Monday Links: November 24th, 2008

Happy early Thanksgiving everybody.  Links:

• This makes complete sense but is nevertheless a major shift in higher ed IT.  Wonder what the cost savings look like (I imagine they’re significant):

Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they’ve stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.

Starting next year, freshman enrolled at Boston College won’t be given an actual email account complete with login and inbox, just an email address. This address, in the format of johnsmith@bc.edu will simply forward mail to the student’s already established inbox, be it Gmail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, or whatever else they may be using.

• Jason from 37Signals argues that, while completely ugly and elementary, the Drudge Report is actually a well-designed site.  For instance:

The Drudge Report is one page. Every visit and every visitor is focused on that one page with a headline and three columns. He knows exactly what people are going to see, he knows exactly how people are going to see it. There’s no mystery page here that hasn’t been redesigned or mystery page there that’s throwing an error. It’s one page to look at at one page to work on. It is what it is. It doesn’t try too hard to be something it’s not.

• This NY Times post on bamboo is largely positive, and attributes bamboo criticisms to group funded by the lumber industry.  The truth of the matter, from all that I’ve read, should not surprise you: bamboo CAN be environmentally sound compared to traditional building materials or other types of wood; but, with the rise in demand for bamboo, many producers are clearing forests to plant bamboo plantations.  Any time you’re clearing a biologically diverse area and replacing it with monoculture, growing the new (desired) plant product is going to require many more resources (water, pesticides, etc) and detract from the environmental services provided by the world’s natural forests.

• Matt Yglesias wonders why conservatives don’t link their future to quality of life issues like sprawl, traffic, and lack of public transportation:

[T]o my way of thinking[,] an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? [...] How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access? It happens to be the case that most of the people who are interested in these issues have liberal views on unrelated political issues, but the specific set of views at hand don’t draw on any deep ideological principles, it’s just application of basic economic thinking to the issues and, as such, is something that should be completely accessible to conservative politicians looking to show that conservative ideas can be relevant to the concerns (environmental concerns, quality of life concerns, economic growth concerns) of a set of people who are disinclined to think of themselves as conservatives.

• These HDR images (I’ll admit my complete ignorance when it comes to photography and tell you that I don’t even know what HDR stands for) are stunning.

• Setting aside for a second my concerns that (a) this video will cause tens (hundreds?  God I hope not) of people to think (unrealistically) that they too could raise a friendly, cuddly, pet lion; and (b) the music contained in this video has no place on this blog, please enjoy the cuteness (thanks Jane):