? There's more bad news about Illinois' worst-in-the-nation government worker pension debt, but it's not as awful as it could have been.
The pension shortfall is projected to hit a record $102.7 billion by next summer if cost-saving reforms aren't put in place. The size of the hole, however, is expected to grow at a slightly slower pace in the next year. Aides to Gov. Pat Quinn say that's because the state has been making full pension payments and is seeing the effect of a lower set of benefits for newer employees.
The new calculations also mean that Quinn will have to revise downward his stock line about Illinois losing $17 million for each day the pension problem goes unresolved. The administration now projects the price tag at a little more than $5 million a day, but that's not going to give taxpayers much solace.
"We're just not bleeding quite as fast, but we're still bleeding out. We've got to find a way to stop this," said Hans Zigmund, Quinn's chief budget economist.
Last week, 10 lawmakers ? six Democrats and four Republicans ? from the House and Senate held a new round of hearings on the state's pension problem. They make up a conference committee that Quinn requested House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton to form to try to break the stalemate between the two Democratic legislative leaders.
Quinn has called on the committee to "work around the clock" to forge a compromise by July 9, but the panel's chairman, Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, has cast doubt on that deadline as unrealistic.
The lawmakers are trying to find a new path between or around two hardened positions: Madigan pushed through the House unilateral cuts that would have raised the retirement age, made workers chip in more from their paychecks and scaled back the cost-of-living increases for retirees. Cullerton's Senate-passed plan centered on giving state workers and retirees a choice, such as giving up on an automatically compounded 3 percent annual cost-of-living increase to keep health coverage or keeping the automatic annual pension boosts in exchange for giving up health care.
Madigan's savings: an estimated $187 billion. Cullerton's savings: an estimated $57.6 billion, depending on the choices people make. Madigan's plan called for 100 percent funding after 30 years. Cullerton's set a target of 90 percent funding during that same timetable.
Jerry Stermer, Quinn's budget chief, said the administration's goals now are to erase the debt, stabilize the pension system so that people will get a pension and "stop the squeeze" on the basic core services of state government.
The near-daily reminder of the costly pension conundrum was underscored further last week.
The state did a routine borrowing of $1.3 billion for public works projects, and Quinn budget officials determined taxpayers will pay an extra $130 million in interest due to lowered credit ratings following inaction on pension reform. Toss in other borrowing this year, and the state is getting charged $180 million extra due to its bottom-feeder status among credit rating agencies, officials said.
State officials had projected that the overall pension debt ? once thought to be about $96.8 billion ? would hit $100.8 billion by Sunday, the last day of the state budget year. It is expected to grow to $102.7 billion a year from now, Quinn's budget office said.
"It's not that we're really getting a lot better," Zigmund said. "It's just that we're getting worse less fast."
The state is paying $6 billion for pensions in the new operating budget ? up from $5.25 billion in the last one ? based on a formula created by a pension payback plan put in place in 1995.
But the real cost of pensions in the new budget year might be more accurately pegged at $7.7 billion. That includes the $1.7 billion in payments on two pension loans taken out under Quinn as well as a major $10 billion pension bond dating to 2003 under his predecessor, Rod Blagojevich.
The $7.7 billion represents about 21.7 percent of the overall state operating budget, or better than one of every five dollars in general funds. Quinn and lawmakers managed to keep school spending for this school year at the same level, but the schools had suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts in recent years because dollars for education, social services and other state operations competed with the rising costs of state pensions.
What Democratic Rep. Elaine Nekritz of Northbrook fears as she sits on the new pension committee is that the state could soon see 30 percent of its general funds going to pensions, an amount that's "just not affordable."
June 30, 2013 ? Spawning droughts, floods, and other weather disturbances world-wide, the El Ni?o -- Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts the daily life of millions of people. During El Ni?o, Atlantic hurricane activity wanes and rainfall in Hawaii decreases while Pacific winter storms shift southward, elevating the risk of floods in California.
The ability to forecast how ENSO will respond to global warming thus matters greatly to society. Providing accurate predictions, though, is challenging because ENSO varies naturally over decades and centuries. Instrumental records are too short to determine whether any changes seen recently are simply natural or attributable to human-made greenhouse gases. Reconstructions of ENSO behavior are usually missing adequate records for the tropics where ENSO develops.
Help is now underway in the form of a tree-ring record reflecting ENSO activity over the past seven centuries. Tree-rings have been shown to be very good proxies for temperature and rainfall measurements. An international team of scientists spearheaded by Jinbao Li and Shang-Ping Xie, while working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, has compiled 2,222 tree-ring chronologies of the past seven centuries from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. Their work is published in the June 30, 2013 online issue of Nature Climate Change.
The inclusion of tropical tree-ring records enabled the team to generate an archive of ENSO activity of unprecedented accuracy, as attested by the close correspondence with records from equatorial Pacific corals and with an independent Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction that captures well-known teleconnection climate patterns.
These proxy records all indicate that ENSO was unusually active in the late 20th century compared to the past seven centuries, implying that this climate phenomenon is responding to ongoing global warming.
"In the year after a large tropical volcanic eruption, our record shows that the east-central tropical Pacific is unusually cool, followed by unusual warming one year later. Like greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols perturb the Earth's radiation balance. This supports the idea that the unusually high ENSO activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming," explains lead author Jinbao Li.
"Many climate models do not reflect the strong ENSO response to global warming that we found," says co-author Shang-Ping Xie, meteorology professor at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa and Roger Revelle Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. "This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases. Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future ENSO activity. If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts."
June 30, 2013 ? What allows certain plants to survive freezing and thrive in the Canadian climate, while others are sensitive to the slightest drop in temperature? Those that flourish activate specific genes at just the right time -- but the way gene activation is controlled remains poorly understood.
A major step forward in understanding this process lies in a genomic map produced by an international consortium led by scientists from McGill University and the University of Toronto and published online today in the journal Nature Genetics.
The map, which is the first of its kind for plants, will help scientists to localize regulatory regions in the genomes of crop species such as canola, a major crop in Canada, according to researchers who worked on the project. The team has sequenced the genomes of several crucifers (a large plant family that includes a number of other food crops) and analyzed them along with previously published genomes to map more than 90,000 genomic regions that have been highly conserved but that do not appear to encode proteins.
"These regions are likely to play important roles in turning genes on or off, for example to regulate a plant's development or its response to environmental conditions," says McGill computer-science professor Mathieu Blanchette, one of the leaders of the study. Work is currently underway to identify which of those regions may be involved in controlling traits of particular importance to farmers.
The study also weighs in on a major debate among biologists, concerning how much of an organism's genome has important functions in a cell, and how much is "junk DNA," merely along for the ride. While stretches of the genome that code for proteins are relatively easy to identify, many other 'noncoding' regions may be important for regulating genes, activating them in the right tissue and under the right conditions.
While humans and plants have very similar numbers of protein-coding genes, the map published in Nature Genetics further suggests that the regulatory sequences controlling plant genes are far simpler, with a level of complexity between that of fungi and microscopic worms. "These findings suggest that the complexity of different organisms arises not so much from what genes they contain, but how they turn them on and off," says McGill biology professor Thomas Bureau, a co-author of the paper.
In a June 28 "Brow Beat" blog post, June Thomas switched the postures of Bert and Ernie in a New Yorker cover. Bert is draping his arm around Ernie and Ernie is resting his head on Bert's shoulder.
In a June 27 "Crime" blog post, Justin Peters stated that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is 20 years old. He is 19.
In a June 27 "Future Tense" blog post, Jason Bittel left the "s" off of Geriatrics in the American Geriatrics Society.
In a June 27 "Future Tense" blog post, Jason Bittel originally omitted the word "Democratic" from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
In a June 27 "Moneybox" blog post, Matthew Yglesias misspelled Nicola Fuchs-Sch?ndeln's last name.
In a June 26, "Frame Game," William Saletan misidentified the litigants who sought to reinstate California?s ban on gay marriage. They were petitioners, not the plaintiffs.
In a June 26 ?Jurisprudence,? Jessica Winter defined the Scalia-ism "lynch mob" as an epithet used by opponents of marriage equality. Scalia employs it as an epithet used by proponents of marriage equality.
In a June 26 "Moneybox" blog post, Matthew Yglesias described the Federal Reserve's dual mandate as including "maximum unemployment." The Fed is supposed to maximize employment and minimize unemployment.
In a June 26 ?Technology,? Will Oremus misspelled the surname of LinkedIn product lead Brad Mauney.
In a June 26 ?Weigel? blog post, Emma Roller wrote that Glenn Greenwald has citizenship in Brazil. He is living in Brazil on a permanent visa.
In the June 25 ?Interrogation? of Pedro Almod?var, June Thomas asserted that the director?s brother, Agust?n, didn?t make a cameo appearance in the 1995 film The Flower of My Secret. In fact, he is seen in the press room of El Pa?s newspaper.
In a June 25 ?Weigel? blog post, David Weigel misspelled John Dickerson?s last name.
In a June 24 "Crime" blog post, Justin Peters stated that Edwin Ernesto Rivera Gracias has a round, unmemorable baby face. Jose Manuel Garcia Guevara is the baby-faced fugitive in question.
In a June 24 Mad Men ?TV Club,? Hanna Rosin misstated that Sally got kicked out of school. She was suspended.?
Slate?strives to correct all errors of fact. If you've seen an error in our pages, let us know at?corrections@slate.com. General comments should be?posted?in our Comments sections at the bottom of each article.
IRIS, the new NASA space telescope, is being sent aloft to study a region of the sun's atmosphere physicists previously had little interest in, so much so the region was dubbed the 'ignorosphere.'
By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / June 27, 2013
This undated image shows technicians preparing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., for the launch of IRIS, the new NASA space telescope, that will study the sun. NASA is set to launch the space telescope Thursday night.
Randy Beaudoin/VAFB/NASA/AP
Enlarge
NASA is set to launch a space telescope Thursday night that is designed to explore the sun's version of terra incognita ? a region between the sun's lower atmosphere and its expansive outer atmosphere blandly dubbed the interface region.
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Indeed, for understanding some of the sun's processes, solar physicists didn't need to know what was going on there, earning it the title "ignorosphere," notes Ed DeLuca, a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
But over the past five to 10 years, as physicists developed models to more fully represent the sun's processes, it became clear that the ignorosphere could be ignored no longer.
It's the region that generates most of the ultraviolet light the sun delivers to Earth, affecting everything from sun tans to atmospheric chemistry and climate. It's thought to play a key role in the solar outbursts that can disrupt power grids and satellite navigation. And, mysteriously, it's the region where temperatures in the sun's atmosphere soar.
At the top of the sun's lower atmosphere, known as the chromosphere, temperatures rise from about 10,000 degrees at the sun's surface to roughly 36,000 degrees. Processes in the interface region ? only about 200 miles thick ? kick those temperatures up to 1 million degrees F., feeding an even hotter outer atmosphere, or corona. There, temperatures are comparable to those in the sun's core.
Getting a handle on what's happening in the interface region is challenging because the region is so thin and because the processes taking place there are so fast. And with more mass than all the matter in the corona or in the solar wind currently flowing through the solar system, the interface region's density can make it hard to observe.
Hints of just how fast processes are have come from Japan's Hinode orbiting solar observatory.
Taking one image every 4 seconds, the craft delivered data that allowed researchers to produce a short video starring a dense forest of hair-like tendrils of plasma rising through the interface region. These represent the central cores of jets of hot gas that rise to give the top of the interface region the look ? from a distance ? of rolling hills.
The hair-like cores are about 100 miles wide and some 10,000 miles long, said Alan Title, a solar physicist with Lockheed Martin Corporation and the mission's lead scientist, during a prelaunch briefing. They rocket up through the transition region at about 270,000 miles an hour, and last for about 10 minutes before vanishing, only to be replaced by fresh tendrils.
The images Hinode captured were scientifically useful. But seeing them, scientists also realized "for the first time that four-second exposures and just one wavelength [of light] wasn't enough" to see the full structures, Dr. Title said
NASA?s new solar telescope, known as IRIS, aims to remedy that.
As satellites go, it's a lightweight. Some seven feet long, the craft and its telescope weigh 403 pounds. IRIS is set for launch between 10:27 and 10:32 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time tonight from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast. It's being launched on an Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket ? a launch vehicle carried aloft underneath an L-1011 jet, then release for its final ascent.
IRIS has 20 times the ability of previous telescopes to see fine details. Its instrument, an imaging spectrometer, can make measurements 20 times faster than its predecessors. And it is designed to gather ultraviolet light at several groups of wavelengths.
And that's a good thing, Dr. DeLuca says, because if the models are correct, processes in the interface zone are nothing if not complicated.
From the sun's core through its surface, the photosphere, the sun's hot gas is dense enough to twist and contort the star's magnetic fields, DeLuca explains. Up in the corona, the reverse it true, with magnetic fields working their will on the hot gas, giving shape to the enormous, glowing coronal loops that appear there.
In the ignorosphere, however, magnetic fields hold sway over gas in some areas. In others, the opposite happens. And still other regions neither gas nor magnetism holds sway over the other, DeLuca says. The shapes of structures in this region are equally complex.
Still, to understand the corona's energy budget and the role magnetic fields play in transferring energy from the sun's surface to the corona, getting a handle on the interface region is important.
"It's all gotta go through the chromosphere and interface region," he says.
Pacifica shark attack: Shark attacks are on the rise, but odds of becoming a shark attack victim are still very close to nil.
By Elizabeth Barber,?Contributor / June 27, 2013
A great white shark near Mexico drags buoys after taking bait.
Chris Ross/Chris Fischer/National Geographic Channel
Enlarge
A shark attacked a kayaker near Pacifica State Beach in Pacifica, California on Tuesday, the latest victim in a rising tally of shark attacks that likely has less to do with burgeoning shark aggression and more to do with more aggressive media coverage of shark incidents.
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The victim, Micah Flansburg, was fishing some 100 yards off from the beach at 3:30 p.m. when a Great White shark rose up under the boat and then took it in its teeth. The man was frightened, but unharmed.
"It was intense. It was just like the Discovery Channel where you see the eyes roll to the back of the head and the pink gums and his teeth bared," Flansburg told ABC.
Shark attack news reached a decade high in 2012, with about 80 unprovoked shark attack reports?worldwide, seven of which were fatal. Some eight of those attacks were off the US Pacific coast and another 26 were in Florida, the state that accounts for about half of all shark attacks in the United States, mostly because that state?s appealing beaches are so heavily trafficked. North America as a whole also accounts for about half of all shark attacks worldwide, but researchers are unsure what combination of meteorological, oceanographic, economic, and social factors are to blame for that trend.
Attacks that are considered provoked, such as when a shark attacks someone trying to pet or fish it, are not included in those tallies. Attacks on already drowned humans are also not included.
On the whole, shark attacks have been on upswing over the last century, but scientists have said that those worrying numbers are largely due to increased efforts to document those incidents. Rates have also climbed as people spend more recreational time in the water, especially so in remote areas where sharks once reigned supreme. Other factors in shark attacks, such as climate change, have not yet been adequately studied to be linked to climbing reports of attack rates.
Some 60 percent of all shark attacks are on surfers, since that category of water users are more likely to be in the surf zone, where sharks sometimes lurk. Surfers are also more likely than swimmers to be kicking up water and alerting sharks to their presence.
In the event of a shark attack, scientists at The Florida Museum of Natural History recommend an aggressive response, like hitting its snout or clawing at its eyes or gills.
But that?s a tip we?re unlikely to ever need to use. The odds of becoming a shark attack victim, based on beach attendance rates in the US, is about one in 11.5 million. The odds of dying in an attack are about 0 in 264.1 million ? or, about nil.?
For perspective:
Odds of getting crush crushed by a vending machine are about 1 in 112 million.
Odds of becoming president are 1 in 10 million.
Odds of dating a supermodel are 1 in 88,000.
Odds of finding a pearl in an oyster are 1 in 12,000.
Odds are, these things are more likely to happen to you than a shark attack.
Odds are, none of these things will happen to you.
Rapper Eminem admits in a new documentary that his abuse of prescription drugs almost killed him. "My bottom was going to be death," the rapper said in an interview in "How to Make Money Selling Drugs," a 2013 documentary.
(Warning: The film excerpt is expletive-filled.)
The musician talks about how his first Vicodin was a revelation for him since it made him feel "mellow" and also took away his pain.
Friends tried to warn him that he was in trouble, Eminem said, but he pushed them away since he didn't view prescription drug abuse as the same as using crack or heroin.
?I would say, ?Get that (expletive) person outta here,? ? he said in the film. ?I can?t believe they said that (expletive) to me. ... I literally thought I could control (my drug problem)."
Soon the specific drugs didn't matter. "You're taking things that people are giving you that you don't even know what the (expletive) they are," Eminem said. "Xanax, Valium, tomato, to-mah-to."
The drugs caught up to the rapper and he had to be hospitalized. "Had I got to the hospital about two hours later, I would have died," he recalls in the film. "My organs were shutting down. My liver, kidneys, everything. They were gonna have to put me on dialysis, they didn?t think I was gonna make it. My bottom was gonna be death."
After leaving the hospital, Eminem relapsed within a month. "I remember just walking around my house and thinking every single day, like, I'm gonna (expletive) die." The rapper said he didn't sleep for three weeks, "not even for an (expletive) minute," and had to regain the ability to walk and speak.
"I just couldn?t believe that anybody could be naturally happy or naturally function or be just enjoying life in general without being on something," he said. "So I would say to anybody, ?It does get better.'"
"Entourage" star Adrian Grenier is one of the producers of the film, which includes interviews with Susan Sarandon and Woody Harrelson.
June 27, 2013 ? A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics conducted the most expensive and most elaborate computer simulations so far to study the formation of neutron stars at the center of collapsing stars with unprecedented accuracy. These worldwide first three-dimensional models with a detailed treatment of all important physical effects confirm that extremely violent, hugely asymmetric sloshing and spiral motions occur when the stellar matter falls towards the center. The results of the simulations thus lend support to basic perceptions of the dynamical processes that are involved when a star explodes as supernova.
Stars with more than eight to ten times the mass of our Sun end their lives in a gigantic explosion, in which the stellar gas is expelled into the surrounding space with enormous power. Such supernovae belong to the most energetic and brightest phenomena in the universe and can outshine a whole galaxy for weeks. They are the cosmic origin of chemical elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon, and iron, of which Earth and our bodies are made of, and which are bred in massive stars over millions of years or freshly fused in the stellar explosion.
Supernovae are also the birth places of neutron stars, those extraordinarily exotic, compact stellar remnants, in which about 1.5 times the mass of our Sun is compressed to a sphere with the diameter of Munich. This happens within fractions of a second when the stellar core implodes due to the strong gravity of its own mass. The catastrophic collapse is stopped only when the density of atomic nuclei -- gargantuan 300 million tons in a sugar cube -- is exceeded.
What, however, causes the disruption of the star? How can the implosion of the stellar core be reversed to an explosion? The exact processes are still a matter of intense research. According to the most widely favored scenario, neutrinos, mysterious elementary particles, play a crucial role. These neutrinos are produced and radiated in tremendous numbers at the extreme temperatures and densities in the collapsing stellar core and nascent neutron star. Like the thermal radiation of a heater they heat the gas surrounding the hot neutron star and thus could "ignite" the explosion. In this scenario the neutrinos pump energy into the stellar gas and build up pressure until a shock wave is accelerated to disrupt the star in a supernova. But does this theoretical idea really work? Is it the explanation of the still enigmatic mechanism driving the explosion?
Unfortunately (or luckily!) the processes in the center of exploding stars cannot be reproduced in the laboratory and many solar masses of intransparent stellar gas obscure our view into the deep interior of supernovae. Research is therefore strongly dependent on most sophisticated and challenging computer simulations, in which the complex mathematical equations are solved that describe the motion of the stellar gas and the physical processes that occur at the extreme conditions in the collapsing stellar core. For this task the most powerful existing supercomputers are used, but still it has been possible to conduct such calculations only with radical and crude simplifications until recently. If, for example, the crucial effects of neutrinos were included in some detailed treatment, the computer simulations could only be performed in two dimensions, which means that the star in the models was assumed to have an artificial rotational symmetry around an axis.
Thanks to support from the Rechenzentrum Garching (RZG) in developing a particularly efficient and fast computer program, access to most powerful supercomputers, and a computer time award of nearly 150 million processor hours, which is the greatest contingent so far granted by the "Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE)" initiative of the European Union, the team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching could now for the first time simulate the processes in collapsing stars in three dimensions and with a sophisticated description of all relevant physics.
"For this purpose we used nearly 16,000 processor cores in parallel mode, but still a single model run took about 4.5 months of continuous computing," says PhD student Florian Hanke, who performed the simulations. Only two computing centers in Europe were able to provide sufficiently powerful machines for such long periods of time, namely CURIE at Tr?s Grand Centre de calcul (TGCC) du CEA near Paris and SuperMUC at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) in Munich/Garching.
Many Terabytes of simulation data (1 Terabyte are thousand billion bytes) had to be analysed and visualized before the researchers could grasp the essence of their model runs. What they saw caused excitement as well as astonishment. The stellar gas did not only exhibit the violent bubbling and seething with the characteristic rising mushroom-like plumes driven by neutrino heating in close similarity to what can be observed in boiling water. (This process is called convection.) The scientists also found powerful, large sloshing motions, which temporarily switch over to rapid, strong rotational motions. Such a behavior had been known before and had been named "Standing Accretion Shock Instability," or SASI. This term expresses the fact that the initial sphericity of the supernova shock wave is spontaneously broken, because the shock develops large-amplitude, pulsating asymmetries by the oscillatory growth of initially small, random seed perturbations. So far, however, this had been found only in simplified and incomplete model simulations.
"My colleague Thierry Foglizzo at the Service d' Astrophysique des CEA-Saclay near Paris has obtained a detailed understanding of the growth conditions of this instability," explains Hans-Thomas Janka, the head of the research team. "He has constructed an experiment, in which a hydraulic jump in a circular water flow exhibits pulsational asymmetries in close analogy to the shock front in the collapsing matter of the supernova core." This phenomenon was named "SWASI" ("Shallow Water Analogue of Shock Instability") and allows one to demonstrate dynamical processes in the deep interior of a dying star by a relatively simple and inexpensive experimental setup of table size, of course without accounting for the important effects of neutrino heating. For this reason many astrophysicists had been sceptical that this instability indeed occurs in collapsing stars.
The Garching team could now demonstrate for the first time unambiguously that the SASI also plays an important role in the so far most realistic computer models. "It does not only govern the mass motions in the supernova core but it also imposes characteristic signatures on the neutrino and gravitational-wave emission, which will be measurable for a future Galactic supernova. Moreover, it may lead to strong asymmetries of the stellar explosion, in course of which the newly formed neutron star will receive a large kick and spin," describes team member Bernhard M?ller the most significant consequences of such dynamical processes in the supernova core.
The researchers now plan to explore in more detail the measurable effects connected to the SASI and to sharpen their predictions of associated signals. Moreover, they plan to perform more and longer simulations to understand how the instability acts together with neutrino heating and enhances the efficiency of the latter. The goal is to ultimately clarify whether this conspiracy is the long-searched mechanism that triggers the supernova explosion and thus leaves behind the neutron star as compact remnant.
SAN DIEGO (AP) ? The military's highest court has overturned a murder conviction against a Camp Pendleton Marine in one of the most significant cases against American troops from the Iraq war.
The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces on Wednesday threw out the conviction of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III.
According to the ruling posted on the court's website, the judges agreed with Hutchins, who claimed his constitutional rights were violated when he was held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days during his interrogation.
Hutchins led an eight-man squad accused of kidnapping a retired Iraqi policeman from his home in April 2006, marching him to a ditch and shooting him to death in Hamdania.
The squad's other members served less than 18 months.
UCI researchers awarded $2.27 million to create novel diabetes treatmentsPublic release date: 26-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Tom Vasich tmvasich@uci.edu 949-824-6455 University of California - Irvine
Grants will support islet cell transplantation and insulin sensor projects
Irvine, Calif., June 26, 2013 Two UC Irvine research groups have received $2.27 million from the JDRF to develop innovative methods of treating and possibly curing Type 1 diabetes.
The JDRF, formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, awarded one grant to Jonathan Lakey, associate professor of surgery and biomedical engineering, and Elliot Botvinick, assistant professor of surgery and biomedical engineering; and another to Weian Zhao, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical engineering. Lakey and Zhao are affiliated with the campus's Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.
With $1.27 million in funding over three years, Lakey and Botvinick will try to find a way to successfully transplant encapsulated, stem cell-created pancreatic islets. In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas cannot produce insulin a hormone key to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body making daily insulin treatments necessary.
The pancreas, an organ about the size of a hand, is located behind the lower part of the stomach. It makes insulin and enzymes that help the body digest and use food. Throughout the pancreas are clusters of cells called the islets of Langerhans. Islets are composed of several types of cells, including beta cells that make insulin.
In a previous study, Lakey helped show that transplanted encapsulated islets can create and secrete insulin. A major hurdle, though, is overcoming immune-system rejection of these transplanted islets.
The Lakey-Botvinick team which includes researchers and products from UC Irvine, the University of Oxford, the Netherlands' University of Groningen, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Islet Sheet Medical in San Francisco, Islet Sciences in New York and Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk will explore the use of isolated islets in which the cells are encased in an ultrapure algae membrane.
The encapsulation chemistry allows for selective permeability, meaning that some small molecules, such as glucose and insulin, can pass across the barrier, while large antibodies and immunological molecules are blocked from entering into the space containing the islets.
"Perhaps the greatest challenge in the field of islet transplantation is to make the metabolic benefits available to patients with Type 1 diabetes without the need for chronic immunosuppression," said Lakey, who's also director of UC Irvine Health's Clinical Islet Program. "I believe that this technology has great promise for realizing our goal. And this welcome support from the JDRF should speed our progress."
With the other grant, Zhao and his colleagues will try to develop an insulin sensor for the JDRF's Artificial Pancreas Project, which supports the creation of an automated system to dispense insulin based on real-time changes in blood sugar levels. Central to such a device is a mechanism that can accurately determine blood insulin amounts to provide feedback control for the artificial pancreas.
Existing systems deliver insulin via a pump under closed-loop control using data from a continuous glucose sensor. They are, however, associated with severe risks especially insulin overdose when any of their components malfunction.
Zhao will receive $1 million for the two-year effort, with the potential for further funding if his team comes up with a promising model. "Integrating a real-time insulin sensor into the artificial pancreas system will allow us to precisely monitor and control the levels of both sugar and insulin, ultimately leading to safe and effective management of diabetes," he said.
Other UC Irvine researchers involved in these projects include Bernard Choi, associate professor of surgery and biomedical engineering; Dr. Clarence Foster, clinical professor of surgery and chief of the School of Medicine's transplantation division; and Frank Zaldivar and Dr. Pietro Galassetti with the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science.
###
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UCI researchers awarded $2.27 million to create novel diabetes treatmentsPublic release date: 26-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Tom Vasich tmvasich@uci.edu 949-824-6455 University of California - Irvine
Grants will support islet cell transplantation and insulin sensor projects
Irvine, Calif., June 26, 2013 Two UC Irvine research groups have received $2.27 million from the JDRF to develop innovative methods of treating and possibly curing Type 1 diabetes.
The JDRF, formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, awarded one grant to Jonathan Lakey, associate professor of surgery and biomedical engineering, and Elliot Botvinick, assistant professor of surgery and biomedical engineering; and another to Weian Zhao, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical engineering. Lakey and Zhao are affiliated with the campus's Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.
With $1.27 million in funding over three years, Lakey and Botvinick will try to find a way to successfully transplant encapsulated, stem cell-created pancreatic islets. In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas cannot produce insulin a hormone key to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body making daily insulin treatments necessary.
The pancreas, an organ about the size of a hand, is located behind the lower part of the stomach. It makes insulin and enzymes that help the body digest and use food. Throughout the pancreas are clusters of cells called the islets of Langerhans. Islets are composed of several types of cells, including beta cells that make insulin.
In a previous study, Lakey helped show that transplanted encapsulated islets can create and secrete insulin. A major hurdle, though, is overcoming immune-system rejection of these transplanted islets.
The Lakey-Botvinick team which includes researchers and products from UC Irvine, the University of Oxford, the Netherlands' University of Groningen, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Islet Sheet Medical in San Francisco, Islet Sciences in New York and Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk will explore the use of isolated islets in which the cells are encased in an ultrapure algae membrane.
The encapsulation chemistry allows for selective permeability, meaning that some small molecules, such as glucose and insulin, can pass across the barrier, while large antibodies and immunological molecules are blocked from entering into the space containing the islets.
"Perhaps the greatest challenge in the field of islet transplantation is to make the metabolic benefits available to patients with Type 1 diabetes without the need for chronic immunosuppression," said Lakey, who's also director of UC Irvine Health's Clinical Islet Program. "I believe that this technology has great promise for realizing our goal. And this welcome support from the JDRF should speed our progress."
With the other grant, Zhao and his colleagues will try to develop an insulin sensor for the JDRF's Artificial Pancreas Project, which supports the creation of an automated system to dispense insulin based on real-time changes in blood sugar levels. Central to such a device is a mechanism that can accurately determine blood insulin amounts to provide feedback control for the artificial pancreas.
Existing systems deliver insulin via a pump under closed-loop control using data from a continuous glucose sensor. They are, however, associated with severe risks especially insulin overdose when any of their components malfunction.
Zhao will receive $1 million for the two-year effort, with the potential for further funding if his team comes up with a promising model. "Integrating a real-time insulin sensor into the artificial pancreas system will allow us to precisely monitor and control the levels of both sugar and insulin, ultimately leading to safe and effective management of diabetes," he said.
Other UC Irvine researchers involved in these projects include Bernard Choi, associate professor of surgery and biomedical engineering; Dr. Clarence Foster, clinical professor of surgery and chief of the School of Medicine's transplantation division; and Frank Zaldivar and Dr. Pietro Galassetti with the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science.
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Facebook's on a quest to get you involved in real-time global conversations. Today it takes the next step towards challenging Twitter by adding hashtag support to its mobile site and launching related hashtags. Starting this evening, when you click or search for a hashtag, the results will page show other hashtags often posted at the same time. Search #equality and you'll see #lgbt and #pride.
June 25, 2013 ? A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully packed habitable zone.
Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. Just over one third of the mass of the Sun, it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667 (also referred to as GJ 667), 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). This is quite close to us -- within the Sun's neighbourhood -- and much closer than the star systems investigated using telescopes such as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.
Previous studies of Gliese 667C had found that the star hosts three planets with one of them in the habitable zone. Now, a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escud? of the University of G?ttingen, Germany and Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has reexamined the system. They have added new HARPS observations, along with data from ESO's Very Large Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Magellan Telescopes, to the already existing picture [1]. The team has found evidence for up to seven planets around the star [2].
These planets orbit the third fainter star of a triple star system. Viewed from one of these newly found planets the two other suns would look like a pair of very bright stars visible in the daytime and at night they would provide as much illumination as the full Moon. The new planets completely fill up the habitable zone of Gliese 667C, as there are no more stable orbits in which a planet could exist at the right distance to it.
"We knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more," says Tuomi. "By adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star's habitable zone is very exciting!"
Three of these planets are confirmed to be super-Earths -- planets more massive than Earth, but less massive than planets like Uranus or Neptune -- that are within their star's habitable zone, a thin shell around a star in which water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right. This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system [3].
"The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star -- instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them," adds co-author Rory Barnes (University of Washington, USA).
Compact systems around Sun-like stars have been found to be abundant in the Milky Way. Around such stars, planets orbiting close to the parent star are very hot and are unlikely to be habitable. But this is not true for cooler and dimmer stars such as Gliese 667C. In this case the habitable zone lies entirely within an orbit the size of Mercury's, much closer in than for our Sun. The Gliese 667C system is the first example of a system where such a low-mass star is seen to host several potentially rocky planets in the habitable zone.
The ESO scientist responsible for HARPS, Gaspare Lo Curto, remarks: "This exciting result was largely made possible by the power of HARPS and its associated software and it also underlines the value of the ESO archive. It is very good to also see several independent research groups exploiting this unique instrument and achieving the ultimate precision."
And Anglada-Escud? concludes: "These new results highlight how valuable it can be to re-analyse data in this way and combine results from different teams on different telescopes."
Notes
[1] The team used data from the UVES spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile (to determine the properties of the star accurately), the Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS) at the 6.5-metre Magellan II Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the HIRES spectrograph mounted on the Keck 10-metre telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii as well as extensive previous data from HARPS (the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) at ESO's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile (gathered through the M dwarf programme led by X. Bonfils and M. Mayor 2003-2010.
[2] The team looked at radial velocity data of Gliese 667C, a method often used to hunt for exoplanets. They performed a robust Bayesian statistical analysis to spot the signals of the planets. The first five signals are very confident, while the sixth is tentative, and seventh more tentative still. This system consists of three habitable-zone super-Earths, two hot planets further in, and two cooler planets further out. The planets in the habitable zone and those closer to the star are expected to always have the same side facing the star, so that their day and year will be the same lengths, with one side in perpetual sunshine and the other always night.
[3] In the Solar System Venus orbits close to the inner edge of the habitable zone and Mars close to the outer edge. The precise extent of the habitable zone depends on many factors.
As the pace of the Odin Lloyd murder investigation appears, from an external perspective, to have slowed, a judge has ensured that the public will continue to be in the dark.
According to Christine McConville of the Boston Herald, the file has been sealed.
All records of the Attleboro District Court Clerk Magistrate?s office involving the homicide investigation in North Attleboro have been impounded by order of the court,? said a notice posted by Attleboro District Court Magistrate Mark E. Sturdy outside his office on Tuesday.? ?No further information is available at this time.?
This means that no documents will be given to the media, including search warrants or arrest warrants.
Meanwhile, police have not returned to Hernandez?s home today.? On Saturday, they searched the property for four hours.? On Monday, police searched a nearby pond, finding ?no evidence.?
The media stakeout at Hernandez?s home noticed that two men in ?business attire? arrived at Hernandez?s house in a BMW convertible on Tuesday.? They knocked on the door, made a phone call, and then were allowed inside.
Astrophysicist Eric Davis is one of the leaders in the field of faster-than-light (FTL) space travel. But for Davis, humanity's potential to explore the vastness of space at warp speed is not science fiction.
Davis' latest study, "Faster-Than-Light Space Warps, Status and Next Steps" won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' (AIAA) 2013 Best Paper Award for Nuclear and Future Flight Propulsion.
TechNewsDaily recently caught up with Davis to discuss his new paper, which appeared in the March/April volume of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and will form the basis of his upcoming address at Icarus Interstellar's 2013 Starship Congress in August. [Super-Fast Space Travel Propulsion Ideas (Images)]
"The proof of principle for FTL space warp propulsion was published decades ago," said Davis, referring to a 1994 paper by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. "All conventional advanced propulsion physics technologies are limited to speeds below the speed of light ? Using an FTL space warp will drastically reduce the time and distances of interstellar flight."
Warp speed: a primer
Before delving into Davis' study, here's a quick review of faster-than-light space travel:
According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. However, some scientists believe that a loophole in this theory will someday allow humans to travel light-years in a matter of days.
In current FTL theories, it's not the ship that's moving ? space itself moves. It's established that space is flexible; in fact, space has been steadily expanding since the Big Bang.
By distorting the space around the ship instead of accelerating the ship itself, these theoretical warp drives would never break Einstein's special relativity rules. The ship itself is never going faster than light with respect to the space immediately around it.
Davis's paper examines the two principle theories for how to achieve faster-than-light travel: warp drives and wormholes.
The difference between the two is the way in which space is manipulated. With a warp drive, space in front of the vessel is contracted while space behind it is expanded, creating a sort of wave that brings the vessel to its destination.
With a wormhole, the ship (or perhaps an exterior mechanism) would create a tunnel through spacetime, with a targeted entrance and exit. The ship would enter the wormhole at sublight speeds and reappear in a different location many light-years away.
In his paper, Davis describes a wormhole entrance as "a sphere that contained the mirror image of a whole other universe or remote region within our universe, incredibly shrunken and distorted."
Sci-fi fans, for warp drives, think "Star Trek" and "Futurama." For wormholes, think "Stargate."
[See also: Warp Drive and Transporters: How 'Star Trek' Technology Works (infographic)]
Mirror, mirror on the hull
The next question is: how to create these spacetime distortions that will allow vessels to travel faster than light? It's believed ? and certain preliminary experiments seem to confirm ? that producing targeted amounts of what's called "negative energy" would achieve the desired effect.?
Negative energy has been produced in a lab via what's called the Casimir effect. This phenomenon revolves around the idea that vacuum, contrary to its portrayal in classical physics, isn't empty. According to quantum theory, vacuum is full of electromagnetic fluctuations. Distorting these fluctuations can create negative energy.
According to Davis, one of the most promising methods for creating negative energy is called the Ford-Svaiter mirror. This is a theoretical device that would focus all the quantum vacuum fluctuations onto the mirror's focal line.
"When those fluctuations are confined there, they have a negative energy," said Davis. "You could have types of negative energy that could make a wormhole that you could put a person through and, if you make a bigger mirror, put a starship through. The [mirror] is scalable ? that's the beauty of it."
Davis described a theoretical configuration of Ford-Svaiter mirrors that could enable FTL spaceflight: "For a traversable wormhole, it'll have to be separate Ford-Svaiter mirrors [arranged] in an array to create the wormhole and then a ship with mirrors attached to it to extend the wormhole to the destination star."
The concern there is how to target the wormhole's exit.
"We don't know the answer to that question yet," said Davis. "Einstein's theory of general relativity doesn't answer it."
That's the difference between the fields of physics and engineering, Davis explained. According to our current understanding of physics, targeting the wormhole's exit is possible, but engineers have yet to figure out how to achieve it. [See also: NASA Turns to 3D Printing for Self-Building Spacecraft]
"On screen, Number One."
Another issue addressed in Davis' paper is how to navigate an FTL starship.
"If you're in a wormhole, you don't go faster than light ? you're going at normal speeds, but your visualization and stellar navigations are all gone [because] ? there are no stars to navigate by."
The iconic image of stars streaking by a spaceship viewscreen popularized by franchises like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" simply isn't accurate, said Davis. "The light that goes through the wormhole gets distorted ? you're going to have a very weird visual display."
This is because the negative energy necessary to create a wormhole or warp drive creates a repulsive gravity that distorts light around the ship.
So ships moving at faster-than-light speeds will not be able to observe their surroundings to calculate their location. Astronauts will have to rely on sophisticated computer programs to calculate their probable location. "You'll need something on the order of a supercomputer equipped with parallel processing," said Davis. "[The computer is] going to have to do all the figuring out ?? [using] input data from the last position and estimating."
This is more of a concern with warp drives, which are actively reshaping space as they travel, but not as much with traversable wormholes, whose entrances and exits will probably be preset before flight. "You can only go one way through the wormhole, so it's not like you're going to get lost," said Davis
It's also important for the computer to be able to produce some kind of visual representation of its flight plan and spatial location. These images would then be rendered and displayed in the starship's cockpit or bridge for the crew to see and study. "It'll help the human psychological need for understanding, in real time, what the position changes of the stars are going to look like," said Davis.
Where no one has gone before
At the heart of Davis' paper is the principle ? supported by rigorous scientific theory ? that faster-than-light travel is a real and even tangible possibility. The last section of the paper proposes nine "next steps" that would push the field toward engineering prototypes and other practical tests of faster-than-light theories.
These steps include creating computer simulations to model the structure and effects of space warps. Davis also calls for more rigorous exploration of the Ford-Svaiter mirror, which is still a largely theoretical device. The mirror is just one possible way to generate negative energy; further study is needed to determine whether there are any other practical methods of achieving the same effect. [See also: Hypersonic 'SpaceLiner' Aims to Fly Passengers in 2050]
Davis describes the development and implementation of space-warp travel as "technically daunting" in his paper, but in conversation, he said he has no doubt that faster-than-light travel will someday be not only possible, but necessary.
"The Earth is subjected to natural and outer space and ecological disasters, so life is too fragile, while the planets in the solar system are not very hospitable to human life. So we need to explore extrasolar planets for alternative homes," Davis said.
"This is all part of the growth and evolution of the human race."
Email jscharr@technewsdaily.com or follow her @JillScharr. Follow us @TechNewsDaily, on Facebook or on Google+.
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This particular cultural ceremony process is quite long and complicated that wants additional strengthens. The truth is that the most important affairs in ones life that needs maximum attention. A wedding is actually a stunning dream for everyone, but proper planning is really a most important believes in the marriage ceremony. We organize the joyful and hassle free wedding ceremony with proper planning. Within Indian weddings are conducted here in various ways as per the tradition, tradition and religious beliefs that vary based on area.
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June 24, 2013 ? Wild bird populations are generally thought to benefit from being given additional food in winter but our understanding of the effects of such food provision is incomplete.
The results of a new study, carried out by researchers at the University of Exeter and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), has found that feeding wild blue tits in winter resulted in less successful breeding during the following spring.
The research, published in Scientific Reports, revealed that woodland blue tits that were provided with fat balls as a supplementary food during the winter months went on to produce chicks that were smaller, of lower body weight and which had lower survival than the chicks of birds that did not receive any additional food.
Dr Jon Blount from Biosciences at the University of Exeter who led the research said: "Our research questions the benefits of feeding wild birds over winter. Although the precise reasons why fed populations subsequently have reduced reproductive success are unclear, it would be valuable to assess whether birds would benefit from being fed all year round rather than only in winter. More research is needed to determine exactly what level of additional food provisioning, and at what times of year, would truly benefit wild bird populations."
Dr Kate Plummer, lead author of the paper, said: "There could be a number of different explanations for our results. One possibility is that winter feeding may help birds in relatively poor condition to survive and breed. Because these individuals are only capable of raising a small number of chicks, they will reduce our estimation of breeding success within the population. But more research is needed to understand whether winter feeding is contributing to an overall change in the size of bird populations."
It is estimated that around half of UK householders feed birds in their gardens. This equates to around 50-60 thousand tonnes of bird food provisioned each year and contributes to a thriving bird food industry.
Jane Lawler, Marketing Director at Gardman, commented: "As the wider scientific evidence shows, feeding wild birds with appropriate foods delivers a range of positive benefits. A number of unanswered questions remain, however, and this is why we have been supporting this and other research, using the information gained to inform our products and the advice that we provide to our customers."
The three year study was conducted across nine woodland sites in Cornwall. During winter, populations of blue tits were left unfed, given plain fat balls or given fat balls enriched with vitamin E -- a vitamin commonly present in bird food such as nuts and seeds. Nest boxes and bird feeders were distributed around the woodland study sites and reproductive success was investigated by checking the nest boxes in the spring to determine the number of eggs laid and the growth and survival of chicks.
Studies elsewhere have shown that feeding wild birds in winter can have almost immediate benefits for survival and can enhance future breeding success, so the latest results provide important new information and inform the debate around the role that feeding wild birds may play in their population processes. Whether providing food is detrimental or beneficial to wild bird populations, it is clear that more research is needed to better understand its effects.
The study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Royal Society, Gardman Ltd and the BTO.
It would seem that many of Tennessee's public school teachers are upset about recent legislation regarding teacher pay. You can get the details
, and then read my comments below.
First off, let me begin by saying I am not an educator. I say this because I myself hold in contempt those who venture to comment on subjects they know nothing about. I try not to jest at wounds I have never suffered. If you choose to stop reading this upon those grounds, you are justified. In the past, I have been, de facto, offered positions in both the public and private sector to teach the skills of my own vocation (technical drawing and engineering graphics, like CAD, solid modeling, parametric modeling, etc) at higher education levels, but I have never actually taught. The point is, my qualifications for making some of the statements I am about to make are questionable at best.
Second, let me make clear at once that I am a libertarian who believes education would be better managed on a local level instead of being managed under the broad umbrella of State or Federal Bureaucracies. Better yet, I believe that education completely out of the hands of any government, at any level, and delegated to the private sector (private schools) would better educate our children. If you?re a proponent of government involvement in education, if you could kindly explain to me how a bunch of bureaucrats with I-Phones, briefcases, and Armani suits, typically hundreds of miles away are contributing to the education of your child, I will be glad to recant my stance on government regulated education. But until then, I think government and education make poor bedmates. In such a scenario, private schools would compete for children the way private colleges and universities do. Competition drives innovation. And in order to be competitive, schools would have to have a proven track record of top-notch education. In such a scenario, there would be no need for government standardized testing or government regulations. The competition would keep the stakes high. For years now? In fact, one can probably trace it all the way back to Bush?s ?No Child Left Behind? legislation, teachers in the public school system have been plagued with standardized testing. Now while I agree that teachers do bear some accountability, I think the grades of students are not good barometers for gauging a teacher?s abilities or effectiveness. Of course, if education was privatized, as stated in my second paragraph, teacher accountability would be cut-and-dried. Teacher evaluations would be handled in the same manner all employees of private companies are evaluated. But as it is, the majority of our childrens? education is conducted in the public sector, so we have the hurdle of how to properly gauge the performance of teachers. Let me give you my prescription on a possibility of how this can be done. I presume every public school has its own autonomous administrative staff. Why not let the local administrative staff determine how teachers are to be evaluated? Perhaps it could be done through live classroom monitoring. Or maybe it can be done through annual teacher evaluations based on parental complaints. There are myriads of ways for employees to be evaluated, just ask any company manager. True, this opens doors for greasy hands, lecherous liaisons, and various and sundry other corruptions to take place to preserve one position in the hierarchy. But hey, you are the one that wanted to work for the government. Political ousting is a time-honored tradition among the politically elite. And no government worker is immune. Think about it like this. How do the cafeteria ladies or the school nurse get evaluated? Are they graded on how fat the children are, or how sick the children are? Such an asinine notion, and yet this is precisely what standardized testing does. Evaluating teachers based upon test scores is like evaluating the cafeteria ladies on how fat the children are, or evaluating the school nurse on how sick the children are. The point being, too much of the result lies beyond the control of the teacher. A teacher can be the best of the best. But that doesn?t mean their students will pay attention, apply themselves, or do their homework at night. This is beyond the teacher?s control. In some ways, it is ironic. When I was in school, some of the best teachers were marked by students with low scores. It didn?t mean the teacher was bad. It meant the teacher was tough. The class they taught suggested that students that were genuinely interested only need apply. The classes these teachers taught were not mere time fillers, but required the whole of one?s intellect. It is funny when you think about it. If test scores determine a teacher?s performance level, and consequently, their pay level, what teacher in their right mind would want to teach advanced classes? Couple this with the fact that the Tennessee Legislature has removed all motivation for educators to further their job skills by acquiring additional degrees. How can we compete unless we challenge the students? Challenging the students can only be done with teachers with high degrees. Now that there is scarcely a reason for a teacher to pursue education beyond a Bachelor?s Degree, can students really be challenged? There is one aspect to all this that no one is talking about, but is actually quite prominent. When I was in school, I could always tell a good teacher from a bad one. There was something that I can only describe as a spark. This spark transcended all subject matter being taught. These teachers had the knack for taking the students beyond the subject material into realms of understanding that isn?t found on any test. The indomitable, ?Why?? and, ?What for?? of education. I had precious few of these teachers during my time in school (some of whom I daresay will read this), and I thank God for them. In fact, I could write an entire blog about some of them. I could mention my fifth grade teacher who was the first to undertake reading to us a little every day from a book. It is doubtful that I have been without a book on my person since. Or perhaps my freshman English teacher, who read us Greek Mythology, which nurtured my interest in ancient cultures. Or my Algebra teacher, who somehow kept me signing up for her classes, even though it seemed like a perpetual struggle just to get a passing grade. Or the seventh grade history teacher who brought history to life, instead of just giving us dates and events to memorize. We have all heard of the phenomenon called ?Teaching to the test?. This is what occurs when a teacher knows their job, and their pay grade, relies on the results of a test, so they simply emphasize those aspects of the subject matter to the children they know will be on the test, while leaving other aspects of the subject untouched, or breezed over. The product of this type of teaching is children with a head full of facts, but no real intellectual mechanism to parse and critically analyze those facts. In summary, standardized testing destroys the transmission of ?critical thinking?, which should be an intrinsic aspect of any subject. You can tell a child that 2+2=4. But what do you tell the child when he asks why 2+2=4, and what he is supposed to do with it? If you?re a teacher, and you teach a child that 2+2=4, are you teaching the child in such a way that he will commit it to memory so that when he sees ?2+2=? on a standardized test, he will know the answer, or are you teaching them in such a way as to lay the groundwork for higher mathematical and logical reasoning, which serves as the foundation for what?s to come in higher education and various vocational fields of study? Are you merely inputting data the way one might input data in a computer, or are you creating the ?spark?? None of the books read in the fifth grade, or the Greek Myths I learned in my freshman year, were on any standardized test. And I could have graduated just as easily, nay, easier, if I had only taken the required years of algebra instead of doubling up on it. And I cannot recall ever answering a question about Longstreet?s march through Bean Station to Knoxville on a standardized test. I doubt those ?long-in-the-tooth? old-fart bureaucrats know who Lee?s old warhorse even is. But, it is these things that nurtured me. That is because these teachers were not teaching to the test. They were attempting to create the spark. C. S. Lewis, the famous Christian apologist and literary author, wrote a small book based upon a series of lectures entitled ?The Abolition of Man?. I highly recommend it to any educator who hasn?t read it. In it, he outlines the necessity of taking education beyond the mere intellect. He argues that a proper education must pervade the intellect and the viscera of an individual. If you?ve never heard the word ?viscera?, it simply is in reference to man?s more instinctive ?animal? nature, symbolized in man?s stomach the way the intellect is symbolized by a man?s head. Lewis argues that education should saturate and stimulate both the head (intellect) and the stomach (viscera), and should have open and free commute between the two. The path connecting the two is through the chest, obviously. The most troubling aspect of the whole treatise is that he defines an education system where this isn?t the case, where educators essentially create ?men without chests?, or in other words, where education is confined, most often in the head, and not permitted to pervade the whole of the man. No critical thinking. No mechanism for utilizing an education. No way to incorporate an education into an adult life. A world of ?men without chests? is not a scenario for social stability in a world where education determines your place on the world?s totem pole. It brings about the true "Abolition of Man". What concerns me is that the actions of the past decade in regards our education is seemingly bringing Lewis? dystopian predictions to fruition. Even our institutions of higher education, which must meet Federal regulations to be ?accredited?, seem to be engaged in what I call ?shotgun? teaching. Today?s graduates of both high school and college seem to have heads crammed with more facts than even the graduates of my own generation had. But they seem so ill prepared in their proper use. ?Outside the box? thinkers are practically extinct. Critical thinkers are a dying breed. They know 2+2=4, but they don?t know why and what to do with it. Students are trained to parrot what schools teach them, and to never even test the tolerances of known rules. This will eventually kill true innovation. Consider, while we have grown rather adept at improving existing inventions and ideas, how long has it been since something new came down the pike? Something like the car, or the computer, or the telephone, or the light-bulb? Yeah, we have improved our cars and telephones and light-bulbs. But has there been anything new that isn?t simply an improvement or derivative of an existing design? I honestly cannot think of anything. Are we, perhaps, further into Lewis? dystopia that even I am willing to speculate? To end, I predict that as long as education lies in the power of government to regulate, things will not change and will only get worse. And with government, as with all ruling bodies of men, acquired power is not easily relinquished. In the end, it is up to educators to bind together and make a change. It may take something radical, like a mass walkout. Or, if principals and administrators are level-headed enough, it might only take a few good, well-informed, and eloquent people to really outline the problem and how Tennessee?s prescribed treatment will only perpetuate and worsen the problem. And then, most importantly, outline the real solution.
I admit I am not hopeful. This transition from educating to indoctrination seems to be close to complete. At risk of sounding conspiratorial, and sounding like an outright fruit-loop, it seems engineered. This erosion in our education seems to be on a fast track, and is a result of planning and design. I might have just discredited everything I said in saying that. But I?d rather be honest about how I feel about it.
But if I am right, the next question will be the indomitable, ?Why?? Why is our educational system being structured in this way? What is hoped to be accomplished? Conspiracy theorists call it the "dumbing down" of America, but I think it goes deeper. Our graduating students have never had more quantified facts in their brains, so you really cannot, objectively speaking, say they are dumber. I think they want people who don't think, at least, not for themselves. They want mainstream thoughts in the minds of people. Constrained thoughts, based on constrained facts. This paralyzes any intellectual dexterity the mind might have possessed. The mind loses its pliability, unable to process information outside the mainstream. Perhaps we have already seen the firstfruits. Creative television programming has given way to mindless "reality telelvision". Interesting and provocative movie plots have been forfeited to "remakes" and "reboots" with more pretty, and less plot. Our culture is giving us all the warning signs of this academic atrophy. But whose able to recognize it?
It is all somewhat reminiscent of Orwell's "Thought-Police". But will there be anyone around who will be able to ask, "Why?" when the time comes?
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Public release date: 26-Jun-2013
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Facebook's on a quest to get you involved in real-time global conversations. Today it takes the next step towards challenging Twitter by adding hashtag support to its mobile site and launching related hashtags. Starting this evening, when you click or search for a hashtag, the results will page show other hashtags often posted at the same time. Search #equality and you'll see #lgbt and #pride.
