University Will Give Anyone an MBA Degree, Even a Dog

You know a university is shady when even a dog can get a Master’s degree. Yes, you heard right – in order to unmask the American University of London (AUOL), BBC Newsnight had Pete the dog apply for an MBA at the American University of London (AUOL). After paying £4,500, the furry “management consultant” actually received his degree.

AUOL is a bogus university which prays on the naivete of people who want to bulk up their resume in preparation for that executive dream-job interview. The so-called educational institution offers distance learning courses that, according to their website, “have been designed to the most exacting standards, in accordance with the most stringent criteria, in order to provide outstanding education at an affordable price.” AUOL then issues corresponding degrees and post-graduate qualifications in business, IT, law, education and liberal arts, humanities and English. Newsnight managed to uncover AUOL’s fraudulent money-making business by setting up a fake identity and CV for the lovely hound Pete. Thus, Peter Smith was born, a management consultant from South London with an undergraduate degree from a real UK University. After e-mailing them his CV and paying £50 – the mandatory application fee, Peter was asked to provide the institution photocopies of his previous qualifications and a photograph of himself. Of course, Pete did not oblige as his resume was made-up and his long dog face could not pass as a real man. Nonetheless, four days later, Pete received a message from AUOL stating that his application for a degree had been processed and that in two weeks he was going to be registered as an MBA graduate. All he had to do was to provide them with £4,500.

Photo: BBC

Surprised, Pete aka the Newsnight crew, inquired about what kind of work he would have to submit in order to earn that said degree. AUOL said that his 15 years of experience in the field were sufficient to qualify him for an MBA. “No, no, apparently the APEL [Accreditation of Previous Experiential Learning] board awarded him the full degree immediately based on his qualification and his professional experience, so he doesn’t have to do any courses,” AUOL answered. Hundreds of senior executives who had written AUOL qualifications in their resumes, were tracked down by the curious crew just to find out about the kind of painstaking work they had to provide in order to earn their phony credentials. It was no surprise that all of them stated they had worked very hard for their AUOL degrees. A psychologist from Birmingham and expert advisor in court cases, Dr Robert Oakes, submitted such good work that he got his AUOL PhD in just five months. Oaks said that his previous 18 months conducting research had been an asset to him in the process of earning his PhD. Apparently Oakes was very surprised to find out that AUOL wasn’t accredited and has since removed the university’s qualifications from his CV.

Photo: AUOL

Another naive soul and senior nuclear industry executive in charge of selling a new generation of reactors in the UK, Dr Rita Bowser, also has a doctorate degree from AUOL but in business. She earned her degree by submitting “significant amounts of coursework.” We certainly believe Dr Bowser especially since her employer vouches that she is very qualified for her job and has 30 years experience in the field and a master’s from Georgia Tech. During their detective work, Newsnight found out not only that AUOL is not accredited but that it is not even present in London, with their real “headquarters” being St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, as clearly stated on their website. They also claim to be recognized by three also bogus American institutions. Moreover, their highly qualified lecturers haven’t even heard of AUOL. One of the unlucky academics who made it on their website as a supervisor, George Colin, states that “It doesn’t have authority to award degrees. They are not degrees. They are pieces of paper and I’m guessing they are not able to sell very many degrees into countries where English is the first language.”

In spite of the above, you can now breathe easy, because AUOL is a legitimate institution… according to AUOL.  “We are not a bogus university… and have always been upfront about our status. We have not applied for accreditation with any American, British or other official agency. Many graduates go on to higher education or hold important positions on the strength of our degrees.” Yes, that might be so, but just ‘cause it’s written on their CV doesn’t make it true

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The islands where foxes fly

Our ship eased out of Tokyo Bay, leaving behind the noise and neon of the city. It was well before 11am, but a few of the old men on deck were already tipping back cans of Asahi beer.

In fairness, we had time to kill. The ferry voyage out to Japan’s Bonin Islands (called the Ogasawara Islands in Japanese), which is the only way to reach the country’s most isolated archipelago, covers 1,000km, takes 25 hours and leaves just once a week. The ride is choppy too. Yet no shortage of people want to visit: I shared a cabin floor with more than 100 other passengers, a space that promptly filled with blankets, instant noodles and the beeping of game consoles.

Related video: How the Galapagos inspired Darwin

Bonin’s popularity, despite the archipelago’s isolation, says a great deal about its allure. We were headed for an island group that has never been part of any other landmass, a phenomenon that has led to an unusually high number of endemic animal, bird and plant species – including 441 native plant species, 379 endemic insect species and 134 native land snail species. Thanks to these numbers, in 2011, Unesco added the more than 30 islands – nicknamed “the Galapagos of the Orient” – to the World Heritage List.

Since then, the islands have, strangely enough, grown. A undersea eruption resulted in a brand-new volcanic island poking up above the waves in November 2013. The island continued to grow throughout December and by January 2014 had ballooned to some 60,000sqm in size. Authorities excitedly christened it Niijima, or “new island”. Then, as quickly as it appeared, Niijima became too big for its own good. No sooner had the barren outcrop asserted its existence, belching out a steamy greeting to the world, than its expanding girth fused it with the nearby island of Nishinoshima.

The Bonin Islands’ tectonic commotion is apt. While the archipelago might give every impression of calm and quietude – more than evident when I checked into my tiny, slippers-only guesthouse, the Banana Inn, on Chichijima, the group’s largest island and home to the majority of the island group’s 2,400-strong population – it is certainly no stranger to change. Once known as the Bonin (or “uninhabited”) Islands, the archipelago was settled by an opportunistic US trader in 1830 before being claimed by Japan in 1862. In World War II, the islands became an arena for fighting between Japanese and US troops. Former US president George Bush was shot down in a torpedo bomber just off the coast in September 1944, an accident in which his two co-pilots perished. After falling into US hands in 1946, the Bonin chain returned to Japanese ownership in 1968.

Today, the grouping still bears the influence of decades of American rule. Many residents have joint Japanese-US ancestry, and the occasional Star-Spangled Banner still flaps in the tropical breeze. Officially, however, the islands are 100% Japanese; indeed, despite sitting in the Pacific Ocean some 1,000km south of the capital city, they’re technically part of the Greater Tokyo prefecture.

While Tokyo itself might be defined by the presence of millions and the march of technology, the wildlife takes undisputed centre stage on Bonin. An afternoon boat trip from Chichijima Island transported me into a realm of 2m-long stingrays and hyperactive humpback whales; at one point a seething mating pod turned the waters around the boat into a froth of tail-slaps and spouting blowholes. Strapping on a snorkel in a quiet bay off Miyano-hama Beach on Chichijima, I found leopard-patterned sea snakes and bulge-eyed groupers lurking above lavender-coloured coral. 

The show continued on land. Endemic giant hermit crabs traced paths along the beaches, bush warblers sang from red hibiscus plants and each day at sunset the skies came alive with Bonin flying foxes – disconcertingly large, bat-like creatures that exist only here.

For the people that live on the Bonin archipelago, the arrival of the weekly ferry from Tokyo is an income lifeline. But foreign visitors are hardly treated as walking wallets. On my last night on Chichijima, a local man with poor English decided that I, with my even poorer Japanese, would be treated to tuna sashimi, seaweed rice balls, chicken skewers and a seemingly never-ending supply of shōchū (barley spirit). I was ushered from counter-top restaurant to karaoke bar, all the while having my offers of payment steadfastly refused. “You are our guest here,” one of his friends advised me at the end of the night. “It’s the local way.”

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Bank of America in $783m settlement over credit card practices

Bank of America has agreed to pay $783m (£470m) in fines and refunds to settle accusations it misled customers about its credit card services.

The bank will refund $738m to affected customers and pay $45m in penalties to US regulators.

The payout relates to the bank's sales and marketing of its payment and identity theft protection add-on services from 2010 to 2012.

Regulators said nearly three million customers were affected.

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a statement that the bank had been "unfairly billing consumers" for the identity theft protection product, and "using deceptive marketing and sales practices" for the credit protection add-ons.

Bank of America neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

Instead, it said in a statement that it had stopped marketing identity theft protection products in December 2011 and credit card debt cancellation products in August 2012.

The settlement comes weeks after Bank of America agreed to pay $9.5bn to settle charges it misled US mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the housing crisis in 2008.

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Why you think your phone is vibrating when it is not

Most of us experience false alarms with phones, and as Tom Stafford explains this happens because it is a common and unavoidable part of healthy brain function.

Sensing phantom phone vibrations is a strangely common experience.Around 80% of us have imagined a phone vibrating in our pockets when it’s actually completely still. Almost 30% of us have also heard non-existent ringing. Are these hallucinations ominous signs of impending madness caused by digital culture?

Not at all. In fact, phantom vibrations and ringing illustrate a fundamental principle in psychology.

You are an example of a perceptual system, just like a fire alarm, an automatic door, or a daffodil bulb that must decide when spring has truly started. Your brain has to make a perceptual judgment about whether the phone in your pocket is really vibrating. And, analogous to a daffodil bulb on a warm February morning, it has to decide whether the incoming signals from the skin near your pocket indicate a true change in the world.

Psychologists use a concept called Signal Detection Theory to guide their thinking about the problem of perceptual judgments. Working though the example of phone vibrations, we can see how this theory explains why they are a common and unavoidable part of healthy mental function.

When your phone is in your pocket, the world is in one of two possible states: the phone is either ringing or not. You also have two possible states of mind: the judgment that the phone is ringing, or the judgment that it isn’t. Obviously you'd like to match these states in the correct way. True vibrations should go with “it's ringing”, and no vibrations should go with “it's not ringing”. Signal detection theory calls these faithful matches a “hit” and a “correct rejection”, respectively.

But there are two other possible combinations: you could mismatch true vibrations with “it's not ringing” (a “miss”); or mismatch the absence of vibrations with “it's ringing” (a “false alarm”). This second kind of mismatch is what’s going on when you imagine a phantom phone vibration.

For situations where easy judgments can be made, such as deciding if someone says your name in a quiet room, you will probably make perfect matches every time. But when judgments are more difficult – if you have to decide whether someone says your name in a noisy room, or have to evaluate something you’re not skilled at – mismatches will occasionally happen. And these mistakes will be either misses or false alarms.

Alarm ring

Signal detection theory tells us that there are two ways of changing the rate of mismatches. The best way is to alter your sensitivity to the thing you are trying to detect. This would mean setting your phone to a stronger vibration, or maybe placing your phone next to a more sensitive part of your body. (Don't do both or people will look at you funny.) The second option is to shift your bias so that you are more or less likely to conclude “it’s ringing”, regardless of whether it really is.

Of course, there’s a trade-off to be made. If you don't mind making more false alarms, you can avoid making so many misses. In other words, you can make sure that you always notice when your phone is ringing, but only at the cost of experiencing more phantom vibrations.

These two features of a perceiving system – sensitivity and bias – are always present and independent of each other. The more sensitive a system is the better, because it is more able to discriminate between true states of the world. But bias doesn't have an obvious optimum. The appropriate level of bias depends on the relative costs and benefits of different matches and mismatches.

What does that mean in terms of your phone? We can assume that people like to notice when their phone is ringing, and that most people hate missing a call. This means their perceptual systems have adjusted their bias to a level that makes misses unlikely. The unavoidable cost is a raised likelihood of false alarms – of phantom phone vibrations. Sure enough, the same study that reported phantom phone vibrations among nearly 80% of the population also found that these types of mismatches were particularly common among people who scored highest on a novelty-seeking personality test. These people place the highest cost on missing an exciting call.

The trade-off between false alarms and misses also explains why we all have to put up with fire alarms going off when there isn't a fire. It isn't that the alarms are badly designed, but rather that they are very sensitive to smoke and heat – and biased to avoid missing a real fire at all costs. The outcome is a rise in the number of false alarms. These are inconvenient, but nowhere near as inconvenient as burning to death in your bed or office. The alarms are designed to err on the side of caution.

All perception is made up of information from the world and biases we have adjusted from experience. Feeling a phantom phone vibration isn't some kind of pathological hallucination. It simply reflects our near-perfect perceptual systems trying their best in an uncertain and noisy world.

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Hacking our senses to boost learning power

Some schools are pumping music, noises and fragrances into the classroom to see if it improves exam results – could it work? 

What did your school smell like? Was it noisy or peaceful?

It might not seem important, but a growing body of research suggests that smells and sounds can have an impact on learning, performance and creativity. Indeed, some head teachers have recently taken to broadcasting noises and pumping whiffs into their schools to see whether it can boost grades. Is there anything in it? And if so, what are the implications for the way we all work and study?

There is certainly some well-established research to suggest that some noises can have a detrimental effect on learning. Numerous studies over the past 15 years have found that children attending schools under the flight paths of large airports lag behind in their exam results.

But general noise seems to have an effect too. Bridget Shield, a professor of acoustics at London South Bank University, and Julie Dockrell, now at the Institute of Education, have been conducting studies and advising politicians on the effects of all sorts of noises, such as traffic and sirens, as well as noise generated by the children themselves. When they recreated those particular sounds in an experimental setting whilst children completed various cognitive tasks, they found a significant negative effect on exam scores. “Everything points to a detrimental impact of the noise on children’s performance, in numeracy, in literacy, and in spelling,” says Shield. The noise seemed to have an especially detrimental effect on children with special needs. `

Shield says the sound of “babble” – the chatter of other children, is particularly distracting in the classroom. Architects that fashion open-plan classrooms in schools would do well to take this on board. “People are very distracted by speech – particularly if it’s understandable, but you’re not involved in it.” This phenomenon is also known as the irrelevant speech effect, she says, adding that “it’s a very common finding in open-plan offices as well.”

Whether background sounds are beneficial or not seems to depend on what kind of noise it is – and the volume. In a series of studies published last year, Ravi Mehta from the College of Business at Illinois and colleagues tested people’s creativity while exposed to a soundtrack made up of background noises – such as coffee-shop chatter and construction-site drilling – at different volumes. They found that people were more creative when the background noises were played at a medium level than when volume was low. Loud background noise, however, damaged their creativity.

This makes sense for a couple of reasons, says psychologist Dr Nick Perham, at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who studies the effect of sounds on learning but was not involved in the study.  Firstly, he says, sounds that are most distracting tend to be very variable.  A general hum in the background suggests a steady-state sound with not much acoustical variation. “So there’s not much there to capture your attention – nothing distracting the subjects,” he says. At the same time, the background noise might cause the subjects to be in a slightly heightened state of arousal, says Perham. You don’t want too much or too little arousal. “Medium arousal is best for good performance. So it might be that a general hum in the background gives an optimum level of arousal.” With that in mind, Perham suggests there may be some benefit to playing music or other sounds in an art class or other situations where creativity is key.

Many teachers all over the world already play music to students in class. Many are inspired by the belief that hearing music can boost IQ in subsequent tasks, the so-called Mozart effect. While the evidence actually suggests it’s a stretch to say classical music boosts brainpower, researchers do think pleasant sounds before a task can sometimes lift your mood and help you perform well, says Perham, who has done his own studies on the phenomenon. The key appears to be that you enjoy what you’re hearing. “If you like the music or you like the sound – even listening to a Stephen King novel – then you did better. It didn’t matter about the music,” he says.

However, it’s worth considering that music is not always helpful while you’re trying to work. Trying to perform a task which involves serial recall – for instance, doing mental arithmetic – will be impaired by sounds with acoustic variation, which includes most types of music, says Perham. (Except a few, like extreme death metal.) Songs with lyrics, on the other hand, are more likely to interfere with tasks that involve semantics – such as reading comprehension. “The task and the sound are important, when you have both of them using the same process then you get problems,” he says.

So, it seems that schools that choose to screen out disturbing noises and create positive soundscapes could enhance the learning of their students, so long as they make careful choices.

This isn’t the only sense being tweaked to affect learning. Special educational needs students at Sydenham high school in London are being encouraged to revise different subjects in the presence of different smells – grapefruit scents for maths, lavender for French and spearmint for history.

Less research has gone into the idea of whether scents can help with cognitive performance, although there have been intriguing findings. In 2003, psychologist Mark Moss, at Northumbria University, carried out a range of cognitive tests on subjects who were exposed either to lavender or rosemary aromas. “Rosemary in particular caught my attention as it is considered to be arousing and linked to memory,” he says, whereas lavender is considered to be sedating. Moss found that those who were smelling lavender performed significantly worse in working memory tests, and had impaired reaction times for both memory and attention-based tasks, compared to controls. Those in the rosemary group, on the other hand, did much better than controls overall in the memory tasks, although their reaction times were slower.

Why might this be? It’s perhaps not surprising that smells affect memory, given that the brain’s olfactory bulb is intimately linked to the hippocampus, which deals with learning. But Moss suspected there was more to it. To explore the pharmacological effects of rosemary on the body, he drew blood samples from volunteers who had just undergone cognitive tests in a rosemary-infused room, and found that they had elevated levels of a compound called 1,8-cineole in their blood. Previous research has shown that this compound increases communication between brain cells, which might explain how it improves brain function.

 

So, as you finish reading this story, take a moment to tune into your senses. Close your eyes and take a few nice deep breaths. What can you hear and smell? The answer, it seems, may affect how much you learnt in the past few minutes. 

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Why marathons have runner 'traffic jams'

Runner ‘traffic jams’ are a major headache in marathons, says Phil Ball, but some smart science can help solve them.

 taking off?

More and more people take part in marathons these days – over 30,000 people will run the London Marathon this weekend, for instance. But it’s not just the 26 miles and 385 yards that could be a daunting prospect. “I have to admit to being completely frustrated by the congestion and for 18-19 miles was just dodging people and being held up,” one participant grumbled after the 2012 London Marathon. “I had to overtake a lot of people and ended up with bruised forearms from all the elbows,” said another.

How do such crowding problems arise, and could they be reduced? Some researchers believe that we can find the answers through a more familiar system in which jams appear – road traffic flow. Martin Treiber, of the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, has previously developed models for traffic flow, and now he has reported modifications that capture the essential details of sporting events such as marathons.

One of the first attempts to model traffic flow was made in the 1950s by James Lighthill and his collaborator Gerard Whitham of Manchester University. They considered the traffic as a kind of liquid flowing down a pipe, and looked at how the flow changes as the fluid gets denser. At first the flow rate increases as the density increases, since you simply get more stuff through in the same period of time. But if the density becomes too high, there’s a risk of blockages or jams, and the flow rate plummets.

Runners in marathons tend to form jams just like road traffic flow (Getty Images)

Treiber’s model of a marathon invokes this same principle that the flow rate first increases and then decreases as the density of runners increases, thanks to an abrupt switch from free to congested flow. He assumes that there is a range of different preferred speeds for different runners, which each sustains throughout the race. With just these ingredients, Treiber can calculate the flow rate of runners, knowing the “carrying capacity” at each point on the route. For example, when the route narrows at bottlenecks, so that the maximum flow rate is lower, the model predicts how congestion might develop and spread elsewhere.

This allows Treiber to figure out how congestion might depend on the race conditions – for example, for different starting procedures. Some marathons start by letting all the runners set off at once (which means those at the back have to wait until those in front have moved forward). Others assign runners to various groups according to ability, and let them start in a series of waves.

Treiber has applied the model to the annual Rennsteig half-marathon in central Germany, which attracts around 6,000 participants. The traditional route had to be altered in 2013, because the police were no longer willing to close a road to ensure that runners could cross safely. It could pass either over a 60m wooden hiking bridge or through a tunnel. Treiber used his model to predict the likely congestion incurred in the various options. The model predicted that a mass start would risk an overload of runners if the bridge were to be used, but so, to a lesser degree, would wave starts (which the Rennsteig uses). Only by moving the starting point further back from the bridge could the danger be avoided – and even then, if some of the numbers assumed in the model were only slightly inaccurate, there was still a risk of jams at the bridge. On the other hand, no dangerous congestion seemed likely for the tunnel route. The run organisers consulted Treiber’s team, and eventually chose this option. They also adopted their recommendation for a staggered start with delays of about 150 seconds between waves.

Crowding in cross-country skiing is a trickier problem to solve (Walter Bieri/AP)

Other mass events like cross-country skiing are more complicated to model, partly because the speed of the skiers can depend quite dramatically on the slope of the course, especially when it is uphill. Treiber built this explicitly into his model for an annual 90km race in Sweden called the Vasaloppet, which draws around 15,000 participants. His computer simulations have predicted that massive jams, delaying participants by up to 40 minutes, would form where the route has a steep uphill gradient – just as is seen in the real event. The Vasaloppet has a mass start – but Treiber says that if organisers adopted a wave start, with five-minute delays between waves, all the jams would disappear. Whether those in charge will accept this “wisdom for the crowd” remains to be seen.

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