I was tied up yesterday and couldn’t jump on the Detroit bankruptcy story. Here’s coverage from the NYT, the Detroit Free Press, and Lawrence.
At Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, there are scores of doctors and nurses on duty around the clock at a cost of $3 million per week. But in the maternity ward, nurses sit and knit or idly watch afternoon television because there are no babies being delivered and most of the hospital is empty. It is meant to house 375 patients; it has 18.
The people who run the hospital want to close it, and are trying to wind down operations. But the unions that represent hospital workers are opposed to closing the hospital.
The hospital is losing $15 million a month, $12 million of it in payroll, with almost no money coming in. State officials said they expected to cover the losses through advances on federal financing given to hospitals with large numbers of poor and uninsured patients.
San Jose State made a deal with the online course provider Udacity to offer “low-cost, for-credit online courses” in “remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses”. How’s that working for them? Not well. “Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44%”. SJSU and Udacity have suspended the courses while they re-evaluate. One thing that might have been a factor:
A large group were enrolled in the Oakland Military Institute, a college prep academy. Many of them didn’t have access to a computer — a fact that course mentors didn’t learn about until three weeks into the semester, Junn said.
In the Prince George’s jail, another of the busiest jails in Maryland, administrators have little information about inmates’ contact with the outside world. Unlike at most jails in the D.C. area, Prince George’s does not directly monitor or record visits with friends or family, and inmates routinely shield their calls from investigators monitoring recorded phone lines.