Over 1,200 ghost schools found all over the country

Aug 30
 
 Waseem Abbasi

The International News
 

ISLAMABAD: A fresh study has revealed that there are 1,205 ghost schools in Pakistan where teachers are getting salaries for ‘promoting literacy’ but no educational activity is taking place at all.

 The study conducted by third party validation teams hired by the government revealed that ghost schools exist in all provinces of Pakistan under the Basic Education Community Schools (BECS) project, which is supervised by the Ministry of Education. The project is being run with a hefty budget of Rs7 billion.

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Regulators Back Away From Tougher Mortgage Rules

Aug 28

From: The Wall Street Journal

A Win for Housing Lobby, But Critics Warn of Toxic Loans

By ALAN ZIBEL  And NICK TIMIRAOS

WASHINGTON—Federal regulators retreated from a proposal that would have toughened rules for the mortgage securities market, a defeat for advocates of tighter standards and a victory for the housing lobby.

Six regulators–including the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Securities and Exchange Commission–on Wednesday issued new proposed rules that would require banks and other issuers of mortgage-backed securities to retain 5% of the credit risk of the bonds on their books, as mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.

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NIH mulls rules for validating key results

Aug 01
US biomedical agency could enlist independent labs for verification

Nature

Meredith Wadman

In biomedical science, at least one thing is apparently reproducible: a steady stream of studies that show the irreproducibility of many important experiments.

In a 2011 internal survey, pharmaceutical firm Bayer HealthCare of Leverkusen, Germany, was unable to validate the relevant preclinical research for almost two-thirds of 67 in-house projects. Then, in 2012, scientists at Amgen, a drug company based in Thousand Oaks, California, reported their failure to replicate 89% of the findings from 53 landmark cancer papers. And in a study published in May, more than half of the respondents to a survey at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, reported failing at least once in attempts at reproducing published data (see ‘Make believe‘).

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