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I usually ease off on reading news stories during the time period between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It isn’t that the news is less important, it is just that I find this an ideal moment to just relax and enjoy quality family time. This year was different. I was focused on the cliff, the ominous fiscal cliff.

In August 2012 the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, signed a bill making it mandatory for all federal universities in Brazil to reserve 50% of the places in each degree program for students coming from public schools according to their family incomes and their ethnic profile (self-declared descendants of blacks and Brazilian natives), and giving them four years to implement the programs. Not to be undone, in December of 2012 the governor of the State of São Paulo, Geraldo Alkimin, announced his own affirmative action project for the state universities, calling it a program of “social inclusion with merit”.

Our family spent the week between Christmas and New Year's traveling, as we try to do every year. This is partly because, since my mother died, we have no family nearby, and so have no fixed celebration ritual, and partly because it is cheaper to travel when no one else wants to.

In Commissioner Jon Leibowitz NYT quote is the salient point: “While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an F.T.C. challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law.” "Under American Law …"

Thank you to the 464 of you that took the time to share your thoughts with us about your reasons for working in higher education, what has surprised you and, for those of you that have been in higher education for a while, what has changed. Here is the first of several posts that will share results from the survey.

In response to the President's panel on Contingent Labor at the MLA, my own story of how my labor conditions negatively impacted the students' learning environment.

Following the vote of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), to which Augustana College is related, to permit public rites performed by its pastors that celebrate and support committed same-gender relationships, I knew it was only a matter of time before a request would come for use of the college’s chapel by a same-gender couple. I was surprised that it took more than two years, but this fall two such requests arrived.

Phil Hill is a "consultant and industry analyst covering the educational technology market primarily for higher education", and someone that I pay close attention whenever he speaks or writes about edtech. What follows is an edited (for length) version of some of Phil's predictions for edtech in 2013, courtesy of the folks at Zer0 to 5ive, (with whom I worked with to secure and edit the interview).