More

Due to inconsistent regulation, rise of private operators, and political factors, it seems very difficult to find a partner in India. There is an opportunity and interest, but there are too many factors that challenge the idea. India is in the middle of the revolution of higher education. Because of the demand, the public university system has been compelled to give up and let private colleges keep up with the demand, which will decrease the level of regulation. India is one of the countries that has the most number of higher education institutions in the world. It has three times as many higher education institutions as those that exist in United States.

Nowadays, these private colleges are the possible partners of choice for the American institutions. Until now, schools from Georgia State and the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania have collaborated exclusively with unrecognized non-degree-granting private institutions.

Today, the Virginia Technology Institute has the opportunity to sign on to construct a campus in southern India. This university was founded in 1872 as an agricultural and mechanical college in Blacksburg, Va. This university has been very perseverant in its idea of obtaining a campus of its own in India. They see a very interesting opportunity there and they are willing to take the chance. Virginia Tech Project

Global Business

Do you know that India spends 7.5 billion dollars annually earning degrees in foreign countries. Their presence is bigger than other nationalities in American Universities. India is concentrated in the expandability and improvement of higher education. Today, there are many foreign institutions, from Northwest to North Dakota State, that have some arrangements with indian colleges. Manipal University in India has offered programs with 10 colleges in the United States. These can benefit both sides, the American Universities increase their global prestige and also the amount of student enrolled in their programs, and the indian students typically pay $ 10,000-$20,000 in annual tuition and they can spend time in both of the two campuses.

The Ohio State University has prepared a management course that is offered to the Graduate School of Business in Hyderabad. The indian school of business pays around $1 million to use the curriculum and the Ohio State University brand. Another American institute that obtained a partner to an Indian school is Virginia Technology Institute, which offered a master's program in information technology and exported its curriculum and faculty to India. They offered a bona fine Virginia Technology Institute degree. In this case the S. P. Jain Institute of Management in Mumbai, India has to provide the campus, facilities, and recruited students for the benefits of the link with an American college. After four years, some Indian's organizations began to be concerned about the fact of rising foreign influence, so they started to question the validity of other programs that S. P. Jain managed. The Indian government is wary to open the door of its home to foreign colleges to set up campuses. Learning Curve

The New Test

 It seems that a new test for early Alzheimer's disease detection has been determined. Dr. Lee Goldstein is a psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry and Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He has studied and determined that the Alzheimer disease process that occurs in the brain also can be detected in the lens of the eye. Optical Tests

A pair of optical tests have been developed by Dr. Goldstein. These tests permit to determine the presence of amyloid beta proteins in the lens of the eye which is also found in the brain of Alzheimer's patients. The presence of the protein can be detected by using a laser ophthalmoscope instrument, which can pick up the gummy aggregated particles in the eye's lens in the very early stage before the formation of cataracts. They need to differentiate the common cataract to the Alzheimer's cataract, so Dr. Goldstein uses a technique where special fluorescence dye drops bind to the amyloid beta proteins. If the proteins glow under the infrared light then the Alzheimer disease is present.

The positive aspect about this finding is that if doctors have the possibility to detect the disease and start the treatment during the early stage, then they can slow the disease and maybe cure it. This new discovery cannot only give the patients the chance to start an early treatment, but it can also help in the development of new drugs for the Alzheimer's disease.

Hope

I have some friends that are living the terrible experience of having a relative with Alzheimer's disease, so, when I read this article I was glad to know that today there is a bigger understanding of the disease which gives the victims a new hope.

The Alzheimer's disease is related to the slow deterioration of the mind where the person experiences the loss of themselves and life. This disease is very common today. The number of Americans with Alzheimer's has almost doubled to 4.5 million since 1980, it is even estimated that by 2050 about 13.4 million of Americans may be affected.

Nowadays, advances in the human genome have given the opportunity of new forms of exploration for the Alzheimer's researchers to find a prevention or treatment for this disease. For years scientists have been studying the possible factors that are involved in the development of the disease and trying to find the cure without success. Today, scientists are most optimistic because of their ability to apply two important lessons learned from their past experience. First, scientists are convinced that the disease must be treated as soon as possible in its early phase, even before the patients show any symptoms of memory loss or cognitive decline. Second, the scope of the medical assault is very important; they need to use an approach that addresses as many of the disease's complex abnormalities as possible because this may improve the chances that using new therapies early on will delay symptoms and also reverse them. What is Alzheimers?

The World's New Perspective of China

     Keeping its currency undervalued, China could help its manufacturers sell their products at a very affordable price in foreign markets like the U.S. and Europe. But there were other factors like low wages, increased infrastructure, businesses' hospitality, and hard-working labor force that helped China to become the key manufacturing base of the world.

     These past decades, China has been working on building up its physical infrastructure such as factories, roads, highways, airports, etc. Today, China's next strategy is to invest in human capital. It started to invest in education, nearly tripling the share of GDP allocated for it. Beijing is a clear example of that. China has experienced a massive expansion of education. They doubled the number of colleges and the number of students attending from 1 million in 1997 to 5.5 million in 2007. they have identified nine of their top universities as Ivy Leagues. Richard Levin, the president of Yale University, said, “This expansion in capacity is without precedent. China has built the largest higher-education sector in the world in merely a decade's time. In fact, the increase in China's postsecondary enrollment since the turn of the millennium exceeds the total postsecondary enrollment in the United States” (Time Magazine, Oct. 2010). This is China's strategy to reach its goal to enter into higher-quality goods and services and often better competition to the markets.

     India is one of the strongest countries in the service sector, but now that China has invested in education, and its students have learned English better and trained in technology, China's firms can enter in this market as well.

     It seems like China will be a real challenge for the U.S. and Europe in the next decade. Now the question is how is the rest of the world going to react to this reality? Are they going to concentrate in making structural reforms and new and better investments in order to make their economy more dynamic and its workers more competitive? The New Challenge from China (Time Magazine)

Facebook's Privacy Problems

     Facebook has been a phenomena among young and old alike for some time now. It's popularity can even be seen as the movie, The Social Network, has come out as number 1 in the box office since its release on October 1. People enjoy being able to share their experiences with their friends and family, although they may be thousands of miles away. They not only share pictures and ideas, but also show people their likes, dislikes, and even their relationship status. This may all seem harmless and fun, however, like most technology, it can be ill used.

     People need to be aware that what they are posting on their walls can be displayed all over the Internet, which has no borders. Recently, Facebook has been having to deal with privacy issues, especially when they gave users more privacy options and made the default option public. All users had to go to their privacy settings and change them from public to private, or whatever else they chose. If they had not realized this earlier and placed something on their wall that they wanted to be private, it was too late now. With new applications, like Facebook Connect and Open Graph, people are able to learn more about others. For example, as long as Facebook can get you to share more information to more people, it can give a whole lot more data to advertisers.

     Nonetheless, this is only one aspect of how sharing on Facebook can invade people's privacy. Using the applications that Facebook provides is done with consent. The users know they are putting personal information that their friends, bosses, co-workers, etc. can see. They are setting themselves up to potential problems coming from too much sharing. On the other hand, people's information might be put up on the Internet without their knowing, and therefore without their consent. This is unjust to these people; they might not want to have certain pictures, videos, or other kind of information displayed to hundreds of other people they have never met before. As was the case with Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University, he was spied on and was unknowingly broadcasted on a live feed on Facebook. Due to the contents that were broadcasted, the young man decided there was no other way but to take his own life and jump off a bridge. The two students who used the web cam in Tyler Clementi's room to transmit his doings in his own dorm room obviously did not realize what the consequence to their actions would be. They rashly placed this video on the web without thinking about how Clementi would react or feel about it. People have begun to lose their empathy and human connection with others. Used with the wrong intentions, technology can devastate anything it is used against. Facebook and Time Magazine

Blockbuster's Bankruptcy

The other day I found an article in the Time magazine informing that Blockbuster has been declared in bankruptcy on last Sept. 23^th. The company is going to close about two-third of its outlets. Imagine this company has 3,500 stores, 25,000 workers and 7,500 of them are full-time workers, and more than a half could be unemployed in the following months. Analysts think that bankruptcy could give the company the opportunity to provide movies to its costumers via vending machine, at this moment the company count with 6,630 DVD dispensers, also by mail and Internet. It seems to be that people think that the company still has the possibility to survive. Blockbuster was the retail chain that once dominated the industry and now is in bankruptcy and trying to compete with companies like Netflix, Apple , Amazon, and Walmart. How companies like Blockbuster can just fail like that. Maybe the company did not take serious the complexity and risky of the situation and when It came to react it was too late. The advance in technology is moving at high speed so companies need to be prepared for Blocbuster Bankruptcy/The New York Time

According to Clayton Christensen, a professor who studied technological change and its effect on large companies from Harvard University, “many of the decision that led Blockbuster to bankruptcy might have appeared rational at the time, but when faced with a threat by disruptive competitors like Netflix, the circumstances were different. Decision that in other circumstances would have made sense, instead drove the company into the ground.”

Outsourcing

The other day I was working on a research paper for some of my other courses. The topic was IT Outsourcing risks. Information Technology Outsourcing is define by some writers as turning over several IT activities to external vendors (Weinert and Meyer, 2005) . Today there are two basic types of work that IT organizations can outsource: 1) specific functions relevant to IT operations like for example, software development and infrastructure, and 2) operations of business that have significant impact on IT systems like for example customer call centers and manufacturing (Lapland, Costello, Sigh, Bindingness, and Landon, 2004).

If it is true that outsourcing has been increasing since 1990, the nature of the practice has been changing: companies are consolidating and creating larger providers offering a broad range of service, countries such a China are beginning to compete with India, smaller and mid-size companies start to outsource work, and some of them are starting to outsource whole project including Research and Development (Leavitt, 2007).

The Forrester study showed and statistics that attracts the most attention track job losses. This study projects that offshoring by US companies will cause a loss of 3.4 million service jobs by 2015. At the same time, various studies suggest that something like 40% of offshore projects fail to deliver the expected benefits (Meyer, 2006). This is an interesting article (IEEE Computer) Revolution in Software Engineering