Creative writing programs in a university setting are nothing new in the US and Britain. But in Germany, the teaching of creative writing remains novel. An award-winning program in Leipzig is trying to change that. 

"Speaking very generally, Germans tend to think of creative writing as something that cannot be taught - a matter of genius, independent of education," said Sebastian Hermann from the University of Leipzig.

 

That historical belief may be why the German Creative Writing Program (DLL) at the University of Leipzig is unique in the country. It has been guiding students through the intricacies of writing literary texts since 1995.

 

From poems to novels to radio plays, graduates of the institute have written it all.

 

And written it well - they've got the publications and awards to prove it. Leipzig alumni have been awarded the nation's top literary accolades, including the German Book Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair's Prize. The institute itself was awarded the German Critics' Prize in 2005, a symbolic award intended to draw attention to an undiscovered cultural gem.

 

This reputation for excellence has likewise helped the institute draw a star faculty. Recent guest lecturers have included the Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Mueller ("The Appointment") and best-selling author and cultural critic Iliya Troyanov ("The Collector of Worlds"), among others.

Historians criticized proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum Tuesday, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks and classrooms far beyond the state's borders.

The changes, which were preliminarily approved last week by the Texas board of education and are expected to be given final approval in May, will reach deeply into Texas history classrooms, defining what textbooks must include and what teachers must cover. The curriculum downplays the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, questions the separation of church and state and says that the U.S. government was infiltrated by communists during the Cold War.

Because the Texas textbook market is so large, books assigned to the state's 4.7 million students often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials.

[...]

Each subject in Texas's curriculum is revised every 10 years, and the basic social studies framework was introduced by a panel of teachers last year. But the elected state board of education, which is made up of 10 Republicans and five Democrats, has made more than 100 amendments to the curriculum since January.

Discussions ranged from whether President Ronald Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's (yes).

Germans are popular in India and Pakistan, but not always for the right reasons. Many in South Asia have nothing but admiration for Adolf Hitler and still associate Germany with the Third Reich. Everyday encounters with the love of all things Nazi makes German visitors cringe.

Pakistan is the opposite of Germany. The mountains are in the north, the sea is in the south, the economic problems are in the west and the east is doing well. It's not hard for a German living in Pakistan to get used to these differences, but one contrast is hard to stomach: Most people like Hitler.

I was recently at the hairdresser, an elderly man who doesn't resort to electric clippers. All he has is creaky pair of scissors, a comb, an aerosol with water. He did a neat job but I wasn't entirely happy.

I said: "I look like Hitler."

He looked at me in the mirror, gave a satisfied smile and said: "Yes, yes, very nice."

A French spacecraft designed to discover new worlds beyond our solar system has made one of its most significant finds yet--a planet that looks like a cousin to those in our own celestial backyard. COROT 9 b, named by astronomical convention for the instrument that discovered it, the COROT (for COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) satellite, is less massive than Jupiter and orbits a star, called COROT 9, at about the same distance Mercury orbits the sun. The new world is of fairly average size, but it is the most temperate exoplanet yet whose properties are well known in orbit around a sunlike star.

A largely European research team reports the discovery the March 18 issue of Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Like NASA's Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, the three-year-old COROT tracks the brightness of stars with a photometer, looking for periodic dimming that might be attributable to the passage of a planet across the face of its host star. Actually confirming a planetary cause of that dimming takes painstaking follow-up work at telescopes on the ground. Most often the researchers look for Doppler shifts in the host star's light as the planet's gravity regularly tugs the star nearer to and then farther from Earth.

The degree of dimming starlight during the passage of a planet across its star, a type of partial eclipse known as a transit, indicates the body's diameter. The velocity at which the star wobbles under the planet's influence, on the other hand, reveals the object's mass. With both transit and stellar-wobble observations of a planet, astronomers can paint a fairly complete picture of a world they have only indirectly observed.

"With transits we can learn much more about the planets than with any other method to find planets," says lead study author Hans Deeg, an astronomer at Spain's Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands. "It's the only method currently where we can measure the size of the planets fairly reliably." On its own, a measurement of the star's wobble can only reveal a lower limit to the planet's mass, and in some cases the true mass turns out to be many times greater than that lower bound.

Mr. Judt's new book, "Ill Fares the Land," is a slim and penetrating work, a dying man's sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens' lives without imperiling their liberties. It makes sense that this book arrives now, not merely during the hideous endgame of the national health-care debate but during mud season; this book's bleak assessment of the selfishness and materialism that have taken root in Western societies will stick to your feet and muddy your floors. But "Ill Fares the Land" is also optimistic, raw and patriotic in its sense of what countries like the United States and Britain have meant -- and can continue to mean -- to their people and to the world.

And in the end it comes down to:

It is "incumbent upon us to reconceive the role of government," Mr. Judt admonishes his audience. "If we do not, others will."

Physicists have demonstrated behavior governed by rules of the quantum world, which operate at the level of atoms, in mechanical objects large enough to see.

The accomplishment fulfills a long-held dream to bridge the quantum and everyday worlds. One day, researchers say, mechanical devices in a laboratory might be manipulated according to the rules of single atoms -- paving the way to quantum information processing or probing other unusual behaviors of the subatomic world.

A pair of UK hackers who used false betting slips in a bid to con casinos into paying out on bogus gambles were undone by greed and a schoolboy maths error, a court heard.

Andrew Ashley, 30, and Nimesh Bhagat, 31, were each handed a suspended jail sentence of one year after they pleaded guilty to theft over a plot involving the mock-up of false winning betting slips for live roulette wheels running at four Gala Casinos in London.

The duo took the casino for an estimated £33,000 in the summer of 2007 after hacking into casino systems to print out winning slips valued at up to £600, irrespective of the number that actually dropped on the wheel, The Daily Telegraph reports.

However, the scheme came unstuck after an alert cashier noticed a winning slip for £600 for a £10 bet at odds of 35-1. The casino launched an investigation that unearthed a string of other suspicious bets, traced back to Ashley and Bhagat, IT contractors working at the casino at the time of the scam.

Here's a figure that will chill the blood of any parent thinking about sending their child to university.

It's a price tag of more than $200,000 - about £132,000 - for a four-year undergraduate course at one of the leading universities in the United States.

It means that as well as student loans there are also parent loans - with huge sums of money borrowed by people who might have been planning for their retirement.

And it's the middle-income families who are facing the toughest squeeze.

In England a major review of university funding and students' fees is under way. What would happen to the cost of going to university if there were no fixed limits?