Landscape Experts Focus on Gentilly & Ponchartrain

DESIGN WEEKEND
Landscape experts and students converge on Pontchartrain Park, Gentilly Woods
Saturday, October 13, 2007
By Leslie Williams
Staff writer

As Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods residents rebuild their neighborhoods, they can expect lots of ideas to choose from regarding how to design their natural areas.

A group of design experts and university students in cooperation with Longue Vue House & Gardens are gathering information about the green spaces in the two New Orleans neighborhoods, collectively known as Pontilly, so they can develop strategies for shaping the landscape in ways that add to the area's beauty while helping protect it against flooding.

"It's wonderful because you have to have plans -- and that costs money," said Concepcion "Connie" Tregre, who lives in Gentilly Woods and was among residents who participated this week in a design weekend with the experts and university students.

"I'm eager to hear their ideas for the golf course (near Southern University at New Orleans) and drainage for our area," Tregre said.

The Pontilly neighborhood already has a master plan, said William Morrish, a professor of architecture, landscape architecture and urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia. This effort, he said, will provide richer details for landscaping the environment and public parks in Pontilly.

"We're hoping that by early next year we'll have a plan to take to the public," said Jane Wolff, assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. "It will be less like a prescription and more like a menu" from which residents may make a selection.

Wolff, Moorish, Longue Vue Executive Director Bonnie Goldblum and students from Louisiana State University, Southern University, Tulane University and the University of Virginia toured the Pontilly area Friday. They began discussing possible options for the green spaces in connection with the four-day design weekend financed by $30,000 from the Catherine Brown Memorial Fund, which is named after Moorish's deceased wife.

There are many issues to consider, said Moorish, like using some of the land in the area to reduce flooding, making the land more productive, sorting out the best use for vacant spaces and deciding what to plant.

The notion is not only to propose ideas that make the area more beautiful with lawns and ornamental plants, but also show the how the landscape can be designed to reduce flooding and conserve water, Wolff said.

In Pontilly, the collective is "looking at issues with drainage and surface water (after a rain) and gardens that function better hydrologically and ecologically," Wolff said.

The scope of the project also includes coming up with ideas for public rights of way, parks, canals, street easements and neutral grounds, she said.

"This area is the third largest green space in the city -- after City Park and Audubon Park," said Carol Reese, an art historian who teaches in the School of Architecture at Tulane University. On Friday, she lectured students and other participants in the design weekend about the history of Pontchartrain Park, a subdivision of single-family homes created for middle-class African Americans in the 1950s.
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Leslie Williams can be reached at lwilliams@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3358.
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Where Saints Fans Only Dare

After the complete defeat of the New Orleans Saints on Monday Night Football, there can be no doubts that both our team and the Chicago Bears will not meet again in the NFC Championship Game. And I wonder how we ever became dillusional enough to believe history would repeat itself. Little was done on paper to improve the team, and many would say that letting a steady kicker and an aging but iconic receiver go did not make this team better.

No draft pick has emerged as an impact player, which is a disturbing reminder of mistakes this franchise has made so often in the past. Not the worst draft of all times, mind you...but an extreme departure from last year's results, probably an indication of the fact that our draftees simply over-achieved as the football-speak goes and their selection was no indication of draft day/war room genius.

And so where does that leave us facing a bye this week and the perennial divison powerhouse Carolina Panthers coming to town to dispense pain-based revenge for taking the division last season, while our team seeks faith-based solutions?

We are looking for wonder-coach to revise the schemes and find answers to our offensive failures. No one expected this team to be a defensive power, but we were supposed to put the points on the board and let the other team try and maintain pace.

With Deuce gone and the defense looking as bad as ever, it looks like die-hard Saints fans like me are going to need to pace ourselves too.

MOVING ON

By JEFF ZASLOW

A Beloved Professor Delivers
The Lecture of a Lifetime
September 20, 2007
Page D1

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer_science professor, was about to give a lecture Tuesday afternoon, but before he said a word, he received a standing ovation from 400 students and colleagues.

He motioned to them to sit down. "Make me earn it," he said.

What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? For Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, the question isn't rhetorical __ he's dying of cancer. Jeff Zaslow narrates a video on Prof. Pausch's final lecture.

They had come to see him give what was billed as his "last lecture." This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?

Carnegie Corporation Commits $14 Million To Revitalize New Orleans’ Intellectual Infrastructure In Wake Of Hurricane Katrina

Carnegie Corporation has awarded grants of $2 million to Dillard University, $5 million to Tulane University and $4 million to Xavier University of Louisiana. The grants are one of the largest commitments of private funds to support higher education in post_Katrina New Orleans. Each of the universities incurred significant hurricane_related damage and losses and will use the new funds to focus on development, retention and hiring of displaced and new faculty; recruitment and retention of new students; resumption of critical strategic planning initiatives; and ensuring the availability of adequate financial aid.

University Fences In a Berkeley Protest

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 7 — In many ways and for many months, the protest outside Memorial Stadium at the University of California has been business, and Berkeley, as usual.

On one side are the protesting tree lovers who have been living Tarzan-like since December in a stand of coastal oaks and other trees. On the other is the university, which wants to cut down the trees to build a $125 million athletic center, part of a larger plan to upgrade its aging, seismically challenged football stadium.

The two sides disagreed. They bickered. Lawyers were called. Then came The Fence.

Before dawn on Aug. 29, building crews and the university police erected a 10-foot-high fence around the grove, effectively cutting off the tree dwellers from their supplies. The university called the fence a safety measure, meant to protect protesters from football fans descending on the stadium for the season opener.
Instead, the fence has united many of the city’s fractious constituencies and unleashed years of frustration with the university that made the city famous (or was it the other way around?).

courtesy...the new york times

Continuing the Internet tax moratorium

Continuing the Internet tax moratorium

Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 12:14 PM Posted by Pablo Chavez
Policy Counsel

As Internet use continues to spread in the U.S., the government should pursue policies that help promote investment in, and greater consumer access to, faster and more robust broadband services.

The current Internet tax moratorium is one policy that Congress has enacted to help make the internet a universally accessible, free, and open platform capable of delivering a rich variety of services to consumers.

With that moratorium due to expire this November, Google recently joined Don't Tax Our Web, a coalition of companies and associations dedicated to extending the current moratorium and reducing barriers to the Internet's continued growth.

The current moratorium prohibits three things: state and local taxation of Internet access, multiple taxes on a single e-commerce transaction, and taxes that discriminate against online transactions.

I support a permanent extension of the moratorium because multiple or discriminatory taxes on internet transactions could damage internet-based commerce, a critical and growing component of our economy.

Cal State Prepares to Open Its First Doctoral Programs Ever, in Education

This fall California State University will, for the first time, independently offer doctoral programs, marking a significant change in the state’s longstanding master plan for higher education. The plan had given the University of California system sole authority among the state’s public institutions to award doctorates.

Upswing in rolls buoys colleges

Upswing in rolls buoys colleges
Freshman influx surprises some
Thursday, September 06, 2007
By John Pope
Staff writer

College administrators in the New Orleans area are jubilant at the start of this semester, even though some might not appear to have much reason to rejoice.

Eight of 10 institutions of higher education are enrolling more students this semester than they did a year ago, when all local colleges and universities were in a post-Katrina slump.
At the other two schools -- Tulane University and the University of New Orleans -- overall registration is down this semester, but officials there and at Xavier University are happy because of big increases in the number of first-year students: 52 percent at Tulane, 50 percent at Xavier and 10 percent at UNO.

"The numbers surprised me," said Earl Retif, Tulane's registrar. "I thought we would do well, but I didn't think we would do as well as we did." But those numbers won't be enough to offset the lower 2006-07 enrollment at those schools, and many students in that smaller contingent will be around for several more years as they progress toward graduation. "Clearly, a depressed class in the fall of 2006 creates a smaller continuing cohort," said Ron Maggiore, UNO's dean of admissions. "Where we're dropping is not in new students because students want to come back, but in the continuing student population."

Making things happen

College officials credit aggressive marketing and recruiting for the upswing. University leaders have routinely met with parents of prospective students to allay their fears about storms and safety, and Tulane flew in about 125 high school guidance counselors from around the country to show them the school and the city. "They went back to their communities and became ambassadors," Retif said. "We had to make sure that . . . the word was going out that the university was back and they could have a great experience." Another motivating factor, administrators said, was students' desire to participate in rebuilding the region.

"Loyola is in a position to attract students who are in a position to do more than build résumés," said Lori Zawistowski, the interim admissions director. "They'll be in a position to see what social justice means." Although Zawistowski is optimistic about Loyola's enrollment prospects, she said figures will not be available until the middle of the month. At UNO, Maggiore said, students want to return after leaving two years ago because of the storm and staying away for the 2006-07 academic year. "They were able to stay at LSU or the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but they want to come home," he said. Vincent Brown said he is noticing the same phenomenon at Xavier University, where he is dean of admissions. "These students who are coming back are committed to staying here," he said. "They're battle-tested."

Retif, who also is Tulane's vice president for enrollment management, said last year's calm hurricane season played a role in students' deciding to head to the New Orleans area.
"If something had been out in the Gulf, that number would have been diminished greatly," he said. This year's registration totals represent progress toward regaining prehurricane enrollment levels, college officials said. Reaching those goals, they said, is still three to five years off.

A new study shows that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did more than lay waste to much of the Gulf Coast. About 35,000 students -- 26,000 in Louisiana and 9,000 in Mississippi -- who had been in public colleges didn't return to school last year because their lives were still in storm-related flux, according to the report that the Southern Education Foundation, an Atlanta-based education philanthropy, published last week. "Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has the United States witnessed so many of its own students thrown out of school," the report's authors wrote. They also found that nearly 70 percent of the 76,000 students from New Orleans area colleges and universities dropped out for at least a semester after Katrina struck in August 2005 and Rita hit a month later.

Challenges vary

The storms' impact was hardly uniform. While Our Lady of Holy Cross College in Algiers sustained relatively minor damage, Tulane sustained upwards of $650 million in losses, and the campuses of Xavier, Dillard University, Southern University at New Orleans, Delgado and Nunez community colleges, and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center were overwhelmed with floodwater. SUNO is the only local institution of higher learning that still hasn't returned to its campus. Even though it is operating out of a compound of portable buildings next to the Lake Pontchartrain levee, its enrollment jumped nearly 14 percent from last fall's figure, spokesman Harold Clark Jr. said.

In addition to advertising in newspapers and on television, radio and the Internet, Donna Grant, the new enrollment-services manager, promoted SUNO by talking at churches and community meetings and by taking fliers door to door. "We got even more aggressive," Clark said.
At Dillard, where repairs are continuing, officials expect enrollment to stay around 1,000, the same as last fall -- and 46 percent of its pre-Katrina total. This year, Dillard recruiters went after transfer students by recruiting at community colleges and by increasing the amount of financial aid available to men and women coming from these institutions, said Toya Barnes-Teamer, the university's vice president for student success.

The most that a transfer student could hope for used to be $2,500, she said, but that was changed to make it possible for people in this category to get a scholarship for full tuition, which amounts to $11,760 per year. "When we started this initiative, we probably had 45 or 50 applicants" from prospective transfer students, Barnes-Teamer said. "After we got the word out to local community colleges and contacted some alumni, that went to 140 in two months. We were thrilled."

At Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, where enrollment has remained relatively steady, the problem has been recruiting teachers, especially in the School of Nursing, Chancellor Larry Hollier said. There is a nursing shortage that LSU is striving to eliminate, he said, but the salaries that nurses can command in the private sector are much greater than what they can earn as teachers. Consequently, Hollier said, "we are pretty much maxed out on how many students we can handle."

There have been enrollment increases this semester in the medical and nursing schools, as well as the schools of Graduate Studies, Allied Health Professions and Public Health, said Hollier, who also is the medical school's dean. But, he said, "we're talking about relatively small numbers of increases because of the number of teachers we have."

At Delgado and Nunez, where students learn skills they can use in rebuilding the area, there were hefty enrollment increases -- 11 percent at Delgado and 27 percent at Nunez.
Delgado also is responsible for Louisiana Technical College's two Jefferson Parish campuses, where enrollment jumped this semester by 30 percent. At Nunez Community College in hard-hit St. Bernard Parish, administrators said they were pleased at this semester's enrollment, even though it's less than half of its pre-Katrina total. "We're not up to where we were before, but I'm impressed," spokeswoman Dorothy Harrington said.
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John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3317.
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The Death of Television

Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts

the end of TV as we know it
Web guru foresees download revolution

Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
The Guardian

Monday August 27 2007

Vint Cerf helped build the internet in California in the 1970s. Now he is working on taking it beyond the earth’s confines, with a plan to use it to control space vehicles.

Thirty years ago he helped create a technology that has revolutionised millions of lives around the world. But yesterday the man known as the "godfather of the net" laid out his vision of where our online future might be, including a time when we download entire TV series in seconds - and even surf the web from Mars. Talking at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Vint Cerf - one of the handful of researchers who helped build the internet in the 1970s - said that the television industry would change rapidly as it approached its "iPod moment".

The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player. "85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time," he said. "You're still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later."

Dr Cerf, who helped build the internet while working as a researcher at Stanford University in California, used the festival's Alternative McTaggart Lecture to explain to television executives how the internet's influence was radically altering their businesses and how it was imperative for them to view this as a golden opportunity to be exploited instead of a threat to their survival. The arrival of internet television has long been predicted, although it has succeeded in limited ways so far. But the popularity of websites such as YouTube - the video sharing service bought by Google in 2005 for $1.65bn (£800m) - has encouraged many in the TV industry to try and use the internet more profitably. Last month the BBC launched its free iPlayer download service, and digital video recorders such as Sky Plus and Freeview Playback allow viewers to instantly pause and record live television.

Dr Cerf predicted that these developments would continue, and that we would soon be watching the majority of our television through the internet - a revolution that could herald the death of the traditional broadcast TV channel in favour of new interactive services. "In Japan you can already download an hour's worth of video in 16 seconds," he said. "And we're starting to see ways of mixing information together ... imagine if you could pause a TV programme and use your mouse to click on different items on the screen and find out more about them." Some critics, including a number of leading internet service providers, have warned that the increase in video on the web could eventually bring down the internet. They are concerned that millions of people downloading at the same time using services such as iPlayer could overwhelm the network. Dr Cerf rejected these claims as "scare tactics". "It's an understandable worry when they see huge amounts of information being moved around online," he said.

But some pundits had predicted 20 years ago that the net would collapse when people started using it en masse, he added. "In the intervening 30 years it's increased a million times over ... We're far from exhausting the capacity." Dr Cerf also revealed that he has been working on future developments for the internet, taking it beyond the confines of planet Earth. With other researchers he has been developing systems for using the net to communicate and control space vehicles, including interplanetary landers sent to explore the surface of Mars. "Up until now we've been using the so-called Deep Space Network to communicate across space with radio signals. What my colleagues and I would like to do is use a version of internet," he said. He said the problems encountered by the project - such as having to wait 40 minutes for a response from a space vehicle 235m miles away - were proving awkward, but predicted the system could eventually be used to enhance internet communications. "I want more internet," he said. "I want every one of the 6 billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the internet - I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us all."

Taken from Guardian Unlimited

Saints Return Home for Pre-Season Opener

As one former coach so eloquently put it..."NFL stands for Not For Long" which means our team will have to climb the mountain again this year...and now the other teams are going be fired up when they face us.

Brace yourselves for our wild ride...as we enter this crazy scene called the NFL Regular Season.

Accreditation System Is Misguided Failure, Trustees Group Says

Wednesday, July 18, 2007
By PAUL BASKEN

Washington
The federal government's system for accrediting colleges is a misguided failure that should be largely replaced with a simpler method that relies on key institutional data about cost and quality, a trustees group is arguing.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative-leaning lobbying association led by Anne D. Neal, proposed in a report released on Tuesday that a process of "expedited accreditation" might begin to repair a system that the council regards as detracting from academic quality rather than improving it.
"Nothing in the accreditation process concretely measures student learning, instructional quality or academic standards," the council said in the report. "If the accrediting process were applied to automobile inspection, cars would 'pass' as long as they had tires, doors and an engine -- without anyone ever turning the key to see if the car actually operated."
The report, "Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policy Makers Can Do About It," is the latest in a series of attempts by both administration allies and critics to force changes in the federal government's use of accrediting agencies as the means for determining which American colleges are eligible for government-guaranteed student loans.
The administration-appointed Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in its final report last September, proposed that accreditation agencies judge colleges on the basis of "performance outcomes," such as graduation rates, rather than on the basis of "inputs or processes," such as financial resources.
Ms. Neal, an outspoken advocate of such a new approach, was appointed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to serve on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. The committee, known as Naciqi, evaluates whether accrediting agencies should be recognized by the Education Department for the purpose of student-aid eligibility.
Naciqi, and Ms. Neal in particular, have been accused by some accrediting agencies of forcing the accreditors to begin abiding by outcomes-based methods of evaluating colleges without first waiting for such standards to be written into federal law or regulation.
Resistance to Outcomes-Based Methods
The Education Department has "gone beyond what's reasonable" in demanding that accrediting agencies employ outcomes-based criteria in evaluating colleges, Susan F. Zlotlow, director of program consultation and accreditation at the American Psychological Association, told participants at a conference last month organized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
In large part, the report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reads as a chronicle of Ms. Neal's discontent with Naciqi and the accrediting agencies that have appeared before it.
Such agencies include the American Bar Association, which provides accreditation to law schools and has been demanding that its member schools work to ensure racial diversity among students and faculty. Ms. Spellings, following Naciqi's recommendation, last month approved only an 18-month renewal for the bar association's accreditation authority, rather than the five-year standard, with a requirement that the bar association further clarify its diversity standard.
The Education Department needs only to ensure that colleges receiving federally guaranteed student aid aren't misusing that money, and it already has systems in place to verify that, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni said in its report. The report cites the bar association's diversity standard and other anecdotal cases as evidence that too many accreditors are imposing requirements on colleges beyond those necessary simply to ensure academic quality.
Such anecdotes, however, do not constitute empirical proof that support the report's conclusion that the current system of accreditation is broken, said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.
"This is not a careful, thoughtful analysis of what accreditation does," Mr. Hartle said. "It's just a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas and anecdotes."
The report should also fuel concern among accrediting agencies that they might not receive fair treatment from Naciqi while Ms. Neal is a member, he said.
"It's impossible to imagine her giving unbiased advice based on the evidence presented in those meetings," Mr. Hartle said. "If the Department of Education wonders why colleges and universities are skeptical about their motives with respect to accreditation, they need look no further than this report."
Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, an umbrella group of accreditors, agreed that the report may make Ms. Neal's future service on Naciqi untenable.
"How can someone with such strong views on accreditation function evenhandedly on a body that advises the secretary?" Ms. Eaton said. "If I were an accreditor coming up for review, I would say to myself, 'Is it appropriate for this member of the committee to recuse herself?'"
"It's the blanket negative characterization, without evidence," that makes Ms. Neal's report alarming, Ms. Eaton said.
At the same time, Ms. Neal is correct to provoke the discussion of whether the Education Department should be using accreditation, rather than some other method, to limit access to the government's $83-billion student-aid program, Ms. Eaton said.
"With everything that's happened in the last few years," Ms. Eaton said, "a very serious discussion of the gatekeeping role, accreditation, and the federal government, and the relationship, is in order."
Ms. Neal and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued an earlier report, in 2002, that also called for an end to the government's use of the academic accreditation process to police the student-loan program.
The key addition in Tuesday's report is the suggestion, as "a short-term alternative," that colleges that are already accredited can renew that accreditation by submitting to Naciqi updated data on cost, quality and achievement, Ms. Neal said.
Criticisms of that recommendation that focus on her fitness to serve on Naciqi are a "predictable" attempt to avoid the issue, Ms. Neal said.
"Instead of meeting a good-faith effort to improve the education our students receive with a thoughtful discussion," she said, "the establishment is denying everything and trying to shoot the messenger."

Universities Must Not Ignore Intelligence Research

By AMY B. ZEGART
Last week the CIA finally released the "Family Jewels" — a 700-page secret file made in 1973 that chronicles domestic spying programs, foreign assassination plots, and other skeletons in the agency's closet. Jewelmania quickly ensued: a feeding frenzy to examine what these documents revealed, what they continued to hide, and what they mean. As bloggers, pundits, journalists, policy makers, and others raced to their computers and hit the airwaves, one group remained conspicuously absent from the debate: university professors.

This is not an aberration. At a time when intelligence agencies have never been more important, universities are teaching and studying just about everything else. In 2006 only four of the top 25 universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report offered undergraduate courses on intelligence agencies or issues. Students at America's elite universities had greater opportunities to learn about the rock band U2 than the spy plane by the same name; more of the top 25 offered courses on the history of rock 'n' roll.

Scholarly inattention is even more glaring in academic publishing. Between 2001 and 2006, the three most highly regarded academic journals in political sciencethe American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics — published a total of 750 articles. Only one discussed intelligence. At precisely the time that intelligence issues have dominated headlines and policy-maker attention, the nation's best political scientists have been studying other subjects.

The University of Pennsylvania lost two prominent professors who study black culture this week.

2 Scholars of Black Culture Are Leaving Penn
By ELIZABETH QUILL

Elijah Anderson, a sociologist known for his work examining urban inequality, has moved to Yale University, and Michael Eric Dyson, an ordained Baptist minister, author, and commentator, has taken a position at Georgetown University.

Mr. Anderson, 63, had worked at Penn for 32 years. During that time, he became known for his studies of the black experience in Philadelphia, writing such books as Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (W.W. Norton, 1999). He also wrote A Place on the Corner (University of Chicago Press, 1978), an examination of life at a Chicago bar and liquor store that is regarded as a sociological classic. Mr. Anderson says he hopes to give urban ethnography a prominent place at Yale.

"I am looking forward to new opportunities," Mr. Anderson said. "It is a new challenge."
There has been some speculation that an unsettled controversy involving allegations of "conceptual plagiarism" of Mr. Anderson's work by a junior faculty member affected his decision to leave. But Mr. Anderson said the dispute did not contribute in any significant way. "That is pretty much in the past," he said. (Penn made a comparable counteroffer, he said, but he still chose to go to Connecticut.)

Mr. Dyson's departure had no slice of controversy, only confusion. Before any official moves were announced, the 48-year-old scholar, who is an authority on hip-hop and many other cultural topics, listed himself as a university professor at Georgetown on a Web site promoting his new book.

Terrence P. Reynolds, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown, said this week that he had heard conversations about Mr. Dyson, but that they were at a level above him. "It may be a complicated matter," Mr. Reynolds said.

Mr. Dyson, who was a professor of humanities and religious studies at Penn, confirmed later that he began at Georgetown on July 1 and would teach English, theology, and African-American studies. As a university professor, he will move between departments.

"I had a true home at Penn," Mr. Dyson said of the university where he worked for five years. "But there is no city more vibrant and teeming with ideas and possibilities to explore than Washington."

Mr. Dyson is the author of numerous books, including Come Hell or High Water (Basic Civitas, 2006), and is set to go on tour to promote his latest book, Know What I Mean? (Basic Civitas, 2007), this month.

Penn's provost, Ronald J. Daniels, declined to comment on the departures beyond a brief e-mail statement acknowledging the contributions of both professors to the university.

JEWEL IN THE ROUGH

The Joseph Bartholomew Golf Course, which has been overrun by grass and weeds since Hurricane Katrina, will require an estimated $11 million to restore the entire facility

Thursday, July 05, 2007

By Fred RobinsonStaff writer

Driving down Prentiss Avenue along the first hole at Joseph M. Bartholomew Municipal Golf Course, anyone who has played several rounds of golf at the facility can't help noticing the huge oak trees that divided the No. 1 and No. 18 fairways are gone.

The missing oaks, the same trees that proved to be an opening-hole nightmare for slicers and a save haven for golfers hitting their approach shots on No. 18, are not the first thing one notices.
Missing is the gem of a golf course that once was 40-something years ago. What one now sees is a vast area that has been overrun by grass, weeds and wild bushes. What years of neglect and lack of funding couldn't kill, Hurricane Katrina did.
The Joseph Bartholomew Golf Course, which sits in the heart of Pontchartrain Park, now is unkempt green space. It is like nearly 80 percent of the houses in the Gentilly Woods-Pontchartrain Park subdivisions -- sitting gutted and waiting for money to fix it up.
The questions facing the course Joseph now are how quickly will it come back, and can it be the catalyst to the rebuilding of the oldest black subdivision in the United States? And should work begin on the golf course while the area's population is, at best, sparse?
"At no time has Joseph Bartholomew Golf Course fallen off the radar," said Ann McDonald, director of the New Orleans Parks and Parkways. "It is a priority. It has not been forgotten, we just have to get the money."
Money has long been a problem for the Joseph Bartholomew Golf Course, named after a New Orleans African-American who designed that course and several others in the metro area.
According to McDonald, it will take nearly $11 million to restore the entire facility -- golf course, driving range, clubhouse and the maintenance building. Although the city has received some donated equipment, its pockets are empty when it comes to the funds needed to restore the course. The city, McDonald says, has slightly more than $1 million in hand for the golf course.
Through freshman state representative J.P. Morrell (D- New Orleans), the city was attempting to get another $6 million from the state to jumpstart the project. However, Morrell said the only monies the city will receive out of the legislative session that ended last week is $400,000. Morrell also said the city is missing a blueprint for how it plans to use the money.
"The city asked for $6.3 million, and of the $4 million that has been set aside, it'll get $400,000 to provide adequate planning for the golf course," Morrell said. "The city needs to get us an itemized list of what's going to be done before it can get the kind of money it's requesting."
Morrell said the kind of planning that's needed is going to take "a couple of months." What it means is the golf course's restoration, at the very least, is a couple of years away.
When the golf course was overtaken by the floodwaters, it was near the completion of a rare capital improvement project. McDonald said between $800,000 and $1 million had been spent to re-do tee boxes, greens and re-sod several fairways. The salt waters that covered the course "killed everything."
"The turf is the golf course, and it was destroyed," McDonald said. "Additionally, some of the natural swales and drainage were destroyed."
Altogether, of the 375 trees the golf course lost, 360 were oak trees.
McDonald said there isn't a time frame to reopen the golf facility, but it will happen -- when the money rolls in. Morrell said there's no chance of that happening before next year's legislative session.
And even if the monies become available next year, the rebuilding of the golf course could take another two years.
King Wells, 73, president of the Pontilly Neighborhood Association and a Pontchartrain Park resident since 1965, believes it's important that something be done soon.
"People don't want to live across the street from a park filled with weeds," Wells said. "The people who lived out here loved the fact that they lived across the street from a golf course, although they didn't play."
But Barry "Mercedes" Gonzalez, an avid golfer whose gutted house sits across the street from the No. 2 green, said bringing back the golf course would have a huge impact on the community.
"That's a no-brainer," Gonzalez said. "It'll definitely speed up the recovery. If you don't see that, you don't have common sense.
"Now (the city) has every opportunity to produce a first-class golf course. I'd like to see a first-class golf course, or to bring it back to the original Joseph Bartholomew design. Don't just bring it back the way it was before."
If there's one thing all parties agree on, the revitalization of the golf course has to be a part of bringing back the homeowners.
Said Morrell: "I don't think you can separate the two. You can't talk about bringing people home and ignore Joseph Bartholomew Golf Course. Part of what is the identity of Pontchartrain Park is Joseph Bartholomew Golf Course. It's an anchor for the community."

Departing UMass Chancellor May Land at Louisiana State

July 3, 2007

If university presidents can have nine lives, John V. Lombardi may be working on No. 3.

Mr. Lombardi, who was ousted as chancellor of the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus at Amherst as part of a controversial restructuring plan a month ago, is now the leading candidate for president of the Louisiana State University system, The Advocate, a newspaper in Baton Rouge, La., reported.

The search committee, which has been seeking a successor to William L. Jenkins for more than a year, could recommend a new president as soon as Friday. Committee members would not comment officially on the selection of Mr. Lombardi, who announced in May that he would leave Amherst at the end of the 2007-8 academic year as part of a leadership shuffle that, at one point, would have combined the jobs of system president and flagship chancellor.

Although UMass officials publicly called Mr. Lombardi’s resignation a “mutual decision,” the chancellor, who is known for his hard-charging ways, apparently clashed with system administrators and trustees, who wanted him to be more of a team player. Faculty members, however, praised him for supporting scholarship and raising money — and the university’s profile.

The Louisiana State post would be Mr. Lombardi’s third act as a university president or chancellor. He was president of the University of Florida for nine years, resigning in 1999 after repeatedly clashing with state higher-education officials. In Florida, too, he earned praise for his vision and criticism for his interpersonal skills.

Mr. Jenkins announced in February 2006 that he was stepping down as Louisiana State’s president in order to devote more time to hurricane-recovery and fund-raising efforts, but many speculated he had been forced out because of his opposition to the immediate closure and consolidation of campuses in the system in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The Chronicle for Higher Education

Article on NOLA recovery in the NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/us/nationalspecial/02orleans.html

Baby Tiger is Born

Given the effort Tiger Woods has put into becoming the best golfer ever...I feel compelled to offer congratulations to him on the birth of his son. He has entertained and inspired me and I hope fatherhood does well by him. It certainly has been good to me.

CWG

For Impostor Student at Stanford, Cardinal Rule Was Just Showing Up

May 25, 2007

A California student with her heart set on Stanford seems to have taken literally Woody Allen’s famous aphorism that “80 percent of success is just showing up.”
According to The Stanford Daily, 18-year-old Azia Kim appeared last fall on the Stanford campus, even though she had not been admitted, and spent the next eight months posing as a biology major, buying textbooks, attending classes, and cramming with friends for exams she couldn’t take.
The enterprising Ms. Kim told an unsuspecting sophomore that she had been assigned to be her roommate. But, lacking a room key or Stanford ID, Ms. Kim had to sneak into dining halls and climb through a first-floor window to enter her room.
Her roommate spent so much time at her boyfriend’s that she never witnessed those dramatic entrances or wondered why Ms. Kim had removed the screen and always left the window open. “I just guessed she always wanted a breezy room,” she told the student newspaper.
The jig was up last week, when the dormitory staff members decided to compile a yearbook for their residents and realized they had no information on the squatter. The newspaper speculated that Ms. Kim may have “felt pressure from overbearing parents to attend Stanford — regardless of whether she was admitted.”
Ms. Kim’s family seemed not to know she had not actually enrolled at Stanford. The latest posting on Ms. Kim’s MySpace page, from her sister, says, “Good Luck on FINALS!!!”
Ms. Kim’s career at Stanford also took former high-school classmates by surprise: “Azia wasn’t the strongest student,” one told the newspaper. “The fact that she was at Stanford was surprising to everybody. She just didn’t have the spectacular grades or extracurriculars.”
The university’s housing department charges unauthorized visitors $175 a day, the paper reported, so Ms. Kim’s eight-month stay could add up to a $42,000 bill — about the price of a year’s tuition, room, and board at Stanford. Some Stanford students have suggested that the university reward Ms. Kim’s chutzpah with honorary-student status. To judge by their comments, however, Stanford officials are not amused.
While impressive, Ms. Kim is not yet the most accomplished collegiate con artist. In 1989 the 30-year-old James A. Hogue was admitted to Princeton after posing as Alexi Indris Santana, a self-taught sheep-raising orphan from Utah. Some years after Mr. Hogue was unmasked, he used a false identity to get a job at a Harvard museum, where he stole $50,000 worth of gems. In 1996 he was caught trespassing at Princeton under yet another alias. —Paula Wasley

Trapped by Education

From the issue dated April 6, 2007

How the discipline became the predominant one for black scholars, and what it's costing them

By JOHN GRAVOIS

One spring day in 2004, during her third year of doctoral study at Howard University, Angela E. Lee received a letter from the federal government telling her she had to look elsewhere for student loans.
The letter said that she had borrowed a total of $138,500 in federal student aid — a debt she had accumulated while financing her entire postsecondary education with a wearying combination of part-time jobs, occasional assistantships, and heavy borrowing. This amount, the letter informed her, was the "aggregate loan limit" for the government's Stafford loans. Ms. Lee was being cut off.
In the weeks that followed, Ms. Lee took to keeping the letter with her in her bag. "I carried it all summer long," she recalls, because it seemed so unreal. And not just to her: When she told her professors about what she owed, one of them was so incredulous that Ms. Lee had to pull out the letter as proof.
She still had at least one year to go to complete her Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Howard's School of Education — an auspicious goal, given that no one else in her family had finished college. But now Ms. Lee did not know how she would pay her way to the finish line. She knew of only one other education student who had received such a letter. Her sense of embarrassment told her that the two of them were alone.
That was then. Two years later at Howard, another student, Syretta James, received the same letter during her third year in the Ph.D. program in school psychology. After firing off a panicky group-e-mail message, she quickly learned that all of the other third-year doctoral students in the program had received similar letters. So had several other graduate students in the School of Education. In fact, so had just about everyone Ms. James knew at Howard.
Once the students found each other, they began comparing notes about which private banks to begin borrowing from. They called a meeting with the dean. And they referred to their problem in familiar shorthand — "maxing out," it was called. What had once been a lonely trial was now almost a rite of passage.
Across the country, graduate students' debts have grown significantly in recent years. They have been among the first victims as state support for universities fell off in the early 2000s, as some federal grants have flatlined, as operating costs have burgeoned, and as campuswide enrollments tick upward. Among doctoral programs, money often flows first to the so-called "highly fundable" fields of science and technology. For many students in other fields, borrowing is the only way forward.
The toll on black doctoral students like Ms. Lee and Ms. James has been especially severe. Not only do African-Americans enter universities with more economic hardships, but the academic fields that have faced the greatest financial strains in the past 10 years — and hence have generated the heaviest doctoral debt burdens — are also those with the highest African-American enrollments: the social sciences, the humanities, and, above all, education.
The situation is particularly grim for young black scholars in education, not because their average debt is the highest — it isn't quite — but because the field is home to so many of them. More than a third of black Ph.D. students earn their degrees in education. No other racial or ethnic group is as strongly concentrated in one field. So the fortunes of a vast proportion of African-Americans in academe sink or swim in a discipline that is itself barely afloat.
How did this happen? Many African-Americans see their presence in education as a proud legacy — a sign that those who have succeeded academically are turning their attention back to a sector where others have failed. But it is a legacy that brings serious costs for its inheritors, and there are no comparable lines of ascent into other fields. Moreover, history shows that the earliest generations of black scholars did not venture into education entirely of their own accord. Often it was simply where they were welcome. Often it was where they were pushed.
Wale's List
In the summer of 1945, Fred G. Wale, an executive with the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a philanthropic group, wrote a letter to 600 college and university presidents in Northern states asking them to consider hiring black scholars on their faculties.
Northern universities had become increasingly willing to accept black students into doctoral programs over the preceding decades, but they had made virtually no moves toward integrating the professoriate. To Wale's chagrin, that state of affairs persisted even though academe was suffering a severe postwar shortage of professors, and even though a growing number of black Ph.D.'s were waiting in the wings.
Wale drew up a list of 150 black scholars who had expressed interest in teaching at white institutions, and sent that to the presidents as well. According to James D. Anderson, a professor of education history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wale's list offers a rough portrait of the first generation of black doctorates in America.
Most of them had earned their Ph.D.'s from elite Northern universities — chiefly Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago — and had done so with the support of philanthropies like the Rosenwald Fund, Wale's employer. The scholars displayed a range of qualifications across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Only a small number held doctorates in education.
The list included Percy L. Julian, a world-renowned chemist who, for lack of a university post, was conducting his research at the Glidden Company, known for its paints; Ralph J. Bunche, a Harvard-educated political scientist who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950; and David Blackwell, a mathematician who had studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. Over the following months, the list grew as more black scholars came forward.
None of that made much of an impression on the recipients of Wale's letter, however. About 400 of the 600 presidents never wrote back. Nearly all of those who did reply attested to their colorblind, meritocratic hiring practices. But they resorted to deflections and excuses when Wale asked them why those principles had not resulted in the hiring of any black professors.
"To the best of my knowledge there is no group prejudice against Negroes on the staff at this university," wrote Robert G. Sproul, president of the University of California, speaking of the system's Berkeley campus. "We have employed a Negro for a part-time coaching position with the football team for many years."
William A. Shimer, president of Marietta College, in Ohio, responded that he guessed black scholars "would be happier in certain other institutions where they would have Negro companions."
If one point can be gleaned from Wale's letter-writing campaign, it is that those "certain other institutions" — the more than 100 black colleges in America — were just about the only places where black scholars were welcome at midcentury.
This had a profound effect on the direction that later generations of African-Americans would take into academe, says Mr. Anderson. If a research scientist like Percy Julian was unemployable for lack of racial openness at white institutions, he was unemployable for lack of resources at black institutions. Black universities at the time were simply not equipped for high-level research, Mr. Anderson notes. Hence, he says, Julian lived out much of his career at the Glidden Company, where he could not "reproduce himself" in the form of more black Ph.D.'s in chemistry.
Black institutions were, on the other hand, well equipped to train teachers for segregated school systems, says Mr. Anderson: "If you were in the field of education, you had a whole industry underneath you" — an industry of black schools.
"When African-Americans asked themselves, Where's a place that I can get a doctorate and also have an opportunity to live out my profession? — well, education stood out."
Northern philanthropists, who took a self-professed "fatherly" interest in nurturing black schools and colleges, were also increasingly intent on supporting black doctoral candidates in education. By the time Wale compiled his list of black scholars, his organization, along with the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board, was already well on its way toward directing the next generation of African-American graduate students into the field.
All of this gave momentum to the notion that black scholars were most "suited" for work in education, Mr. Anderson writes. When the first African-Americans were hired by white universities, they were hired in education departments — even when it was not their field. One of the first black professors at a predominantly white institution was Allison Davis, an anthropologist who joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1942. But it was the department of education — not anthropology — that hired him.
In the years to come, as education schools and departments became more hospitable to black faculty members, the legacy reinforced itself. James Blackwell, an African-American sociologist who received his Ph.D. in 1959 and is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says the greatest predictor of where black graduate students will enroll is the presence of black professors in a program. Education departments became magnets.
By 1976 almost 62 percent of new black Ph.D.'s were in education.
The proportion, although not the number, of black doctoral students in education has gone down since then. But the third of black doctoral students who specialize in education now find themselves in a field that is, in Mr. Anderson's words, "very much threadbare."
How threadbare? Between 2002 and 2006, according to data compiled by the Council of Graduate Schools, the Department of Education, the main agency supporting education research, went from giving out $41-million to graduate students to giving out $40-million. By contrast, in the same period, the National Science Foundation increased its support for graduate students working in the sciences from $153-million to $229-million, and the National Institutes of Health raised support from $651-million to $761-million for postdoctoral fellows alone.
Reach Back
After receiving her jarring letter from the federal government in 2004, Angela Lee managed to finish her Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Howard by the end of 2005 — on a fast track, and only after having accumulated another several thousand dollars of debt.
She took a job counseling students at North Carolina Central University, a historically black institution in Durham, where she still works. Her salary there is no match for her loan payments, however. So in addition to her 9-to-5 counseling job, she teaches nights at the university and works weekends at a local Barnes & Noble.
And still, most of her loans are under an economic hardship-deferral. "It hurts," Ms. Lee says, "because I know I've worked hard. I know I'm good at what I do."
She remembers conversations she has had with people outside academe, who seem as baffled as they are impressed by her years of study: "They say, 'Is it worth it? You're making less than me, and I only have a high-school diploma.'"
She thinks of her own brother, who began college but then decided to leave. "One of the reasons he didn't finish is because he ran out of funding," she says. "He chose not to get all of the loans. He was trying to work full time and pay for school, and they wooed him on the work side, and so he's there."
"He didn't complete his degree," she says, "and he's doing better than me."
Ms. Lee does not seem to pine for a different place in the academic universe, however — she does not wish to be in a lab or a library. Despite its pitfalls, education is the field that connects her to her own roots. "You don't want to feel like you're just in the ivory tower," she says. "You want to have a hand in the community."
No matter how far she has come, she says, "I need to reach back."
Picture of Neglect
Like many symbolically important institutions, Howard University, a mecca of black higher education, is set on a hill. And one of the most prominent pieces of architecture that the hilltop presents to the capital city below — atop a steep, grassy slope and a long set of concrete steps — is the old Miner Teachers College.
The stately colonial-revival building is a picture of quiet neglect. Its first floor contains a few offices, but the rest of the space is empty or under repair, and the stairs leading up to its main doors are crumbling.
The Howard School of Education, meanwhile, is housed in a drab building at the back of campus, amid loading docks and parking lots — a location that sometimes prompts doctoral students there to wonder about their place in the constellation of Howard's concerns.
Orlando Taylor, dean of the Graduate School at Howard, presides over an institution that produces more black Ph.D's than any other research university, and he is more aware than many college administrators of graduate students who face severe debt. But Mr. Taylor, who earned his own Ph.D. in education in 1966, directs much of his energy toward nurturing black students in the scientific fields, where their enrollments are often abysmally low but financial support is greater.
National organizations like the Council of Graduate Schools talk frequently about high black graduate-student debt and, in the same breath, low black enrollments in science and technology. (In congregations of graduate deans, those are usually referred to as science, technology, engineering and medicine, or STEM fields — an acronym that can have the awkward effect of making other academic pursuits sound flimsy.)
Often, increased black enrollments in the sciences are presented as the solution to the problem of black scholars' debt. "We have to figure out a way to get more of those students into those STEM fields," says Kenneth E. Redd, director of research and policy analysis at the council.
However, when presented with the issue of low black enrollments in the sciences, many of Howard's doctoral students in education immediately see themselves as part of the solution, not part of the problem. Because even if higher education has failed black students, they say, primary and secondary education has failed them even more.
Leaving Laurel
Janine Jackson attended Laurel High School, in Maryland, before heading to Florida Atlantic University for a bachelor's degree, working for a time as a teacher in Florida, and then going to Howard for a doctorate in educational psychology. Upon beginning her doctoral studies, she went back to Laurel High School, this time to teach.
She entered the field of education largely because of a single high-school English teacher, she says: "I wanted to be the black Ms. Burnsides." But apart from Ms. Burnsides's influence, Ms. Jackson suggests she made it to a doctoral program more despite her early schooling than because of it.
"I'm teaching at the high school that I graduated from, and my high-school experience wasn't the best," she says. "I came back to make peace."
To do so, Ms. Jackson asked to teach ninth-grade English to students below grade level, most of whom are black and male. In her classes are students whose parents told them, at age 12, that they could pretty much take care of themselves from there on out, and students who have abruptly disappeared to serve jail time. For them, Ms. Jackson feels, she is there to be an example.
"I think it's important for African-Americans to go into the field of education," she says. Then she mentions a bit of context that often gets overlooked: There may be more black doctoral holders in education than in any other field, but they are still not an overrepresented minority. "It is a predominantly white, female field," says Ms. Jackson. "I think it's important for African-American students to see people who look like them be successful. I want them to see that I have a bachelor's, I have a master's, and I'm pursuing my doctorate. I want them to see that."
Recently, however, she has had to broach the subject that she might need to leave. Living between ninth-grade English and the School of Education has simply spread her too thin. "One of them's going to have to give," she said one day last month outside the high school, as freezing rain fell in the parking lot. "It's either going to be my job, or I'll have to sit out a semester or a year."

A week later, Ms. Jackson decided: She would stop teaching and turn her attention to Howard full time. That meant not only saying goodbye to her students, but something else, too. For as long as she taught, she had been able to avoid going heavily into debt. Now, as she prepared to leave Laurel High again, she took out her first big loan.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The FacultyVolume 53, Issue 31

Two Women Sue Southern University System for Possible Wrongdoing after "Whistle Blowing"

April 3, 2007 07:41 PM CDT

Two women who claim possible wrongdoing by the chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans are going public after blowing the whistle in an anonymous letter in September of last year. The women say Chancellor Victor Ukpolo set in motion a plan to increase enrollment at SUNO by counting non-existent students in non-existent classes. And you're about to read a name in this case you've read before in previous Southern problems. The women are speaking out now, half a year later, because nothing has been done about their claims. The women also say Johnny Anderson, chairman of the Southern University System's board of supervisors, has played a role in keeping the allegations quiet over the months, rather than airing the claims fully before the board.
Reverend Linda Mosley is one of the two whistle blowers and Mrs. Tim Bailey is the other. Both worked at director level in recruitment, admissions, enrollment and student retention at Southern New Orleans. Last year, they sent an anonymous message to university leadership making certain allegations against Chancellor Victor Ukpolo. In a suit they have filed, they accused Ukpolo of setting out to inflate campus enrollment by deceptively registering and reporting students as being enrolled in SUNO's dual enrollment program. The plan would literally involve counting non-existent students in non-existent classrooms to boost numbers. Mrs. Bailey alleges, "The chancellor insisted in several meetings that we admit every student that applied, regardless of whether or not the student met the requirements."
Bailey says she learned later the names on many of the student applications that were admitted were then used to enroll the students into the dual enrollment program. And she claims that in hundreds of cases, there were only names. No students, no classes. The allegedly bogus enrollment numbers also increased funding to the school. Southern board of supervisors chairman Johnny Anderson is also named in the suit, which alleges he knew of the whistleblower allegations, but failed to inform the full board of supervisors of possible fraudulent acts. Anderson told us he's not aware of the lawsuit and that he's now waiting on results of a Southern System audit he called for to be presented to the board. SUNO chancellor Victor Ukpolo declined an interview, but gave us a statement regarding the whistleblower claims. It states, "I absolutely deny what they are claiming. It is not true." Ukpolo also referred to the two ladies as disgruntled employees. He said one of them had asked for a raise, which he had denied. Bailey and Mosley say that once they came forward as the whistleblowers, things changed. Reverend Mosley says, "As soon as it was learned that we were the individuals that reported it, my life, Mrs. Bailey's life, Mr. Thomas's life, our lives changed dramatically. Everything that could be done to us by officials of Southern University has been done."
A possible motive for pumping up the numbers would be increased funding for SUNO, plus higher enrollment would show goals are being met. Meanwhile, both women's positions have been abolished. They were offered demotions with a hefty cut in pay or dismissal. Reverend Mosley has refused to take the cut and her employment remains in question. Mrs. Bailey says she took the cut under duress. Both women are awaiting their day in court for a civil ruling on what they say has been a violation of their rights as whistleblowers.

Reporter: Paul Gates, WAFB 9NEWS

Lets Geaux Hoyas....Down Goes UNC !!

Enough said.....

Broadcast iPod tunes using the latest widget

Monday, March 26, 2007

A Novel Way to Share Songs

A new gadget can broadcast music from your iPod to friends nearby.

By Rachel Ross

A San Francisco teenager has invented a gadget that turns iPods into miniature radio stations, broadcasting beats to nearby devices. The system, called NoeStringsAttached, uses FM radio waves to transmit music from a portable music player to any other specially equipped player within 15 feet.
The NoeStringsAttached system consists of two identical units. Each one plugs into the standard headphone jack found on most MP3, CD, and tape players. A user selects one of five radio frequencies and then opts to transmit or receive music by flicking a switch. (The five frequencies were specially selected because they are not often used by traditional broadcasters, but in theory, the device could pick up FM radio stations.)
Listeners don't even need a music player if they just want to tune in to someone else's music. All they need is a pair of headphones plugged into a NoeStringsAttached unit.
"It's basically like you're listening to a radio with headphones," says NoeStringsAttached inventor Kristyn Heath.
The 16-year-old says she made the gadget so that she could share her favorite songs with her friends. Heath tried sharing ear buds, but that requires two people standing relatively still and very close together. Even using an adapter to plug two sets of headphones into one iPod wasn't ideal, Heath says, because the cables "only go so far." Heath was sure there had to be a way to share her music with lots of friends at once without being tangled up in wires or blasting her music through speakers, forcing everyone to listen to the same thing.
Three years ago Heath turned to her father, Allen Heath, for help. He says it took Kristyn six months to convince him of her idea. "I did not buy it at first," says Allen, who has more than 30 years of experience in information technology. "We had a number of conversations over time at the dinner table about wireless technologies, and she then formalized her idea in writing with a descriptive drawing." Kristyn says they decided to take a low-tech approach and use FM radio to transmit the music because they wanted to keep costs down. Other wireless options, such as Wi-Fi (a communication protocol used to wirelessly connect laptops to networks), would have made the product too pricey for their target audience of 15-to-22-year-olds. "Most people my age don't make that much money," she says. "We want to keep it affordable."
By using FM radio, Heath got around another pesky problem: patents. Heath is not the only one who has thought that wireless music sharing would be a good idea, and some researchers already hold patents on ideas similar to hers. In 2005, researchers at the MIT Media Lab Europe patented their own system, which involved wirelessly sharing music using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (a wireless communication scheme used for short-range data transfer between digital devices).
Mike O'Malley, now a program manager for Microsoft, built a similar device while he was a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst last year. His scheme used Bluetooth to transmit music.
O'Malley thinks that Heath's product is interesting because it gets around a problem he encountered during his research. Unlike O'Malley's system, NoeStringsAttached can broadcast to multiple devices at once. O'Malley says he also appreciates the fact that it can work with different kinds of devices.
"That's the compelling part about it," he says. "Any device--whether it's a Zune, iPod, or Creative Zen [player]--can share the same music."
Microsoft's Zune player also lets owners wirelessly share songs, but the recipient only gets three plays or three days with the track--whichever comes first. And songs can only be shared from one Zune to another.
FM radio doesn't offer the same sound quality as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but Heath believes that people won't mind. She notes that the old-fashioned radio signal is still a popular broadcast medium.
"I think the quality is good enough for them, especially when you consider the price," says Heath.
Now CEO of her own company, Passive Devices, Heath hopes to study business in college. She has already submitted a patent for her idea of broadcasting to small spaces and plans to submit more. (The Heath family is still based in San Francisco, but the company is officially registered in Denver because Colorado allows teens to write checks.)
A NoeStringsAttached kit, which includes two transmitter/receiver units and a set of headphones, costs $59.99. Powered by a single AAA battery, each unit can transmit tunes for up to 9 hours or act as a receiver for approximately 20 hours.
Right now the kits, which are manufactured in China, can only be purchased through eBay. Heath declines to say how many kits she has sold so far, but she says that an updated version of the device should be in stores by Christmas.
Copyright Technology Review 2007.

State of Louisiana Steps Up - Teaching Hospital

WINDFALL PROMISE:
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana has proposed increasing state spending on higher education by about $196-million, or nearly 17 percent, in the coming fiscal year. Of that amount, $80-million would go toward giving faculty members at public colleges a pay increase and helping the institutions bring new faculty members on board. On top of the $196-million, Ms. Blanco, a Democrat, has called for state lawmakers to appropriate $15-million to establish Louisiana's first major need-based financial-aid program for college students.

VISTA versus Apple's OS X

Not even close yet...but software demands adjustment...so we shall see in 12 months how far Microsoft has come in bringing their new OS along.

MTSU and New Orleans university partner

By ERIN EDGEMON

MTSU has entered into a partnership to help rebuild a New Orleans university devastated by Hurricane Katrina both physically and academically.A formal agreement was signed between MTSU President Sidney McPhee and Southern University of New Orleans Chancellor Victor Ukpolo Tuesday morning. Representatives from the traditionally black university are visiting Murfreesboro for three days, attending events on campus and meeting with academic departments."They have to essentially rebuild their entire university," McPhee said in a released statement. He said the agreement between the two universities should be a “true partnership that will help them (SUNO) get back on their feet.” MTSU has agreed to help SUNO in a variety of areas, some of which could include student-exchange programs, sharing of academic expertise and assistance in a variety of topics including diversity, technology, e-learning and university security.The visitors from SUNO arrived Monday and will meet with academic deans, administrators and other officials during their three-day visit to discuss how MTSU can assist the university.The partnership spawned after a recent visit McPhee made to New Orleans to witness the devastation and the rebuilding efforts, said Tom Tozer, director of News and Public Affairs at MTSU. The president thought there must be something MTSU could do to help SUNO. Before the hurricanes, Tozer said the university had approximately 3,000 students but enrollment dwindled to just over 2,000 since. SUNO reopened after the hurricane in January 2006.He said wasn't aware of any SUNO students who attended MTSU in the hurricane’s aftermath. Students from such universities as Tulane and Xavier, both in New Orleans, were allowed to attend MTSU while their universities were closed.In a statement on the SUNO Web site, Ukpolo said the university faces "some difficult months and possibly years ahead" and will need the assistance of the university community and at the community at large.He said SUNO has moved forward with streamlined programs and reduced student population and staff. SUNO virtually lost all of its building after Hurricane Katrina. The university is now made up of a temporary campus consisting of 45 trailers set up by the U.S. Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Of the 45 trailers, 26 are classrooms and the rest are used as a computer laboratory, dining area, health unit and other university support services. Many students, faculty and staff live in 400 trailers on the campus.

Erin Edgemon can be reached at 869-0812 and at eedgemon@murfreesboropost.com.

Tennessee University to Help Southern U. at New Orleans to Recover From Katrina

February 7, 2007

Middle Tennessee State University and Southern University at New Orleans signed an agreement on Tuesday in which the Tennessee institution pledged to help the New Orleans campus as it recovers from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. According to The Murfreesboro Post, a Tennessee newspaper, the assistance could include student-exchange programs and the sharing of academic talent in technology, security, and other areas. The Associated Press reported that, nearly a year and a half after the hurricane struck, Southern University at New Orleans is still operating out of trailers.

NEW HOSPITAL IN NEW ORLEANS:

A panel of lawmakers in Louisiana has voted to give Louisiana State University a $300-million down payment on a new teaching hospital in downtown New Orleans. That recommendation, by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, goes beyond the advice of an agency appointed by Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, to guide rebuilding efforts. The agency, known as the Louisiana Recovery Authority, had asked the legislative panel to give Louisiana State $74-million to buy land and hire architects to design the replacement for Charity Hospital, which was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Under the authority's plan, the remaining $226-million would not become available until university officials produced a detailed business plan. But the president of the State Senate, Donald E. Hines, a Democrat, said it was important to budget the full amount to signal to federal officials that the project is on track.

Violence in the City Deters College Recruiting

Violence could deter students, colleges warn
Make neighborhoods safe, neat, officials urge police and city

Thursday, January 11, 2007
By John PopeStaff writer

Besides the potential for physical harm posed by the wave of violence that has swept over New Orleans, local colleges and universities are worried that it also might hurt their attempts to recruit and retain top-flight students, teachers and administrators, leaders of those institutions said Wednesday afternoon.

Although none of the most recent killings has occurred on a campus, "I consider it dumb luck," said Ron Gardner, a vice chancellor at the LSU Health Sciences Center.
"I don't think there's a big difference between what happens in the city and what's happening on our campuses," he said.
The violence is especially damaging to schools trying to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina because people far away regard the crime as pervasive and, consequently, are loath to move to New Orleans or send their children to school there, school leaders said during a 90-minute meeting at Loyola University to discuss the issue with City Council members and law enforcement officers.
"If the kids aren't here, the city is going to have huge economic difficulties," said Deborah Stieffel, Loyola's dean of admissions and enrollment management. "We owe it to our parents and ourselves to ensure we're taking care of students."
If, somehow, the institutions can get people to move to New Orleans, the rewards will be great, Councilman Oliver Thomas said.
"Our greatest challenge is who we keep in this . . . city," he said. "If we keep folks, guess who our advocates and salespeople are?"
College representatives urged the city to step up the police presence on their campuses and to do a better job of repairing streetlights. Neighborhoods near Dillard University and the University of New Orleans need to be revitalized to make them less bleak and forbidding, representatives of those institutions said.
"I need to be able to convince parents when they get off the interstate and are driving along Elysian Fields, they'll see a live campus," said Ron Maggiore, UNO's dean of admissions. "They need to feel safe."
It's tough on the students who have returned, said Deanie Brown, Dillard's senior executive officer.
"Everything that has been identified (as a problem) is magnified for us because we sit in the devastation," she said. "Our students, in terms of retention, are frustrated. They want everything back together quickly. They say, 'I want to feel like a regular college student.' "
Although officials pledged to do as much as they could, they said their jobs aren't easy because budgets are tight and personnel levels are down.
"We're in a post-Katrina environment where all the elements of the infrastructure have been destroyed," New Orleans Police Department Capt. Michael Pfeiffer said. "We're overstressed. We go from one crisis to the next."
The most recent serious crime on a local campus occurred in October, when a UNO student was strangled in his dormitory room. No one has been arrested in the case.
At Wednesday's meeting, law enforcement officers urged university representatives and students to get involved in neighborhood groups to extend the feeling of community and safety beyond the campus.
"If you're going to a neighborhood meeting, . . . you have more strength as a neighborhood voice than by yourself," Pfeiffer said. "Problems will be addressed more quickly because officials will have to explain the outcome."
Joseph Boyd, Xavier's vice president for student services, said he urges students to increase their sense of safety by being more vigilant on campus.
"I tell them that everybody who comes through campus with a book bag doesn't always have books in that bag," he said.
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John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3317.