Vending Machine Back Up Plans?

The student health center at Shippensburg University, a public institution of 8,300 students in the Cumberland Valley, provides the Plan B One Step emergency contraceptive in a vending machine along with condoms, decongestants and pregnancy tests. For $25, students at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania can get the "morning-after" pill without coming face-to-face with another person.

Federal law makes the pill available without a prescription to anyone 17 or older and the school checked records and found that all current students are that age or older but that hasn't stopped U.S. Food and Drug Administration from contacting state officials and the university to gather facts.

Aspirin, ibuprofen, antacids and other common over-the-counter remedies have long been available in vending machines, but some see a trend in making drugs like Plan B, which is kept behind the pharmacy counter, available in a vending machine. It's part of the general trend that drugs are available for consumers without interface with a pharmacist or doctors.

In December, the Obama administration overruled drug regulators and stopped the Plan B pill from moving onto drugstore shelves next to condoms and other items. It remains available behind pharmacy counters. In addition, Teva Pharmaceuticals (which makes Plan B) said that it sells the product only to "licensed pharmacies or other licensed healthcare clinics, which are required to follow federal guidelines for the distribution of pharmaceutical products." On whether the machine might violate the law is unclear.

Also while the ease of access to such a machine could be positive for many women, could highly accessible "self-treatment" deter sexual assault victims from seeking medical attention?

I guess the administration representing a potent drug as no more harmful than a pack of Juicy Fruit gum kinda rubs me the wrong way...

I Love College

Former Stanford University Computer Science professor Sebastian Thrun is starting his own free online school, Udacity.

This is awesome but how did this happen? Well, when Thrun taught an online class on Artificial Intelligence through Stanford, 160,000 students around the world enrolled and 23,000 graduated the course with a Stanford University certificate – 248 of whom had a perfect score.

So Thrun turned down tenure at Standford to teach young nerds across the country how to code through his own online university and currently is offering two courses - CS 101: Building a Search Engine (in which he hopes to enroll 500,000 students) and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car.

So basically, if teachers want to teach and people want to learn....no one has to shell out six figures.