Friday, December 7, 2007

Asteroid Shower

"Mark your calendar: The best meteor shower of 2007 peaks on Friday, December 14th." Dr. Tony Phillips tells of the Geminid meteor shower in Asteroid Shower. He writes, "The Geminids are not ordinary meteors. While most meteor showers come from comets, Geminids come from an asteroid—a near-Earth object named 3200 Phaethon." The resulting "meteor" shower will peak late Thursday evening and early Friday morning, December 13-14, 2007.

Asteroid Shower is a recent posting from Dr. Phillips's excellent series on Science@NASA. The site features short articles about interesting space objects and events. The stories are available as web pages with or without narration and also as podcasts. Recent postings include:

• New Discovery: The Sun is Bristling with X-ray Jets
• Asteroid Shower
• Improving Drought Forecasts
• Chandra Discovers a Cosmic Cannonball
• Watch Out for Flying Moondust
• Mars Doubles in Brightness

English-only laws serve to divide

Ruben Navarrette Jr., of the San Diego Union-Tribune had an interesting column this week, The great language debate. It also was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle (in case the previous link doesn't work).

FREE

If you haven't checked out the Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) site lately, you might want to check out their New Resources page.

Leopard

I hate to admit it, but I backed off of using Leopard at work on my G4 PowerBook. There were just too many things to deal with, not the least of which is that I'm getting a bit old and resistant to change. I never could get my PC at work to network with the PowerBook running Leopard. I missed the ability to run Classic apps, as every now and then I still have need for them. The final straw was when MaxMenus quit working. It may not have been Leopard alone, as I'd just upgraded another application about the same time my favorite Finder enhancer quit. I really never got even close to trying out any of the new whiz-bang features of Mac OS X 10.5. And, it definitely felt slower on the PowerBook than Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4).

When I switched back, I actually installed a slower Seagate 160GB hard drive from Buy.com, partitioned it for a large Leopard section and a rather small Tiger section. While I boot from Tiger now, I save all my files to the Leopard partition, as I expect at some point I'll again try to make the jump to the new OS. At home on my G5 tower, I'm doing much the same, only with it, I left one drive untouched with my Tiger installation that I cloned to another drive and upgraded it with Leopard.

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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

A Few Words About NCLB

Alyson Beahm, a teacher at Noralto Elementary School in Sacramento, California, recently wrote an exceptionally perceptive piece about the effects of the No Child Left Behind law at her school . Quality education gets lost in translation: Law's requirements hurt school that has influx of immigrants is her story. Alyson obviously cares about her students and her school. Since the article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, it has been picked up by other news outlets and prompted others to speak out. The NEA also has a section of comments by teachers about the shortcomings of the law.

Math, Science, and Technology Competition Winners

Amanda Millner-Fairbanks tells about the recent Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology in Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest. While Millner-Fairbanks's angle was on the girls winning (which was very cool), the topics of their studies blew me away:

• Creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria
• Bone growth in zebra fish (whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones grow)
• Genetic defects that could play a role in the development of Lou Gehrig’s disease
• Herceptin resistance (when breast cancer patients with HER2-positive tumors do not respond to the drug Herceptin)
• FtsZ Inhibitors as Novel Chemotherapeutic Agents for Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis
• Design Of A Novel Video System To Assure Safe Cooking Of Hamburgers In Commercial Kitchens ("Burgercam monitoring system")

The full list of finalists and their projects is available on the Siemens Foundation site.