TRANSPARENCY: Judicial Watch Obtains 106-Page HHS Document Revealing Scope of Obamacare Rollout Disaster. Some highlights:

On October 1, there were 43,208 accounts created and 1 enrollment. (Page 49)

As of October 31, 2013, there were 1,319,425 accounts created nationwide – but only 30,512 actual enrollments in Obamacare. (Page 19)

On October 1, 2013, at the end of the first day (4:30), the Senior Advisor at Center forConsumer Information and Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Brigid M. Russell, sent out an email to her staff with a subject line celebrating “2 enrollments!” The body copy of the email read: “We have our second official FFM enrollment! The first two Form 834s sent out are to: 1) CareSource in Ohio, 2) BCBS of North Carolina. (Page 90)

Official figures contained in the HHS report provide conflicting figures as to the number of enrollments. FFM [Federally Facilitated Marketplace] statistics show 23,259 cumulative to-date applications submitted as of 10/2/13 and 286 completed plan selections. Earlier numbers show 356 enrollments created as of 7pm on 10/2/13 that were completed with Form 834s sent. (Pages 91-92)

An October 2, 2013, email from HHS Special Assistant Marianne Bowen indicated serious problems with congressional enrollments: “The Congressional issue (68 attempts for Direct enrollment) was an issue stemming from incomplete applications being sent through (started, not finished, sent anyway) and the way the issuers are assigning unique numbers. Turns out there were only 4 complete Direct Enrollment applications that went through, the other 64 were not complete.” (Page 93) [The U.S. Congress has approximately 24,000 professional staffers.]

On October 2, 2013, the Obamacare website had 70,000 page views but only 5,000 were unique visitors, and 48% of registrations failed. The large number of page views may have been the result of visitors repeatedly hitting the “refresh” button due to long waiting times. (Page 106)

Follow the link for more.

IMAGES: Exploring the Depths of Florida’s Swamps and Springs.

OUT: REGULATORY CAPTURE. In: Academic Capture.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: YOU SPELLED “BECAUSE OF” WRONG. A new report by the progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies finds that salaries for the top 25 highest-paid public-research university presidents have swelled in recent years despite the growth of student debt and various faculty disenfranchisement issues.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Higher Education’s Self-Beclowning. With guest appearances by IowaHawk, and Yale Law’s Stephen L. Carter.

DID NORTH KOREA Kidnap This American Hiker?

REVIEW: Motorola’s $129 Moto E is good and cheap (but mostly good).

BACKUP YOUR BRAIN: The Neuroscientist Who Wants To Upload Humanity To A Computer: Randal Koene is recruiting top neuroscientists to help him make humans live forever.

Of course, if your mind is uploaded, whoever controls the hardware and software controls your mind. That seemed less sinister in the 1990s than it does today.

The best science fiction treatment of this that I’ve read is Greg Egan’s Permutation City. Back in the Mobius Dick days I had a song on this — I recommend the Club Dance Edit.

GOOD ADVICE: Be Skeptical of That Measles “Cure” for Cancers.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Higher Education’s Self-Beclowning.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE: Professors Inflate Grades Because Their Jobs Depend On It.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Students Accused of Rape Can Fight Back // Court OKs Suits Against University, Employees, and Female.

With so much attention focused on the alleged failures of many universities to forcefully prosecute male students accused of date rape and sexual assault, the problem of universities whose judicial proceedings are unfair to the accused, and/or are overzealous because of pressure from female students or otherwise, have been largely overlooked.

But now a new judicial ruling gives those wrongly convicted a powerful new weapon – they can sue the university, the employees who participated in the proceedings, and even the accused herself in federal court for substantial monetary damages and other remedies, notes public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who was twice called a “radical feminist.”

After a school tribunal at Saint Joseph’s University found a male student to have committed sexual assault arising out of an incident of allegedly consensual sexual intercourse, he took legal action, says Banzhaf, who has been successful in over 100 sex discrimination proceedings.

The federal court held that he was entitled to sue the private university under the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, and that he could also sue the university, university employees, and the female complainant for defamation (slander), with the court holding that their accusatory statements about him were not legally privileged.

Banzhaf has a nose for developing legal trends.

HIGHER EDUCATION: ENGINE OF INEQUALITY?

In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, roughly 75 percent of the students at the 200 most highly rated colleges came from families in the top quartile of income, he said. Only 5 percent came from families in the bottom quartile, and while that’s up from 3 percent in 1994, it’s no huge advance or cause to rejoice.

Carnevale told me that since 1994, 80 percent of the white young men and women in this country who have headed off to college have gone to schools ranked in the top 500 by Barron’s. But 75 percent of the black and Latino young men and women who have entered college over the same period have gone to two-year or open-admissions schools outside the top 500.

“We’re sorting students by class,” he said. The most prestigious colleges are crowded with the richest kids.

Perhaps we need to move past the antiquated notion that colleges should choose their own students. In the interest of equality, college admissions should probably be handled by outside groups who will make sure that things are fair. Indeed, the very notion of “elite” schools is anti-equality.

NEW THINKING ON WHY PEOPLE ARE GETTING FATTER: “One reason we consume so many refined carbohydrates today is because they have been added to processed foods in place of fats — which have been the main target of calorie reduction efforts since the 1970s. Fat has about twice the calories of carbohydrates, but low-fat diets are the least effective of comparable interventions, according to several analyses, including one presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association this year. A recent study by one of us, Dr. Ludwig, and his colleagues published in JAMA examined 21 overweight and obese young adults after they had lost 10 to 15 percent of their body weight, on diets ranging from low fat to low carbohydrate. Despite consuming the same number of calories on each diet, subjects burned about 325 more calories per day on the low carbohydrate than on the low fat diet — amounting to the energy expended in an hour of moderately intense physical activity. . . . If this hypothesis turns out to be correct, it will have immediate implications for public health.”

Gary Taubes gets a mention.

THE DEMOCRATS’ WAR ON WOMEN.

I DOUBT IT, BUT IF THEY DID, THEY’RE PROBABLY REGRETTING IT NOW: Did NSA blackmail Roberts to OK Obamacare?

Related: Obamacare Has Granted 1 Million Incorrect Health Insurance Subsidies. “The Obama administration doesn’t really want to talk about any of this, because they promised this wouldn’t be a problem.”

#NOPERSONALSTATEMENTS: Samuel Goldman: Abolish The College Admissions Essay.

SCIENCE: Some People’s Brains Are Wired For Sex.

HIGHER EDUCATION: NOT SUCH AN ECONOMIC EQUALIZER AFTER ALL? “Whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.” So encouraging poor and working-class kids to go to college may leave them without a degree, but with debt, and thus worse off than if they hadn’t gone at all.

This is something I’ve talked about before. But read the whole thing, as there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on at UT-Austin, though I question whether it will scale.

PRAGER UNIVERSITY: 4 Reforms That Would Make Our Schools More Boy-Friendly. With Christina Hoff Sommers.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Higher Education’s Self-Beclowning.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 375.