Saturday, June 19, 2010

Textbook rentals will give N.J. college students more options this fall | NJ.com

Textbook rentals will give N.J. college students more options this fall

Published: Saturday, June 19, 2010, 9:30 PM

Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger
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Ed Murray/The Star-LedgerRutgers University school bookstore in New Brunswick and two other school branches will start renting school books this fall.

For generations, college students have made the trek to the campus bookstore every semester to either buy new copies of their textbooks or hunt the shelves for used editions.

Starting this fall, students at many New Jersey colleges will have a third option: renting their books.

More than a dozen colleges and universities — including Rutgers, Montclair State, Fairleigh Dickinson, Drew and Union County College — are launching programs in their campus bookstores that will allow students to rent textbooks for one semester for less than half the cost of purchasing them new.

Students will still be able to mark up their textbooks with highlighters, but they must agree to return the rented books to the store after finals or face steep fines. The rental fees are paid up front with cash, credit cards or student financial aid funds.

"They are trying to give students what they want," said Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the National Association of College Stores, a group representing nearly 3,000 campus bookstores.

Last year, fewer than 300 stores offered textbook rental programs, according to the association’s survey. But this fall that number is expected to jump to nearly 1,500. The sharp increase is due to a long list of factors, including pressure from students, education advocates and the federal

What I Do During The Final Week Of School | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

What I Do During The Final Week Of School

by Larry Ferlazzo

I’ve already written about many of the activities I do with students during the final days of school (see How Students Evaluated Me This Year — Part One, My Revised Final Exams (And An Important Lesson) and What Do You Do On The Last Day Of Class? (Part Two)) , and included a number of downloadable materials.
I thought readers might find it useful for me share a couple of other activities, along with excerpts from some of the work produced by students this past week.
STUDENT PORTFOLIOS:
I have students do an analysis of their best work over the year, along with answering a number of other questions. You can download them, if you’d like:

Authorities will collect questionnaires at Skyline School about day Kyron Horman went missing | OregonLive.com

Authorities will collect questionnaires at Skyline School about day Kyron Horman went missing

Published: Saturday, June 19, 2010, 5:55 PM Updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010, 6:07 PM

Noelle Crombie, The Oregonian
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Multnomah County authorities are asking that Skyline School parents, teachers, staff and anyone else who was at the school the day Kyron Horman was last seen return to the school Sunday with completed questionnaires about that day.

A police officer will be at Skyline School between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. to accept the questionnaires.

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Investigators on Friday released thequestionnaires and fliers with photographs of Kyron; his stepmother, Terri Moulton Horman; and a white pickup similar to one she drives. They hope the images jog the memories of those who may have seen Kyron and his stepmother June 4, the day the 7-year-old disappeared.

"The purpose of this is to get information that they might not have thought about reporting before," said Lt. Mary Lindstrand, a Multnomah County sheriff's spokeswoman.

Kyron's stepmother has told authorities the last time she saw the boy was 8:45 a.m. June 4; in the questionnaire, authorities ask the Skyline community to recall what happened between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. that day.

Lindstrand said Saturday that she could not recall a major criminal investigation in which such questionnaires were used. She also did not know whether the release of Kyron's photograph and those of his stepmother generated new tips or leads for investigators.

She did say investigators "are not in a position to name any suspects at this time or persons of interest."

Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI profiler and Virginia-based security consultant, said such questionnaires have been used in other missing-persons cases nationally. He said they often are used to "clarify the whereabouts of people during critical times in the disappearance of a child."

Brownley, De La Torre: California Jobs Budget Keeps | California Progress Report

Brownley, De La Torre: California Jobs Budget Keeps

by kaldveer

By Assemblymembers Julia Brownley and Hector De La Torre
SACRAMENTO – In this Democratic weekly address, Assemblymember Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica), Chair of the Assembly Committee on Education, and Assemblymember Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate) discuss how the jobs of over 25,000 teachers and 10,000 school aides, counselors and support staff would be saved through the Assembly Democrats’ California Jobs Budget proposal. They discuss why education is important to the health of California’s economy and why the California Jobs Budget proposal makes saving and creating hundreds of thousands of California jobs a priority.
Click onto the following link for the English language MP3 file. The running time is 2:23.
http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/Newsline/Audio/20100618EnglishRadioAddr...
read more

We Should Vote Before We Pay! � Tangerine, Florida

Via Florida Hometown Democracy

Typical Florida politics: the Manatee County land speculator doesn’t get the vote he wants so he gets a “do-over” next week. Same old story: he wants to covert rural land into suburbia. New twist: he’s in a hurry and worried about Amendment 4 [ also known as Hometown Democracy Ed. ]

The story below provides just another example of why we need Amendment 4. Our

Volunteers mark Juneteenth with cleanup at historic black cemetery | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News

Volunteers mark Juneteenth with cleanup at historic black cemetery

04:31 PM CDT on Saturday, June 19, 2010

By DIANE JENNINGS / The Dallas Morning News
djennings@dallasnews.com

Standing in a patch of shade at Carrollton's historic black cemetery, Gwen Turner couldn't help but wonder what her great-grandfather, Ned Welch, would have thought of the crowd gathered there this morning.

Carrollton Black Cemetery

His tombstone, erected after his death in 1884, is one of the last original markers in the small graveyard.

"I can just imagine he would be elated people thought enough of this little cemetery to come out and maintain it," she said.

Turner was one of about 70 people who showed up early today, armed with rakes and hoes, clippers and saws, for the annual cleanup. They trimmed trees, bagged dead grass, painted crosses and placed red, white and blue flowers atop each grave.

For many in the crowd, both black and white, it was especially meaningful that the event fell on Juneteenth, the state holiday that celebrates the day news of the emancipation of slaves reached Texas.

Serita Wright of Lewisville wasn't familiar with the holiday when she moved to Texas from Virginia 10 years ago. "I couldn't figure out why June 19th was a big day," she said with a laugh.

In addition to helping at the cleanup, she planned to observe Juneteenth by attending a crawfish boil later in the day.

University of Anarchy and No Consequences

Debra J. Saunders

Saturday, June 19, 2010

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DEBRA J. SAUNDERS

The inaction president 06.17.10
Crack and powder, Dems and Repubs 06.15.10
Jerry Brown, California's chameleon prince 06.13.10

More Debra J. Saunders »

When activists (who are not necessarily students) were able to delay construction of a UC Berkeley sports center by living in trees for 21 months, there was no review of what went wrong.
When protesters with torches vandalized UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's home, there was no review. But when UC police arrested 46 people demonstrating against higher-education cuts by occupying Wheeler Hall on Nov. 20, there were complaints that police over-reacted. And so - with authorities, not anarchists in the sights - a review was born.
Last week, UC Berkeley released the 128-page report. In academic fashion, it notes two forces that converted "an animated but essentially nonviolent protest into a raw power struggle between demonstrators and police" - without overtly taking sides.
There were officers, who in a "series of over-reactions by insufficiently supervised police" intensified fears among students. Then there were demonstrators, mostly "young, sincere and emotionally mobile" students, but also "a smaller group" that "set out to instigate confrontations with police" and provoke them "into high-visibility over-reactions that could be used to inflame the crowd and escalate its aggressiveness."
The review served a useful purpose in that it details the need for campus police to prepare for the worst and, when it occurs, to communicate with demonstrators and other law enforcement personnel who come to their aid.
There are also some heroes in the review, like Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard, who took the initiative to advise Wheeler Hall occupiers via megaphone that if they wanted to leave peacefully, they should sit down before the police came in. "As it turned out," the report noted, "all the occupiers followed this wise advice."
Two aspects of the report stand out for me.
First there's this dubious theory on the use of riot gear by officers from UC and other departments called to assist at the scene: "If the police had not worn riot gear, there

Engaging High School Youth in their Own Education | Lefty Parent

Empowering High School Youth

by Cooper Zale

So when you are bored and not really engaged with what is going on around you, is that a good learning environment for you? It apparently isn’t for most of America’s high school students.

As reported in a June 15 article in Education Week, “Study: Teens Are Bored”…

Most high school students feel bored and disconnected from school, according to a new survey of students from 103 high schools in 27 states. Begun in 2004, the annual High School Survey of Student Engagement aims to take a pulse on teenagers’ attitudes toward school and learning. But

Gulf Loop Current ferrying spilled oil towards Florida Keys � Tangerine, Florida

Gulf Loop Current ferrying spilled oil towards Florida Keys

by tangerineflorida

Loop Current Pathway

Via http://arstechnica.com/science/

The University of Miami is announcing that a research cruise sponsored by the National Science Foundation has discovered that a large oil plume originating from the Deepwater Horizon site is heading for the Dry Tortugas. These islands, preserved as part of a US national park, reside just to the west of the Florida Keys. Should the oil make it that far, it will almost certainly find its way into the Atlantic Ocean.
The flow of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon has been difficult to track, since the source is on the sea floor, while oil’s buoyancy will cause it to move towards the surface. On its way there, it will encounter different currents at various depths. The currents in the Gulf are dominated by what’s called the Loop Current, which enters the Gulf between Cuba and the Yucatan. What happens next can vary considerably.
Depending on a variety of factors, the Loop can extend well north in a large clockwise sweep through the Gulf before exiting into the Atlantic near the Florida Keys. At other points, this loop pinches off into an independent vortex as the main current heads directly for the Atlantic. The

Saturday, June 19, 2010