), does not make economic sense; it merely as I said provides windfalls to families willing and able to pay the full tuition. …

This situation presents a case for a virtuous tax increase (raising a fee for a public service is the equivalent of a tax): the increase helps to close the state’s fiscal gap; the burden of the increased tax is borne entirely by the well-to-do; and some of the higher revenue can be used to subsidize students unable to afford the higher tuition.

In other words, the wealthy will go to college whether it is cheap or not, and as most of those in college are better off than the average American why not use tuition as a “tax”.

Posner and Becker note that one section of academia does follow this system as private universities

charge very high tuition (though not high enough to cover all their costs—but they have other sources of funds, such as alumni donations), but grant scholarships or loans to students whose families can’t afford the tuition.

Over at Economix, David Leonhardt agrees but warns that it is important to remember that

there is typically no guarantee that financial aid will keep pace with tuition. If public colleges raise tuition, they will probably have a hard time increasing financial aid to keep pace, given the current troubles with state finances.

So what is to be done? Take our Poll below:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

It is tradional for the political party in opposition to the President of the United States to give a rival speech on the night of the State of the Union address.

Yesterday the Republicans did even better… they supplied not one but TWO rebuttals from the other side of the aisle!

To get the Party started, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin gave the official Republican response following the President’s speech.

His remarks were followed by Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota giving the Tea Party backed response.  It was the latter response which had most pundits abuzz… but maybe not for the reasons you’d think.

The talk of the morning has been Bachmann’s seemingly failed attempt to look into the camera while delivering her remarks.  David Axelrod, a top advisor to President Obama, even took a moment to poke fun when appearing on MSNBC later in the evening.

CNN, the only network to air the address, later explained Bachmann was looking into the Web-cam set up by the Tea Party Express and not the camera broadcasting across the nation…oops!

Work by Professor Hillol Kargupta and his students and colleagues was recognize as one of the top ten data mining case studies at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. The case study submission cited was described in

Hillol Kargupta, Kakali Sarkar, Michael Gilligan, Parag Namjoshi, Sai Subhash Paruchuru, Thiraphat Pongsudhiraks, and Robert Gilligan, "MineFleet, A Distributed Vehicle Performance Data Stream Mining System"

The MineFleet software was designed for commercial fleet owners and fleet management companies who want the power of advanced predictive vehicle data mining for dramatically reducing the operating costs. It uses powerful data stream mining algorithms for modeling, benchmarking, and monitoring of vehicle health, emissions, driver behavior, fuel-consumption, and fleet characteristics. Work on Minefleet was done at UMBC and Agnik, a a data analytics company for distributed, mobile, and embedded environments based in Columbia MD. You can read more about the Minefleet system here.