This bone-writing device is now being clinically tested at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. Should the device prove to be successful – which it already has – surgeons can expect to find this instrument in the operation room in the future.
Source: Cnet
When you’ve made it to land an interview, you may have your best power look going and your resume and presentation prepped, but what happens when you face a dreaded and oftentimes difficult question at the top of the interview?
The prospective boss shakes your hand, asks you to take a seat, and then asks …
“So, tell me a little about yourself.”
Do you err on the side of modesty or toot your own horn? Do you include personal attributes or strictly stick to your career accomplishments? What if what was supposed to be a 30-second elevator pitch turns into a nervous rambling of your life story?
Well, consider these tips from hiring manager Melanie Szlucha, via Brazen Careerist, on how you can best answer one of the most difficult job interview questions:
Think of your responses as a movie preview, she advises.
The movie preview always relates to the movie you’re about to see. You never see a movie preview for an animated flick when you’re there to see a slasher movie. So the “tell me about yourself” answer needs to directly fit the concerns of your prospective employer.
It should also be as short and engaging as a great trailer.
Another approach, touted by venture capitalist Brad Feld is “to do the opposite of what comes naturally and go backwards in time.”
h/t – blackenterprise
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Yale University announced Thursday that research has determined an 1858 manuscript it acquired is the earliest known prison memoir written by an African-American.
The book-length manuscript, titled “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict” and written under the name Robert Reed, describes the author’s experiences while incarcerated in New York from the 1830s through the 1850s. It was acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2009.
English and American studies professor Caleb Smith authenticated the manuscript and identified its author as Austin Reed, a free black man who was born in upstate New York, Yale said.
“Finding any new text by an African-American author of the 19th century is significant, but this memoir has so much to say about captivity, freedom and human rights,” said Smith, who’s preparing the manuscript for publication. “It is a truly remarkable discovery.”
The key piece of evidence in the authentication process was an 1895 handwritten letter, preserved in state files, from Austin Reed to the warden of a juvenile reformatory where he served earlier that recounts some of his story and inquires whether the institution has maintained any records of his time as an inmate, Yale said.
Reed’s account aimed to expose the brutal punishments at Auburn State Prison, including whippings and what were called shower baths, similar to water-boarding, a type of simulated drowning. He described what happened after he confronted a warden with a knife:
“Stripping off my shirt the tyrantical curse bounded my hands fast in front of me and ordered me to stand around,” he wrote. “Turning my back towards him he threw sixty seven lashes on me according to the orders of Esq. Cook. I was then to stand over the dreain while one of the inmates was my back in a pail of salt brine.”
Yale American history professor David Blight called the Reed prison narrative manuscript “a revelation.”
“Nothing quite like it exists,” said Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. “Reed is a crafty and manipulative storyteller, and perhaps above all he left an insider’s look at the American world of crime, prisons and the brutal state of race relations in the middle of the 19th century.”
h/t – huffingtonpost
Back in August, programmer Patrick McConlogue offered homeless man Leo Grand a choice: US$100, or 16 coding lessons. Grand, who had been homeless since 2011 after losing his job at insurance provider MetLife and being priced out of his home when a high-rise apartment block was built nearby, didn’t have to think for long: coding lessons it was.
After furnishing Grand with a refurbished Chromebook and three books on coding, McConlogue met with him every weekday morning for an hour for a lesson. Now, Grand has released his very first app: Trees for Cars, available for iOS and Android.
The idea behind the app, Grand said, is to decrease the number of cars on the roads with a view to reducing CO2 emissions. Users sign up, specify whether or not they want to catch a ride or offer one, and the app will connect them with like-minded carpoolers nearby. The app will then track how much CO2 was saved by all the passengers.
Every line of code was written by Grand, and all proceeds from the AU$0.99 app sales will go directly to him.
You can check out the course McConlogue taught Grand here, read the story of thisremarkable journey here, and pick up the app for AU$0.99 for on iTunes and Google Play.
It is important to know that some conditions affect your hair as much as your body, the following guide will help you separate myths from facts when it comes to your health.
Hair dyes, hair blowers, and swimming in chlorinated water may lead to dry hair, but be alert because it may also, be an indicator of an underactive thyroid, known as hypothyroidism especially if you notice fatigue, weight gain, slow heart rate, and feeling cold all the time.
This usually indicates psoriasis, which can be distinguished from other dandruff-like skin conditions by the presence of a thickening, scab-like surface
There are many things that can cause this effect, such as a sudden psychological or physical stressor, like a divorce or job loss, or it can also mean a high fever from the flu or an infection and diabetes. There are many medications that can cause hair loss as side effect too, such as birth pills, lithium and Depakote. Autoimmune diseases can also promote sudden hair loss. Hormone changes and thyroid disease, especially hypothyroidism, are some of the most common causes of hair loss.
It’s usually caused by a change in the pattern of the sex hormones, but diseases and other underlying conditions can cause this type of hair loss by affecting the hormones
Breakage is most frequently the result of hair becoming over-brittle from chemical processing or dyeing, but there are certain health conditions that also lead to brittle, fragile hair, such as: Cushing’s syndrome, a disorder of the adrenal glands that causes excess production of the hormone cortisol, and hypoparathyroidism, a condition that usually either hereditary or the result of injury to the parathyroid glands during head and neck surgery.
Yellowish flakes on the hair and scaly, itchy patches on the scalp
It could mean a chronic inflammatory condition of the scalp that causes skin to develop scaly patches, often in the areas where the scalp is oiliest. When the flaky skin loosens, it leaves the telltale “dandruff” flakes.
What Causes Blue Eyes?
A team at University of Copenhagen conducted a study in 2008 about the formation of blue eyes. The research showed that those who have blue eyes have a single common ancestor. They found a genetic mutation that took place between 6000 – 10,000 years ago which is the reason behind the occurrence of blue eyes and the causation of all blue eyed people today.
What is genetic mutation?
Eiberg, a professor of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, says we all had brown eyes originally. A genetic mutation affected the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes which created a switch that literally switched off the ability to produce brown eyes. The OCA2 is a gene that codes for P-protein, responsible for the production of melanin. Melanin is the pigment that gives color to hair, eyes, and skin. The switch is situated in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and does not entirely switch off the gene but limits its function to reduce the production of melanin in the iris – effectively diluting brown eyes to blue. If there were no melanin then we all would be without colors in our hair, eyes, and skin, a condition known as albinism.
Genetic Variation
Variation in eye color from brown to green is linked to the amount of melanin present in the iris. All blue-eyed people have a small amount of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes, leading to the conclusion that all blue-eyed people have a common ancestor and have the same switch inherited at the same place in their DNA.
The findings of Professor Eiberg and his team are the latest regarding genes. He and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and analyzed and compared people who had blue eyes in countries like Jordan, Denmark, and Turkey. Research began in 1996 when Professor Eiberg suggested the theory of the OCA2 gene as responsible for eye color.
Shuffling of genes
Nature is responsible for the shuffling of genes. The mutation of brown eyes to blue ones does not represent a positive or negative mutation, it’s like many other mutations including baldness, hair color, freckles, and beauty spots, none of which affect chances of survival. Professor Eiberg explains that it is nature who is continuously and constantly shuffling the human genome thereby creating a cocktail of human chromosomes trying out changes.
Blue eye color is the second rarest color after green. Blue eyes are common among Israeli Jews, the percentage of people with blue eyes is decreasing in the US. The countries where you can find the most blue-eyed people are Netherland, Germany, the Baltic States, and Scandinavia. In Germany almost 75% of the population have blue eyes.
Giving of course my humble opinion, I believe we are at the high water mark of the anti-union, pro-market-force, evaluation-by-testing mania that’s gripped education. Or I could be seriously deluded and education is going through a profound change that will see radically different protocols for years to come.
Monday is the National Day of Action, where schools and community organizations are rallying to focus public attention on how to improve schools and promote social justice. There is a set of principles behind this, and it represents a concerted effort to fight back against the corporitization of schools that started on the far right, but has been moving to the center for a few years. Even President Obama supports the principle of more testing and teacher evaluation models that erroneously support it.
But a larger issue is also part of this debate, and that’s the role of unions and associations in public education. Perhaps it is true that teachers unions are facing a moment of truth and that they will need to adapt to the changing landscape rather that being able to pull the country back to a position that supports the idea of collective rights. Many people who should be supporting unions and what they’ve won for workers are in fact opposing them on the grounds that everyone should suffer in a free-agent world, not that they should demand the rights that unionized workers have. Employers have gained the upper hand in salary negotiations and with the coming of the new health care landscape, will most likely be able to stop offering insurance and tell employees to buy on the exchanges. Teachers generally have better protections because they have representation, but that’s led mostly to resentment, not mobilization by other industries.
Another challenge, and perhaps the biggest, is that the teaching staff population is getting younger. Far younger. Most teachers have been on the job for less than ten years. More importantly, they grew up in a nation that didn’t value unions. Yes, Ronald Reagan did say that he supported unions, but his actions in firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 is a far more potent reminder of the power of the president to shape the national agenda through actions rather than words. Most of the newest teachers were young during the 1980s and 90s when the anti-union rhetoric became louder and there were fewer steel workers, miners, and automobile workers to remind them what unions could do. The technology economy rendered union protections less important when the ethos was that you could create your own wealth. It’s still a powerful message. The problem is that it only applies to a few workers. Evidence is showing that many of these younger teachers are not as committed to unions or at least want them to change in ways that unions might not want to. The NEA and AFT will need to adapt, and at the moment it’s unclear what direction they will take.
The infusion of right wing money into the privatization and testing movement has also undermined effective education because it essentially said that teachers were to blame and that unions were anti-reform because they stood in the way of change. Yes they did, and for good reason; using tests to evaluate teachers and students is a terrible strategy. It saps energy from the system because teachers are tethered even more closely to a curriculum that defines what’s important to learn, what’s on the test, and discards everything else.
My subject, history (not social studies by the way; HISTORY) has been left in the educational dust for years as math and language arts skills have become the de facto national curriculum. Then science was added. I have no problem with this. But we are raising a nation of students who have limited historical knowledge because they have limited access to ideas because history is not a tested subject, therefore it must be less important. The same goes for the practical, industrial, visual and performing arts. This is the legacy of the corporate influence in education. Will the Common Core Standards help? We’ll see, but if they don’t, we’ll have wasted time that could have been better utilized.
Monday’s National Day of Action should be a day that reminds us of what effect the power of people can have when it’s channeled for social justice and education. These are the bedrocks of solid citizenship and point to a return of a society where all people, not just those who can pay for SAT Preparation classes, have access to a quality education and control over their own lives. The promise of corporatization and testing is a false hope that will leave students on the sidelines and teachers in a system that rejects the basic premise of effective schools that have a collegial staff and a collective ethic meant to educate every child.
For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest
One of the warnings that veteran educators tried to sound was that the growth of charter schools would create two levels of opportunity: one for parents who were proactive and worked to get their children into top charter schools, and the rest of the population that either couldn’t compete or was shut out and stuck in the now-depleted public system. That seems to be happening in Newark, if this article is accurate. Yes, there are some significant successes if you count the students who are thriving in schools that can skim the best off the top and can generally avoid recruiting the poorest and least-able students. Test scores are up. There are fewer disruptions.
But it’s a false success if it means that other students are denied that quality of education. Free market principles are great for businesses, stock markets, and competitions for talent and ability. It can be deadly, however, when it comes to education.
Public schools by law must educate all children. Think about that: all children. Not one exception. And they need to educate them so they will be productive members of society. What the know-nothings have done is to criticize the public schools as unwieldy, rife with union activism, and failing our children. What they’ve created are academies that are exempt from the public school’s rules and worse, have created winners and losers. That’s not what education is about. As a matter of fact, it runs against every rational, reasonable and moral imperative that undergirds an education system in a compassionate society. It’s wonderful that more students are doing well and are thriving in these new schools. For the losers, though, it’s a life sentence.
As for the teachers, the know-nothings created a new evaluation system that is supposed to weed out the less effective educators from the classroom. What they’re created in reality is a time-wasting, money-sucking, mathematically-skewed nightmare that is taking money from school programs and budgets that can best be used in the classroom, and not on software that shows faculty members what an effective lesson looks like. We already know that.
With the Common Core Standards breathing down our necks, educators need more resources that students can use to learn, such as technology that works, interactive readings and mathematics lessons, and more time to plan collaboratively with teachers of other disciplines, grades, and expertise.
What we’re getting is a system that requires teachers to spend hours writing or rewriting lesson plans to meet the new guidelines, to meet with administrators to coordinate scoring rubrics, and to defend what we’ve always done in every other year, but now have to write down. If the goal was to create evaluations that mimicked the business world, then congratulations; it’s just as ineffective as your average corporate annual review.
Again, it’s the students who will really pay for the damage in time, in money and in lost resources. I give this new teacher ratings system about five years before the corporate world and the Koch brothers move on to something else they can try to ruin. Until then, the race to the bottom will be quick.
For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest
1. Lack of Stimulating Thoughts
Lack of brain stimulation may cause brain shrinkage. Thinking is the best way to train your brain, so think more, write more, explore more, all this will help you to keep your brain fresh.
2. Skipping Breakfast or No Breakfast at all
People who do not eat breakfast have lower blood sugar levels, which leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.
3. Over Eating
Often we find tasty food and start eating more than what our body requires, which can cause hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.
4. Smoking
Smoking not only harms the lungs, but the brain as well, the nicotine in cigarettes contains substances that can cause multiple brain cell shrinkage, leading to Alzheimer’s disease.
5. High sugar consumption
Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.
6. Sleep Deprivation
Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain cells. More cells dead equals more memory loss.
7. Head covered while sleeping
Sleeping with the head covered increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decreases concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects, it would result in a 92.8% chance of suffering from either an early stage, middle stage, or late stage of dementia, by the age of 70.
8. Talking Rarely
Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.
9. Working your brain during illness
Take a rest, working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damaging the brain.
10. Air pollution
You probably know that your brain is the largest oxygen consumer in your body, so its the organ that consumes the largest amount of pollution from the air. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.
h/t – positivemed
I am nothing if not a good sport and an optimist by temperament, so when I read this NJ Spotlight article about a website full of great information and resources for teaching the Common Core Curriculum Standards, I took a look. The site, njcore.org, is well-designed, if a bit busy, and you can sign up to post resources.
If you teach Language Arts and Mathematics, there are probably some good resources for the effective teacher, but as a high school history teacher, there was nothing on the site. Nada. Zilch. Not even a pretense that teaching history is in any way important or even part of the curriculum. Perhaps more will be added later, but at this point, the state has no interest in engaging anyone who doesn’t teach the tested subjects. And that’s to be expected because it’s been clear for a couple of years that the NJ Department of Education is focused on testing to the exclusion of a rich, varied, integrative curriculum..
Clearly this is still a work in progress and there’s a distinct possibility that it will grow into a valued resource. It has a good deal of competition from other, more established sites and its success will be determined by how well it meets teachers’ needs. The comments on the NJ Spotlight article are negative so far, with this being the most telling:
This is Governor Christie scolding a teacher on Saturday for questioning his education policies. A full accounting of the event can be found on Jersey Jazzman’s site. But as always with this governor, the picture really tells the story.
Here is a man who wants to be president, who wants to be a role model, and who wants to brook no opposition. He’s only succeeded at the latter. This is what we get when we elect former prosecutors to public office. Prosecutors, remember, are true believers who are always, always, always right. Even when they’re wrong. But they never are wrong, so the point is proven. Challenging them is a challenge to the natural order of things.
Remember when New Jersey missed out on some wonderful federal Race to the Top dollars because Christie nixed the application that included some concessions to the New Jersey Education Association? That couldn’t be Christie’s fault, even though it was, so he fired Education Commissioner Brett Schundler.
And when Christie’s budget numbers didn’t add up and the state economist, David Rosen, called him on it? And it turned out that Rosen was right? The governor never admitted he was wrong on the numbers because, well… Christie is never wrong.
So now we have an example of a teacher asking the governor why he’s against teachers, and his response is clearly venomous. Does he really think that teachers are supposed to like what he’s said and done over the past four years? Has he convinced himself that trying to tear down the NJEA, overtly accusing teachers of bringing pro-union sentiment into their classrooms, and saying that the public schools in New Jersey are failing would be popular among the education set? If this is his response to a teacher when his reelection is looking promising, just imagine his response in a national race when the press won’t let a story go just because the governor wants it to.
As for being a role model, Christie said in the first debate that he didn’t think his style was anything but telling people the truth and that New Jerseyans appreciated his candor. Now we know what that really means: I’m right, you’re wrong and I’m going to bully you into believing me. This man is no role model, and he never will be.
But there is a remedy to all of this. On Tuesday, vote for Barbara Buono. She knows how to speak to people, but more importantly, she knows how to listen to people. She will make us proud as our governor. And she will do right by families, workers, the environment and our long-term future.
Remember this on November 5.
For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest
As if being a teacher isn’t enough of a financial challenge, here’s some worse news, compliments of a front-page article in Sunday’s New York Times about the Federal Reserve possibly injecting some inflation into the economy. Right now it’s an intellectual argument, and if you’ve ever studied the Great Depression of the 1930s, you know that the real danger to the economy would be deflation. In an effort to combat that, the Fed would look kindly on an inflationary course for these reasons:
The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.
The next paragraph, though, shows that not all people would benefit from such an economic course. Read it and weep.
The school board in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, is counting on inflation to keep a lid on teachers’ wages.
But wait; there’s more.
Rising inflation also punishes people living on fixed incomes.
So there you have it. The very same people who caused the financial meltdown, destroyed the pension system, and enacted laws that capped what municipalities and states could pay for social services now want an economic policy that would punish teachers and other public workers while they’re working, and it would keep on giving after they retire and are on a fixed pension and Social Security. Is that the way to continue to attract the best and brightest people to teaching, and to show them how much society respects their contributions? Absolutely not.
(As a side note, I completely reject the notion that we have not already attracted some of our best people to become teachers. America’s teachers put in an extraordinary amount of hours into their jobs and genuinely care about their chosen field. We’ve attended some of the best universities in the land and have studied with world class professors and professionals. So, it bothers me a great deal when others say that we need to get the best and brightest into our classrooms. We’re already there. Pay us what we’re worth, give us the tools to do our jobs and stop nickle and diming the schools in the name of an ideology that disrespects and ultimately wants to destroy a system that gives us the right to bargain collectively, set acceptable work rules and protect our due process rights.)
(Which leads to another side note. The right wing doesn’t know what it’s talking about on education.)
The politicians and think-tank lackeys who are presently influencing the education debate in this country have done a fine job singling out teachers, telling the public that their schools are failing, and blaming us for having pensions and benefits. Now the economists want to manipulate the economy so that it punishes us more. The contradiction is that if you continue to squeeze America’s public workers, then we won’t be able to spend and otherwise contribute to the economy. We won’t be able to afford to send our children to college. And we won’t be able to continue to do what we love.
Yes, I know there’s an old myth in this country that says that teachers don’t teach for money, they teach because they’re committed to their craft. As with most myths, this is not only false, but dangerous, and society is playing with fire if it believes it can continue to treat us poorly.
For more please go to:
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