Guide to Education Grants

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To send e-mails or chat online without emoticons would be like listening to your computer’s artificial voice read an excerpt from the Harry Potter books—you may get the plot, but Harry’s spells are no longer frantic and Voldemort’s hissed threats no longer ooze evil.   
 
This month, we celebrate September 19, 1982, the birth date of the “smiley” emoticon, and all you chatting kings and queens out there may want to pay your respects to a man who revolutionized the way we communicate online with three simple keystrokes.
 
Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first introduced , or “the smiley,” on a departmental electronic bulletin 25 years ago. Fahlman considers his post to be the foundation of emoticons, otherwise known as emotional icons.
 
 
Scott Fahlman.
 
“I’ve never seen any hard evidence that the sequence was in use before my original post, and I’ve never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did,” Fahlman writes on Smiley Lore  :-), the university Web page he’s dedicated to the origins of the electronic smiley face. “But it’s always possible that someone else had the same idea—it’s a simple and obvious idea, after all.”
 
 
Following the Smiley Craze
 
Fahlman could never have imagined what would follow after his quick, impulsive post. As use of the smiley spread throughout his department, then from college to college, and finally across the country to the global e-space, writing in online formats changed forever.
 
“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman says in an Associated Press article (“:-) Turns 25,” Sep. 18, 2007). “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this started.”
 
The online bulletin with Fahlman’s post wasn’t saved and remained lost for years following the smiley explosion, Fahlman says on Smiley Lore. Neither Fahlman nor anyone else had any idea how popular that little sideways face made up entirely of punctuation would become, or that a two-sentence message would eventually be archived as a piece of communications history.
 
With the help of Mike Jones from Microsoft, an exhaustive search of Carnegie Mellon’s backup tapes uncovered Fahlman’s original post, which reads, “I propose the following character sequence for joke matters: . Read it sideways.” 
 
Today, 25 years later, Internet users have thousands of emoticon options to choose from. Emoticons help to convey tone of voice or shades of meaning in online conversations that could otherwise be easily misconstrued without hearing a speaker’s intonation or seeing a facial expression to differentiate the excited from the angry, the serious from the sarcastic. 
 
For example,
 
See you later  ; )
 
means something completely different than
 
See you later
 
 
Smiling Strong for 25 Years
 
For some language purists, the use of emoticons cheapens the written word. They point to masters like Shakespeare and Faulkner, who crafted exquisitely descriptive phrases to paint vivid images and convey undertows of emotion, all without the use of emoticons.
 
But it’s hard to compare chat-speak to literature when online chatting and e-mail act more as stand-ins for speech than as writing.
 
 â€œWhat emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University communications professor, in a quote in the AP article.
 
Whichever way you view it, the online world, from teen chatterboxes to forty-something CEOs, has embraced the smiley and other emoticons to such an extent that our words would now be lost in translation without them.
 
So the next time you stick out your virtual tongue or send a cyber wink, give a small thanks to the emoticon father himself, Steve E. Fahlman, for giving you the tools to do so.
 
 
Still a little lost when it comes to figuring out what that B-) and :–} in your e-mail mean? Check out this emoticon dictionary from Nerd Times.   
 
 
 
Talk to the education finance advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.
 
Student Loan Girl
 
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Super-sizing isn’t just for combo meals anymore.
 
They’ve grown up with SUVs, Hummers, giant plasma TVs and, evidently, bigger beds—Gen Y’s all grown up and in college, and they like their non-digital amenities big.
 
This fall, colleges and universities across the country are attempting to answer the demands (and generally taller and larger bodies) of the millennial generation by upgrading their bed sizes on campus. Those Gen Y kids used to the comforts of double or queen-sized beds at home haven’t been too thrilled with the skinny singles that have been the dorm standard for decades.
 
Double beds, writes Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, are part of schools’ array of tactics aimed at competing with off-campus housing to keep student on campus. Some colleges are even implementing luxuries like maid service, in-room microwaves, and larger, renovated dorm rooms that can better accommodate the wider beds (“Students Can Rest Easy Now,” Sep. 18, 2007).
 
 
Size Does Matter
 
“The trend seems to be that there is more competition among different schools for the student body—I guess literally—with larger beds,” says Ryan Trainer, executive vice president of the nonprofit International Sleep Products Association.
 
Strauss writes about Elissa Robinson, now a senior at American University, who, “[a]ccustomed to sleeping on a queen-size, 60-by-80-inch water bed at home, … got a rude awakening when she headed off to college: a twin-size bed, somewhere around 38-by-75 inches, with a mattress that had seen better days.”
 
After three years of dealing with the twin bed, Robinson received a double bed from AU for her senior year. “[T]his is much, much better,” Robinson says. “It’s where I sleep, do my homework and everything else. It’s just more of an adult thing to have a bigger bed.”
 
 
Bigger is Better
 
College campuses have traditionally plagued their dorm denizens with the modest twin mattress that many students these days haven’t seen since elementary school, if at all.
 
“Many of them are not coming from single beds,” says Rick Treter, director of residence life at AU. “Many come from doubles and queens, so they have to readjust to living on the single bed.”
 
AU made its move to double beds, Strauss reports, after receiving complaints from students that the twin beds were “too small and too childish.”
 
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has also started providing double beds for its on-campus students in response to feedback from focus groups and student requests for larger beds.
 
UNCG students characterized twin beds as “too small and uncomfortable,” says Mary L. Hummel, the director of housing and residence life. The new doubles “accommodate students more comfortably, especially taller students, and better meet student needs.”
 
Though college administrators may not know for a few semesters if their efforts to entice students back to on-campus housing will prove successful, initial feedback on the bigger beds has been nothing but positive.
 
“It’s amazing,” says AU sophomore Matt Valdivia. “Now I can be alive and fit on the bed in every direction.”
 
 
For all the information you need about student loans, go to www.nextstudent.com.
 
Student Loan Girl
 
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The programmers and executives at San Francisco–based startup Powerset are hoping that the answer to this question will be “yes” once they debut their search engine that operates on natural-language technology.
 
Powerset finally offered its first public preview on September 17, reports Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke, at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, “a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries” (“Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google,” Sep. 17, 2007).
 
Powerset’s natural-language search engine would give Internet users a platform to conduct their searches in plain English—in other words, in the kinds of sentences people speak in real life—as opposed to by typing in an assortment of keywords.
 
Right now, all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—use the traditional keyword-based model, with Google cornering more than half of all search engine traffic.
 
The difference between the two types of searching technologies has to do with how the search engine processes the search terms you type in when you want to find something on the Internet.
 
A keyword-based engine, like Google, basically disregards “minor” words like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, by, about, etc.), and hones in on what it considers to be the most important terms. Natural-language engines take into account a string of words as a whole rather than looking at them as individual pieces.
 
For example, if you wanted to find information on student loans, in a natural-language search, you would type your request in the same way you would ask a person: “How much money can I get as an undergrad?” In a Google search, on the other hand, you would search by keywords like “undergrad money college” and hope to get results with information on maximum loan amounts. Change the order of your keywords—“money college undergrad”—and get different search results.
 
This distinction, writes Liedtke, means “Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions.”
 
 
Searches Going Au Naturel
 
Perhaps more buzzworthy than the natural-language engine itself is the fact that Powerset is licensing its technology from veteran powerhouse Palo Alto Research Center, the subsidiary of Xerox famed for introducing one revolutionary technology after another—laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet networking, and the first commercial use of the computer mouse, just to name a few.
 
Ronald Kaplan, PARC’s top natural-language specialist, is now Powerset’s chief technology and science officer, Liedtke reports.
 
“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” says Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive.
 
And he plans to take that technology, along with Powerset’s $12.5 million in venture capital, and give Mother Google a run for her money.  
 
Although Powerset is not the first to push natural-language searching, with Ask Jeeves failing miserably in the 1990s and Hakia currently struggling to make inroads in the Internet search market, Pell believes his company’s technology will be able to fill in the holes that keyword searches leave behind.
 
He compares the problem of searching with keywords to trying to talk to a toddler with limited language skills.
 
“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he says. 
 
Not everyone expresses the same optimism. Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research says the problem with natural-language searches lies not with faults in the technology’s algorithms, but with a computer’s inability to differentiate between variable meanings of the same word and discern the subtle nuances of language.
 
In a search, Li says, asking “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” will generally yield completely different search results even though the questions are essentially the same. 
 
For other skeptics, whether Powerset can achieve its goal of revolutionizing the search engine sector will depend on the company’s ability to transform the mindset and ritual practices of Internet searchers. These critics argue that the majority of current searches are short, only a few words long, and that Internet users, increasingly demanding that all their online interactions happen in high-speed, may not easily make, or even want to make, the shift to more typing and longer search strings.
 
Danny Sullivan, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, says Pell fails to provide a convincing argument for why today’s keyword search users would miraculously transition to the other side.
 
Internet users “aren’t using keywordese now because they somehow have been trained to do it,” Sullivan writes in a blog post. “No one from Google sat the searchers down and said ‘only two words, and don’t use conjunctions.’ People search however they want—and right now, they use only a few words” (“Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend,” Oct. 5, 2006).
 
 
Testing to Determine Powerset’s Potential
 
The natural-language debate aside, how successful the technology and the company will be remains to be seen. Powerset is rolling out its search engine gradually and will begin by analyzing feedback from the 16,000 people who have registered as users of its test site, Powerlabs. The temporary site is currently operating in a limited capacity, explains Liedtke, only indexing content from Wikipedia, the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia.
 
Powerset has set up Powerlabs to display, alongside its own results, the results returned by competitor sites like Google and Yahoo when given the same search questions. Powerlabs then requires users to choose which search engine’s results worked better for them before they can proceed with their next search.
 
With all the press over the past two years surrounding Powerset’s natural-language model, Google execs may be starting to feel the pressure of a competitor threatening to break Google’s steel grip on Internet searchdom. According to Liedtke, Google has been working on its own version of natural-language search technology since the end of 2005, pumping nearly $2.2 billion into research and development and beefing up its staff by thousands.
 
But executives at Powerset aren’t deterred by the competition or the criticism.  
 
“Google is the king. … Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on” says Pell. “But we think they have plateaued.”
 
 
 
Talk to the education finance advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.
 
Student Loan Girl
 
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Spurred by the monolithic popularity of iTunes and the decline of CD sales, veteran online retailers like Amazon.com, start-ups like SpiralFrog and other companies are clamoring to get into the fray of digital music on demand.
 
With so much competition, consumers can get great deals and music options, depending on what they’re looking for.
 
 
Amazon Betting on Flexibility to Lure Consumers
 
Amazon’s venture into MP3 sales launched last week with an inventory of nearly 2.3 million songs from the catalogs of major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music, as well as thousands of independent labels—and none of these songs are copy-protected with digital rights management technology.
 
DRM technologies, which have been implemented by the music industry both on CDs and digital files, aim to restrict how consumers can use or distribute their music purchases. In the world of downloadable music, these DRM controls will typically restrict, for example, what kind of hardware (iPod, Zune, etc.) a music file will play on, or how many times a digital file can be burned to a CD.
 
While the Universal and EMI songs available from Amazon aren’t subject to DRM, they represent only a portion of the labels’ vast music libraries. Nevertheless, Amazon is setting the stage to compete directly with Apple’s iTunes, which has so far dominated the digital music market.
 
Amazon MP3, as Amazon’s digital-music virtual aisle is called, offers songs for 89 to 99 cents a pop and albums for $5.99 to $9.99 each, a slightly lower price point than iTunes, which sells individual copy-protected songs at a flat rate of 99 cents each and DRM-free songs from EMI for $1.29 apiece. Full album downloads from iTunes typically sell for $9.99.
 
iTunes uses AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format with proprietary DRM to encode its downloads, which means, unless you spring for the slightly pricier DRM-free songs or if you want something not on the EMI label (which is the only label currently offering DRM-free songs through Apple), your iTunes downloads will only play on an iTunes platform.
 
So if you have any portable digital player other than an iPod or an operating system that doesn’t support iTunes (Linux, for example), you won’t be able to listen or watch your iTunes downloads. And your iPod won’t play any DRM-enabled files that you purchased outside of iTunes.
 
Amazon MP3, on the other hand, by providing all DRM-free content, gives you the freedom to play your purchases on most types of portable devices (including the iPod) and through various desktop media players like iTunes or Windows Media Player.
 
Realizing that flexibility is the convenience factor most music lovers are looking for in their online purchases, Wal-Mart is following in Amazon’s footsteps. The low-cost retailer offers its DRM-free tunes from EMI and Universal Music for 94 cents each and albums for $9.22, which is roughly 27 percent cheaper than iTunes.
 
 
Free Songs: Too Good to Be True?
 
SpiralFrog is taking a different approach, offering its non-DRM downloads free instead of engaging in a price war with online retailers. But the free music comes with a catch: Visitors can download songs at no charge but “have to wait 90 seconds for each track to download, and they must answer questions each month about their buying habits,” explains Joseph Menn in the Los Angeles Times (“SpiralFrog Offers Free Songs—With a Catch,” Sept. 17, 2007).
 
Songs can be stored on your computer but can’t be burned onto a CD. And if you don’t visit the SpiralFrog website at least once a month to watch more ads, your SpiralFrog music library gets digitally locked, and you won’t be able to access your music. You do have the ability to transfer your music files onto two Windows-compatible portable players or mobile phones at a time—but of course, this excludes the Apple iPod, the most popular digital music player out there.
 
The SpiralFrog website opened with a selection of 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music. According to eFluxMedia, SpiralFrog has also recently signed a deal with digital label/publisher INgrooves to make INgrooves’ full catalog of audio and video files available, which adds close to 100,000 songs and 2,000 videos to SpiralFrog’s library, including 4,000 Brazilian albums from INgrooves’ iMúsica division (“SpiralFrog Opens for Business,” Sept. 17, 2007).
 
SpiralFrog makes its money from displaying online advertising. The ad revenue, Menn explains, will be split between SpiralFrog and the labels and music publishers, with the music industry getting more than half.
 
By offering free media downloads, SpiralFrog wants to appeal to customers tired of paying for their entertainment at iTunes or other pay sites.
 
“This is a very viable alternative to selling music because clearly that mode is broken,” says Scott Stagg, a SpiralFrog investor, in a quote in Menn’s article. “This is very similar to TV: You get it for free and the advertisers pay the money.”
 
The record labels, for their part, hope that free sites like SpiralFrog will help keep users away from illegal downloading and unauthorized peer-to-peer share services like LimeWire.
 
 
Whether you decide to get your music free, by dealing with a few restrictions, or at the best deal you can find by shopping around, SpiralFrog, Amazon and Wal-Mart are just a handful of the companies competing for you. Rumor has it Google may also get into the melee of online music sales.
 
Let the games begin.
 
 
 
The Education Finance Advisors at NextStudent can help you figure in all your college expenses so that you get the student loans that best suit your needs. Don’t get caught short. Go to www.nextstudent.com for all your student loan needs.
 
Student Loan Girl
 
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Earlier today, we posted the Mindset List for today’s college freshmen, an interesting look at their experiences and benchmark events.  Now, we are pleased to report that today’s college grads are volunteering more than any previous generation.   Influenced by Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and September 11, many are putting off their careers to join service groups and to start charitable, non-profit organizations.   
For example:   Applications for the Peace Corps rose  37 percent from 2001 to 2006;  AmeriCorps-Volunteers in Service to America has seen its number of applications rise by 50 percent since 2004 and applications increased almost five times what they were in the year 2000 at Teach for America.   
 

If you have ever posted an ad seeking a roommate, you know certain words mean absolutely nothing and will not factor in any way into your decision.  For instance, every one says they are “laid back, easy to get along with, and clean.”  These words, my friends, are useless.  If I want a place to live, of course I’m going to say I am “laid back, easy to get along with, and clean.”  How else would I describe myself?  Could you see yourself living with someone who described themselves as “moody, difficult, and disgustingly sloppy?”  Of course not.

Well, according to CareerBulder.com, hiring managers and HR people have their own set of words that appear so often in resumes and cover letters that they are entirely useless.  Plainly stated, everybody thinks of themselves as “team players,” “problem solvers,” or somehow manages to mention their “take charge attitude.”  These, along with many others, are empty phrases based on our perception of the ideal employee.  Just like the prospective roommate, every job applicant is going to describe themselves in the best terms.  Could you imagine submitting a resume highlighting how you “don’t perform well on a team,” your ability to “complain about problems,” or your “standby attitude?”  Again, of course not. 
 
Career Builder says to avoid, or at least use sparingly, the following “empty words and phrases” on a resume: 
 

Top-flight
Collaborative
Interface
Innovative
Energetic
Problem-solver
Proclivity
Strategic
Dynamic
Ethical
Penchant
Aggressive
Motivated
‘Outstanding communication skills’
Creative
Goal-oriented
Proactive
Team player
Take-charge
Entrepreneurial
Detail-oriented
Organized
Hard-working
Ambitious
People-person
The words themselves are not that bad, they just need some evidence behind them.  If you use them to TELL prospective employers what you can do, instead of SHOWING them what you have done, you end up with a whole lot of nothing on your resume.  Check out this example from Career Builder:  “Cultivated a team-based atmosphere.”  The first time you read it; sounds nice, doesn’t it?  Read it a second and third time?  By now, your BS detector should be on full out alarm.  There is absolutely nothing of value in that statement.  Reading resumes is what hiring managers do for a living; believe me, their alarms were going off the first time they read a statement like that.     
What you can do, however, to make your resume stand out is provide examples of accomplishments on specific work or school related projects.  Rather than make a hiring manager decide whether or not to call you for an interview based on the subjective claims about you from a rather biased source (you), provide them with the proof that you have done well in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future.  Specifics matter, and while you certainly want to provide the best “spin” on yourself as a prospective employee, watch out for the all fluff resume.  If you don’t show your job prospects at least a little bit of substance, it may be much more difficult to land that all-important interview.           
  
 

 
 
Secretary Spellings announced the national student loan cohort default rate fell to 4.6 percent from last year’s rate of 5.1 percent.  Although default rates remain at historic lows, dropping from levels as high as 22 percent in the early nineties, they are still a major concern for those involved.    Lenders in the FFEL program attributed the decrease—a borrower and taxpayer benefit—to their efforts in financial literacy and default prevention.  One association described the news as “bittersweet,” as the customer service that allows borrowers to maintain repayment schedules is one of several benefits to borrowers, schools, and taxpayers that will have to be curbed in the wake of the recently passed $22 billion cut to the student loan program.
 
If you are having genuine difficulties making student loan payments, contact your lender.  It may not be something that you want to do and it may seem like you’re in a heck of a hole, but you have to remember the first rule of holes (“stop digging”) and make that call.  It does you absolutely zero good to be unreachable, and you’d be surprised at the number of lenders willing to work with you.  No one benefits—neither the borrower, nor the lender, nor the taxpayer—from a defaulted loan.