NEWSLINK, V8N2 In point of fact; news of note

There’s a market for everything! Can’t we apply this to MCAS?
A school in China is allowing students who don't do well in tests to borrow a few extra marks as long as they pay them back with interest. The scheme was recently introduced by Penglai Road No 2 Primary School in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, reports the news agency Xinhua. Students who do poorly on a test can ask their teachers to lend them a few points to improve their grade, but twice as many points must be paid back on the next test, assuming they achieve a better mark. If they don't, interest on the loan continues to run at 100% per test until it is paid off. It is reported that about 40% of students at the school have taken out such loans.
Annanova.com, “Teachers offer to 'lend' students marks to pass tests,” February 2, 2004.

Haven’t we heard this before?
People Soft Inc. CEO Craig Conway has some advice for students planning for the future: Learn as much as possible about business, technology and Mandarin. Mandarin? An ecosystem in the United States that allows the country to dominate the technology industry is being duplicated successfully in places like China and India, Conway says. Restrictive domestic legislation, increased taxes and mandated employee-compensation initiatives have made it increasingly difficult for technology businesses to succeed in the United States. “While the US is subsidizing tobacco farmers, China is providing R&D subsidies for technology, has great universities and technology graduates, and a capital market that doesn’t require that stock options be expensed,” Conway says. “They have over time recreated the magic formula that the U.S. had to achieve success in technology.”
“Staying focused: There’s no room for error in enterprise software today,” Dennis Dunn, InformationWeek, February 2, 2004.

Why rent when you can own? Part 1
Renting an apartment in much of the country these days can feel a little like waking up on your birthday. Waiting for the tenants in some building lobbies every morning are free cups of Starbucks coffee. In the Atlanta suburbs, people who move into one garden-style apartment building receive $500 gift certificates to Best Buy, the electronics chain. In Cleveland, Denver and many other cities landlords have been giving new tenants gifts worth $1,000 or more: one, two or even three months of rent-free living. While rents have continued to rise in many big cities on the coasts, including New York and Los Angeles, they are falling in more than 80 percent of metropolitan areas across the country. Low interest rates in recent years have persuaded many families to move out of rented apartments and buy their first homes at the same time that developers have been putting up thousands of new rental buildings, leaving many landlords desperate to fill apartment. The portion of apartments sitting vacant this summer rose to 9.9 percent, the highest level since the Census Bureau began keeping statistics in 1956.
“Apartment glut forces owners to cut rents in much of U.S.,” David Leonhardt, New York Times, November 29, 2003.

Why rent when you can own? Part 2
With so many consumers snapping up DVDs to own, home video rental stores saw a decline in 2003, with rental revenue down by 1.5 percent industry-wide, according to trade journals. VHS rentals plunged by 29.8 percent last year, but nearly making up for the drop were rentals of DVDs, which were up by 52.1 percent. Overall, rentals were particularly low during the last two weeks of December, a holiday time that has historically been among the heaviest of renting periods. Heavy DVD buying is through to be largely responsible for Hollywood Entertainment’s rentals being off by 9 percent from 2003 during the last two weeks of December. As a result, the No. 2 video-store chain warned that its fourth quarter earnings will come in lower than originally projected. “DVD sales soar, home video rentals fall,” Greg Hernandez, Los Angeles Daily News, January 10, 2004.

What a nagging government doesn’t know! A man’s home may be his castle but his office is a refuge!
It is a common sight in Sweden: a single man trudging behind a pram (whats a pram?) while shopping or on his way to a nursery. “Papa leave”, the right of a father to take time off for his baby, is marking his 30th anniversary. Yet men take only a small fraction of their entitlement. They are under pressure to take more.
“Forced fatherhood,” The Economist, January 10, 2004

Why are you not surprised at Clear Skies?
A new study from the National Research Council, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that while air pollution is declining, the reduction could be accelerated by a "multi-state, multi-pollutant" approach that sets broad overall reduction targets, then allows industrial facilities to trade reduction permits with each other. (Current Clean Air Act rules generally require cumbersome site-by-site, pollutant-by-pollutant litigation.) It's, um, a scientific study, and so perhaps The New York Times might have been forgiven for reporting it in a short article on page A11, while The Washington Post might have been forgiven for giving the study all but three graphs under "Washington in Brief." Here's what was missing from the coverage. The "multi-state, multi-pollutant" approach just endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences is exactly what the Bush administration has proposed to adopt under its Clear Skies initiative. The ill-named Clear Skies plan would replace the Clean Air Act's cumbersome site-by-site litigation formula with a new system that sets broad overall reduction targets, then allows industrial facilities to trade reduction permits with each other. The Clear Skies plan has been roundly condemned by Democrats and mocked by editorial writers. As we noted in December, Democrats are fighting Clear Skies exactly because they know it would reduce air pollution: They want to deny George W. Bush a progressive victory going into the 2004 election. But the official reason Democrats, and editorial writers, have derided Clear Skies is their claim it wouldn't work. Comes now the National Academy of Sciences to say the Clear Skies approach is desirable, and the big papers bury that inconvenient development.
“Pollution Coverage,” Greg Easterbrook, The New Republic Online, February 2, 2004.