Byline: Robert MacMillan

Bring me my iPods of desire.

So that's not how Blake wrote it, but it does seem like Apple's popular digital music player is getting plenty of mileage in Britain's green and pleasant land.

The London Times reported that Bournemouth and Poole College is offering students iPods valued at 170 pounds ($310), along with 100 pounds ($182) in cash if they sign up for its "Step up 4 summer" program. "ONCE the prospect of a certificate and a handshake from the headmaster was all the incentive a student needed. Today it takes an iPod and [pounds sterling]100 in cash to persuade unemployed teenagers to sign up for a course intended to improve their job prospects. A further education college in Bournemouth has been inundated with inquiries from prospective students since it announced the reward scheme on Saturday," the Times wrote. "The bill for the rewards, which could total [pounds sterling]119,000 [~$217,000] for the iPods and around [pounds sterling]750,000 [~$1.37 million] including the other benefits, will be met by the taxpayer."

The 14-week course, the Times said, shows students how to apply for jobs, gives them interview tips and teaches them how to prepare resumes.

But the effort has also prompted anger among the populace: "Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, described offering iPods as an incentive to learning as 'horrific'. He said: 'Maybe these people shouldn't be in education at all if the reason they are doing it is to get an iPod.'" Nick Seaton, head of the "pressure group" Campaign for Real Education, told the Times: "It looks like bribery. It tells young people that they don't have to do anything unless they're getting a sweetener for it, which is wrong. The money could have been spent better on books or getting more teachers into schools."

The BBC quoted a spokeswoman from the college who seems to have pursued a degree in fine distinctions: "They don't perceive themselves as wanting to engage in learning or training so I see it as an incentive to get them back in to learning. They do have to be treated differently. I personally do not see it as a bribe. I see it as an incentive."

The iPod "incentive" plan first sprang up in Scotland, where school officials in Glasgow touted the players among other things as a reward for students who choose to eat healthier meals.

The Evening Times now reports that Glaswegian youngsters in fact no longer deign to eat meals in the school system at all: "The percentage of pupils in the city's 29 secondaries who choose to eat lunch in school has dropped from 46.4% to 43.2% in a year. Over a five-year period it has fallen even more sharply. Primary schools in the city have seen a similar decrease in pupils taking school meals, whether free or bought. In 2000 more than half of all secondary pupils took school meals, with an uptake of 51.8%."

The Herald quoted a Glasgow City Council spokeswoman as saying that the program is proving popular so far: "After a successful pilot scheme the project was rolled out to all 29 secondary schools in the area. So far, we have given out 90 iPods, 156 Xboxes, 104 Amazon vouchers and 252 cinema tickets." That's a good thing, especially considering that ABC News sent a TV crew to St. Thomas Aquinas secondary school to do a story that presumably will be tied to our own obesity problem here in the states, the Herald reported.

Northern Virginia might be a hub for the high-tech industry, but technology still gets the best of the state from time to time. Last month, it was revealed that officials had lost track of 250 sex offenders listed on its online registry. Then this week comes news that the commonwealth's schools are holding a bagfull of faulty calculators.

The Virginia Department of Education recalled thousands of calculators after Dakota Brown, a 12-year-old sixth grader at Carver Middle School in Chesterfield County, discovered that pressing two particular keys at once could convert decimals into fractions. The Virginian-Pilot covered the news: "Michael F. Bolling, the Chesterfield County instructional specialist for math, remembers the e-mail he received from Dakota's teacher. 'I think the teacher said, "I don't think this is a big deal, but ..."' Bolling said. Bolling knew it was. He informed the state about problem. Within days, the state sent a message to the more than 130 divisions recalling the calculator."

The paper described the problem as a flaw in the particular calculator model, but in fact it's quite the opposite. The calculators, manufactured by Texas Instruments, allow students to do simple work in algebra and trigonometry, but Virginia requires the decimal-to-fraction work be done through brainpower alone.

"The state specifically asked Texas Instruments two years ago to wipe out the fraction function on its calculators if it wanted to sell them to Virginia's schools, said Lois A. Williams, a middle-school math specialist with the Virginia Department of Education," the Pilot article said, but apparently TI translated "to wipe out" as "to hide." Here's more from the Virginian-Pilot: "Texas Instruments disabled the key that converted numbers into fractions and left it blank on the calculator. The calculator passed a review by officials at Texas Instruments and the staff of the state's math department, Williams said."

The timing of Dakota's discovery worked out well, the paper noted: "State officials said they are relieved that the problem was discovered before Virginia's middle-school students used the calculators on their Standards of Learning tests. Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders will be allowed to use the calculators for the first time on next year's math tests."

That didn't faze the other kids at Carver MS, though, the Associated Press quoted Bolling as saying: "His fellow students were so proud of him and congratulatory. They thought it was really, really cool. They didn't call him a nerd or anything."

Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Ray McAllister said that the state had ordered 160,000 calculators from TI at $8 each. He also provided an update on the situation: "An employee of a public-relations agency for TI said yesterday that 97 percent of the TI-30Xa SE VA calculators have been replaced."

We in the media love happy endings, so it's worth it to note that Dakota was rewarded for his troubles: "Officials and TI also presented Dakota with five scientific calculators during a visit to the school in April," McAllister wrote. "'We're very proud of him,' said his father, Kirk Brown, a chemical technician at B.I. Chemicals in Petersburg."

Millionaire Scottish businessman and amateur race car driver Ronnie Klos was cleared on a technicality after facing a possible prison sentence for speeding at 156 miles per hour in his BMW... while one of his hands was facilitating a cell phone conversation.

"Mr Klos had denied driving his BMW M3 CSL at 156mph on the A92 near Kirkcaldy, Fife, on 2 May last year, while talking on a mobile phone," the Scotsman reported. "The court heard evidence from a speed camera operator that he had witnessed the businessman driving the car, and photos alleged to have been of Mr Klos behind the wheel of the car at the time of the offence were also produced in court. Mr Klos denied he was the driver and claimed the car must have been borrowed by a friend who had been at a party he had attended."

Klos might be a danger to himself and those around him, but at least he's a sober danger. His company, Fire and Flood Damage Restoration, said it would be the first in Scotland to breath-test its employees before driving: "He said at the time: 'Anyone under the influence of alcohol is a danger, not just to themselves but to colleagues, customers and other road users,'" the paper wrote.

The growing popularity of the "Jack" FM radio format is starting to leave a trail of unemployed DJs and angry radio listeners.

Newsday reported on WCBS FM's switch from an oldies format to the new "iPod-on-shuffle" mode, but focused more on what listeners are missing than the new music they're getting: "By Saturday afternoon, [Bobby] Pace, of Howard Beach, still hadn't found a new favorite, resigning himself instead to news station 1010/WINS. At 5 p.m. on Friday, the classic Top 40 radio station, which played tunes from the 1950s and 1960s, threw out Frank Sinatra and Buddy Holly for the more modern-day sounds of the Beastie Boys and Tom Petty. 'Everything is geared toward the younger generation. There's nothing for our age,' Denise Gallo, 45, of Howard Beach, said Saturday. 'The doo-wop is gone. It's the end of an era.'" Didn't the sun set on doo-wop during the Johnson administration?