For all the gloom & doom - and I'll admit that I agree with some of it - nobody seems to have actually read the article and seen any of the pluses. Yes, it's somewhat suspicious that the biometric registration is being applied only to sixth formers (I assume this is akin to our senior year of high school), whose adult features have pretty much developed, but honestly, who the hell thinks that it will be any easier to spy on them than it is already, given the astonishing amount of privacy they give up via facebook or similar sites?
For those who don't read, here are a few of the stated positives to give a bit of balance to the proceedings:
"Not only a hit with the students, who enjoy signing themselves in, the system is saving a member of staff about an hour and a half each day in recording data."
[...] Principal Richard Barker said: "With this new registration technology, we are hoping to free up our teachers' time and allow them to spend it on what they are meant to be doing, which is teaching.
[...] "Only today (Thursday, 05 March) we had a fire alarm test and the administration staff were able to quickly and effectively print data off from the system showing who was on site.
There's a long history of technologies being used for purposes unintended by the designer - it's one of the marks of a useful tool - and as long as we are users of tools, this will continue.
PROTIP: Education is not a consumer-oriented service industry. You have as much a responsibility as faculty to facilitate your own learning. Part of college is learning how to learn. Most schools offer free tutoring services, and their centers have well trained staff.
Large research universities are not there to educate, but rather to produce knowledge. Even at state schools, tenured faculty have a greater responsibility to research than to teaching. Want proof? Look at budgets. Less than 10% of salaries in Engineering, Math, and Natural Sciences colleges come from tuition or state funding. The rest comes from grants - private corporations who expect research and care nothing for your pass/fail ratio.
To take your first clause: If I'm receiving $2.5 million for my current project from Bayer, and $50 from you, I expect you to shut up and try your best to learn in the three hours a week we're in class, or failing that, to show up at office hours, because I'm spending the rest of my time earning my paycheck.
It looks like the current members are EMI, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group. That is not a long list. I wonder why news sources can't list them. It would seriously help put responsibility where it should be.
They can't list them because that's not the whole story. Sony BMG is the parent company of dozens of labels, including Columbia Records, Loud, Epic, Ruthless, RCA Music Group, Arista Records, J Records, and many more, not to mention that they act as distributor for 18 "independent" labels.
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.