Exporting Death, second hand

US death row injection comes from Mumbai firm - The Times of India: "Correctional services in the US are buying sodium thiopental from a little-known firm in Borivli (West) for use in lethal injections to execute death sentences.

Kayem Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd, at Marian Colony, shipped a 500-gram consignment of the yellow powder, packed in a hefty 25-kg strongbox, on December 8, 2010, to the Nebraska department of correctional services. Sodium thiopental is generally used along with pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride to create a cocktail with which several states in the US carry out the death sentence by lethal injection. In February this year, Kayem sold another consignment to the South Dakota department of corrections. Executions are yet to be carried out by Nebraska or South Dakota with the drug purchased from Kayem...."

E-QED: Ensuring Quality in EDucation

Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges - NYTimes.com: "Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege.

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What makes WNBC — whose parent company, General Electric, is valued at more than $200 billion — think it can get away with this? In Mr. Batson’s case, a letter from Colgate, certifying that he was receiving credit for doing the internship. (Now 24, he gave up on journalism and is at a technology start-up. NBC calls its internship program “an important recruiting tool.”)

The uncritical internship fever on college campuses — not to mention the exploitation of graduate student instructors, adjunct faculty members and support staff — is symptomatic of a broader malaise. Far from being the liberal, pro-labor bastions of popular image, universities are often blind to the realities of work in contemporary America.

In politics, film, fashion, journalism and book publishing, unpaid internships are seen as a way to break in. (The New York Times has paid and unpaid interns.) But the phenomenon goes beyond fields seen as glamorous...

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Three-quarters of the 10 million students enrolled in America’s four-year colleges and universities will work as interns at least once before graduating, according to the College Employment Research Institute. Between one-third and half will get no compensation for their efforts, a study by the research firm Intern Bridge found. Unpaid interns also lack protection from laws prohibiting racial discrimination and sexual harassment.

The United States Department of Labor says an intern at a for-profit company may work without pay only when the program is similar to that offered in a vocational school, benefits the student, does not displace a regular employee and does not entitle the student to a job; in addition, the employer must derive “no immediate advantage” from the student’s work and both sides must agree that the student is not entitled to wages.

Employers and their lawyers appear to believe that unpaid interns who get academic credit meet those criteria, but the law seems murky; the Labor Department has said that “academic credit alone does not guarantee that the employer is in compliance.”

Fearing a crackdown by regulators, some colleges are asking the government, in essence, to look the other way. In a letter last year, 13 university presidents told the Labor Department, “While we share your concerns about the potential for exploitation, our institutions take great pains to ensure students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education.”

Far from resisting the exploitation of their students, colleges have made academic credit a commodity. Just look at Menlo College, a business-focused college in northern California, which sold credits to a business called Dream Careers. Menlo grossed $50,000 from the arrangement in 2008, while Dream Careers sold Menlo-accredited internships for as much as $9,500.

To meet the credit requirement of their employers, some interns have essentially had to pay to work for free: shelling out $2,700 to the University of Pennsylvania in the case of an intern at NBC Universal and $1,600 to New York University by an intern at “The Daily Show,” to cite two examples from news reports.

Charging students tuition to work in unpaid positions might be justifiable in some cases — if the college plays a central role in securing the internship and making it a substantive academic experience. But more often, internships are a cheap way for universities to provide credit — cheaper than paying for faculty members, classrooms and equipment.

A survey of more than 700 colleges by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 95 percent allowed the posting of unpaid internships in campus career centers and on college Web sites. And of those colleges, only 30 percent required that their students obtain academic credit for those unpaid internships; the rest, evidently, were willing to overlook potential violations of labor law...Campus career centers report being swamped; advisers I spoke to flatly denied being able to “monitor and reassess” all placements or even postings, as the 13 university presidents claim to do — their ability to visit students’ workplaces, for instance, is almost nil. They described feeling caught between the demands of employers and interns, and scrambling to make accommodations: issuing vague letters of support for interns to show employers; offering sketchy “internship transcript notations” or “internship certificates”; and even handing out “0.0 credit” — a mysterious work-around by which credit both is and isn’t issued.

Is there a better way? Cooperative education, in which students alternate between tightly integrated classroom time and paid work experience, represents a humane and pragmatic model.

Colleges shouldn’t publicize unpaid internships at for-profit companies. They should discourage internship requirements for graduation — common practice in communications, psychology, social work and criminology. They should stop charging students to work without pay — and ensure that the currency of academic credit, already cheapened by internships, doesn’t lose all its value.

To be sure, the unpaid internship is only part of a phenomenon that includes the growing numbers of temps, freelancers, adjuncts, self-employed “entrepreneurs” and other low-wage or precariously employed workers who live gig by gig. The academy should critique, not amplify, those trends."

Merit and Ethics, the IIMC way

A big stand by IIMC. The big business schools would do well to create a system where the degree of an alumnus could be recalled or nullified for significant ethical infractions. It should be made clear that an alumnus can use a degree but can also lose it, and has a responsibility to uphold the integrity of the institution.

IIMC denies awards to 8 for indiscipline - The Times of India: "KOLKATA: When state institutes are finding it tough to implement discipline on campuses, the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC) has set a precedent by deciding against honouring eight students, all within top 20, with awards they would have ideally bagged had it not been for their indicipline.
The board of governors (BoG), which met on Saturday before the 46th annual convocation, debated long before finally pronouncing the "exemplary punishment" for the students on disciplinary grounds such as short attendance (less than 75%) and proxy presence. Even the topper of 2009-11 batch failed to find his name in the Director's merit list.

"We met to ratify the results, which were then put forward before the BOG by the faculty council. After discussing various aspects, we decided to implement the punishment because an institute like IIMC not only imparts education of the highest order but also aims at churning out responsible employees," said principal secretary of higher education and BoG member Satish Tiwary.

Initially, the faculty had decided not only to deny students the awards but also prohibit them from taking up jobs. "However, we didn't want be so harsh in delivering punishment for the very first time. We decided to set an example by denying them their awards," added a faculty member.

IIM has done what no state- run college has been able to do implement discipline on campus despite students failing to achieve the required attendance. At institutes like Gokhale Memorial Girls' College, Jogomaya Devi College and Basanti Devi College, authorities have been heckled and traffic disrupted over students refusing to accept Calcutta University's guideline of meeting 75% attendance to appear in the university exam.

"IIMC students find takers from some of the biggest companies in the corporate world. We want to be known to our recruiters as an institute where discipline is ingrained in students. Moral standards are very important and play a crucial role in building up careers. We wanted to give out the message, loud and clear, that only merit cannot bring them honour, it is important to understand social ethics too," said a senior PGP faculty member. ..."

Norway-Guyana - the Green Way forward

A truly remarkable partnership for growth appears to be taking seed...

A historic move in the battle to save tropical rainforests | Tony Juniper | Environment | guardian.co.uk: "Guyana and Norway's leadership is seen in the second stage of a ground-breaking deal through which one (Norway) makes annual payments to the other (Guyana) to keep its forests. The amount of money to change hands is calculated on the basis of how well Guyana has done in holding back deforestation, and the value of that in terms of avoided carbon dioxide emissions. A complex calculation is made to determine how well the recipient country has done but this year $40m is being transferred.

Guyana spends the money paid by Norway - a total of $250m spread over a period of years - on projects that will help with environmentally sound development, for example through funding solar panels on all the houses belonging to the indigenous people. In remote rainforests these are no fashion accessories. They are the means for children to read books at night and mark the end of the kerosene lamps and candles which cause indoor air pollution and fire hazards.

There is also money to connect remote settlements to the internet, again powered with solar electricity. There is money to pay for the costly job of legally demarking Amerindian lands and there are plans for health, education and business support. The overall strategy is geared to keeping the forest intact, and thus the priceless services they provide for the entire world. Any rational economic calculation must conclude the world is getting the bargain of the century.

Without this kind of support from Norway, the pressures on the forests might become irresistible. Guyana is poor. The country needs jobs, foreign exchange and tax revenues. And there are plenty of takers for the natural resources that await plunder in delivering these benefits. Since Brazil has cracked down on deforestation, the loggers, ranchers and soya farmers there have been looking for other places to expand their industries. Guyana is next door, connected by a new road and a prime target. I wrote about this in 2009, but fortunately there has so far been no major incursion. Part of the reason is because Guyana's President Jagdeo has been able to hold the line politically, in part because Norway has delivered money on a different basis.

But even with the best will, Guyana needs to undertake some forest clearance. There are plans for a new hydropower dam that will flood 45 square kilometres of forest. It will lead to the loss of 0.05% of the country's forest and is by any standard a major project. There has also been forest loss to gold mining. In the last year forest clearance has nearly tripled, mainly because of an expansion of this industry, from about 40 square kilometres to about 110. It is important, however, to put this change into the context of a tiny original deforestation rate – at six hundredths of 1% per annum, Guyana's present rate of forest loss is about 95% below the global average. With forest nearly the size of England and Scotland combined, the total loss from the dam and mining will lead to the equivalent of 10% of Norfolk being deforested. And the very fact that we know this is a major step forward. Both the low deforestation rate and the rapid rate of change were revealed by satellite monitoring funded from the first tranche of Norwegian money paid last year.

Guyana has sent a signal – and it is being heard. One consequence is seen in the fact that land-hungry natural resource companies looking for space in which to expand agriculture and logging are heading toward neighbouring Surinam. That country has no such deal with Norway, or anyone else for that matter, and unfortunately business as usual prevails there...."