WORLD IN BRIEF

U.S. planes strike Canadian troops in Afghanistan By Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune… U.S. planes strike Canadian troops in Afghanistan By Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune

KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. warplanes accidentally strafed Canadian troops fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan early Monday, killing one soldier and wounding several, NATO officials said.

The “friendly-fire” incident happened near Panjwayi, where NATO troops have been fighting a pitched battle with the Taliban for three days, part of Operation Medusa. On Monday morning, NATO troops called for close air support. Two U.S. A-10 aircraft responded but hit the Canadian forces with cannons by mistake, NATO officials said.

“It is particularly distressing to us all when, despite the care and precautions that are always applied, a tragedy like this happens,” said Lt. Gen. David Richards, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, the NATO-led forces that assumed security control of most of Afghanistan in August.

International troops are facing their toughest challenge from Taliban insurgents since the regime fell almost five years ago. The Taliban has taken advantage of a weak government in the south, and is often paying recruits more than the government pays its soldiers.

Occupational-related majors soar at U.S. colleges By Patrice M. Jones, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO – Alex Zatvornitsky has spent uncountable hours researching Loyola University Chicago, the school where he started classes as a freshman last month.

“I don’t have a major, and I don’t mind being undecided,” Zatvornitsky said recently.

“I know I am not going to major in science,” he added, “maybe anthropology, history. … What I do know is that I want to take a broad scope of things.”

Zatvornitsky’s decision to make college a time of academic discovery and exploration is becoming less common as more students focus on college majors with a laser-like precision, hoping to make themselves more competitive in the job market.

That pressure to compete has meant majors such as business, technical or so-called occupational-related majors – specialized fields that are aligned directly with hot sectors of the job market – are gaining ground as the most popular majors on many university campuses.

Among college students at four-year institutions, the top five majors by enrollment are business, education, health sciences, computer/information sciences and visual/performing arts, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent data.

With the exception of biology, economics and psychology, traditional liberal arts and sciences majors have declined both in the number and the percentage of the total degrees conferred during the last 30 years, according to Steven Brint, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Riverside, who studies higher education trends.

Strikingly, this trend has occurred during a time of significant enrollment growth at American universities.

“Occupational fields have accounted for approximately 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees in recent years, up from 45 percent in the 1960s, and hundreds of institutions now award 80 percent or more of their degrees in these fields,” Brint wrote in a recent study.

Cheating: It’s in the numbers By Joshua Benton, The Dallas Morning News

It’s the sort of case you might expect Encyclopedia Brown to tackle.

Two kids seem to have cheated on Professor Harpp’s final exam. Can he prove the culprits did it – before it’s too late?

But when McGill University professor David Harpp suspected some of his students were up to no good, he didn’t hire a boy detective for a shiny new quarter. He did the job himself.

He devised a statistical method to determine whether two students were copying test answers from each other. He found that, on a 98-question multiple-choice test, the pair of students had 97 answers exactly the same – including 23 wrong answers.

Confronted with the evidence, the students confessed.

To the untrained observer, it may seem strange that cheating can be reliably detected with statistics, formulas and math, as Texas officials have hired an outside firm to do. But decades of research around the world have produced methods that prove quite effective at smoking out cheaters in ways even the best proctors often can’t.

“We had always worried that cheating was happening, but we had to find a way to figure out who was doing it,” said Chris McManus, a professor of psychology and medical education at University College London, who hunts cheaters.

In Texas, the test-security firm Caveon has identified 699 Texas schools – nearly 10 percent of the state’s total – where cheating may have occurred. The Texas Education Agency is planning how it will deal with those schools, some of which will be the targets of a full state investigation.

Caveon used several methods to look for bad behavior. But the most common problem it found was classrooms or schools where a group of students had identical or nearly identical answer sheets, suggesting they may have copied from one another.

Washington state’s glaciers are melting, and that has scientists concerned By Les Blumenthal, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – With more glaciers than any state in the Lower 48, Washington has emerged as a bellwether for global warming.

The signs are not encouraging.

A national environmental group recently reported that North Cascades and Mount Rainier are among the dozen national parks most susceptible to climate change.

At Mount Rainier, which has more glacial ice than the rest of the Cascades combined and is among the best studied sites in the nation, the area covered by glaciers shrank by more than a fifth from 1913 to 1994, and the volume of the glaciers by almost one-fourth, the National Park Service says. From 1912 to 2001, the Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier retreated nearly a mile.

Since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago, glaciers in the northern Cascades have shrunk by 40 percent, and the pace is accelerating. The South Cascades Glacier, one of the most studied in the nation, has lost roughly half its mass since 1928.

In the Olympic Mountains, glaciers have lost about one-third of their mass.

“They are the canary in the coal mine,” Ed Josberger, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey’s ice and climate project in Tacoma, said of the glaciers in Washington state. “They are changing fast, and this is not good.”