Daily Digest

In today's Digest we will be looking at the impact that the Affordable Health Care Act is having on the status of student employees, the Columbus library system's use of small 'express' libraries to help reach underserved areas, the July job figures for Ohio's economy, the preperation many campuses are taking for receiving students from Ebola affected countries, and the expansion of Hoopla streaming service to another major library. 

As we start the week the Daily Digest highlights a new partnership between Columbus State and the Columbus Metropolitan Libraries that will include a CSCC room at 10 new or renovated libraries, a new nonprofit that has begun reviewing Common Core based textbooks to assess their content and alignment, changes to the way Ohio k-12 school days are measured, a look at the participation rate that shows MOOCs to be more effective than some people realized, and a discussion of how to better frame aspects of education policy to make the debate easier for people to understand and relate to. 

We end this week with a look at the current advantage that libraries have over tech companies in the realm of e-book rentals, the new graduation requirements that incoming 9th graders will have to face, a new STEM focused university and supercomputer center in Florida, the high rate of delinquency for the most common type of federal student loan, and a call from manufacturing leaders for Congress to address the issue of currency manipulation being practiced by a number of foriegn countries. 

Today we delve into the use of big data by the Centers for Medicaire and Medicaid Services to try and improve health care costs, Apple's recent diversity report and the growing attention big tech firms are paying to their workforce diversity, the disparity in high speed internet access between urban and rural library systems, strong economic indicators for the U.S., and a growing number of free online academic journals that are challenging the standard subscription based journals. 

In today's Daily Digest we will be examining a growing debate over some key words in Ohio's Constitution regarding school funding, a new tool developed by Google to help manage their databases, a start-up supercomputer company that is planning to revolutionize computer processing with an optical processor, the growing focus on education policy in part thanks to some celebrities, and a team from MIT that has analyzed hundreds of hours of MOOC videos to learn what makes an engaging video lecture. 

In today's Daily Digest we will be highlighting Denver City Schools move to invest $7 million in developing new STEM career classes for its high schools, new data that shows that white students will no longer be the majority in public schools, a data analytics tool that was able to spot the Ebola epidemic prior to the WHO announcement of the outbreak, the mayor of Milwaukee's push to invest in building a strong library system for the city, and an unusual library storage system in Australia that relies on robots to retrieve and manage the books. 

We begin this week by discussing a set of rule changes from the Dept. of Education aimed at easing restrictions on student loans, a new law that will require states to offer in state tuition to veterans regardless of how long they have lived in the state, Michelle Obama and Laura Bush team up to talk about the importance of providing women worldwide with education, manufacturing companies are facing a shortage of STEM trained workers, and a new computer chip offers the power of a supercomputer in the size of a postage stamp thanks to a unique process.

We end this week with a review of the low percentage of Ohio school districts that passed their proposed levies in the recent August special election, an announcement from NASA that it is near completion of a 3D printed telescope, a survey that shows mixed opinions regarding how robots are affecting people's jobs, a report that has found that Ohio students in the Appalachian counties are falling behind their peers in the rest of the state, and with the school year aproaching a number of districts are figuring out how to handle the nearly 50,000 immigrant students who have recently arrived in the U.S. 

In today's Digest we will look at the strong growth in service industry jobs in the U.S., a study that has found that more challenging math and science courses can help improve student performance in these topics, Ohio's partnership with Michigan and Indiana to obtain funds to help improve water quality in Lake Erie, the Army's use of 3D printed skulls to study shockwave damage, and a $45M grant that will help Ohio learning centers improve their literacy education efforts. 

This Wednesday's Digest will take a look at a range of topics including a set of new additive manufacturing competitions to be hosted by America Makes, a new partnership that is aimed at expanding the digital offerings of the textbook renting company Chegg, a study from Standard & Poor's that suggests that the widening wealth gap is responsible for the slow economic recovering, new rankings from the Princeton Review are out on everything from food services to partying for which Miami University ranks the highest in Ohio, and a recent survey looks at how Americans view the idea of autonomous vehicles.