Al's Morning Meeting

The College Board, which administers the SAT, said it had begun to notify college admissions offices, high school counselors and affected students this week in letters and in e-mail messages, and expected to complete the process by Thursday. It also said that it planned to return registration fees and charges for sending test scores to colleges to the students whose scores were in error.

The disclosure came at the height of the college admissions season, at a time when many colleges have already made many of their decisions about which students to accept, reject or defer.

"We ask that you do everything you can to ensure that students are in no way penalized for a matter that was beyond their control," Jim Montoya, a vice president of the College Board, wrote in a letter to deans and admissions directors dated March 6.

The company that administers the test said it learned about the potential problems in December when a couple of students questioned their scores. It is unclear why it has taken so long to notify the thousands of others who were affected. In perspective, the number of tests affected so far is about eight-tenths of one percent of the 495,000 students who took the test.

AMA Warns Girls Not to Go Wild

The American Medical Association has a warning for female college students who are about to take off for spring break. I'm not sure why they do not have a similar warning for guys. A new poll released by the AMA says:

• A majority (74 percent) of respondents said women use drinking as an excuse for outrageous behavior.
• More than half of women (57 percent) agree being promiscuous is a way to fit in.
• An overwhelming majority (83 percent) of women had friends who drank the majority of the nights while on spring break.
• More than half (59 percent) know friends who were sexually active with more than one partner.
• Nearly three out of five women know friends who had unprotected sex during spring break.
• One in five respondents regretted the sexual activity they engaged in during spring break, and 12 percent felt forced or pressured into sex.
• An overwhelming majority (84 percent) of respondents thought images of college girls partying during spring break may contribute to an increase in females' reckless behavior.
• An even higher percentage (86 percent) agreed these images may contribute to dangerous behaviors by males toward women.
• Almost all (92 percent) said it was easy to get alcohol while on spring break.
• Two out of five women agreed access to free or cheap alcohol or a drinking age under age 21 were important factors in their decision to go on a spring break trip.

The study is critical of spring-break promoters' Web sites, and cites one that tells kids that in Cancún, they can do a year's worth of drinking in a week. That quote is years old -- I saw it on Web sites as early as 2003.

The State Department even has a warning page about Spring Break in Cancún.  

Camp Crunch

CNN/Money reports:

It's estimated there will be 11 million kids going to summer camp this year. To get into the camp your kid wants, you should act quickly. Many camps are reaching their occupation limit by March, says Jeff Solomon of the American Camp Association.

Parents shouldn't wait past mid-April if they want to send their kids to camp, according to Ann Sheets of the American Camp Association. You should also start making your camp decisions now if you're considering a traditional camp. They tend to fill up first, according to Chris Thurber, the author of "The Secret Ingredients of Summer Camp Success."

There's another benefit to being the early worm. You may get a registration discount, says Sheets. Keep in mind that schools in some states let out earlier than most and that means summer camp starts even earlier. In Texas, for example, schools get out in the middle of May.

The story says:

There are [more than] 5,000 day camps and 7,000 sleep-away camps. There are camps for every kind of hobby, from sports and fine arts camps to education and test prep camp and travel and adventure camps.

To narrow your options, get a sense of what you can afford and what interests your child. Then you can begin trolling the Web. The American Camp Association runs a database of 2,400 accredited camps that you can search by your activity and cost preference, at www.campparents.org.

March Madness Online

Here is a leap into online programming. The Los Angeles Times says:

CBS Corp. wants to inject a little madness into online media.

The TV network plans to make all early-round games from the NCAA basketball tournament, known as March Madness, available for free on the Internet. When the tournament gets into full swing March 16, it will mark the first time a major broadcaster has shifted such an important programming franchise onto the Web without charging a subscription fee.

The March Madness on Demand service will black out local games -- plus the final three rounds of the tournament, when only one game is played at a time -- to avoid direct competition with CBS affiliates.

Broadband capacity will limit the Web audience to a few hundred thousand viewers at a time.

But analysts and industry executives described the experiment as a key inflection point in the Internet's maturation as a platform for the distribution of video. Eighteen big-name advertisers, including Marriott International, Dell Inc. and Pontiac, already have purchased all the available ad spots.

Viewer Beware: Local TV and Health News

I have not seen (and do not have) the full study -- it will not be online until Monday -- but I can give you a top-line report on a new survey of local television health reporting. And it's not pretty. The University of Michigan press release says: 

In the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report results from an in-depth analysis of health coverage on local TV newscasts from across the country.

 

In all, health and medical stories comprised 11 percent of the news portion of late-evening newscasts in the one-month period studied, with 1,799 such stories carried on 2,795 broadcasts captured from the representative sample of 122 stations in the nation's top 50 media markets.

 

The average story was 33 seconds long, and most did not give specifics about the source of the information presented. Items about specific diseases tended not to contain recommendations for viewers, or information about how common the disease was -- which could help put the news into perspective with other health issues.

 

But most disturbing, the study's authors say, were the egregious errors contained in a small minority of studies -- errors that could have led to serious consequences.

 

For instance, a story that aired on several stations reported on lemon juice's effect on sperm and speculated about, or presented as fact, the use of lemon juice as an effective contraceptive, and its potential effect on preventing sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Despite the fact that the study was done in a research lab, nearly all the stories failed to mention that it had not involved humans. Even more alarming, one of the stations misinterpreted the study altogether and stated that lemon juice may be a substitute for "costly" HIV medications.

 

"Egregious errors such as these can actually harm the public," says lead author James Pribble, M.D., a lecturer in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the U-M Medical School who began the study as a U-M Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.

 

"The key here is the focus on local news," says co-author Ken Goldstein, Ph.D., a UW-Madison professor of political science. "Local TV news is the single greatest source of information for the majority of Americans -- whether it be politics or health - and understanding what sorts of health information people are being exposed to demands that we analyze the content of this most prevalent source." 

The study, when it is released Monday, will appear here.
 

The University of Michigan tells me that tomorrow, you will be able to find an abstract of the study here.