Exercise balls get education rolling 0 comments

Classrooms that have replaced chairs with balls and ball chairs see better results. The devices sharpen students' attention and improve posture, teachers say.


Reporting from Chicago - Donna Yehl's fourth-grade students bob behind their desks, heads nodding up and down as if the children were on the deck of a ship.

But they aren't fidgeting.

The two dozen children in Yehl's Elgin, Ill., classroom read and write -- in fact, do all of their classwork -- perched on exercise balls.

The inflatable balls are commonly used in Pilates, yoga and exercise classes. Some teachers say they belong in school classrooms too because they sharpen students' attention and improve their posture.

This year, Yehl checked the Internet for ways to help her restless pupils sit still. She stumbled on a story about exercise balls improving concentration. So she replaced her classroom's chairs with bouncy 21-inch-high balls in colors students chose.

She sees a difference.

"They're more focused," Yehl says. "They're sitting upright."

Balls and ball chairs, which have wheels, feet and backs, are popping up in classrooms.

Lisa Witt, whose Wisconsin company WittFitt sells exercise ball chairs for classroom use, reports a sharp increase in customers, from one school in 2004 to more than 300 across the country and abroad.

"Some people initially think, 'Are you crazy?' " says Witt, a former elementary school teacher in Colorado. But aside from mental and physical benefits, she says, "it's just plain fun."

Kids often agree.

Emily Ziemba, 10, a student in Yehl's class, laughs and nods when asked whether she likes sitting on an exercise ball.

"I mean, sometimes I would like to lean back," she says. "But other times, it's better than a chair."

Teachers say children on ball chairs often quit flopping over on their desks. And they're getting enough exercise to improve concentration.

"You'd be surprised how many kids really need to move while learning," says Adrienne O'Brien, a fourth-grade teacher in Barrington, Ill., about 40 miles from Chicago, who calls her more energetic kids "squirrels." "That would be the majority of them, frankly."

Subconscious mental activity lies at the core of the science behind the balls' success, experts say.

The tiny movements kids make to stay balanced stimulate their brains and help them focus, says Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard University professor and author of "Driven to Distraction" and "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain."

Children with attention disorders, he says, have "a sleepy cortex," and exercise combats that mental disengagement.

"Just by using their core muscles more, they're flipping [their cortex] on" and increasing their mental activity, Ratey says. "The cerebellum part of their brain is really working to adjust, every millisecond."

John Kilbourne, a professor of movement science at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, experimented with college students last year. He found that they preferred ball chairs to regular chairs and that their concentration improved while balancing.

In elementary school, though, some students equate exercise balls with playtime. So teachers devise ways to keep them from goofing off.

Yehl begins the school day by playing music and letting the kids do what she calls "baby bounces": They move up and down but keep their feet on the floor. She follows the same routine after recess.

Kids sometimes sway back and forth or roll on the balls, she says, but they rarely leave their seats.

And during class, the room is strikingly quiet.

"Even teachers walking past the room said they'd never realize [students] were sitting on exercise balls," Yehl says.

Exchange Server 2010: Microsoft Explains It All 1 comments

Exchange Server 2010 is all about new levels of control. The Transport Protection Rules system enables administrators to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents. The dreaded Access Control List has been replaced with something better, and the archiving process can be completed in the background.

The biggest change to Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange Server 2007 was supposed to have been the introduction of something called "Unified Communications" -- the introduction of a singular console for the handling of all forms of digital communication, wrapping voice mail, instant messaging, and email into a single delivery system. History may yet vindicate UC as the product's singular achievement.

However, in the near term, administrators credit Exchange more for what it gives them than the world at large. In that light, the inclusion of PowerShell as not only the underlying language of the system but as its engine as well, changed everything for the admin. It may very well be why the product has surged to a two-thirds market share, by some estimates, over once formidable competition such as Lotus Notes.
Short Functionality Gap

So learning a lesson from history, the message from Microsoft with regard to Exchange Server 2010, which went on sale last week, is about new levels of control. The idea that email, or any kind of communication, once sent unto the vast Internet is out of the sender's hands -- like a paper sailboat launched from a river pier -- is what the Exchange team has been working to combat. During a beta program which Microsoft says involved dozens of universities, signing up some 10 million participants worldwide, the company has completed development of a browser-based endpoint for ES 2010-delivered email that is not only more manageable than Outlook 2007, but that has beaten Outlook 2010 -- the product it's supposed to be derived from -- to market by perhaps eight months.

What that means is, hopefully for a short time only, there will be a functionality gap between what the new Outlook Web App -- hosted by ES 2010 -- can deliver compared to what Outlook 2007 provides. If Julia White, Microsoft's marketing Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales director for Exchange, has anything to say about it, that gap will be shorter rather than longer, but it's not unnoticed.

White spoke with Betanews from Berlin, where she had just completed a TechEd Europe demonstration along with Corporate Vice President Stephen Elop. "Obviously Outlook Web Apps comes with Exchange, so they can use that today; when Outlook 2010 comes out, they can use that," said White, "and we are absolutely planning support for Outlook 2007 in the roadmap here. So it's on the agenda, and we will actually be getting to it."

Much of what Exchange 2010 will deliver absolutely depends on this upgrade to Outlook 2007, as you'll see. We asked White for her take on what she would consider the top three enhancements to administrator functionality in ES 2010.
#3: Transport Protection Rules

Number three on this list is the Transport Protection Rules system. It enables the administrator to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents, based upon rules that enable Exchange to analyze the content itself. "In the demo this morning, I set a Transport Protection Rule based on a keyword. But actually another aspect of that is, those rules can be set based on the sender, the recipient, or even contents of an attachment," White told Betanews.

"Any of those things can be triggered; and having the ability to centrally decide what gets encrypted and what doesn't, is a really powerful tool. With end users, it's hard for them to keep up with corporate policy, pay attention to it, or know about it. So oftentimes it's unintended, versus intended, when information isn't protected. Having that essentially managed brings peace of mind, for the users as well as the IT pros."

The ability to analyze an attachment takes place on a granular level, White told us. If a PowerPoint presentation, for example, were to contain the words "Microsoft Confidential," that fact alone would trigger a rule that automatically encrypts the message outgoing, and that restricts the recipient from being able to pass it on.
#2: Role-Based Access Control

One of the least loved features of Exchange, or anything Microsoft has ever done, disappears in ES 2010: The Access Control List is a Registry-based system for designating which identified and authenticated user had permissions to control specific objects. It has often been a ridiculous concept that starts one off with the assumption that everyone has rights to everything, and that ACLs provide the exceptions.

Exchange Server 2010 replaces this entirely with a concept that is much more rooted in Active Directory. Now, the administrator starts off in a universe where nothing is allowed until groups of users are added into the pool of permissions. Those groups that are added in are called "management role groups," with the concept being that a predefined set of roles exist (a concept made popular by Windows Server 2008), and that groups of users or individual users are delegated those roles.

Julia White demonstrated how Role-Based Access Control enabled an otherwise unprivileged user to search for emails through multiple mailboxes on the company's behalf (in this case, Microsoft's usual fictitious firm, Contoso). Her system was delegated a role that let her perform the search, without having to delegate other responsibilities and privileges of a much higher administrative order. "A compliance officer might get that level of capability," White explained to us, "but a help desk might have the rights to increase mail box quota size. Maybe HR would be given the ability to update contact information on behalf of employees. Extending all the way down to end users, even that same roles-based administration capability -- end users can now create and manage their own distribution groups within Exchange. That no longer requires a call to the IT pro ... usually that's a lot of overhead."
#1: Integrated Archiving

During the late 1980s and into the '90s, Microsoft liked to centralize things, thinking that if everything were in one big pile -- as Arlo Guthrie put it -- that would beat two or more little ones. The System Registry is, and remains, one big pile. Another -- which can stink just as bad -- is the .PST file, the single personal folder file that is created on the client side by Outlook.

It is every Outlook user's nightmare, especially since Office buries this file typically in a black hole within a hidden directory inside each user's Documents folder. For individuals who receive hundreds of thousands of emails per year (I'm on that list, believe me), the archiving process has cost users many a weekend.

With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft marketing director Julia White told Betanews, is the ability to perform this process completely in the background. However, in addition, the archived items remain indexed and available, still listed as part of "Personal Folder" but stored separately.

"Today, the vast majority of email actually sits on the local hard drive on those .PST files," White remarked. The end users love it because they can file as much as they want in there, and they have access to it when they're on their PC. But from an administrator's perspective, they don't like them because they're very expensive to discover, they get lost, they get corrupted, it's a liability and a lot of overhead for the IT organization.

"So with integrated archiving ... it doesn't have any change to the end user experience," she continued. "That Personal Folder appears, but the archive shows up and it looks just the same, it's another folder in your file directory, it looks like a secondary Inbox...The benefit is, it's all sitting on Exchange, so it's not going to get corrupted or lost. It's very easy to discover -- that time comes down dramatically. And as a user, you get access to it through Outlook Web App, [as opposed to] on the local hard drive."

Here, White took the bold step of proclaiming OWA as superior to Outlook, in that users still get full access to their mail (albeit with transport restrictions), but without having to keep those multi-gigabyte .PST files locally:

"What got us into this in the beginning was when we talked to our Exchange customers as we were planning [ES] 2010, and we found out that 20 percent of Exchange mailboxes have an archive on them today, but over 60 percent said it was important to them. It's scary, because there's not a mailbox out there that shouldn't be archived for one reason or another. What we heard from them was, 1) the cost and overhead of maintaining and managing another system -- new tools to learn -- was too expensive; and 2) the end-user experience. Oftentimes you have an archive today, you have to go to a different UI to retrieve the mail, or the performance is really poor on the archived mail. Because what they do is called 'stubbing,' which means they literally just leave a little bit of the email in the Inbox, and the rest of it sits out on a third-party system. So the performance has to go bounce between multiple systems, so it's very slow.

"If end users don't adopt it, it doesn't work," White remarked. "So this clears the hurdle of both the end user experience as the IT pro cost and management perspective."
That 70 Percent Cost Savings Claim

During the presentation at TechEd in Berlin, Microsoft CVP Stephen Elop made the staggering claim that within a group of 100 companies testing Exchange Server 2010 over the last year, some were able to cut their administrative costs over earlier versions of Exchange by as much as 70 percent.

As is Betanews' custom (and as is the custom of Betanews readers who see anything in double-digits beside a percentile mark), we asked how that figure was obtained. For instance, we've seen companies in the past that said the expenditure to do something this year was X percent lower than the expense to do something in the past, and that typically refers to the fact that memory or storage or processor power is just that much cheaper. That's not really savings; that's a factor of the economy.

So what is this 70 percent savings a factor of? "A big cost driver is storage," responded White. "We know the storage aspect of email, it's a lot of information and it can get expensive. Traditionally, Exchange was deployed always on a storage-area network, which was fine back in the day when you had a 200 MB mailbox. Obviously, that's not sufficing anymore, and 10 GB is becoming more of a standard. Supporting that kind of mailbox storage size on a SAN becomes cost-prohibitive.

"So what we've done in Exchange 2010 is two things: First, we dramatically improved performance, tenfold over Exchange 2003. When I say that, I mean the time it takes to read and write information to the disk. What that enables is world-class support of low-cost storage options -- direct-attached storage, SATA, even in a JBoss configuration. So big, slow disks, you can run Exchange without any performance or reliability impact." NEC (Nasdaq: NIPNY) Philips (NYSE: PHG), for example, was able to increase its storage capacity by a factor of eight, while simultaneously reducing costs by a factor of four, White said; and Germany-based hosted service provider Elabs was able to reduce its storage costs by 70 percent.

Isn't that saying that the expenditure this year is 70 percent or so less than the expenditure for a similar service in 2003? Yes, according to White, but that's in terms of operating cost run-rate, which is figured according to time and not total investment, especially since companies don't always purchase storage capacity all up-front.

Betanews also learned that Microsoft's SMB Windows Server bundles, Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008, will not be updated immediately with Exchange Server 2010. Those bundles may continue to be sold with Exchange Server 2007 for at least several more months down the road.

ASSISTANT DEPUTY SECRETARY OF EDUCATION JIM SHELTON OBSERVED H1N1 FLU LEARNING CONTINUITY DRILL AT VOISE ACADEMY 0 comments

October 7, 2009 - Chicago, IL - On October 7, 2009 at 12:30 pm, US Dept. of Education’s Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James H. Shelton III visited the VOISE (Virtual Opportunities In a School Environment) Academy, a Chicago Public School in the Austin neighborhood (231 N. Pine Chicago, IL, 60644), to observe a H1N1 flu learning continuity drill. The drill demonstrated how VOISE Academy’s unique use of learning technologies and digital curriculum materials promote exceptional student learning during normal school days as well as enable learning continuity in the event of a school shutdown due to a flu outbreak or other emergency.



VOISE Academy principal Todd R. Yarch led the event, accompanied by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) leadership. Sandi Atols (CPS, retired), a founder of the school, and Dr. Kemi Jona (Director of the Office of STEM Education Partnerships at Northwestern University), a member of the VOISE Academy design team, also attended. Dr. Jona is a nationally recognized expert in educational technology and online learning. ”VOISE Academy is a real working model of the promise of online and blended learning in improving the learning of all students,” said Jona. “In 5 years, this is what most schools across the country will look like. Not only are the digital curriculum and tools used at VOISE engaging students in individualized learning every day, they also make it a snap to implement continuity of learning in the case of a flu outbreak or other emergency.”



The impetus for this event is the Dept of Education’s focus on the important role that educational technologies and online curriculum materials like those used at VOISE Academy can play in improving learning for all students. "Technology is core and essential to the strategies we are using to reform education," Shelton said. These same technologies can help meet the challenge of continuity of learning for possible upcoming H1N1-related school closures. There is concern in the education community that the H1N1 flu pandemic will pose significant challenges for educators this school year.



Principal Yarch said: “I think the benefits of online learning and digital curriculum in the case of crisis such as an H1N1 shut down is obvious. Schools like ours can continue to deliver high levels of instruction even when students can't get to school, although what you see in a hybrid school like VOISE is the ability of our outstanding teachers to integrate face-to-face instruction with the rigorous online curriculum on a daily basis. The hybrid model makes the online environment less daunting because students and teachers know each other on a personal level--this creates a nurturing environment, which is something our students desperately need.”



“Interest in online learning solutions for continuity of learning is in high demand by school districts,” said Susan Patrick, President and CEO of The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). “The recent outbreaks of swine flu in schools has prompted the need for continuity of learning using online learning. Online learning offers solutions for helping prepare schools for pandemic planning as well as for natural disasters caused by weather, hurricanes, fires and other closures. States and district education leaders are reviewing policies for learning continuity and virtual education to help establish new school models using blended models of online learning every day to help engage students in 21st century classrooms – and prepare schools for readiness to use online learning in the event of a school closure,” Patrick added.



VOISE Academy has been collaborating with iNACOL and has contributed to and benefited from their newly released continuity of learning website at www.inacol.org/col.



About VOISE

A model of the future of schooling, VOISE Academy: Virtual Opportunities Inside a School Environment is one of the only urban public (non-charter) non-selective schools in the country to use online materials all the time. VOISE is open to all neighborhood students who choose to apply. It uses a hybrid model, integrating face-to-face teacher instruction with rigorous online curriculum. VOISE’s mission is to provide all students with choice, flexibility, scholarship, and individual attention by combining the use of technology, best distance learning practices, and quality online curriculum with exemplary secondary classroom teachers and student-centered philosophy.



About the Office of STEM Education Partnerships (OSEP) at Northwestern University

OSEP is a service organization that supports K-12 teachers, schools and other educational institutions by connecting them with the world-class science, technology, engineering, and mathematics resources of Northwestern University for the benefit of K-12 students. OSEP also supports Northwestern researchers in developing proposals and implementing research projects that incorporate K-12 educational components, particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

About iNACOL

iNACOL is the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a non-profit 501(c)(3) membership association based in the Washington, DC area with more than 2,500 members. iNACOL is unique in that its members represent a diverse cross-section of K-12 education from school districts, charter schools, state education agencies, non-profit organizations, colleges, universities and research institutions, corporate entities and other content and technology providers (www.inacol.org). iNACOL hosts the annual Virtual School Symposium (VSS). VSS 2009 will be held Nov. 15 – 17, 2009 in Austin, TX

Time for education reform with Governor 0 comments

The Governor has called for a special session on education reform to enact changes needed to make California eligible and competitive for billions of dollars in federal funding.

I am honored to serve as the vice-chair of the Assembly Education Committee, and I look forward to working with the Governor and my colleagues in the Legislature to enact meaningful reforms that will improve the delivery of education for our children.

While there will be many issues that emerge in the special session, I am focused on making changes in the following areas:


1. Remove barriers in state law that prohibit using student achievement on state testing in the formal evaluation of teachers.

This is necessary because it is a requirement in the proposed federal "Race to the Top" grants. While I am in support of this concept, I also believe that student test data should be only one factor in evaluating teacher performance.

There are several conditions that impact students' standardized test scores, including parental involvement, public safety (e.g. gangs in the community and on school campuses) and language barriers.

Ultimately, a "value-added" analysis, such as evaluating a teacher's success at making progress with a pupil, is the most logical way to incorporate pupil performance into formal teacher evaluations.


2. Enhancing accountability

I favor crafting reforms that promote innovative approaches that properly distribute accountability, while granting the necessary decision-making authority to those who are held accountable.

For example, there is evidence of success in educational models that allow a principal to be in complete control of his or her school, and then hold that principal accountable for results.

To promote such models it would be necessary to enact changes in law that will allow the principal to hire and fire whomever they think will do the best job.

Also, incentives could be enacted to encourage school districts to allow the principal to spend monies wherever they deem necessary.

Furthermore, the state should do away with or minimize "categorical funding," which dictates to school districts how funds must be spent rather than allowing local decisions to be made based upon the unique circumstances of each local school.


3. Charter schools

The proposed "Race to the Top" regulations favor fewer restrictions on charter schools.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has suggested that California should lift the current cap on the number of charter schools allowed. I favor educational choice and welcome this change in state law.

I propose, in addition, that we focus on which charter schools work best and why, and then initiate incentives to duplicate that success in the lowest performing schools across the state.


4. School vouchers for special education

Funding for special education is overwhelming school budgets, yet special needs children are not always getting adequate attention.

Rather than forcing parents to fight with school districts over appropriate levels of care, why not give them the option of purchasing those services from a private vendor or a school that has excelled in that area of service?

The bottom line for my approach in achieving educational reform is to experiment and promote innovation. The best way to approach reform is to encourage innovation at the local level, while maintaining high standards and enforcing accountability by empowering parents through greater choice and flexibility.

We should exchange the "command and control" model that favors mandates from Sacramento and Washington, D.C., for a model that promotes local innovation and grants local authority.

Assemblyman Brian Nestande (R-Palm Desert) represents the 64th Assembly District in the California Legislature.

Excel password recovery software works really fast 2 comments

One of the best and simplest ways to protect your data from fraud is having it encrypted with a password. Passwords are used on all the websites where people have any personal page. Passwords are also used to protect documents and important data. However, what can you do when you forgot a password to your excel document? These things happen a lot nowadays because we have to remember so many passwords.

There are cases when you forget your password or you family members that need to use your excel document forget the password. In these cases the solution can be the Excel Password Recovery. This software will help you open any password protected excel document. So if you need to open an excel document as fast as possible you are going to need a software like Excel Password Recovery.

Easy and comprehendible interface will help you recover excel documents in a few moments. All you need is to download, launch the application and open the excel document with it. Excel password recovery software will show you all the passwords that this document contains even the ones that are set to different books within the document.
However, the best way is not to forget your password and if you do not want to get your files hacked bring them with you on your flash drive.

UC Davis study of kids' blood mercury levels finds no autism link 0 comments

By Anna Tong
In one of the largest studies yet, UC Davis researchers said Monday that they found no real difference in blood mercury levels of children with, and without, autism.

The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, measured blood mercury levels of 452 children, 249 of whom had autism. Those with autism had lower levels, but it was because they eat less fish. Once researchers took fish consumption into account, the difference disappeared.

The levels were similar to those found in national samplings of children covering a similar age range.

"It's a pervasive belief that children with autism have tons of metal in them," said co-author Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist at UC Davis. "We could not measure levels in brain or other tissues, but mercury concentrations circulating in the blood of children with autism were similar to levels in other children."

Hertz-Picciotto cautioned that the study measured only current mercury levels in children, not exposure that may have happened earlier in life.

"This isn't a study asking whether mercury causes autism," she said.

High levels of mercury have been known to cause severe neurological damage, and there have been hypotheses pointing to mercury as one of the possible causes of autism.

The number of autism diagnoses, characterized by abnormal social interactions and communication, has increased dramatically of late.

Another study published this month in the journal Pediatrics estimated autism's prevalence to be 1 in 91 children, an increase from the rate of 1 in 150 children reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2008.

While the increase is in part due to increased awareness of autism, experts are agreed that it is also directly related to environmental factors.

Another study published last year by Hertz-Picciotto documented a 600 percent increase in autism diagnoses in California between 1990 and 2006, and estimated 400 percent of that was due to environmental factors.

In recent weeks the new H1N1 vaccine has reignited the issue of autism and mercury. Public health officials are pushing hard to vaccinate all young children against H1N1. But a significant proportion of parents are reluctant to give children the vaccine, in part because thimerosal – a mercury-containing preservative – is present in multidose vials of the vaccine. Thimerosal is not present in single-dose vials and the nasal spray vaccine. Rumors of a link persist, even though the CDC has declared the link between vaccines and autism unsubstantiated.

The study announced Monday did not look at the vaccine. Nor did it address how earlier exposure to thimerosal may have affected children.

The new report is part of a large Sacramento-based study seeking to cast a wide net over environmental and genetic factors in relation to autism. Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment Study (CHARGE) has enrolled over 1,000 children since its inception in 2003.

There is a great need for credible research in the arena of autism and the environment, experts said.

"It's a problem that the issue of environmental factors has not been researched to the degree it needs to be," said Lee Grossman, head of the Maryland-based Autism Society.

The comprehensive nature of the Sacramento study will help guide clinicians, said Antonio Hardan, director of Stanford Medical School's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Clinic.

"There have been similar studies but not as good as this one," Hardan said. "This will really add to the literature."

U.S Maths Test Find Scant Gains Across New York 0 comments

New York State’s fourth and eighth graders made no notable progress on federal math exams this year, according to test scores released on Wednesday, sharply contradicting the results of state-administered tests that showed record gains.

In state exams, 80 percent of eighth graders met learning standards in math this year, a jump from 59 percent two years ago. But judged by federal standards, only 34 percent were considered proficient, up from 30 percent in 2007. Fourth-grade students actually performed worse than in 2007.

Across the country, many states posted disappointing results, with fourth-grade students stagnant nationally for the first time in nearly two decades.

The results of the federal exam renewed criticism that the state exams have become too easy. The gulf between the state and federal exams also put Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, in a difficult position, because he has staked much on the state exams, tying them to consequences like student, teacher and principal bonuses and the city’s A through F grading system for schools. And the results come at a politically potent time for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is trying to ride his record on education, and test scores in particular, to a third term.

While the results of New York City’s performance on the federal exams will not be available for several weeks, in previous years they have tracked closely to New York State’s federal results.

There has long been a chasm between what the state tests and the federal tests, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, deem proficient. But perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the latest federal results for New York education officials was that they showed little or no improvement during two years in which the state was claiming huge jumps in student achievement.

The state’s Education Department renewed its promise to raise standards and ensure that the state tests include less predictable questions next year.

“It is clear to us that this gap cannot stay,” said Merryl H. Tisch, the chairwoman of the state’s Board of Regents, who added that she considered the national exam the “gold standard” that did a better job of measuring overall student achievement. “We are going to start to address that this year and we are going to make the state tests more transparent and more truthful.”

David Steiner, the state education commissioner, said he was “particularly concerned by the tragically stubborn gaps” between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts. According to the federal exam, 50 percent of white fourth graders are proficient in math, compared with 25 percent of Hispanics and 19 percent of blacks, contradicting results from state tests showing a significantly smaller gap.

“What this amounts to is a fraud,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian who has been one of the most vocal critics of both the state exams and Mr. Klein. “This is a documentation of persistent dumbing down by the State Education Department and lying to the public.”

Christopher Cerf, a former deputy chancellor at the Department of Education, who is now advising the mayor’s campaign and spoke on its behalf, said that when the New York City numbers become public, they could show that city students outperformed their peers in the rest of the state.

“It would be impossible to draw any conclusions about New York City’s progress at this point,” Mr. Cerf said.

The federal exam, which is given every two years, uses what it calls a representative sampling of students. In New York, roughly 4,050 of the state’s fourth graders were tested, while nearly 198,000 students took the state test, which is given every year. In the eighth grade, about 3,800 students were tested on the national test, compared with 209,000 on the state exam. The state also tests grades three, five, six and seven every year.

The federal results for English tests are not expected to be released until the spring.

Critics of the state tests have said that they measure a narrow slice of the curriculum. And under state law, tests from previous years are publicly available, allowing teachers to give students many practice tests and predict what kinds of questions will be asked. The federal exam, on the other hand, does not encourage such preparation, in part because there are no consequences for teachers or schools if students do not perform well.

Mr. Klein said that the city has no choice other than to use the state exam to reward and penalize schools, because it is the only test that measures all city students. And he said that eighth-grade scores on the tests are reliable predictors of whether a student will graduate from high school. “This doesn’t in any way undermine what we’ve accomplished here,” he said.

In 2007, only 34 percent of New York City’s fourth graders and 22 percent of eighth graders were considered proficient on the federal math exam. On the state exam that year, those numbers were 74 percent and 46 percent, respectively.

The city made huge gains on the state math exams in 2009, with 85 percent of fourth graders and 71 percent of eighth graders passing.

“I have said many, many times that we should raise the bar,” Mr. Klein said. “The state’s definition of proficiency needs to be tethered to a more demanding standard.”

But in a show of the politics involving test scores, a spokeswoman for William C. Thompson Jr., the Democratic candidate for mayor, called the Bloomberg administration the “Madoff of the American education system” and a “national disgrace.”

“Bloomberg’s D.O.E. has systemically lied about test scores, graduation rates and dropout rates,” the spokeswoman, Anne Fenton, said in a statement. “Our children deserve a quality education; instead, they have become pawns in Mike Bloomberg’s 200-plus million-dollar public relations campaign to rewrite history.”

Defending the mayor and the city’s school system, Mr. Cerf, the Bloomberg campaign adviser, said that there were important differences in scope and content between the state and federal tests. And he and Mr. Klein noted that the even the federal No Child Left Behind law uses state tests to measure schools’ performance.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers’ union, said the federal results showed that the state tests were not reliable yardsticks.

“We’ve designed a school system that is just test-taking prep, and we have teachers saying, ‘I know I am not teaching children what they need to learn,’ ” he said.

Michael Barbaro and Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting.

September price drop part 2: Nintendo Wii for 199.99 USD 0 comments

Unlike Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii suffers smaller impact from Sony PlayStation 3 Slim arrival. But as it appeared, they also decided to drop the price for their bundle a bit. Why? Well, our idea is that Wii has been around for quite a while now and the new one is coming. In fact come to think of it, Wii is the oldest of the three. But still the same fun as it was two years back, I'm I right? This is the thing about gaming consoles - they depreciate slower that desktop PCs or smartphones. Back to Amazon now.

Nintendo Wii has finally dropped under two hundreds dollars. 199.99 USD tag is, of course, very catchy, but with the console itself you get the excess to an boundless world of Wii games, peripherals, and even backward compatibility with Nintendo GameCube if you got nostalgic about it. Bundle inculeds Wii sports game - a perfect variant to get acuainted with Wii is capable of.

Intel Developer Forum brief 0 comments

More OLED notebook stuff, this time from IDF. Only that this time a full OLED panel is not the case. Intel has given everyone a glimpse at freshly developed concept notebook that has three downsized screens located right over the keyboard. Lets join this with the fact that Intel developed Moblin operating system has reached its 2.1 version, an epic Light Peak 10Gbps interconnector for mobile devices and it sort of comes all together as I see it.

You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, so I just look forward to an end product developed fully by Intel. I do think they have the technology and ability to come up with a neat netbook probably even with OLED and Moblin onboard, who knows? Not a long time ago we have reviewed internet orientated operating systems and concluded that they make sense especially for computing on the go. In the same key light and slim OLED display is perfect for a notebook. Intel, we are intrigued.

Parents 'oppose' school test rankings 0 comments

Most parents oppose naming and shaming of bad schools, a poll says

The survey said the Rudd Government's top five priorities should be recruiting more teachers, reducing class sizes, upgrading public school facilities, introducing a national curriculum and giving a computer to all Years 9-12 students.

The Australian Education Union, a vocal critic of school league tables, commissioned the survey, which was carried out by UMR Research.

Surveyors told parents there were concerns that organisations, such as newspapers, could take school test results and publish tables that ranked schools by performance. Respondents were also told some parents and teachers believed the data should not be reproduced without the Government's permission.

For schools, use of stimulus money falls short of big hopes 0 comments

Many administrators say the opportunity to direct funds to reforms has been limited or nil.

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo

The announcement earlier this year that roughly $100 billion in federal stimulus funds would flow to public schools came with great expectations – both for saving jobs and for fostering reforms in education. But the way the money is being used so far is decidedly more mundane.

In a new survey of 160 school-district leaders, 53 percent say they have not been able to use the money to save teaching positions in core subject areas or special education. And 67 percent say the opportunity to direct the money to reforms has been limited or nil.

“Everybody appreciated getting the money …, but primarily all the money did was help to backfill the budget deficits they were already facing,” says Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) in Arlington, Va., which released the survey Tuesday.

The majority of survey respondents did prioritize saving various personnel positions, along with investing in professional development. Other top uses of the money included buying technology, equipment, and supplies for classrooms and paying for school repairs.

Survey respondents cited several key reasons for not being able to focus more on reforms.

The money is coming through several streams, and the most flexible one, known as State Fiscal Stabilization, was primarily used to fill holes left by declining state and local funding.

The bulk of the remaining money comes with specific purposes: Title I stimulus funds support low-income students, and Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) dollars support special education. Fewer strings would have made it easier to stimulate the economy and implement innovative ideas, some respondents commented.

Fear of a “funding cliff” also comes into play: Administrators worry that if they maintain too many jobs or set up new programs now, they won’t be able to continue to fund them after the stimulus money runs dry in the 2010-11 academic year.

Some education-watchers, though, say districts could take a more radical approach if they were willing. “That would entail districts thinking about whether their class sizes … are configured smartly, whether they’re using distance technologies effectively,… whether they might want to rethink their pay scales,” says Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “One has to search long and hard to find districts doing any of this.”

Mr. Hess and Mr. Domenech do agree there is still hope that some models for reform will emerge from about $5 billion of stimulus cash still to be distributed to states and districts. Such competitive grants would be based on proposals in key areas, such as linking teacher pay to student outcomes and turning around failing schools.

The US Department of Education isn’t giving up hope, either: “We are confident that as states continue to invest stimulus dollars in their schools, the funds will not only go towards saving jobs but to investing in reform,” writes deputy press secretary Sandra Abrevaya in an e-mail.

—–

Schools try to do more with less

Budget cuts and demands for improved student achievement test public-school administrators more than ever. But read here about how some scrappy innovators are passing that test with an ‘A.’

Schools prepare for swine flu 0 comments

As schoolchildren return to class this fall, they'll find that any trace of a feverish forehead or deep cough could quickly land them in the nurse's office with a call home to pick them up.As schoolchildren return to class this fall, they'll find that any trace of a feverish forehead or deep cough could quickly land them in the nurse's office with a call home to pick them up.

Officials worry that a surge of swine flu -- coupled with the annual return of seasonal flu -- just as the school year begins could be an educational and health nightmare. As a precaution, school administrators are quickly changing how they handle sick children.

Students who report for class with a temperature of more than 100 degrees will be sent home without exception and not permitted to return until a day after the fever breaks. School nurses will track absenteeism and report kids' symptoms to county health departments, a practice that began last spring when the virus first emerged. Teachers, aides and cafeteria servers will continue to drill students in common-sense precautions such as washing hands and covering coughs.

While much about the emergent H1N1 strain remains a mystery, so far it has hit young children especially hard. School officials and health experts are responding with a call for vigilance in the classroom and at home.

"We're on alert," said Ellen Wolff, health services supervisor with Naperville School District 203. "It's so much of an unknown right now."

Just before lunch Friday, nearly two dozen 1st graders extended their tiny palms for a squirt of hand sanitizer before heading toward the Elgin school cafeteria, their clean hands pressed to their sides.

Sheridan Elementary School teacher Maribel Andino gave instructions as she put a dollop of the cleansing liquid onto each outstretched palm and demonstrated how to make effective use of it.

"Solo en las manos, si? Only in your hands," Andino said. "Show me how you do it. Not in your hair, not in your eyes. Now rub your hands together."

In addition to expanding its use of hand sanitizers, the Elgin district stepped up surveillance of flulike symptoms. District officials made clear to parents that a fever-ridden child with the telltale flu symptoms will not be permitted to stay in school.

"Prior to H1N1, if a student came to school with a fever, it may or may not have been noted. There's nothing to say a child would be sent home," said district spokesman Tony Sanders. "With this new strain, if a student comes to school with a fever greater than 100, they will be sent home and parents will be contacted."

Unlike the seasonal flu, which typically dies off in the summer, the H1N1, or swine flu, strain that emerged last spring continues to spread. To date, 3,443 cases have been confirmed or identified in Illinois, nearly 60 percent of them striking school-age people 5 to 24, according to the state Department of Public Health. Nine of every 10 confirmed infections have been clustered in Chicago and the surrounding counties.

The spread shows no sign of slowing. Indeed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anticipates more illness after the school year begins because the flu typically spreads more easily during fall and winter.

"As far as being a bellwether and a potential hot spot for epidemics, schools are probably No. 1 on the list," said Bill Mays, community health director with the Lake County Health Department.

How schools handle the virus is shaped by health experts. Last spring, when the first cases were diagnosed in the U.S., the federal government urged schools to shut down for up to 14 days if they had a confirmed case. More than 700 schools in the nation closed, including nearly three dozen in the Chicago area.

But schools this year likely will be slower to call off classes, based on new information. The CDC now says schools should be conservative about closing entirely. The agency instead urges parents to check their children each morning for flulike symptoms and keep them home from school if they have a fever.

What's more, the CDC has changed its recommendation about when students can return to class after a bout of swine flu. Previously, it said that students with confirmed cases should stay home for up to seven days. Now it's saying that students can return to class 24 hours after the fever ends.

"We can't stop the tide of flu, but we can reduce the number of people who become very ill by preparing well and acting effectively," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC.

School nurses will be at the forefront of efforts to stop the spread of swine flu. Illinois, however, lags behind most states in the number of school nurses available. Illinois has 2,893 students per school nurse -- a ratio that's 46th in the nation -- according to the National Association of School Nurses.

In Barrington, school nurses will continue to work with classroom teachers to reinforce lessons about hand-washing and covering coughs. One teaching tool they employ is an ultraviolet light that allows elementary students to put their hands underneath and see what germs did not get scrubbed away, said district nursing supervisor Eva Dettloff.

"We ask staff to enforce hand-washing and to remind kids when they perhaps need to wash their hands," Dettloff said.

Chicago Public Schools again will look for suspicious attendance dips to identify schools that may be affected by swine flu.

Any student with a temperature more than 100 degrees will be sent home, but the district is working with the city health department to determine what other symptoms might trigger a dismissal from class, said district spokeswoman Monique Bond.

One factor that's still in play is a possible swine flu vaccine. It is being tested, but it likely won't be available until weeks after students return to class. School-age children are expected to be among those given first access to the vaccine.

The national health agency also recommends seasonal flu shots for all children older than 6 months. Many schools plan to host health fairs and promote the annual flu shot among employees.

The common flu vaccine cannot guard against swine flu, but it can avoid confusing a routine illness with the more serious H1N1 infection.

"You can't tell a difference between seasonal flu and H1N1 by the symptoms," said spokeswoman Melaney Arnold with the Illinois Department of Public Health. "If we build up a better protection to the seasonal influenza, it will cut down on the number of people needing to go the hospitals for H1N1."

Elise Hauptman typically skips the annual flu shots for her three children. But this year, the Vernon Hills mother insisted on the vaccine for her 6th grader and 4th-grade twins.

"There's no monkeying around," Hauptman said. "We're doing it this time."

MPS struggling to create stable corps of principals 0 comments

To be a successful principal, Julia D'Amato says, you need to be "a 29-baller." That's someone who can juggle 29 balls at the same time, not dropping any of them.

That's someone who can juggle 29 balls at the same time, not dropping any of them. That's what it feels like to run a school, says D'Amato, principal of Reagan High School, the south side school she has led from birth in 2003 to the top bracket of Milwaukee high schools now.

It's hard to find people who can juggle like that.

And it's hard for Milwaukee Public Schools to find top-notch people to lead approximately 200 schools.

As a new school year approaches, MPS is struggling with creating a strong, stable corps of principals. How so?

•  More than 20% of elementary and kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools have someone different at the helm now than a year ago, and turnover in recent years has, in general, been high. MPS officials say there are 58 principals with three years of experience or less, almost one-third of the total.

•  Change goes beyond retirements and new hires. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos has moved principals from school to school frequently. He says he is trying to get better results from both people and schools. But some principals find the moves baffling and alienating.

•  The system that was used for coaching principals in recent years has been dropped, and a new one, focused on mentoring newer principals, is being launched in cooperation with Alverno College.

•  New Leaders for New Schools, a high-profile national program for preparing people to lead struggling schools, has encountered strong resistance within MPS. The program is key to plans for strong principals in MPS in the future, but some principals - and assistant principals who think the New Leaders program jeopardizes their chances of promotion - have little good to say about it.

•  In general, principals such as D'Amato say the job has become harder, more complex and more demanding in recent years, and attracting good people to take the jobs has become harder. Among the reasons: More demands from administrators and politicians; increased burdens due to the federal No Child Left Behind law and the state's plan to make MPS change some of its practices; as well as the general impact of tighter budgets and higher poverty in the city.

•  Some principals say morale is low in their ranks and fear is high of reprisals from the superintendent if principals stick their necks out in any way.

How to build up the quality of the corps of principals will be one of the biggest challenges facing the next superintendent of MPS. John Weigelt, executive director of the Administrators and Supervisors Council, an organization of MPS managers, said principals overall hope the next chief will be "someone who can inspire people to do their best work."

It is almost universally accepted among educators that a high-quality principal is key to a high-quality school.

Yet filling those jobs has gotten harder and more complex. MPS has gone through a series of changes, going back to Andrekopoulos' predecessor, Spence Korté, in how it selects principals, and it continues to make changes.

One key change in recent years is a shift away from looking at being an assistant principal as the preferred route to becoming a principal.

To Andrekopoulos and the founders of New Leaders for New Schools, this is a positive step. The field of candidates has broadened to include not only people in other roles but people outside MPS, especially if they go through the intensive program New Leaders is offering, including a summer of training and a year of internships in MPS schools.

"We have changed the notion that there's a rite of passage in the district . . . (that) just because you have seat time, you have a right to a position," Andrekopoulos said.

But that has made many principals and assistant principals unhappy.

How are principals picked? Sallie Brown, veteran principal of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning and president of the administrators organization, said, "You would like to think there's rhyme or reason for it. If there is (an understandable process), I'm not privy to it."
Power to hire, fire

Everyone agrees that the power to pick, to assign and to shift around principals lies with the superintendent, and Andrekopoulos has used that power actively.

"That's my job, to put people in places where we think they can perform," he said when asked about shifts in principals that have made other MPS administrators unhappy. He said MPS is holding principals more accountable for success than in the past, and more work must be done to improve that system.

If anything, Andrekopoulos would like the MPS superintendent to have more power to hire and fire principals.

Now, they generally have tenure to stay as principals or, if they are relatively new in the job, to return to their prior jobs, often as assistant principals. Andrekopoulos said the job security is "an increasing concern I have."

He said that with a spate of retirements by veterans in the last few years, MPS has a roster of principals generally younger than in the past. "We have a lot of young, enthusiastic people who are giving it their all," he said. The pipeline for future appointments is getting better with the increasing presence of New Leaders and other efforts, he said.

But there are clearly strong critics within the system.

Weigelt said that morale among principals is "at the lowest point I've seen it in 12 years in this position" as director of the principals and administrators organization. "People are disheartened," he said. There are many reasons, from attacks on public education from outside the system to diminishing resources for schools to increasing demands on principals. One reason, he said, is that principals feel "hamstrung by central office policies."

Andrekopoulos has recentralized power in MPS in the past several years, putting principals and schools under more specific control and narrowing the choices schools can make in what they are doing, especially if the schools have had low test scores.

Those steps were recommended by outside consultants and are now part of the state Department of Public Instruction's orders for MPS.

But one result, Weigelt said, is that "the days of the maverick are gone - one cannot be a maverick in MPS and last very long."

A decade ago, it was a handful of maverick principals - including Korté and Andrekopoulos - who drove the dialogue about change in MPS. Now it is Andrekopoulos and the central office.
Changes causing division

The New Leaders program is intended to bring a wave of highly motivated people into principal jobs in MPS and nine other urban districts where the organization has operations. The goal is to put them in the most challenging schools, where they can shake things up and produce higher achievement.

But the program has encountered resistance, much from people in the MPS bureaucracy. The criticisms include that it is expensive and that it bypasses good training programs that include spending years building up to being a principal.

One sign of trouble in Milwaukee: Two people from the first wave of New Leaders training were assigned last year to lead challenging schools, Maple Tree on the northwest side and Urban Waldorf (now Twenty-Seventh Street). Both were transferred out at the end of the year by Andrekopoulos, who said both will be good principals but need more seasoning.

Almost no one is willing to talk about what happened, but the stories behind the moves were much more complicated. It is clear particularly that Jane Behr, who led Maple Tree, pushed the staff to focus more on achievement and to change some established practices, and that the staff became divided. Some supported her strongly and said in e-mails to MPS officials that they had the most successful year of their careers, while others opposed what she did. Test scores rose in her first year on the job.

Andrekopoulos offered Behr a position as an assistant principal at an elementary school, but she has requested a leave to work on her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jon Schnur, the Milwaukee-area native who is the co-founder and CEO of New Leaders, said he is confident the organization is starting to have substantial positive impact in the cities where it operates.

"We are on the brink of cracking the code of how to drive dramatic gains in low-performing schools across the country," he said.

Andrekopoulos said it is important to learn to use data better in guiding schools, accountability systems must be improved, and MPS must continue to press to get the best people it can to lead schools.

But, speaking from her vantage as a lead among Milwaukee's principals, D'Amato said, "It's getting harder and harder to get qualified, competent people to fill these positions because of the increased demands of the job."

Eco-friendly Portable Partial Washer 0 comments

The design of this eco-friendly gadget is credited to Rong Yong and Jiang Qian. The device performs two major functions: firstly it saves gallons of water when washing clothes and secondly the Partial Washer produces solar electricity and thus cuts your electricity bill.

It is most likely that the gadget was developed for people who are lazy enough to do their laundry, but it could also be used for those who want to go camping, taking the portable washer with them.

With the help of the solar-powered Partial Washer users can wash only the part of clothes that requires cleaning. The device has a clamp that one can place on the stained part of garments. The gadget takes advantage of the new air washing technology, which uses a very small amount of water.

Rimlock bike to skillfully lock you bicycle 0 comments

Leaving your favorite bicycle unattended in public areas might be risky and you never know what could happen with it. But are there reliable locks that are able to protect your green transportation from being stolen? Here is a trustworthy gadget dubbed Rimlock bike that is capable of locking your bicycle in a smart way.

Once locked, it appears to be unable to drive anymore until you unlock it. Does not it sound like a good idea? With the Rimlock, bikers may not worry anymore about their bicycle’s future. Wherever you leave it, it is well protected. Simply use the key in the hub of the bicycle and remove its rim to completely disable it.

Not only does the Rimlock lock front wheel but also locks it its back wheel. Just one turn of the key will make your bike motionless. However if you prefer some extra protection for your bike, you may additionally use a traditional chain lock.

Apple Seals iPhone's SMS Security Leak 0 comments

Security researchers have apparently motivated Apple to kick out a patch that plugs an SMS hole in the iPhone's operating system. As demonstrated in a Thursday presentation at Black Hat, an iPhone flaw allowed hackers to launch malicious attacks through text messages. On Friday, Apple served up a fix.

Could something as simple as an SMS More about SMS text message turn your own smartphone against you, allowing a hacker to listen in on your private conversations or direct you to a malicious Web site?

It can be done, according to security experts presenting their findings Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

News of the now exposed flaw generated quite a buzz, especially because the researchers said they had notified Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Apple Store Discount on Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition . Click here. More about Apple about the iPhone's susceptibility to the attack, but the vendor had not released a fix at the time it was revealed at the conference.

However, the iPhone maker on Friday rushed out with an iPhone OS update that it says addresses the flaw.

Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google Android operating system is also affected by an SMS flaw, but the Internet search giant has fixed it.

The danger of SMS flaws is that they let attacks spread widely very fast and have the potential to take phishing and cyberfraud to new heights.
News of the iPhone SMS Flaw

At Black Hat, Charlie Miller, a researcher from Independent Security Evaluators, and University of Berlin Ph.D. candidate Collin Mulliner demonstrated that hackers can break into an iPhone through the SMS protocol to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack or take control of a user's device.

They showed that hackers can launch malware attacks through a victim's iPhone or implement other types of attacks common in the PC world, such as installing information-stealing Trojans.

That's because smartphones, with their flash memory, operating systems and other capabilities, are essentially very small computers. iPhone hackers and crackers have been able to turn the phone into what could arguably be called a desktop. The Java-based Open Office suite can be ported to the iPhone and, because the iPhone has a connector on its base for video output, it can be hooked up to a large screen. Add a keyboard, and you have a computer with at least 16 GB of disk space, 128 MB of RAM and a 600 MHz processor that can run any Linux application.

Miller, who formerly worked at the National Security Agency, released the first remote exploit for the iPhone back in 2007 and has made a career out of breaking Apple's security. He made it to Popular Mechanics' Top 10 Hackers list in 2008.
Apple Issues Update

The duo publicized the flaw at Black Hat because Apple did not initially respond to their requests to fix it, they said.

On Friday, after news of the attack had been widely reported, Apple introduced iPhone OS 3.0.1, which it claims patches the SMS flaw.

Apple's exclusive carrier in the U.S., AT&T (NYSE: T) More about AT&T, said it's working hard to maintain security. "AT&T takes all security threats seriously, and we have controls and mitigation capabilities in place that block and identify attempts to breach the security of our network," spokesperson Jeannie Hornung told TechNewsWorld.
iPhone Users Upset

News of the flaw sparked the creation of a topic on how to disable SMS on Apple's iPhone forum.

"In light of the recently announced hack of iPhone's SMS, I'd like to turn the feature completely," dan-the-red wrote on the forum. "Once there's a permanent solution ... well, I'd like to leave it off. Frankly, I can't stand it. How can I kill it, short of turning off the iPhone?"
What Is SMS and Why Is It Flawed?

SMS, part of the GSM series of standards, uses standardized communication protocols to let mobile phone users send and receive messages of up to 160 characters.

GSM has several vulnerabilities, some of which carry over into SMS. However, SMS has additional vulnerabilities because of its store-and-forward feature and because it can be conducted over the Internet.

Back in 2005, researchers at Pennsylvania State University presented a paper on SMS' vulnerabilities at the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Titled "Exploiting Open Functionality in SMS-Capable Cellular Networks," this paper said that connections between mobile phones and the Internet through SMS could let hackers kill voice service to large metropolitan areas with a cable modem. The hackers could target the entire United States with a medium-sized zombie network.

SMS traffic can be used to create a denial-of-service (DoS) attack by simply sending enough of them to flood control channels. "It would be theoretically possible to knock out cellular service for the continent with a data rate of approximately 370 Mbps," the paper stated.
The Danger of Thinking Big

Hackers have not launched wide-scale attacks through SMS so far perhaps because they would first have to collect data on the phones available in a given area. However, that can be done over the Internet.

"Evidently, the bad guys haven't been able to figure out how to do it effectively yet," Randy Abrams, director of technical education at security vendor ESET, told TechNewsWorld.

However, when the hackers do figure it out -- if they manage to work around the patch Apple delivered -- it could be big trouble. "The iPod touch and iPhone share the same operating system, so if I can infect your iPhone and use it to infect all other iPhones in your address book, that could spread like wildfire," Carl Howe, director, anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld.

The iPod touch would be a good vector to help spread the infection because it uses WiFi and can drop off the network after pulling or sending malware. Yankee's research shows there are more than 40 million iPhones and iPod touches worldwide.

"This could parallel the swine flue pandemic with the rapidity of its spread," Howe said.
Google Plugs the Leak

The Android operating system also suffered from an SMS flaw, but it's different from the Apple flaw, according to Android security engineer Rich Cannings.

The Android flaw would let attackers temporarily knock mobile phones off the cell network but would not let them gain control of the devices, Cannings told TechNewsWorld.

Miller and Mulliner had notified Google about the flaw at the end of June, and Google fixed it within days, Cannings said. "We made the fix available to carriers and OEMs for use in updating their customers, and have updated open source Android," he added.

Android users who update their systems will see that the update includes a security fix.
Taking CyberFraud to the Max

Security fixes are essential because SMS spoofing could take cyberfraud to new heights, ESET's Abrams warned.

"I just got an e-mail from a stranger claiming she's stranded in London and has lost her wallet and passport and asking me to send her money," he said. Such messages are a common tactic for scammers who break into a victim's email account and then steal money from that person's friends.

"That sort of fraud will be even more effective on cellphones than it is on e-mail when it appears to come from your friend, because people trust their cellphone messages even more than they trust e-mail," he said.

Senate hearing details influence of drug companies in doctor education 1 comments

Drug company-funding of continuing medical education for doctors has become one of the most lucrative ways for pharmaceutical firms to promote and sell their products, according to testimony before a U.S. Senate hearing.

Drug company funding of continuing medical education for doctors has become one of the most lucrative ways for pharmaceutical firms to promote and sell their products, adding to the enormous cost of health care in the United States, according to testimony Wednesday before a U.S. Senate hearing.

"CME (continuing medical education) has become an insidious vehicle for aggressive promotion of drugs and medical devices," said Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. "CME has largely evolved into marketing, cleverly disguised as education."

Nissen was one of several experts to testify on conflicts of interest in doctor education activity before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, led by Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.).

In questioning from Kohl, Nissen said the U.S. spends, on a per capita basis, $90 billion a year more than other industrialized countries, largely as a result of prescribing habits promoted by doctor education activities. If those costs were eliminated, it could fund a major portion of health care reform, he said.

Drug companies now spend more than $1 billion a year to fund doctor education, accounting for more than half of all such activity.
Influencing use

Critics contend that it leads to more use of expensive brand-name drugs and the use of those drugs for unproven therapies.

The Journal Sentinel has published a series of stories this year raising questions about the influence of pharmaceutical companies at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, including several stories on drug company-funded doctor education. Drug companies spend about $13 million a year to fund UW medical education courses, and the university receives about $3 million of that.

In written statement to the committee, Robert Golden, dean of the UW medical school, said all of America's health care teaching institutions should abide by clear standards that eliminate or manage conflicts of interest.

"Transparency, however, must be a basic element of any approach to conflict of interest," Golden said.

However, Nissen noted that the flow of money is so enticing that large academic medical centers now compete with for-profit entities known as medical education companies for industry funding. Often those firms work with medical schools such as UW to produce doctor education material with funding from drug companies.

While the grants are supposed to be unrestricted, often there is a "wink and a nod" in which the private companies pick speakers and topics that will please the drug company, Nissen said.
Eye on the market

Drug companies can use their sponsorship of doctor education to increase market share and maximize their return on investment, said Lewis Morris, chief counsel for the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services.

He noted a study showing that every dollar spent by a drug company on doctor education activities generated $3.56 in increased revenue.

Sometimes continuing medical education can work as a cleverly disguised form of a kickback, he said. In such cases, a drug company might reward a doctor who prescribes large amounts of its drugs by directing a contractor to pay or overpay that doctor to be a CME faculty member, he said.

He noted that in 2006, Medtronic paid $40 million to settle allegations that it illegally paid doctors to promote and use its spinal devices. The payments included free travel and lodging for the surgeons and their families at lavish locations in Hawaii, Cancun and Malaysia for discussion groups of no or limited substance, he said.

Sometimes drug company-sponsored doctor education does not mention a specific drug, but rather a disease or condition that can be treated by the company's drug, said Adriane Fugh-Berman, a physician with Georgetown University Medical Center and director of PharmedOut, an organization that helps doctors resist inappropriate drug promotion.
Focus on disease

She said drug company-sponsored doctor education is used to sell drugs by selling diseases, often by emphasizing the severity or prevalence of a disease to expand a market.

"Manipulating physicians' understanding of the prevalence or severity of a medical condition can lead to over-treatment and expose patients to the adverse effects of drugs without significant benefit," she said.

In a statement, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said there is no conclusive evidence that drug company funding of doctor education creates bias.

"Eliminating commercial funding of CME would not benefit patients or doctors," the group said.

Nevertheless, the group said its revised code calls for drug companies to separate doctor education grant-making decisions from the sales and marketing departments.

In an interview after the hearing, Kohl said continuing medical education for doctors is important and also expensive. While drug companies expect the money they spend will help promote their products, he did not think those financial relationships were rife with corruption.

"We need a firewall to separate science from commerce," he said. "Hopefully, the industry will become more self-policing. (But) we may need some legislation on that."

Cheaper Solar Thermal Power 0 comments

A simpler design could reduce the cost of solar power generated by concentrating sunlight on Stirling engines.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company's latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The projects are part of a resurgence in what's known as solar thermal power. Various solar thermal technologies were developed starting in the 1970s, but a breakdown in government funding and incentives caused them to stall before they reached a scale of production large enough to drive down costs and allow them to compete with conventional sources of electricity. "It was a classic problem with solar. The market support to bring solar to high volume wasn't there," says Ian Simington, the chairman of SES and chief executive of the solar division of NTR, a company based in Dublin, Ireland, that bought a controlling share of SES last year.

Recent state mandates and incentives for renewable energy have led to a new push to commercialize the technology. There are over six gigawatts of concentrated solar power under contract in the southwestern United States right now, says Thomas Mancini, program manager for concentrated-solar-power technology at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. That's equivalent to about six nuclear-power plants. BrightSource Energy has contracts to provide 2.6 gigawatts of solar power with concentrated solar power (a previous version of this story cited only one of two 1.3 gigawatt contracts), and Solar Millenium has announced a project that would generate nearly one gigawatt of power.

Stirling Energy Systems technology uses 12-meter-wide mirrors in the shape of a parabolic dish to concentrate sunlight onto a Stirling engine. The difference in temperature between the hot and cool sides of the engine is used to drive pistons and generate 25,000 watts of electricity. The first phase of the company's large-scale projects will use 12,000 of these dishes to generate 300 megawatts of power. Simington expects electricity from the systems to cost between 12 and 15 cents per kilowatt hour, higher than the cheapest sources of electricity--such as coal-fired power plants--but competitive in many markets, especially in the afternoon, when prices are highest.

Earlier this month the company unveiled its production design. Compared to several prototypes that have been tested for several years at Sandia National Laboratory, the new design cuts about two metric tons from the weight of each dish and reduces the number of mirrors in each from 80 to 40. The simplified design can be built in large quantities using equipment in existing factories for automobiles.



The company's design has certain advantages over other approaches to concentrated solar power. In other systems, heat is collected over a large area and used to drive turbines in a central facility. These turbines require large amounts of water for cooling, Mancini says, whereas the SES system uses a closed-radiator system that doesn't consume water. Water use is an important consideration for solar thermal technologies, Mancini adds, since they work best in areas with a lot of direct sunlight--that is, in deserts. (These concentrated-solar-power systems are quite different from solar water heaters used in homes.)

Another advantage of the SES system is its modularity. With other approaches, the entire solar collection and generation system has to be in place to start generating electricity. With the Stirling engine system, power can come online as the dishes are installed, and more generating capacity can easily be added by building more dishes, without any need to enlarge a central generating plant.

But the system also has a significant disadvantage. Other solar thermal power plants collect heat in a central place where it can easily be stored, making it possible to generate electricity when the sun isn't shining. "There's no obvious way to do this with the dishes," Mancini says.

Although there has been a resurgence in contracts for solar thermal power, obstacles to the plants being built still remain. The new projects could be stalled by slow action from the government. Permits originally thought to be ready by the end of this year are now expected no sooner than next May. What's more, the current economy has made financing hard to come by, says Sean Gallagher, SES's vice president for market strategy and regulatory affairs. That has forced his company and others to rely on Department of Energy loan guarantees. But, Gallager says, although the DOE has promised to speed up its process for issuing these, it has yet to issue even the rules for applying for the guarantees included in February's stimulus package.

PRINCETON REVIEW'S ANNUAL COLLEGE RANKINGS 0 comments

BASED ON 122,000 STUDENT SURVEY

NOW OUT IN "THE BEST 371 COLLEGES – 2010 EDITION"



· 62 Ranking Lists Report Top 20 Colleges in Categories from Profs to Financial Aid to Food

· Unique Ratings: Schools Scored on Financial Aid, Fire Safety, and "Green"



NEW YORK, July 27, 2009, Noon EDT /PRNewswire/— According to a survey by The Princeton Review that asked 122,000 students at 371 top colleges to rate their schools on dozens of topics and report on their campus experiences, the best professors are at Davidson College (NC). However, the college at which students are happiest with their financial aid – the issue many parents care most about – is Swarthmore College (PA). Colgate University (NY) takes top honors as the most beautiful campus while Virginia Tech serves the best campus food and Smith College (MA) has the best dorms.



The Princeton Review, an education services company, reports the top 20 colleges in these categories and over 50 others in the 2010 edition of its annual college guide "The Best 371 Colleges" (Random House / Princeton Review, $22.99), on sale tomorrow. Other student survey-based ranking lists in the book reveal the schools at which students most highly rated their administrators, campus career centers, and athletic facilities.



The book also has unique ratings -- scores from 60 to 99 – on each college's profile in eight categories including Financial Aid, Fire Safety, and Green: a rating based on the schools' environmental commitments. The book's ranking lists and school profiles with ratings will post on www.PrincetonReview.com today.


"Each of our 371 'best' colleges offers great academics," says Robert Franek, author of the book and V.P. / Publisher, The Princeton Review. "However, we don't rank schools academically because our goal is to help students find and get into the best school for them. Instead, we tally 62 ranking lists based how students at these schools rated their campus experiences, plus ratings based on institutional data we collect on issues important to applicants. It's all about the fit."



Other ranking lists in the book and #1 colleges on them are:



· Best Career Services – University of Florida

· Best Classroom Experience – Pomona College (CA)

· Most Accessible Profs – U.S. Military Academy (NY)

· Most Conservative Students – Texas A&M University

· Most Liberal Students – Warren Wilson College (NC)

· Most Politically Active Students – George Washington University (DC)

· Least Religious Students – Bennington College (VT)

· Race / Class Relations Friendliest – University of Miami (FL)

· Gay Community Most Accepted – New York University

· Top Party Schools – Pennsylvania State University

· Top Stone-Cold Sober Schools – Brigham Young University (UT)

· Everyone Plays Intramural Sports – University of Notre Dame (IN)

· Best Athletic Facilities – University of Maryland at College Park

· Best Town-Gown Relations – Clemson University (SC)

About the rankings and survey



The 62 ranking lists are based on surveys of 122,000 students (325 per campus / average) at the 371 schools in the book during the 2008-09 and/or previous two school years. The 80-question survey asks students about their school's academics, administration, campus life, student body, and themselves. Almost all of the surveys were completed online at http://survey.review.com.



About the ratings



The ratings are scores (60 to 99) based largely on institutional data collected during 2008-09. Categories include Admissions Selectivity, Financial Aid, Fire Safety, and Green – a rating The Princeton Review developed with ecoAmerica, a non-profit environmental organization. Honor Rolls in the book salute schools that received rating scores of 99 for Financial Aid (13 schools), Green (15 schools) and Fire Safety (15 schools), plus 10 Tuition-Free schools.



About the book



"The Best 371 Colleges" also has a section listing "Great Colleges for 15 of the Most Popular College Majors" and The Princeton Review list, "100 Best Value Colleges for 2009." Annually published since 1992, it is one of 165 Princeton Review books published by Random House. No school has ever paid a fee to be in the book.



The Princeton Review is an education services company known for its test-prep courses, tutoring, books, and other resources for college and graduate school-bound students. It is headquartered in Framingham, MA with editorial offices in New York City and test-preparation locations across the country and abroad.


The Princeton Review is not affiliated with Princeton University, and not a magazine.

# # #

SOURCE: The Princeton Review

US shock jock Savage targeted to balance least wanted list 0 comments

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has suffered a major setback in her legal battle with American 'shock jock' Michael Savage after her officials were accused of banning him from the country on racial grounds.

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has suffered a major setback in her legal battle with American 'shock jock' Michael Savage after her officials were accused of banning him from the country on racial grounds.

Emails written by Home Office officials privately acknowledged the ban on Mr Savage would provide 'balance' to a list dominated by Muslims - and linked the decision to Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

The officials admitted their action could look 'duplicitous' and cited his 'homophobia' as a reason the move would receive public support.

The Right-wing radio presenter, whose hardline views on Islam, rape and autism have caused outrage in the US but whose show, The Savage Nation, has eight million listeners, was identified in May by Ms Smith as one of 16 people barred due to their political views.

Mr Savage, who had not even applied for entry to Britain, claimed his name had been 'plucked out of a hat' because he was 'controversial and white'. He has since served a £100,000 libel writ on Ms Smith, who announced his ban on television.

Now, correspondence released under Freedom of Information legislation suggests the banning of Mr Savage, whose real name is Michael Weiner, was based on a party political calculation made at the highest level of Government.

One message, sent by an unidentified Home Office official on November 27 last year, said that 'with Weiner, I can understand that disclosure of the decision would help provide a balance of types of exclusion cases'.

The documents include a draft recommendation, marked 'Restricted', saying: 'We will want to ensure that the names disclosed reflect the broad range of cases and are not all Islamic extremists.'

A further email confirmed the decision was approved at the highest level of Government, saying: 'HO [Home Office] intend to include Weiner in their quarterly stats... Both the FS [Foreign Secretary] and PM [Prime Minister] are firmly behind listing and naming such people.'

One civil servant, again unnamed, counselled caution, saying: 'I think we could be accused of duplicity in naming him' - without explaining why - and even added that 'the fact that he is homophobic does help'.

The Home Office refused to say whether names on the banned list had been selected to provide political 'balance', adding that any legal proceedings would be 'robustly defended'.

A spokesman said the DJ 'was excluded for engaging in unacceptable behaviour by making comments that might provoke others to serious criminal acts'.