The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that students tend to be more conservative when it comes to school materials. Still, some schools are forcing college students to change.

Traditionally, professors expect students to read the required texts, but do not actually require students to purchase textbooks. Therefore, many students have found ways to avoid expensive textbook costs, which have gone up an average of 186 percent between 1986 and 2005. Instead, students buy a used version, borrow a copy from the library or friend or simply go without it.

In an effort to help cut costs, some colleges have come up with a new model where students are required to pay a course materials fee that covers the costs of eBooks. According to eCampus News, Florida’s Daytona State College is working towards being a “100 percent” eBook campus. The school is negotiating with publishers so that students can purchase electronic textbooks for $20 each. Additionally, the school will also offer affordable eReaders to the students. The goal of the initiative, said officials, is to reduce annual textbook costs by 50 to 80 percent.

School officials felt compelled to create the initiative after seeing students drop out due to costly textbook fees. “When you look at why students withdraw from schools, so many of the responses are textbook related,” said Rand S. Spiwak, Daytona’s chief financial officer and executive vice president. Furthermore, he said to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “When students pay more for new textbooks than tuition in a year, then something’s wrong.”

Electronic textbooks are not only cheaper to produce; they also make bulk purchases much easier, which is more cost efficient for colleges and students. Publishers, who only profit when students buy a new book, also benefit by cutting out the used book market.

According to eCampus News, if everything goes as planned, Daytona’s eBook initiative will begin next summer. Campus technologists will work out any kinks that might come up before the fall 2011 semester starts.

Virginia State University’s business school has also started to transition to eBooks, noted The Chronicle of Higher Education. The school recently made a deal with Flat World Knowledge. The publisher offered the school a bulk rate of $20 per student per course. In addition to a PDF textbook, students can also download a study guide, an audio version or an iPad edition–a package normally worth $100.

However, as The New York Times pointed out, many students are reluctant to switch. Digital book sales only made up three percent of textbook sales and although the number is expected to grow to 10 to 15 percent by 2012, that percentage is still small compared to traditional textbook sales. “Students grew up learning from print books so as they transition to higher education, it’s not surprising that they carry a preference for a format that they are most accustomed to,” said Nicole Allen, textbooks campaign director for the Student Public Interest Research Groups.

Based on head-to-head trial results, the bivalent vaccine boosted the immune system at least as well as monovalent oral vaccines and better than the trivalent vaccine, Roland Sutter, MD, of the World Health Organization’s Polio Eradication Department in Geneva, and colleagues found.

In the industry-sponsored study, a single dose of the bivalent vaccine against poliovirus types 1 and 3 produced immunity to type 1 in 20% of Indian babies treated with it at birth and to type 3 in 7%.

The second dose boosted immunity rates to 90% and 84%, respectively, the group reported online in The Lancet.

These results were noninferior to treating with two single-strain-targeted vaccines and superior to using a trivalent vaccine that included the type 2 strain.

The bivalent polio vaccine can increase population immunity and “accelerate the elimination of the final chains of transmission of these two remaining wild polioviruses,” Sutter and colleagues concluded in the paper.

With the availability of the monovalent and trivalent vaccines, choosing which strategy to pursue has been a complicated issue, they noted.

Combining three strains into a single vaccine dose covered all the possibilities but apparently reduced the immune response to each individual strain; the presence of type 2 in the trivalent vaccine is believed to interfere with antibody production to types 1 and 3. This interference led to high numbers of cases in endemic areas like Egypt, despite use of multiple trivalent doses.

The U.S.-based auto company reported net earnings of $1.7 billion, or 43 cents per share for the third quarter ending September 10, compared with last year’s profits of 29 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting 41 cents per share. Ford Motor ( F – news – people ) profits gained 29% from the third quarter last year.

Revenue declined $1.3 billion year over year to $29 billion, reflecting the sale of the company’s Volvo brand to Chinese carmaker Geely in August for $1.5 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $27.83 billion.

The company says it is on track to achieve 15.9% market share in the U.S. this year, up from 14.6% last year following the bankruptcies and reorganizations of General Motors and Chrysler, the two other major American auto makers.

Ford reported profits in almost every global market this quarter. South America produced a pre-tax operating profit of $241 million, compared with $247 million last year. Emerging markets reflected sales growth of 28 % in the Asia Pacific Africa region, leading to pre-tax operating profits of $30 million, compared with $22 million last year. Ford North America reported third quarter pre-tax operating profit of $1.6 billion, a $1.3 billion improvement from last year.

The company announced it would pay down its revolving credit line by $2 billion this year, and prepay the remaining $3.6 billion of debt owed to the VEBA retiree health care trust. As of Sept. 30, Ford’s total automotive debt was $26.4 billion.

Godard, 79, was invited to the November 13 ceremony to accept an honorary Oscar marking his 50 years as “one of the seminal modernists of in history of cinema” through films like “Breathless” and “Sympathy for the Devil”.

But the Academy said that after a “two month long, cordial exchange of correspondence”, Godard notified Academy president Tom Sherak that he would not be able to attend the ceremony.

“He reiterated his thanks for the award,” Sherak said in a statement, “and also sent his good wishes to the other individuals being honored the same night — Kevin Brownlow, Francis Ford Coppola and Eli Wallach — who he refers to as ‘the three other musketeers.’”

The dinner ceremony will pay tribute to Godard through film clips and commentary by admirers. The award will be accepted on Godard’s behalf by the Academy, and the Oscar statuette will be delivered to him in Switzerland, the Academy said.

Godard, who prefers to make small budget movies, has in the past stayed away from large public events, including the 2010 Cannes film festival.

The Academy last year moved its honorary Oscars ceremony to November instead of handing them out during the main Academy Awards in February.

The company, best known for its educational software program, Imagine Learning English, sees its foray into the mobile app market as another way to deliver engaging literacy instruction to children. “Kids naturally love to explore picture books, but the iPhone and iPad invite an even higher level of engagement,” said Clydie Wakefield, vice president of instructional design at Imagine Learning.

“With Bookster, kids can touch the words on the screen and hear them spoken, turn pages, listen to a narrator, and even become narrators themselves by recording their own voices. In the process, they learn print concepts, they expand their vocabulary, and they develop a love of reading,” said Wakefield.

The app features dynamic artwork by New York Times bestselling illustrator Maryn Roos, as well as instructional components adapted from Imagine Learning English like sync-highlighted text and echo reading capabilities.

The app was designed with both children and educators in mind, says Derek Dobson, director of products at Imagine Learning. “We envision Bookster being utilized not only in homes, but in schools as well,” said Dobson. “More and more classrooms are implementing mobile devices like iPads and iPods as part of the curriculum, and we are working to meet schools’ technology needs by supplying them with quality content that is both educational and engaging.”

In a review on ipadcurriculum.com, a website that spotlights top educational iPad applications and practices, 2009 Edublog award-winner Kelly Tenkely identified Bookster as a valuable tool for helping students develop fluency.

Tenkely noted that giving students feedback on proper pronunciation and enunciation can be a challenge. Bookster helps teachers provide better feedback by enabling students to “play back their recording and compare what they recorded with the prerecorded narration, hearing the difference for themselves,” Tenkely wrote.

Additional stories and updates for Bookster are in development. The company appreciates feedback from parents, educators, and kids who use the app. Consumers are encouraged to download the app and submit reviews to the iTunes App Store or at bookster@imaginelearning.com.

September’s seasonally-adjusted reading showed 4.53 million existing home sales on an annual basis, up 10% from August’s tally of 4.12 million, but 19.1% below the 5.6 million sold in September 2009. The median price tag was $171,700, down 3.3% from a month ago and 2.4% from last year. Distressed sales accounted for 35% of all sales in September.

“This is the biggest monthly gain in 28 years, even though we should be closer to 5 million [monthly home sales] given the rate of population growth,” says NAR spokesman Walter Molony. “Buyers are responding to low interest rates, but what hurts is the anemic pace of job growth,” he explains.

The NAR’s gauge of existing home prices bottomed in February at $164,600, then rose until reaching $183,000 in June. The figure has since fallen for three straight months, and the latest decline comes amid the latest turmoil in the market over whether banks properly followed foreclosure processes. The uproar sparked several firms to temporarily halt foreclosures and on Monday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said regulators are “looking intensively” at foreclosure procedures to determine “whether systematic weaknesses are leading to improper foreclosures.” GMAC, Bank of America ( BAC – news – people ), JPMorgan Chase ( JPM – news – people ) and Wells Fargo ( WFC – news – people ) are among the firms that have seen their procedures called into question.

The possibility of a federal foreclosure moratorium could cause “potential disruption” in the housing market. Molony says a freeze in foreclosures could have the potential of substantially affecting prices and inventories, as holding back homes that would likely be on the market at lower price levels would temporarily raise home prices. Once a moratorium was raised, it would lead to a flood of cheaper houses entering the market, depressing prices further.

“Foreclosures have been coming in at a steady pace, and they get sold off quickly, but a recent survey we conducted showed that 23% of realtors had clients that didn’t want foreclosed homes because of fears concerning the process,” Molony says.

Though inventories are still quite high, up 8.9% from a year ago, they have been falling on a monthly basis and were down 1.9% to 4.04 million, or a 10.7 month supply, in September. “We are hoping for a decline [in inventories]; flattening prices indicate we won’t go much lower, we think we will be seeing the market gradually pick up next year,” says Molony.

HSBC analyst Kevin Nolan is not as optimistic. “A rise in inventory tends to precede price declines by about six months. Since the inventory started rising roughly eight months ago, it’s no surprise that the median sales price recorded a 2.4% year-over-year decline this month. That follows an 8.0% decline in September 2009,” says Nolan.

“The weakness in the housing market presents a clear risk for the US economy going forward,” Nolan continues. “If house prices keep falling, more homeowners could find themselves with mortgages that exceed the market value of their properties [which] could dampen consumer confidence further and worsen the foreclosure problems currently affecting banks.”

Aside from the foreclosure issues, banks are also facing possible consequences from the mortgage securitizations that accelerated until the housing market crumbled. A group of investors including PIMCO, Blackrock ( BLK – news – people ) and the New York Fed pushing Bank of America, to repurchase loans that were tied into $47 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities.

The slight gains in the U.S. markets occurred early Friday morning with the third-quarter reporting season showing decidedly mixed results so far.

In the current week’s reports, Gary Jenkins, head of fixed income at Evolution Securities, said a majority of reports — 85 out of 103 — showed that earnings beat expectations but only 46 of those reported revenue that exceeded expectations, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell 7/32, to yield 2.565 percent.

The euro rose to $1.2947 from Thursday’s $1.3925. Against the yen, the dollar fell to 81.22 yen from Thursday’s 81.33 yen.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 index rose 0.54 percent, 50.23, to 9,426.71.

The returns are in keeping with yesterday’s slight improvements. On Thursday, U.S. markets rose as a Labor Department report said first-time unemployment benefit claims fell by 23,000 in the week ending Oct. 16.

The Conference Board said leading U.S. economic indicators for September rose 0.3 percent, beating expectations slightly. In an overview of the U.S. economy, the U.S. Federal Reserve said Wednesday “national economic activity continued to rise, albeit at a modest pace” in September.

By close of trading, the Dow Jones industrial average added 38.60 points, 0.35 percent, to 11,146.57. The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 0.18 percent, 2.09 points to 1,180.26. The Nasdaq composite index of tech-dominated stock gained 0.09 percent, 2.28, to 2,459.67.

On the New York Stock Exchange, 1,450 stocks advanced and 1,507 declined on a volume of 5.7 billion shares traded.

The benchmark 10-year treasury note fell 16/32 to yield 2.542 percent.

The euro fell to $1.3921 from Wednesday’s $1.3949. Against the yen, the dollar fell to 81.30 yen from Wednesday’s 81.18 yen.

In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index lost 0.05 percent, 5.12, to 9,376.48.

In London, the FTSE 100 index rose 0.5 percent, 28.93, to 5,757.86.

Facebook’s security flaw works something like this: when a Facebook user loads a particular kind of application (one that uses iframes) and authorizes the application to access their profile, the URL of the iframe then carries the user’s UID, a number that can link the account to actions on other websites.

Usually the UID is responsible for webpage personalization, as when a box informs you which of your other friends have “liked” something on a page outside of Facebook. If an ad network or similarly nefarious Web presence is able to mine the iframes for UIDs, it could open users up to a new level of targeting.

To make iframe-based applications handle UIDs more responsibly, Facebook’s Mike Vernal has proposed that developers begin encrypting the parameters passed to these applications. Facebook has posted the technical details of the proposal, followed by a comment thread for developers to give feedback.

Good things, mostly. Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler confesses that the latest iteration of Air fulfills his every need. “After using it pretty much non-stop for the past 7 hours or so, I’m happy to report that I couldn’t find one task in my regular routine that the Air wasn’t able to handle with ease,” Siegler writes. “I did some work, I did some regular browsing, I edited some pictures, I played some videos, etc.”

“To be honest, it makes me feel a little silly,” Siegler continued. “Why on Earth have I been lugging around a machine that’s twice as heavy if I didn’t need it? I’m not sure. The lure of the 2.8 GHz i7 chip, 8GB of RAM, and dual graphics cards got to me, I guess. But I really don’t need that. And I’m sure most people don’t either.”

The staff at Electronista – which posted an unboxing and a quick round of “first impressions” – also likes the rejiggered MacBook Air. Still, they have a few reservations: “The only aspects that are somewhat disappointing are the lack of keyboard backlighting, and the fact that it doesn’t use Intel’s latest generation of Core i series chips, but a previous generation CULV Core 2 Duo.”

“Though, as already noted, performance is more than adequate; it’s just nice to have more processing grunt than one needs. Then again, Apple would have had to sacrifice on graphics performance and increase the asking price,” Electronista writes.

Meanwhile, Jason Snell of PC World takes stock of the impressively sleek dimensions of the MacBook Air. “I love small Mac laptops. The smaller, the better. That’s why I embraced the 12-inch PowerBook (and before it, the iBook),” Snell writes. “But the 11-inch MacBook Air puts that venerated system to shame.” (As we noted yesterday, the MacBook Air will come in two dimensions: 13.3-inch and 11.6-inch.)

“It’s got roughly the same width and depth as the paragon of tiny Mac laptops (the 11-inch Air is almost an inch wider, but is an inch less deep), but of course the Air is also only seven-tenths of an inch thick at its thickest point, while the old PowerBook was a full half-inch thick. And that old standard was twice as heavy (at 4.6 pounds, compared with the 11-inch Air’s 2.3 pounds)

The researchers looking at data from the ongoing Black Women’s Health Study did not find a similar benefit from fruit intake.

Previous studies of the relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and breast cancer in white women have led to conflicting results, and no prior research has investigated this link separately among African American women, lead researcher Dr. Deborah A. Boggs, of Boston University, told Reuters Health in an e-mail.

Boggs noted her team’s earlier work showing that a so-called “prudent diet” high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains and fish led to a lower risk of estrogen receptor-negative breast cancers among African American women.

The ER-negative form of breast cancer, which is insensitive to the hormone estrogen, is more common in this population than among white women. It is also more difficult to treat and more often fatal than estrogen-sensitive cancers.

Overall, breast cancer is the second leading cancer-killer for both African American and white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Approximately 1 in 8 American women will develop the disease at some point in life, although age, heredity and environmental factors can increase an individual’s risk.

Boggs and her colleagues wanted to find out whether fruits and vegetables drove the beneficial effect they saw in women eating the prudent diet and whether specific varieties are particularly protective.

They tracked the diets and health of more than 50,000 African American women from across the U.S. for 12 years. About 1,300 of the women developed new cases of breast cancer during that period, 35 percent of them ER-negative.

The researchers found, however, that women who ate at least two servings of vegetables a day had a 43 percent lower risk of ER-negative breast cancer compared with women who ate fewer than four servings of vegetables each week.

Further, they identified certain types of vegetables that appeared to reduce the risk of all types of breast cancer, including broccoli, collard greens, cabbage and carrots.

Women who ate three or more servings a week of carrots, for instance, had a 17 percent lower risk of developing breast cancer than women who ate carrots less than once a month.

The results for all vegetables held after accounting for other potential breast cancer risk factors, such as physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education level, as well as consumption of other components of the prudent diet, the researchers report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Still, it is too early to determine if this is a true cause-and effect-relationship, they note. High vegetable consumption could mark a healthier lifestyle in general or some other unknown mechanism that accounts for the apparent protection. Vegetables’ cancer-staving power needs to be confirmed in further studies, the researchers write.

“Most Americans do not meet the recommendation of five servings of vegetables per day, based on a 2,000-calorie diet, and African Americans in particular eat fewer vegetables on average than do whites,” said Boggs.

“It is clear that, in addition to potential protective effects against breast cancer, higher vegetable consumption can lead to many health benefits, including lower risk of cardiovascular disease,” she added. “Therefore, we recommend that African American women try to increase their daily intake of vegetables to meet the established guidelines.”