Blah...Blah...Blah from the Bayou

Friday...Game Day

2010-08-27T14:28:00.001-05:00

Saints host the Chargers in the Dome tonite and I am waiting for a t-storm cell to push thru the area so we can get to it !!

Who Dat

stolen

2010-07-29T15:14:00.003-05:00

i am entering day two since my trek was lifted, right from underneath me at the library...i was distracted by an argument at the front desk...and also looking for a dvd to watch...lock in my bag...reckless...and just having a hard time letting go.

thankfully...i found an alternative route to work...one that is much more peaceful and relaxing with virtually no variation in time...meanwhile back in the bat cave...robin and i are devising a strategy to catch a thief.

get dental

2010-07-28T17:27:00.004-05:00

my trip to the dentist was not that bad...no drilling...no extractions...no pain

and the congregation rose and said...amen.

monetize !!

2010-07-28T17:24:00.002-05:00

just finish playing around with my "blog face" and i must admit...the drive to create wealth from my comments is motivating.

where was this idea 20 yrs ago when i could have cornered the market?

anyway...buy me !!

thoughts on golf

2010-07-20T11:45:00.002-05:00

last week...i found myself laughing out loud...as the analysis of ball loft off the putter face was discussed. it was the first time for me that "loft" and "putter" was analyzed to that degree of minutiae...and i think it is reflective as a whole on how we have come to over-analyze Tiger...i simply accept that the competition in the world has caught up and Tiger's ability win any tourney by 5 to 10 strokes is an era that has ended...blame it on whomever or whatever you wish...ball designers...course layouts...club design, particularly the driver...global warming...sun spots...or the gravitational pull of Halley's Comet.

time marches on...even for Tiger...

take...for instance...beisbol...one second my favorite pitcher Doc Haliday is dominating the National League his first year with the Phils...over from the Toronto Blue Jays...and viola...by Allstar Break...batters get some of stuff on tape...see him in game settings...and watch his ERA rise.

No doubt both Tiger and Haliday will continue to be force majeurs...Tiger will stalk his prey at every major till he passes Jack...the latter will be the World Series MVP if the Phillies get there because he was brought in to take the Yankees down.

But in the mean time....let us remember that both men are mortals...no need for kryptonite...or wild conspiracy theories...and much more importantly...the competition these guys face is forever planning, plotting and improving...it is not disorder...rather...it is the way of things in the sports world...dominance always...always...comes to an end.

Sprinkle in that element of luck which always brings a smile to our faces...and during the replay the announcer calls it magic...just like Tiger at Augusta...chipping in that ball...as the Nike logo rotated the last 90 degrees.

second...on the British Open...mega-dittos...links golf...the four-letter gimmicky coverage...throwing more bodies at the camera than one can keep track of as they now do in every sport...thank God radio still does it right...as the song used go..."It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right."

Picking winners this year has become an ugly business...golf metrics are no longer predictive measures we once had so much faith in...just like my putting stroke...it has become whimsical and subject to feel...i really thought the young lad, Rory, was going to launch himself to the win...but...at his age...there is plenty of time to take a the British or Senior British.

i get heckled for engaging in fantasy golf...it is an acquired, elite sport...for those with exquisite taste.

friday, july 16

2010-07-16T11:07:00.003-05:00

i am anxiously awaiting the completion of the lafitte greenway, which will open up the center of the city to a sort of "highway" for cyclists.

The city is in the final stages of negotiating a design and construction contract for the greenway with Design Workshop of Austin, Texas, said Bart Everson, a board member of Friends of Lafitte Corridor, a nonprofit group that has been pushing for the greenway since 2006.

Last month, the state approved two pots of money for the project: nearly $400,000 in transportation and trails money and $2.6 million of federal Community Development Block Grant disaster-recovery money awarded through the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
(June 2006)times picayune

http://folc-nola.org/

The city has set aside $7.6 million of CDBG money for planning and developing the park but has not decided who will get the contract, said Ryan Berni, a mayoral spokesman. He said the city hopes to make that decision in a few months.

A previous contract with a design firm under the Ray Nagin administration fell apart when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began to look over all city projects using CDBG money.

While it wasn’t clear whether there were problems with the Lafitte Greenway contract, Nagin terminated it and asked companies to submit new proposals, but he did not award a new contract before leaving office last month.

The Landrieu administration will subject those proposals to new contract rules, Berni said. A panel of Landrieu aides and other city employees will review the proposals and recommend a winner.

Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant will oversee the project.

While the corridor in the most recent past saw railcars rumble through it, it was originally part of the Carondelet Canal, dug in the late 1700s to ship goods to the French Quarter. A turning basin at the end of the canal gave Basin Street its name.

the beauty of the french quarter

2010-07-14T11:07:00.003-05:00

this morning...i was able to take in some of the amazing ambiance of the crescent city....a bike ride thru old algiers...a ferry ride to downtown that offers a full view of the cathedral and the riverfront...a ride down decatur...past jax brewery...past cafe du monde...a brief stop at a cafe by the joan of arc statue...then a brief conversation with an employee...who sermonized about saving our youth with education...which struck a cord in my mind for some time...then onto the french market...ending up at the old mint/museum.

my reaction to the first round of hearings on the oilspill

2010-07-13T15:16:00.002-05:00

i took in some the c-span rewind this morning before work...the industry folks were well-prepard to answer and not answer all the key questions.

what emerged for me is the rhetoric of "best practices" has become worn out and meaningless.

everyone says it all the time now...without ever there ever being a need to define this in each instance.

okay....so we won't have guys who are dead on the emergency response team...and ensuring all our people are actually alive is now going to be a best practice.

one exec came clean (no pun intended, my fellow pelicans) and stated that the clean-up process is basically incidental, because the amount of oil escaped and escaping is so tremendous that there is no process known to man that can save our environment.

so...as long as we have to have big trucks and suvs...with big engines...and do not embrace mass transit...folks should stop crying.

if you want to pay less than five bucks a gallon at the pump...then just shut up and deal with it.

you cannot have it both ways...a shrimp poboy for less than $20 bucks...or a gallon of petro for less than three bucks.

i think we can effectively shut down our gulf coast to tourism and residents east of the river.

all the commercial fishermen should be compensated based on current earnings and life expectancy.

the great wall of louisiana should be built that would serve two purposes:

a. keep the oil from coming inland
b. serve as our new hurricane protection barrier.

install a gate so that shipping can continue...and work your way east to negotiate settlements with our neighboring states.

but louisiana first, because we do business here...this ain't about a bunch of folks sitting on the beach getting a tan.

we are where the drilling and processing of oil and gas happens.

we are the nation's third busiest port...and the key to trade with central and south america.

our tradition for good food will be fine...it just won't be gulf seafood-based anymore.

July is Really Nice

2010-07-10T16:59:00.004-05:00

having been in higher education for nearly 25 years, summer is wonderful.

i have always been a 12 month man...no three month break...but the pace of summer and the awareness and urgency of summer students is really what i would prefer...however, the fall semester always brings a new level of intensity and a corresponding level of re-commitment to purpose....it is called first time freshmen...FTFs...if you want use U.S. Dept. of Educ. vernacular.

now that we, in the State of Louisiana have barely survived another round of crippling budget cuts, we must look forward towards the frosh who look forward to their first semester in college...both the highs and lows...my first year college experience was supreme...but thanks to the lack of vision, commitment and sense of purpose of our state leaders...my son's senior year will resemble something i recall being the state of affairs in 1981, when Ronald Reagan came to power and ushered in a new level of pessimism as commander in chief...this country and this country's gov't was now the enemy.

i pray for him...and just shake my head at all that he will not have the chance to enjoy as a college senior...thanks to Hurricane Katrina...he sacrificed so much as a high school junior and senior...it motivates me to stand by his side even more...it is God's will...and all one has to do is answer the call.

the work of the 1960s had been all for naught...people died...for nothing...according to the righteous right...slavery and discrimination never happened....and after 400 yrs..."negroes" needed to be content.

well...i have a differing view on the state of affairs now...a little less militant than 1985...but still angry because my boss today has a problem with me spending time at the center for elders in my neighborhood of origin for whatever reason...a black man...with more than 20 years of time in this State's higher education system.

well...she has another thing coming...if there will be ANY confusion where my loyalties lie.

perhaps i would be better off cutting grass and driving miss daisy...as much as i fight for the campaign of togetherness...it is apparent...that Malcom X was right...as long as you are south of the Canadian border...YOU ARE SOUTH!!

all of our state legislators have failed and should be fired...the governor has failed...and should be replaced...but these so called leaders have taken politics and law to a level where they are insulated from review, evaluation and most important of all...reprisal.

elective politics...is nothing more than a business.

shame on the governor...the state legislature...and me...most of all...for staying in Louisiana after Katrina...i did have my chance to escape.

Let's Party with a Purpose

2010-07-02T12:35:00.002-05:00

and perhaps the folks at Essence could get the website up and running.

CP3 traded?

2010-07-02T12:30:00.002-05:00

heard an awful rumor that the "King" wants him to steer his show...cannot blame him...pound for pound...i would take him anyday over any other NBA guard...Paul is a finished product...he would make any quality group of players an instant contender.

As much as I wish he would remain here...we should get "value" for him...and the Hornets should petition the NCAA for standing...and just join the SEC.

The King

2010-07-01T14:30:00.002-05:00

I understand the excitement over LeBron...but what President Obama is dealing with and doing is much more important.

I, for one, plan to drop pay TV so that I can purge myself from that instrument of self-destruction.

I plan to purchase a boom box and listen to the local music station WWOZ.

Check it out on the web....WWOZ.ORG

Essence Fest eve

2010-07-01T14:15:00.003-05:00

and all throughout the city...some look forward to the influx...others consider it an invasion.

many of us need to "free our minds, so that our asses will follow."

welcome the people...be thankful for the gifts they bring...and participate if you can.

but this is old new orleans...and african americans own so very little...tell them where to go.

many may be arrogant...intoxicated...and opinionated...so be it.

walk away.

nobody can party with a purpose better than new orleans.

if Essence could find a better place...they would not be here.

and remember...the BP oilspill clean up process has thrown confusion into what would normally be a quiet metro-region.

instead, there all sorts of people staying around here that will cause fest goers problems...particularly when it comes to hotel.

we need to open our doors and let them in.

2010-06-29T10:03:00.001-05:00

serve up a bowl of gumbo, pour a dixie draft beer, sit back and relax for the BP show.

they have brought our homeboy, with his Masters degree in Geology from here at UNO (univ of new orleans) and hails from Ponchartrain Park, no less...as does Wendell Pierce

Wendell may have to get him into the second season of Treme...if he has any acting skills...problem is...what some would say...the lack of acting skills of the real musicians.

well...given how badly the CEO of BP acted like he really cares about the gulf coast or BP's culpability...i think we can cut Trombone Shorty a little slick...i mean slack...sorry...for his lack of thespian presence.

turns out the department chair for Geology here at UNO...once hosted a program to inspire minorities to purse the earth sciences...a program yours truly attended with a life long friend from Ponchartrain Park back in the 1970s during high school, that produced folks like Darryl Willis.

Dr. Lou Fernandez was brought up in NYC...having had to dodge bullies on the way to skool in the Bronx...felt the way to reach back was to develop a youth mentoring program.

fast forward 40 years....and a product of that program is now the face of BP and oilspill in the gulf...now that is what i call full circle.

I Am Back !! Season 6...Episode #1

2010-06-24T10:06:00.003-05:00

As we approach August of 2010, we all must brace ourselves for a storm season that is projected to more active than the past year. All I need for this comparison is one simple outlook: projected number of major storms. Unfortunately it is not July yet, and the tropics are already very active.

One need not add to extensive amount of coverage and opinion already out there on the oil spill...but what is not clear yet...is what impact a major storm will have on the recovery effort and the spread of oil.

Time has come for the daily visit to the NOAA website for weather projections...we now live on our 7 - 14 day schedule...packed and prepared to go.

BHO's first Court Nominee

2009-05-28T16:26:00.002-05:00

As expected, the first court nominee has drawn a hale of criticism. It is clear that the party system in this country is broken...people just oppose actions for partisan-sake.

I think I will begin to spend my time on Sunday mornings on better things. After CBS Sunday Morning goes off and before Face the Nation starts, I will begin a new process. Until a ballgame comes on, the jazz will be played with flavor and fever.

The new, emerging constitution for the summer 2009 is beginning to take form and shape.

Five Dimensional Optical Material

2009-05-21T11:09:00.000-05:00

Data rainbow: These six patterns were written within the same area of a new data-storage medium using three different colors and two different polarizations of laser light.
Credit: Nature Publishing Group

A new light-responsive material could lead to discs the size of today's DVDs that store four orders of magnitude more data. Traditional DVDs and CDs store data on their surface in two dimensions, and holographic discs can store it in three. Now researchers have for the first time demonstrated what they call a five-dimensional optical material. It can record data in three spatial dimensions and in response to different wavelengths and polarizations of laser light.

The material is being developed by researchers led by Min Gu, director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They've further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.

"You can record each bit by one laser pulse," says Gu. The writing laser melts and reshapes the gold particles, which are less than 100 nanometers long. The changes affect how the nanorods interact with light from a laser-imaging system, allowing the data to be read.

Big Papi Homers

2009-05-21T10:54:00.001-05:00

Finally...clutch too as we chasing down the Blue Jays for first place and the Yankees are on an eight game winning streak.

Storm Season

2009-05-19T16:51:00.002-05:00

on the eve of memorial day weekend, and two weeks before the official start of hurricane season, there is a low pressure system over florida.

it will entering the gulf by week's end and into the warm waters of the gulf.

gulp....

Superbowl Returns to NOLA

2009-05-19T16:50:00.002-05:00

well...despite the skepticism of the city of Miami's rep, we are back on the block.

this will be our 10th game and 7th in the superdome...amazing.

School's Is Out

2009-05-05T15:23:00.004-05:00

Finals week at the Univ. of New Orleans has come quickly and is almost over. Welcome news came as local sports and civic interests have expressed concern about the deficit in the athletic department funding for next year.

Too bad they did not express the same concern when academic programs face the budget axe now and in the past.

Play Ball !!

Now This is a Real Pisser, Mate

2009-05-05T15:23:00.001-05:00

The Saints waived receiver Biren Ealy and tight end Kolo Kapanui on Tuesday, two days after they were arrested for lewd conduct, obscenity and disturbing the peace.

The team also officially announced the signings of three more undrafted rookie free agents -- Western Illinois running back Herb Donaldson, Kent State offensive tackle Augustus Parrish and Louisville receiver Chris Vaughn.

Ealy, 24, and Kapanui, 25, were arrested early Sunday morning and booked on charges of obscenity, disturbing the peace by being drunk in public and lewd conduct by urinating in public and exposing themselves.

Both players were long shots to make the Saints' roster even before the incident occurred. Ealy signed with the Saints in Janaury after spending the past two years with the Tennessee Titans, mostly on the practice squad. Kapanui joined the Saints' practice squad late last season, his first in the NFL.

One Year Later

2009-02-10T08:19:00.001-06:00

Wow...has it almost been a year since my last post?

Yes it has...

Obama vs McCain: Battleground states

2008-06-05T10:17:00.001-05:00

Battleground states

The Zurich Classic in New Orleans

2008-03-26T09:43:00.000-05:00

It is time again for festivals, a golf tourney and generally a wide assortment of things we do in NOLA prior to the beginning of our summer and the dreaded hurricane season. The price of crawfish are so low that farmers have begun draining their fields. The pace of our recovery has quickened a bit, as a new govenor gives the agency overseeing the funding of home building a stern directive.

The local folks will undoubtebly be dissappointed by the withdrawl of David Toms, past champion and LSU grad, but alas he has back problems. The surge in success of the New Orleans Hornets has given this spring a renewed sense of enthusiasm for me, while Major League Baseball celebrates Opening Day in Japan. Bud Selig just needs to go away. Now that the steriod mess has run its course, he should have the good sense to know that his legacy will remain with needles and Canseco. We have no faith in him or the owners who knew all the while what was going on.

So while I usually am getting ready for the French Quarter and our major Jazz festivals, all the while poking the finger at my Yankee-lovers, this spring is different. Golf and the "Association" is on my mind....after March Madness ends of course. And I proudly declare that this is my first year in recovery from charting failed predictions in the tournament, which has lead me to enjoy both the men's and women's action at a new and different level. This goes along well with the use of the mute button on my remote control, to block out all the noise from Jay Bilas, Billy Packer and the other sports know-it-alls. Music is a much more soothing condiment to buzz beating shots.

Landscape Experts Focus on Gentilly & Ponchartrain

2007-10-16T15:27:00.000-05:00

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.
. . . . . . .
Leslie Williams can be reached at lwilliams@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3358.
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Where Saints Fans Only Dare

2007-09-25T12:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-21T09:51:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-19T14:48:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-07T09:20:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-06T09:14:00.000-05:00

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.
. . . . . . .
John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3317.
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The Death of Television

2007-08-28T16:06:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-10T11:14:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-12T14:24:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-07-11T11:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-06T12:19:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-03T14:13:00.001-05:00

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

Baby Tiger is Born

2007-06-19T18:44:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-29T10:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-05T15:40:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-04-04T09:27:00.000-05:00

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 !!

2007-03-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

Enough said.....

Broadcast iPod tunes using the latest widget

2007-03-26T10:57:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-23T11:06:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-10T09:56:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-07T11:20:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-07T11:08:00.000-06:00

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:

2007-01-26T09:00:00.000-06:00

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

2007-01-11T10:12:00.000-06:00

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.
. . . . . . .
John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3317.

NOLA's New Recovery Czar

2006-12-05T14:54:00.001-06:00

Nola.com's Printer-Friendly Page

Insurers Must Cover Flooding Damage Caused by Canal Breaches After Katrina, Federal Judge Rules

2006-12-01T11:41:00.000-06:00

Insurers Must Cover Flooding Damage Caused by Canal Breaches After Katrina, Federal Judge Rules

By KATHERINE MANGAN

Xavier University of Louisiana is among the beneficiaries of a sweeping decision this week by a federal judge in Louisiana who ruled that insurance companies must pay for damages caused by canal breaches in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
A handful of insurance companies had denied coverage, saying their policies excluded flood damage. But Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr., of the U.S. District Court in New Orleans, said that most of the insurers had failed to clearly distinguish in their policies between flooding that is caused by heavy rains and high winds, and damage caused by human error.
"The exclusion does not clearly address flooding caused by man-induced causes, and as such, the court must find coverage," he wrote in his 85-page ruling.
Xavier suffered an estimated $50-million in property damages after breaches at the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals in New Orleans sent several feet of water cascading into campus buildings, where it remained for weeks.
The university had argued that the canal breaches were caused by human error and were not a natural disaster, and that therefore the insurer, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, did not have the right to deny coverage based on its flood-exclusion policy.
Xavier was one of several Gulf Coast universities that sued after its insurers refused to pay for the damages.
"This was a great ruling for Xavier and for all institutions in Louisiana," said James M. Garner, who argued the case for Xavier. "The policies cover all risks, and the risk here was badly built levees."
He said that because of the insurer's refusal to cover damages, Xavier's president, Norman C. Francis, was forced to borrow tens of millions of dollars to reopen the university.
"Dr. Francis had to spend millions of dollars out of pocket to put the university back together, and this ruling will allow Xavier to come close to getting its money back," Mr. Garner said.
The ruling came in an umbrella case that consolidated numerous claims for damages that resulted from post-Katrina canal breaches. It was the first by a court in Louisiana on insurance claims from Hurricane Katrina, and it followed a ruling by a federal judge in Mississippi that had favored insurance companies that had denied coverage.
"Judge Duval did the right thing, and we're going to look to the other judges to do the same," Mr. Garner said.
Other universities that have sued their insurers include Dillard University, Loyola University New Orleans, and Tulane University. The Dillard and Loyola lawsuits did not specifically involve flood damage, so they were not directly affected by this week's ruling.
Officials at Tulane, which suffered around $400-million in damages, released a written statement saying that they were proceeding with their own suit. Their case is not directly related to the Xavier case but may benefit from it, since Tulane also suffered massive water damage.
"Tulane University is pleased for those policy holders, who the court found were entitled to insurance proceeds for damages arising from Hurricane Katrina," it read. "Judge Duval's recent ruling will go a long way to rebuild the City of New Orleans."
Although he ruled in favor of the homeowners and Xavier, Judge Duval cleared the way for an immediate appeal by the insurance companies. Officials from Allstate and St. Paul Travelers, the corporate office for Travelers Insurance, said on Thursday that they planned to appeal, so the case could drag on for up to a year or more.
"We respectfully disagree with Judge Duval's ruling," Jennifer Wislocki, a spokeswoman for St. Paul Travelers, said. "It is inconsistent with many other court rulings that held that a flood is a flood, whether or not manmade factors are involved. The language in our policies specifically and clearly exclude damage from floodwater."
Lawyers have said they expect this week's ruling, if upheld, will cost the insurance industry more than $1-billion.

FEMA to the Rescue! Now Saves RTA

2006-11-01T09:43:00.000-06:00

Streetcars getting back on track....Feds will pay for repairs, new buses
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
By Leslie Williams
Staff writer
The candy-apple red streetcars -- trashed by Hurricane Katrina -- likely will begin reappearing on the Canal Street tracks in the summer. And hybrid buses could be added to the Regional Transit Authority's fleet.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Tuesday that it has obligated $43 million to repair the Canal line's 24 water-damaged streetcars as well as replace some of the more than 200 buses ruined by floodwaters, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Blanco Cook said.

'We're just so excited about having the money,' Cook said. 'Now we can get to work, repairing the streetcars and ordering the buses. We plan to soon start calling back some of the craftspeople we laid off.'
The return of the red streetcars will follow the restoration of a portion of the historic St. Charles Avenue streetcar line, which has been shut down since Katrina's high winds toppled trees, shredding the overhead electrical systems that powered the streetcars.

By Christmas, Cook said, the St. Charles line's Central Business District Loop -- the curling stretch of tracks along Lee Circle, Carondelet Street, Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue -- should be up and running.
FEMA said $21.6 million of the $43 million is for streetcar repair.

The remaining $21.4 million will be spent to buy new buses to replace some of the 205 RTA buses ruined by Katrina, Cook said.

'It's a good start,' but not enough money to replace all of the buses, she said. On average, a new diesel bus sells for about $325,000 and a hybrid bus"

Mrs. Louisiana America...Nomica Guillory

2006-10-31T08:49:00.000-06:00

Lake Charles native is named 3rd runner-up in Mrs. America Pageant

Mrs. Louisiana America

The Chronicle: Daily 10/30/2006 :Minority Enrollment Grew by More Than 50% From 1993 to 2003

2006-10-30T10:15:00.000-06:00

Monday, October 30, 2006
Minority Enrollment Grew by More Than 50% From 1993 to 2003, Report Says
By JANE R. PORTER
Washington
Minority-student enrollment at colleges and universities increased by 51 percent in the decade ending in 2003, an improvement driven by growth in the number of Hispanic and minority-female students, according to a report scheduled for release today by the American Council on Education.
The report, "Minorities in Higher Education: Twenty-Second Annual Status Report," includes data on rates of high-school completion, college enrollment, college graduation, attainment of professional and doctoral degrees, and employment in higher education. It uses data collected by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Over all, the number of minority students on American campuses grew by 50.7 percent during the decade, totaling 4.7 million undergraduate and graduate students by 2003. During the same period, the number of white students increased by 3.4 percent, reaching a total of 10.5 million white students in higher education.
Although the report notes rising enrollment and degree-attainment numbers for minority students, it says the proportion of African-American and Hispanic students enrolled in college was still not as high as that of white students. While 47.3 percent of white high-school graduates ages 18 to 24 attended college, 41.1 percent of African-American graduates and 35.2 percent of Hispanic graduates continued their education, according to data from 2002 to 2004.
Hispanic students accounted for the largest increase in undergraduate enrollment among minority groups, rising nearly 70 percent from 1993 to 2003. By contrast, African-American enrollment increased by 42.7 percent, Asian-American enrollment went up by 43.5 percent, and the number of American Indian students rose by 38.7 percent.
The increase in the number of Hispanic students in higher education can be credited mainly to overall population growth among Hispanics; the proportion of Hispanic high-school graduates ages 18 to 24 attending college increased only slightly from 1993 to 2003.
Hispanic students had the greatest increase in the rate of high-school completion over the 10-year period, with growth of 7.8 percent. White and African-American students' graduation rates went up by 2 percent and 2.2 percent, respectively.
According to the report, Hispanic students made up 41 percent of the decade's new minority students, compared with 37 percent who were African-American. The enrollment of students whose race and ethnicity were unknown increased by 114 percent, accounting for more than one million students.
The report attributed two-thirds of minority enrollment growth to women, with improvements in male enrollment trailing behind for all minority groups. Women earned 61 percent of new associate degrees, 58 percent of new bachelor's degrees, and 59 percent of new master's degrees.
At the doctoral level, the greatest increase in the number of degrees earned by minority students occurred in the health professions, up by 223.6 percent; in the physical sciences, up by 95.3 percent; and in education and the biological and life sciences, each up by more than 80 percent.
Minority faculty numbers increased by 50 percent from 1993 to 2003, rising from 65,000 to more than 97,000. That increase was led by Asian-American and Hispanic faculty members, with the number from each group rising by more than 60 percent in the 10-year period.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Subscribe About The Chronicle Contact us Terms of use Privacy policy Help

State Flagship Universities Do Poorly in Enrolling and Graduating Black Men, Report Says

2006-09-29T09:28:00.000-05:00

By JANE R. PORTER
Black men are underrepresented at institutions of higher learning over all, and even more so at flagship universities in the 50 states, says a report released on Wednesday by a national research center.

The report, "Black Male Students at Public Flagship Universities in the U.S.: Status, Trends, and Implications for Policy and Practice," was written for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Dellums Commission.

Led by former U.S. Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, Democrat of California, the commission focuses on public policies affecting the health of young African-American men.

The paper analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and other sources to review the status of black men in higher education, with an emphasis on public flagship universities in each of the 50 states.

In 2000 black men represented 7.9 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. population, but in 2004, they constituted just 2.8 percent of undergraduate enrollments across the 50 flagship universities.

Thirty of the universities enrolled fewer than 500 black male undergraduates that year. And at 21 of the institutions, more than one of every five black men on campus was an athlete, the report says.

The findings "confirm that higher education is a public good that benefits far too few black men in America," writes the report's author, Shaun R. Harper, an assistant professor and research associate at Pennsylvania State University's Center for the Study of Higher Education.

"Given all of the institutional rhetoric regarding access to equity, multiculturalism, and social justice," Mr. Harper said in an interview on Thursday, "I just see next to no evidence of those espoused values being enacted on behalf of black male undergraduates."

Statistics cited in the report include the following:
In 2002 the proportion of all students enrolled in colleges and universities who were African-American men was the same -- 4.3 percent -- as it was in 1976.

Gender gaps in enrollment numbers within racial groups are widest among African-American students, with women outnumbering men by 27.2 percentage points.

Over a 26-year period beginning in 1977, the proportion of degree recipients who were African-American men increased by an average of 0.2 percentage points. The greatest improvement was seen on the associate-degree level.

Of those who received associate degrees in 1977, 3.8 percent were African-American men. By 2003 the proportion had grown to 4 percent.

But the proportion of doctoral-degree recipients who were African-American men fell from 2.3 percent to 2 percent over that same time period.

More than two-thirds of African-American male students who enroll in college do not graduate within six years, the lowest college completion rate across all racial groups and for both sexes.

In 2004, 30.5 percent of all male athletes in Division I college sports were African-American.

They made up 54.6 percent of football teams and 60.8 percent of basketball teams, while only 10.4 percent of all male undergraduates were black.

In a section of the report focused on implications for policy and practice, Mr. Harper recommends using affirmative action in admissions to help increase the number of African-American men at public flagship universities.

He also advocates an increase in institutional, state, and federal financial support for college-readiness programs geared toward black male students.

Legislators should also hold universities accountable for their progress in enrolling black males, he wrote in the report.

Mr. Harper also says in the report that university admissions officials should more aggressively recruit black male students for reasons other than sports -- a goal that could be achieved, he suggests, by creating a policy that links the number of black male athletes in a particular ratio with the number of African-American male students at the institution over all.

The report urges that the National Collegiate Athletic Association share in the responsibility for racial disparities in graduation rates by, for instance, financing support programs for black male athletes and barring institutions with low graduation rates for any racial group from competing in NCAA championship tournaments.

Placing an emphasis on increasing the number of black male faculty at these flagship institutions would also help raise the number of graduating black male students, Mr. Harper suggests in the report. "That's another area of tremendous institutional negligence," he said.

Universities should furthermore set a goal for the percentage of black male students expected to graduate each year, he suggests. Institutions that fail to meet these goals should be held accountable for "creating, implementing, and documenting improvement plans," according to the report.

U. of Phoenix Buys Naming Rights to a Pro-Football Stadium

2006-09-27T17:35:00.000-05:00

By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK

Following in the path of Gillette, FedEx, and Reliant, the University of Phoenix has bought the naming rights to a National Football League stadium, it announced on Tuesday.

Phoenix's $154-million, 20-year deal with the Arizona Cardinals makes it the first university to strike a stadium deal in which the university is paying out the millions rather than receiving them.

The deal is the second-most-lucrative in the NFL, after the Houston Texans' 30-year, $300-million deal with Reliant Energy. Still, even with Phoenix making average annual payments of $7.7-million a year, the expense will amount to only about 3 percent of the $250-million the university's parent company spends annually for advertising and promotion. It spends about the same on recruiting students. Its overall revenues exceed $2-billion.

Reggie Bush donates turf

2006-09-22T13:59:00.000-05:00

Built in the 1930s...Tad Gormely Stadium is an icon for high school football...and is often referred to simply as "Tad" or "the Cathedral" by local New Orleanians....

Saints Running Back...Reggie Bush...donated funds to replace the turf destroyed by the floodwaters a year ago...

Thank You...Reggie !!

More Pictures

cgw

Ortiz hits # 51....a Boston Red Sox Single Season Record

2006-09-22T08:22:00.000-05:00

YALE ONLINE

2006-09-20T10:52:00.000-05:00

Yale U. Plans to Offer Some Course Materials, Including Lecture Videos, Free Online

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Cameras are rolling in Yale University classrooms this fall, as part of a project to make video recordings of several courses available free for anyone to view online.

Yale is the latest institution to pledge to create 'open courseware,' in which detailed material from courses is placed online in the hopes that it will be used by educators and students elsewhere. Open courseware was pioneered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in 2001 announced plans to put material for nearly all of its courses online.

Yale plans to start out slowly, publishing materials from seven courses by the fall of 2007. After that, the project might expand if it is deemed a success. The effort is supported by a $755,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Ramamurti Shankar, a professor of physics who is teaching one of the courses, said knowing that his lecture might be watched online by a wide audience keeps him on his toes. 'I have to be a little more careful than I usually am,' he said.

Even so, he was 'caught on candid camera' last week when he made a mistake writing an equation on the board, and a student had to correct him. He said he hoped that if 'some kid is watching this in another part of the world where you're not supposed to question your professors,' the student would see the value of questioning authority.

In an announcement on Tuesday, Yale officials said that the university would be the first to offer complete"

Tuesday, September 28, 2006

2006-09-19T08:48:00.000-05:00

Progress Report

As we see the Saints come marching in on Monday Night Football next week, one wonders what will be the reaction of the media onslaught which grows by the day....al Jazeria TV has signed up to cover the game...giving the terrorists a full view of a target for their next suicide mission...just great...like anyone in Asia or the Middle East cares about football in New Orleans...knowing that the Dome will be sold out and full of "targets."

But enough of the grim, dark side of things...onto brighter stuff...like the beautiful weather we will enjoy for the next couple of days...and the weather patterns which will make another week of hurricane season bearable...it is like the Great Spirit which controls things decided to give us this year off to recover.

I pray for those folks still in exile...who are not part of the problems in other cities...particularly Houston...where ambitious drug dealers have moved up to the next level of killing and selling...but demand drives supply...as we all well know.

So let's chant aloud for a week...while await the Falcons of Atlanta!

The Chronicle: Daily news: 09/18/2006 -- 04

2006-09-18T09:39:00.000-05:00

Monday, September 18, 2006

Colleges Hit by Hurricanes in 2005 to Receive $50-Million in New Federal Grants

By KELLY FIELD

Forty-two colleges that were forced to close, relocate, or scale back operations as a result of last year's hurricanes will receive grants of up to $7.5-million each, the colleges learned on Friday.
The bulk of the total of $50-million in grants will go to institutions in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi that were hit during Hurricane Katrina, though some of the money will go to colleges in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas that were damaged in other Gulf Coast cyclones, including Hurricane Rita.
Some lobbyists had hoped that the money would be restricted to institutions damaged by Hurricane Katrina, but Congress decided to open the competition to other colleges as well. The largest grants, however, went to institutions that were devastated by Katrina, including Dillard University, Tulane University, and the University of Southern Mississippi, each of which will receive the maximum grant of $7.5-million. Xavier University of Louisiana will get $5.3-million.

Cynthia A. Littlefield, director of federal relations for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, said that while she was "disappointed" that Congress did not limit the grants to Katrina-affected institutions, the Department of Education "did a pretty good job of figuring out who had the most extensive damage."

Over the last year, colleges have received more than $250-million in federal aid to help cover the costs of hurricane reconstruction and repair. The latest infusion came in an emergency supplemental spending bill signed by President Bush last June. Forty-eight institutions applied for the money, but six were rejected because they were not recognized under federal law or because they had failed to provide all the required information.

The Department of Education notified the remaining colleges of their tentative award amounts Friday; the colleges must submit formal applications detailing how they will spend the grants before the money is disbursed.

College Enrollment is Down in NOLA

2006-09-15T18:08:00.000-05:00

http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1157954338224720.xml?NSBED&coll=1

University places Stanford Band on indefinite provisional status

2006-09-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

University places Stanford Band on indefinite provisional status

The Chronicle: Daily News Blog

2006-09-15T12:16:00.000-05:00

The Chronicle: Daily News Blog: "Stanford U. Cracks Down on Delinquent Band

Stanford University has put its marching band on “indefinite provisional status” and placed it under the direct supervision of an associate dean, in response to band members’ role in trashing a practice center over the summer. According to a statement released by the university, band members did as much as $50,000 worth of damage to the Band Shak, a temporary structure used while a permanent practice facility was built.
The band, which has a tradition of shunning marching formations and preferring off-beat presentations, made an unparalleled performance in July at the Band Shak. As the university statement put it, “The vandalism included using a sledgehammer to create extensive damage to the walls. Windows were broken, equipment was destroyed, much of the ceiling was torn down, and the walls were spray-painted and covered with food.” Not what you’d expect in a half-time show.
A criminal inquiry is in progress, and the university cited the band’s “history of misconduct” in imposing the penalties. Among other things, the band will be barred from performing for at least a month, and will be forbidden to travel for a year.Stanford U. Cracks Down on Delinquent Band
Stanford University has put its marching band on “indefinite provisional status” and placed it under the direct supervision of an associate dean, in response to band members’ role in trashing a practice center over the summer. According to a statement released by the university, band members did as much as $50,000 worth of damage to the Band Shak, a temporary structure used while a permanent practice facility was built.
The band, which has a tradition of shunning marching formations and preferring off-beat presentations, made an unpara"

The Chronicle: Daily News Blog

2006-09-15T12:11:00.000-05:00

The Chronicle: Daily News Blog: "Stanford U. Cracks Down on Delinquent Band
Stanford University has put its marching band on “indefinite provisional status” and placed it under the direct supervision of an associate dean, in response to band members’ role in trashing a practice center over the summer. According to a statement released by the university, band members did as much as $50,000 worth of damage to the Band Shak, a temporary structure used while a permanent practice facility was built.
The band, which has a tradition of shunning marching formations and preferring off-beat presentations, made an unparalleled performance in July at the Band Shak. As the university statement put it, “The vandalism included using a sledgehammer to create extensive damage to the walls. Windows were broken, equipment was destroyed, much of the ceiling was torn down, and the walls were spray-painted and covered with food.” Not what you’d expect in a half-time show.
A criminal inquiry is in progress, and the university cited the band’s “history of misconduct” in imposing the penalties. Among other things, the band will be barred from performing for at least a month, and will be forbidden to travel for a year.Stanford U. Cracks Down on Delinquent Band
Stanford University has put its marching band on “indefinite provisional status” and placed it under the direct supervision of an associate dean, in response to band members’ role in trashing a practice center over the summer. According to a statement released by the university, band members did as much as $50,000 worth of damage to the Band Shak, a temporary structure used while a permanent practice facility was built.
The band, which has a tradition of shunning marching formations and preferring off-beat presentations, made an unpara"

SREB Legislative Report

2006-09-14T11:16:00.000-05:00

Final Legislative and Budget Actions

http://www.sreb.org/main/LegAction/legrept/2006Report/06S06-Leg_Report_5.pdf

Report Card on Colleges Finds U.S. is slipping

2006-09-14T09:05:00.000-05:00

Print: The Chronicle: 9/15/2006: Report Card on Colleges Finds U.S. Is Slipping

Congress Broadens Inquiry Into College Sports, Focusing on Academic Problems and Lucrative Programs

2006-09-14T09:03:00.000-05:00

Print: The Chronicle: Daily news: 09/14/2006 -- 01

Integrated Postsecondary Education System IPEDS Import Revisions 2006-2007

2006-09-12T12:32:00.000-05:00

Integrated Postsecondary Education System IPEDS Import Revisions 2006-2007

ACT Score Trends

2006-08-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/08/2006081601n.htm

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Average ACT Scores Rise, But Many Students Still Lack Preparation for College

By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL

The average score of high-school seniors who took the ACT exam in 2005-6 rose two-tenths of a point, to 21.1, the biggest one-year increase in scores over the past two decades, ACT officials said Tuesday.
But even though scores have reached their highest level since 1991, and a record number of members of the Class of 2006 took the test, ACT officials said many students were still not adequately prepared for college-level course work. The results were released Tuesday in the test service's annual "ACT High School Profile" report.
Scores for both men and women rose one-tenth of a point, with the average score for men at 21.2, slightly higher than the average of 21 for women. All racial and ethnic groups except Hispanics also raised their average scores.
Asian-American students scored 22.3, up .2; white students scored 22, up .1; and scores for African-American and Native American students both rose .1, to 17.1 and 18.8 respectively. Average scores for Hispanic students remained unchanged at 18.6.
The ACT exam consists of four sections: English, mathematics, reading, and science, and each section is scored on a scale of 1 to 36. Those four scores are averaged for the total score. Beginning in February 2005, the test added an optional 30-minute writing section, graded on a scale of 2 to 12. Only 36 percent of students took this portion of the test, and the average score was 7.7.
Students with scores above a certain level on each section are considered likely to earn at least a C in related college course work. Only 21 percent of test takers in the Class of 2006 reached the recommended threshold in every section, the same proportion as last year.
Over all, students did best on the English test, with 69 percent reaching the minimum threshold score of 18. While 53 percent of students met a similar benchmark on the reading test, only 42 percent scored high enough to reach the threshold on the math portion. The science test had the lowest rate of students reaching the threshold, with 27 percent of students meeting the minimum score of 24.
"This doesn't mean those students won't succeed in college," said Richard L. Ferguson, ACT's chief executive, in a news conference. "But it does mean there's a higher likelihood that they'll struggle or need help along the way."
Mr. Ferguson also said high schools needed to encourage more students to take challenging courses. The ACT endorses a curriculum that includes four years of English and three years each of math, science, and social studies.
But the ACT's own data suggest that following such a curriculum does not help all students equally. According to the 2006 data, white students who took fewer courses than recommended by the ACT scored an average of 20.6, while African-American students who took a more challenging curriculum had a 17.8 average score. Hispanic and Native American students with the recommend classes also scored lower than the white students, at 19.5 and 20.2, respectively.
"One part of the problem does lie in the rigor of the courses at our schools," said Mr. Ferguson. "Many of the courses students are taking are not up to the standards they need to learn the skills they need. ... We have an enormous task in shoring up our school systems."
Other data released by ACT suggest that the test is becoming more popular as an alternative to the SAT. In the past, the ACT was primarily taken by students in the Midwest, but this year the number of test takers rose by double-digit percentages in several states outside that region, including New Jersey (33 percent), Connecticut (26 percent), and Vermont (16 percent). In Florida the percentage rose by 14 percent, and 45 percent of all graduating seniors in that state took the ACT.
According to Ed Colby, a spokesman for ACT, the number of students taking the test in those states -- as well as in California, Ohio, and Georgia -- has been steadily increasing over the past 10 years as his company has more heavily promoted the use of the test in new markets.
Other factors may also be driving the surge in ACT test takers, however. Recent changes in the SAT, including a mandatory essay section and fill-in-the-blanks math questions, could also add to the appeal of the ACT, which has only multiple-choice questions and does not require students to write an essay.
"Part of it might be that the SAT has a pretty extended fight on its hands in terms of public perception," said David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. "There are other trends as well, though, including that more students are taking these tests in general and more colleges now accept the ACT as well as the SAT."
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

Back to School

2006-08-09T08:58:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day for official registration at Southern U at New Orleans !!

Now let's see who comes back...how many...not as many as first thought...for things are moving slowly...and the Gulf is always on our minds these days...Contra-Flow...is just a Govenor's call away...let's hope we can get our folks back in school.

/wag

Unsettled in America

2006-08-09T08:57:00.000-05:00

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i49/49a03201.htm

From the issue dated August 11, 2006

Many refugees in the United States struggle to find their way to college

By SARA LIPKA

Washington

Five years ago, Simon Malith left Kenya for the United States hoping to earn a bachelor's degree. Today he lives in the nation's capital, within 10 miles of a dozen colleges, but those campuses seem half a world away.
As a child, Mr. Malith fled civil war in southern Sudan. He spent nine years in Kakuma, a refugee camp in northwestern Kenya. He finished high school at the camp, where 80,000 people lived and the desert dust clung to everything.
In 2000 the U.S. State Department began to select more Sudanese refugees for resettlement. Officials interviewed them individually at Kakuma, and each week residents would gather to see a newly posted list of those who had been chosen. In February 2001, Mr. Malith saw his name, and 48 hours later, he boarded a plane bound for Washington. He carried little more than a backpack and a journal.
Mr. Malith enrolled at the University of the District of Columbia in 2002, but dropped out after two semesters because his loans were piling up and his unpredictable work schedule often interfered with his classes. Since arriving in Washington, he has held four jobs and lived in three apartments, always trying to save more money. He now works as a security guard at the Washington Convention Center, earning $14 an hour, although his hours vary each week.
There are many things Mr. Malith does not know, such as whether he is really 26 years old, as the State Department estimates. He is certain, however, that he would do well in college if he could only afford the tuition. "There is nothing that I like more," he says, "than education."
Refugees who succeed in American colleges often capture headlines. This spring a handful of Sudanese refugees earned degrees, including three from the University of New Hampshire and one from Stanford University.
But those stories, while stirring, are exceptional. In resettlement destinations as varied as Pittsburgh and Phoenix, refugees who seek higher education struggle to stay on the path to a degree. Financial difficulties, language barriers, and a lack of support from colleges keep many from succeeding.
Mr. Malith is one of the "lost boys," the name given to young Sudanese refugees, many of whom were orphaned as children. (There are relatively few "lost girls" because many of the boys, out herding cattle when their villages were attacked by militias, were able to flee.) Some 4,000 of the lost boys have settled in the United States during the past five years. About 150 of them have been placed in Boston and 150 in Chicago, where local volunteers estimate that, in each city, half have taken college classes and 15 have completed degrees.
Last year 53,813 refugees from around the world resettled in the United States. There are no reliable estimates of how many refugees go to college, however, primarily because the local agencies that coordinate the resettlement process track individual cases for only six to eight months.
Mr. Malith shares a rundown two-bedroom apartment here with five other young men from Sudan, all of whom had hoped to attend college. None are now enrolled. Unlike most students in Africa, Mr. Malith and his friends, as refugees, did not have to pay for their high-school education; they had expected to receive a free college education in the United States, too. Mr. Malith recalls that during an orientation session in Kakuma, an American aid worker described the many educational opportunities that awaited them.
"When we came to this country," Mr. Malith says, "we thought they brought us here to go to college."
Luck of the Draw
That misimpression may have set Mr. Malith's expectations, but chance has played a large role in shaping his experience in the United States.
When the State Department grants refugee status to a person, it sends his or her name and biographical information to a group of 10 agencies that coordinate the resettlement process. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are the largest of those groups, followed by other religiously affiliated and secular organizations.
Representatives of those agencies meet weekly, in Rosslyn, Va., to decide where to settle each new group of refugees. Arrivals with relatives in the United States are permitted to join them. Many others are placed in existing ethnic communities — Iraqis in Detroit, for example, and Burmese in Indianapolis.
For most refugees, however, the luck of the draw determines where they will live. "It's basically like a draft," says Terry Abeles, director of program development at the Lutheran group.
Regional branches of those organizations lead refugees through a "reception and placement" process, which includes a whirl of applications for jobs, Social Security, and apartment leases. For their first four to eight months, refugees are eligible for modest stipends from the states where they are placed. Mr. Malith and his fellow refugees in Washington, for example, say they each received $140 per month for four months.
The problem for prospective students is that the resettlement process was designed to make refugees economically self-sufficient — not to help them get an education. In many states, refugees who enroll as full-time students automatically lose their eligibility for the monthly stipends, even if they are also employed.
Some coordinators of state refugee programs say they typically discourage newcomers from going to college. One reason: The programs' federal funds are designated for employment services only. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, in the Department of Health and Human Services, checks up regularly on how many refugees the state programs place in jobs within the first six months of their arrival.
"There is a lot of pressure on the system to get that person to go to work," says Bill Sperling, dean of learning services at Everett Community College, in Washington State. "If we can pry a year of ESL and a couple of quarters of job training, that's usually the maximum the system will support."
Most refugees cannot afford to pay for college on their own. Those who are dependents may qualify for student aid, but single heads of household — like most of the lost boys — are often ineligible for federal and state grants. In the 2007-8 academic year, a single head of household with no dependents and no savings would qualify for a Pell Grant only if he made less than $17,000 annually.
Where a refugee happens to settle may also affect how accessible college is to him or her. Those who live in cities or towns with a strong refugee-support network or a community-college outreach program have a better shot at an education than those who move to places without such resources.
In suburban Boston and Chicago, for instance, volunteer groups have incorporated as nonprofit organizations to raise scholarship money for local refugee students.
Two years ago the writer David Chanoff, who lives in Marlboro, Mass., founded the Sudanese Education Fund. It raises money through private donations, family foundations, and public events, like a musical revue performed by refugees last fall. The budget is now large enough to support one $1,000 grant per year for each local Sudanese refugee enrolled in college. With community-college tuition at $300 per course in Massachusetts, "sometimes it's really enabling," says Mr. Chanoff. "It makes the difference between being able to do it and not do it."
The Chicago Association of the Lost Boys of Sudan spends more than $100,000 per year on college scholarships. Mike Dubiel, president of the group, says it can pay full tuition for most of the 35 to 40 refugee students now enrolled in the area. (Full support is more likely for students at two-year colleges than for those at four-year institutions, where tuition is higher.)
Mr. Dubiel says the group's volunteers stay in touch with community-college administrators, to make sure they "know who the guys are and help them out, keep them from spinning their wheels taking classes that ... don't move them along toward an associate degree."
The Massachusetts group does the same. If a student is struggling, says Mr. Chanoff, he will talk to someone from the college on that student's behalf: "We're doing absolutely everything we can to encourage them and help them get through the different and often arcane ways that we get ourselves educated in this country."
Institutional Support
Some colleges have reached out to refugee students. In 2001 Mr. Chanoff's group took several dozen Sudanese refugees on a field trip to a dairy farm at the University of New Hampshire. Much to Mr. Chanoff's surprise, administrators there encouraged some of the young men to apply for admission.
New Hampshire officials say they wanted to diversify their student body but did not wish to admit students who were unprepared. "We wanted to make sure this wasn't being done to satisfy our objectives, our agenda, at the expense of them as individuals," says Mark Rubenstein, vice president for student and academic services. "We wanted to be comfortable that the students had the potential to be successful here."
Administrators gave the prospective students an English-language exam, allowing them to take what is normally a computerized test on paper because the refugees had little computer experience. Out of about 20 applicants, a handful scored high enough to be admitted. Five enrolled, and student-aid officers at the university gave them partial scholarships and helped them apply for loans.
Three professors became the students' closest advisers. Andrew B. Conroy, a professor of animal science, recalls spending hours tutoring Peter Guguei, one of the refugees. "I sort of kept Peter under my wing," says Mr. Conroy. "He'd pop in between classes. ... He really struggled that first year to try to overcome the language difficulty."
Mr. Guguei, who earned an associate degree in dairy management this spring, plans to pursue a bachelor's degree in political science. Three of the other students graduated this spring, and the fifth plans to finish his degree this fall.
Administrators who work closely with refugees say the students need a strong, close-knit support system to succeed. Don Beech coordinates the registration of about 500 refugees per year as cross-cultural counselor at Monroe Community College, in Rochester, N.Y. He advises new students one on one, teaching them the basics of higher education. He explains the importance of attendance and class participation and warns them not to ignore deadlines for withdrawing from a class or changing a major.
Some of the students, in a rush to finish their degrees, become overwhelmed. "They see so much they want to do here and think they can handle it," says Mr. Beech. Sometimes they skip recommended courses or underestimate how many hours they must study. Mr. Beech often refers the students to workshops on time management and test taking, or to tutors, to help them stay on track.
Pima Community College, in Tucson, is home to a program called the Refugee Education Project, which provides free English instruction. Successful participants move on to take the college's regular English-language classes. Some of those students go on to take other courses at Pima.
Raisa Bograd, an English instructor at the college, helps refugees make that transition. On Tuesday afternoons, when she is available for advising, a line forms outside her door. Refugee students bombard her with questions: Am I ready for college? How do I fill out this form? How do I apply for financial aid? "I'm just trying to prevent failures ... ," Ms. Bograd says, "to make sure they are making progress."
Some refugee students at Pima, who come from Africa, Iraq, and a variety of other places, take just one course per semester. Others drop out, although some return a year or so later, when they have more money or have hit an employment ceiling.
Others juggle full-time jobs with full-time course loads. Faridoon Abdul-Wahid, who is from Afghanistan, enrolled at Pima in 2004. He works 30 to 40 hours a week as a server at a nearby Hilton and takes as many credits per semester as he can. Mr. Abdul-Wahid, who lives with his mother and five siblings, often leaves home at 7 a.m. for classes, then works from 3 to 11 p.m. He hopes to transfer to the University of Arizona next spring, to take pre-med courses, earn his bachelor's degree, and apply to medical school.
"It is hard," he says. "But it is still possible."
Friday-Night Study Group
Mr. Malith, the refugee who settled in Washington, is much less optimistic about the prospect of balancing work and college while paying tuition. He has heard about the special scholarships for refugees in other cities, and he wishes he, too, could get one. "Luck," he says, "is not for everyone."
While large groups of the Sudanese lost boys have settled elsewhere, only a handful live in the nation's capital, where the refugees tend to blend in with a considerable population of African immigrants. Unlike Boston and Chicago, however, Washington has no advocacy group for the lost boys. Without that support network, the young men have little means of learning about scholarships at local community colleges for which they may be eligible.
When Mr. Malith started taking classes at the University of the District of Columbia, in 2002, he qualified for a Pell Grant because he had postponed working in order to have eye surgery, to correct advanced glaucoma.
By the next semester, however, he was earning $7.50 per hour stocking shelves at a Rite Aid pharmacy, and he qualified for just a loan.
One of his roommates, John A. Dut, is in a similar position. Mr. Dut, who collates newspapers at The Washington Post, met last year with an admissions counselor at Prince George's Community College, in Maryland. He keeps his placement-test scores and course-selection sheets close at hand, but he cannot come up with the $1,179 to enter a program in computer engineering. "I have the interest to do it," he says, "but not the money."
Mr. Dut regrets that he does not have more to show for the five years he has been in the United States. Each long day of work exhausts him.
Popular among the lost boys is a saying: "Education is my mother and my father." The saying, Mr. Malith explains, is based on the belief that knowledge can support and protect committed students. Mr. Dut, Mr. Malith, and their roommates occasionally chat in Dinka, their first language, but they are serious about improving their English, which is sometimes hesitant but generally very good.
They started to learn English in Kakuma, the refugee camp, where as many as 15 students shared one book. Mr. Malith looked forward to his day in the rotation. "It was very exciting when you got the book," he says. "You are happy when you are reading."
He reads often, swinging by the local branch of the public library once a week and frequenting a nearby used bookstore. Still hoping to study political science one day, he looks for political histories. Recently he has read biographies of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and Rudolph W. Giuliani.
At his apartment on a Friday night, Mr. Malith starts a discussion on constitutional rights with his roommates. He reflects on how the First Amendment applied in a Vietnam War-era case that reached the Supreme Court, in which students wearing protest armbands were suspended from their public school in Iowa.
None of the young men here have plans to go out tonight, because all but one of them have to work the next day. So they gather for what amounts to a Friday-night study group. A copy of The Washington Post and a red pocket dictionary lie open on their coffee table. A plastic clock is all that hangs on the bare white walls.
As CNN drones in the background, Mr. Dut concentrates on a copy of The Chronicle, underlining unfamiliar words and asking what they mean. David L. Deng, a friend and fellow refugee who has dropped by to visit and make use of a shared hand-me-down computer, looks up from the keyboard, where he is typing an e-mail message, and asks how to spell "hectic."
Two years ago, for four months, Mr. Dut and another of his roommates, Mac Deng, met for 12 hours of weekly language lessons with instructors from the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages program at American University. "I am pleased with what we were able to give them, but it wasn't enough," says Brock Brady, the program's coordinator. "I've read the success stories, and I certainly don't see anything about the abilities or characters of these young men here that indicate that they shouldn't have the same success."
Mac Deng contacted Mr. Brady recently to discuss his education options. The instructor hopes to meet with Mr. Deng soon, but he is not sure what advice to offer. Mr. Brady figures he could scrape together enough of his own money to pay for Mr. Deng's first class at a local community college.
"But I'm not sure," he says, "what happens after that.

"http://chronicle.comSection: StudentsVolume 52, Issue 49, Page A32

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

How High?...from the Washington Post

2006-07-31T07:48:00.000-05:00

For Those Rebuilding in New Orleans, How High?

By Peter WhoriskeyWashington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 31, 2006; A03

NEW ORLEANS -- Be careful walking out the front door of Al Petrie's new home. It's a long way down.
Fourteen steps above the sidewalk, about 10 feet over the street, the front stoop is perched high like a lookout post within a fortress of brick.
The home is built far enough up, Petrie says proudly, that "when the next Katrina comes, I'll be dry."
What if a more powerful hurricane strikes?

Petrie squints and frowns. "I just can't imagine it getting much worse than Katrina," he says.

As residents struggle to rebuild some of the tens of thousands of ravaged properties here, few questions unnerve people more than how safe their homes will be in the next catastrophic flood. And the key to that is how high above the ground their homes will stand.
Some, like Petrie, are lifting their dwellings far above surroundings. Others are betting that Katrina was so rare that nothing that bad will come their way again, and they're building just as they were before the storm. But in a city daunted by profound uncertainties about the future, the issue of home elevations arouses these often-unspoken fears like no other.
For flood insurance purposes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has recommended that people rebuild to the elevation requirements in effect before the storm, or three feet above ground level, whichever is higher. But officials acknowledge those levels won't ensure safety -- they certainly didn't in Katrina, when many homes took on 10 feet or more of water.
Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is repairing the city's levees and flood walls, isn't guaranteeing protection when a hurricane of Category 3 strength or higher strikes.
"It's a risk each individual must decide whether or not to live with," according to a Corps statement. "History has proven time and again that Mother Nature will throw something bigger at these protection systems than what was built so people should recognize that that threat always exists."
The financial viability of the federal flood insurance program, which took a staggering $22 billion hit in Katrina, may one day depend on whether homeowners take steps now to reduce the risks.
Many people are simply rebuilding their homes without elevating. It costs too much money, they say, and they're willing to bet that another disaster won't come along for another 40 years, the length of time between Katrina and New Orleans's previous devastating storm.
Others are putting their faith in the new dictates of the federal flood program, or relying on their own estimations of the risk.
"The last big storm was Betsy in 1965," said Cynthia Horne, 47, who is rebuilding her home in New Orleans East but not elevating it because of the cost. "I guess it's a gamble we're taking. If it takes another 40 or 50 years for the next one, I don't think we'll be here. I trust in God."
But to a handful of people at least, neither the existing requirements nor the new federal recommendations make sense because they ignore Katrina's punishing lessons.
The most meaningful safety benchmark, in their view, is the waterlines left on houses when Katrina's floodwaters receded.
Both Petrie and Jim Pate, the executive director of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, have decided to go beyond the elevation recommendations from FEMA and raise their homes high enough that the first floors will be above Katrina's floodwaters.
"You'd have to have almost a tsunami-type wave for the flooding to be worse than Katrina," Pate said.
The federal rules required Pate to elevate Habitat homes in the Upper Ninth Ward a little over three feet above the ground, he said. He's raising them more than five feet.
Likewise, the federal rules require Petrie to raise his home only about 3 1/2 feet over the ground, he said. But he's raising it about six feet beyond that.
"This should be our model," he says, waving at his new home.
He invites a visitor to compare the waterline on the house next door -- reaching nearly to the top of the front door -- with the height of his stoop. His stoop is about a foot higher.
A home built to the current federal recommendations in his Lakeview neighborhood "would have been under six feet of water in Katrina," he said.
Although lax in comparison, however, the FEMA guidelines are not without their logic.
The guidelines are meant to prevent the flooding of a property in the event of a "100-year storm," or a storm so severe it has only a 1 percent annual chance of happening.
Exactly what the "100-year storm" amounts to for any given location is a scientific question that is complicated enough because accurate storm records can be difficult to come by. But then scientists are asked to estimate what kind of river-level rises and storm surge the imagined storm will generate, and ultimately, how high floodwaters will rise in city streets.
FEMA believes that the required building elevations in place in New Orleans before the storm do not require drastic revisions. But the agency's faith assumes that the levees will hold in a 100-year storm.
The Corps of Engineers is engaged in a $5.7 billion project that they say will bring area levees up to that strength by 2010.
"Katrina was larger than a 100-year storm," said Dan Hitchings, who is leading the Corps repair efforts. And "Katrina was not the largest storm this area could experience."
Of residents' efforts to elevate homes higher than FEMA requirements, Hitchings said, "They are preparing for a storm larger than Katrina, which would be an extremely rare event."
Many in New Orleans are no longer willing to trust in official assurances. They say it's time to heed the example of historic New Orleans, when people built on the higher ground and elevated their homes -- sometimes many feet.
"Our grandparents knew better than to live flat on the ground, but the levees gave people a false sense of security," Petrie, 53, said. "We trusted them before, and look where that got us."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
'

Tiger Woods

2006-07-21T15:09:00.000-05:00

After missing the first cut in a major tourney in years...he's back !!

Auburn Prof Accused of Grade-Fixing

2006-07-17T11:16:00.000-05:00

The New York Times

ROLL TIDE !!

Blogger Succeeds in Bartering a Paper Clip for a House

2006-07-12T09:00:00.000-05:00

Blogger Succeeds in Bartering a Paper Clip for a House

After one year of bartering everything from a snow globe to free rent for a year, Kyle MacDonald has acquired a home in Canada.

By Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- Taking a paper clip and turning it into a house sounds like a cheesy magic trick.
Kyle MacDonald, however, has pulled it off.
One year ago, the 26-year-old blogger from Montreal set out to barter one red paper clip for something and that thing for something else, over and over again until he had a house.
On Wednesday the quest is ending as envisioned: MacDonald is due to become the proud owner of a three-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot (99-square-meter) home provided by the town of Kipling, Saskatchewan. MacDonald and his girlfriend, Dominique Dupuis, expect to move there in early September.
''This is such a cool community project. It feels right,'' MacDonald said. ''And now that I think about it, I can't believe that another small town didn't think of it. It will literally put them on the map.''
What's in it for the town? The answer requires a quick MacDonald recap, featuring a menagerie of friendly folks, radio talk show hosts and aging celebrities, all bound together by the Internet.
It began when MacDonald, an aspiring writer, doer of odd jobs and apartment dweller, advertised in the barter section of the Craigslist Web site that he wanted something bigger or better for one red paper clip. He traded it for a fish-shaped pen, and posted on Craigslist again and again.
Roaming Canada and the United States, he exchanged the pen for a ceramic knob, and in turn: a camping stove, a generator, a beer keg and Budweiser sign, a snowmobile, a trip to the Canadian Rockies, a supply truck and a recording contract. Next, in April, he got himself really close, obtaining a year's rent in Phoenix.
His adventure became an Internet blockbuster. He did Canadian and Japanese TV and ''Good Morning America.'' He made dozens of local radio appearances -- one of which, in Los Angeles, was heard by a man who ended up as a pivotal figure.
That man is Corbin Bernsen. You may remember him from his roles in ''L.A. Law'' and ''Major League.''
Hip to the publicity-generating machine that is Kyle MacDonald, Bernsen contacted him to say he was writing and directing a movie and would offer a paid speaking role as an item available for trade.
MacDonald was thrilled. But he feared the integrity of his journey would be compromised if he accepted the role without trading Bernsen something he really could use. Say what you want about ''Major League 3,'' but Bernsen has done well enough that he doesn't need a free apartment in Phoenix.
So MacDonald kept Bernsen's offer off his blog, but plowed ahead with an eye to finding something Bernsen would legitimately want.
Seemingly disregarding good economic sense, MacDonald traded the year's rent for an afternoon with rocker Alice Cooper. (MacDonald's response: ''Alice Cooper is a gold mine of awesomeness and fun.'') Then in a move that really confused his blog readers, MacDonald bartered time with Cooper for a snow globe depicting the band Kiss.
Re-enter Corbin Bernsen.
You see, since the days when he'd get free stuff on promotional tours for ''L.A. Law,'' Bernsen has amassed a collection of 6,500 snow globes. ''One off, they look sort of goofy,'' Bernsen said. ''Put them all together and they sort of look like pop art.''
So MacDonald gave Bernsen the Kiss model and encouraged his blog readers to send the actor even more globes in exchange for autographed pictures.
All this delighted the elders in Kipling, a town of 1,140 believed to have been named in honor of author Rudyard Kipling.
Like many rural towns, Kipling is eager to stave off the perils of dwindling population by attracting new businesses, tourism and above all, attention. When the local development coordinator, Bert Roach, heard about MacDonald's odyssey, he suggested at the next council meeting that Kipling lure him.
Quickly the town purchased an unoccupied rental house on Main Street and offered it to MacDonald. Roach won't disclose the price because MacDonald says he doesn't want to know. But Roach says it was well under the going rate in Kipling, which is about $50,000 Canadian (US$45,000).
The town also pledged to put a giant red paper clip at a highway rest stop and hold an ''American Idol''-style competition for the movie role. Participants will have to make a donation to the town's parks department and a charity.
When MacDonald agreed last week, ''I was holding back tears, I was so bloody happy,'' Roach said. ''It's going to be such a great project for our community.''
Bernsen says that if the right person emerges in the talent show, he'd be willing to cast him or her as a lead. ''Maybe a career is going to get started. Maybe it's going to be huge. Maybe that's the magic of Kyle.''
MacDonald doesn't expect to live in Kipling forever. But he says he'll make it home at least while he settles down to write a book.
Of course, even if the house came free, he'll have the usual homeowner headaches: taxes, utilities, upkeep. It should come as no surprise that MacDonald isn't worried.
''I'll figure something out,'' he said. ''I can get a job. There's three grocery stores in town.''
On the Net:
MacDonald's blog: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com

Copyright Technology Review 2006.

Education and Entertainment Merge in One Whimsical View of Colleges' Future

2006-07-11T08:58:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

By JEFF SELINGO
Honolulu
Predicting the future is an inexact science, of course. Just ask the creators of The Jetsons. After all, our workdays still don't consist of pushing a single computer button as they did for George Jetson.
Even so, Richard N. Katz, vice president of Educause, took a crack at forecasting the future of higher education with a whimsical video he showed here at the "Campus of the Future" conference. Among other things, the video, titled edu@2020, made the following tongue-in-cheek predictions for the coming years:

2008
The Apollo Group sells the University of Phoenix Online to Google, which creates GooglePhoenix.

Microsoft takes over Pearson Education and Blackboard.

Michael S. Ovitz, the former Hollywood talent agent, starts FacultyOne, a talent agency for star professors, and immediately signs up 13 Nobel laureates.

2009
Disney, Sony, and Apple merge.

Disney acquires struggling colleges, promising to invigorate them with "Disney magic -- entertaining while they educate."

2012
MIT leads a partnership with other universities to "open source" their curricula to the masses.

In response, Harvard, Princeton, and other Ivy League universities start a competitor -- VirtualIvy.

2017
Disney and Britain's Open University form a partnership that delivers the university's curriculum on Sony PlayStation.

Google introduces software that allows students to generate artificial instructors based on their preferences.

It is soon followed by Sim Student, which allows students to create peers to go along with their artificial instructors.

2020
Google, Disney, and Microsoft compete for a worldwide learning market.

All the colleges that existed in 2006 have standardized their curricula under regulatory and competitive pressures, while struggling colleges have been turned into "educational theme parks."

Access to higher education is nearly universal and less expensive than it was in 2006.

Course credits transfer easily because they all come from one of a dozen common curricula.

After the presentation, the moderator, James Dator, director of the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies and a professor of political science at the University Hawaii-Manoa, quipped to the audience: "There you have it. I'd suggest you just head to the beach now."
Later on, Mr. Katz did admit to the limitations of his predictions, noting that forecasting is generally wrong in two ways. For one, it is usually too enthusiastic. In other words, predicted events, if they occur, probably will be further into the future than imagined. Also, predictions tend to "undershoot the mark in terms of change."
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

Ponchartrain Park in the Times Picayune !!

2006-07-07T14:32:00.000-05:00

Article on the Park

Louisiana One Step Closer to Sharing Oil/Gas Revenues

2006-06-30T09:10:00.000-05:00

Sad to say...that after all these years...and Katrina/Rita...we need to justify getting more revenue from the natural resources taken from our region...typical...Florida (Zeb Bush)...where there is no offshore drilling...California...and the White House oppose...well it is time to stop being cordial...get this done...now !!

Times Picayune Story

The State of Our Levees: Are We Ready ?

2006-06-29T11:24:00.000-05:00

Times Picayune Graphic

Hornets Dream Scenario

2006-06-29T11:10:00.000-05:00

The debate continued for weeks. Hilton Armstrong or Cedric Simmons?

The Hornets needed a big man like beignets need powdered sugar, and the team's brass couldn't decide which college player to select 12th in Wednesday's NBA draft.

Moreover, they didn't know if they would get either.

But in a stunning turn of events, as far as the Hornets were concerned, the team had the opportunity to draft both players -- Armstrong, a Connecticut senior, at No. 12, and Simmons, a North Carolina State sophomore, at No. 15.

"It's a dream come true," said Armstrong, who averaged just 3.8 points per game two years ago.

And with the 43rd pick in the second round, the Hornets drafted Brazilian Marcus Vinicius, a 6-foot-8 forward.

The State of Our Levees: Are We Ready ?

2006-06-29T11:06:00.000-05:00

Times Picayune Graphic

RED SOX PREVAIL IN 12...ALL HAIL ORTIZ

2006-06-27T14:34:00.000-05:00

From One Extreme to Another: Drought in NOLA

2006-06-26T10:05:00.000-05:00

Southeast Louisiana is officially suffering an extreme drought, with precipitation totals since the middle of last June more than 20 inches below normal, according to the National Climate Data Center.

"I know the idea concerns the public, but these kinds of cracks are a common occurrence when you have this kind of drought condition. A real good rain would take care of them -- they'll just close up. But they are being watched," said Jerry Colletti, an Army Corps of Engineers division chief in New Orleans.

General Honore honors St. Aug Grads

2006-06-26T10:01:00.000-05:00

Monday, June 26, 2006
By Leslie Williams
The charismatic Army lieutenant general who helped guide Louisianians out of the chaos of Hurricane Katrina returned Sunday to New Orleans to point the way for St. Augustine High School's graduates.

"It doesn't matter where you start," Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said to more than 170 young men in purple caps and gowns gathered in St. Louis Cathedral for the 52nd commencement of the all-boys school. "It's where you end the race."

Observing that many of the graduates who survived Hurricanes Katrina and Rita looked "sad," Honore -- a graduate of a small segregated high school in New Roads and one of 12 children reared on a 40-acre subsistence farm -- urged the boys not to dwell on the past and to look toward a future of opportunities.

"Your parents in the '50s and '60s were singing songs, 'We Shall Overcome,' " Honore said. "You have overcome."

St. Augustine's students were scattered in August when flooding after Katrina heavily damaged the campus, closing the school for the first time since its founding in 1951.

St. Aug students who were able to return to New Orleans attended classes at the combined MAX school, housed on the campus of Xavier Preparatory in New Orleans. Sunday's ceremony reunited and honored the St. Augustine senior class, whether the students attended the MAX school or high schools elsewhere.

Honore, who was picked by President Bush to lead Joint Task Force Katrina, held a command that included more than 20,000 active-duty troops from all military branches devoted to the storm-recovery operation in a three-state region. He endeared himself to frustrated storm victims with his take-charge attitude and no-nonsense style.

Honore encouraged the boys to consider careers in public service: law enforcement, firefighting, the armed forces, the priesthood or elected office.

"Community life is something greater than you. You have that choice, " he said. He took a moment to recognize others in public service: the students' teachers, who were asked to stand.

The graduates -- including valedictorian David Gray; salutatorian David Reed; class speaker Darin James; and Ernest Ancar, recognized for four years of perfect attendance -- will have another choice, Honore cautioned.

Soon, there will be a fork in the road, he said.

On one road, "it'll look very smooth. It has a lot more bright lights and the right music you want to hear. It's nothing but fun."

On the other road, "it's kinda dull. It's kinda bumpy and it's uphill."

"That's the road," he said, "that'll get you to your next degree."

UCLA and UC San Diego African American Frosh Dive

2006-06-05T09:13:00.000-05:00

UCLA's plummeting minority admissions

The Future Home in Southeast Louisiana

2006-06-02T09:10:00.000-05:00

Post Election Thoughts

2006-05-27T18:50:00.000-05:00

Now that we have a new mayor...it is time to get busy...Mr. Mayor...pick up the garbage...focus citizens on debris clean up...get the officials in Baton Rouge involved...and most importantly...help people heal...we are all still trying to fix our homes...let's not be led astray by Carnival and Jazz Fest...it is time to wake up and get things moving

Excellent Animation of Storm Surge & Levee Failure

2006-05-17T08:26:00.000-05:00

The best I have seen yet...from the Times Picayune

FLOOD NOLA

Keep It Real

2006-05-15T08:56:00.000-05:00

If we didn't weep, we weren't human
Friday, May 05, 2006
Jarvis DeBerry
My moment came Sunday morning, Sept. 4. When I walked into the sanctuary at Second Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, the congregation had already begun singing an Andrae Crouch composition taken verbatim from Verse 1 of the 103rd Psalm. Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

I had trouble with the second verse of the song, the one that repeats: He has done great things. First, there was a theological hurdle: How could I sing such a thing after the destruction I'd just seen? Then there was the physical hurdle: How could I sing while sobbing?

Soon after the strongest of the winds died down Aug. 29, I stood on Interstate 10 and looked down on people who had already taken extraordinary measures to keep their heads above the rising water. Three men paddling a boat yelled that they'd just left a house on North Miro Street where 13 people, including some elderly folks and a pregnant woman, were stranded. I don't know if the men realized it, but they, too, appeared to be in danger. There were power lines above their heads, and if the water kept rising, there was the potential they could be electrocuted.

After seeing those men paddling and that woman sitting on her roof and that old man with his arms thrown around an orange water cooler hanging on for life, after asking firefighters about the billows of smoke rising in the distance and hearing them say they'd have to let it burn, after seeing people wander the interstate barefoot and despondent or emerge from attic windows like so many wingless butterflies, I heard myself saying, "OK. My house is probably gone." There may have been resignation in my voice, but if so, that was the only emotion. That was neither the time nor the place to mourn. Nor was it the time to let worry about my house distract me from the important work ahead.

I held the tears at bay for six days. But on the seventh day. . .

That Sunday morning service wasn't the last time I cried. Nor was that cry the most cathartic. Such designation belongs to the weeping I did more than a month later in the parking lot of The Mall at Cortana on Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge. I was on the phone explaining to a therapist how the loss of some family heirlooms made me a failure as a custodian and how I'd hoped that my mother would validate my guilt by yelling at me. My mother never yells, least of all at me, so there was no chance she'd bring down on me the punishment I thought my failure warranted. And yet, it was the fact that she didn't respond angrily that intensified my guilt and prompted me to reveal my anguish to a therapist.

Mayor Ray Nagin cried, too. We learn this from historian Douglas Brinkley, author of the upcoming book "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast," excerpted in Vanity Fair magazine. That's hardly remarkable. If Nagin had not wept, one would have to question his humanity.

Had another writer chronicled Nagin's alleged moments of sorrow, frustration, anger and fear, it probably would have come off as the kind of thorough history the public has come to expect. But in a television interview last year, Brinkley heatedly accused Nagin of having blood on his hands. In his written account, Brinkley relies on some of the mayor's political enemies as sources. As a result, his focus on Nagin's private emotional moments seems intended not to flesh him out but to humiliate him.

Perhaps that will play well in Peoria. Maybe Brinkley will find readers so far removed from our situation they'll find it easy to ridicule a weeping man. But here in New Orleans, the man who hasn't wept sticks out, and the man who seeks approval for mocking the tearful would do well to search for another audience.

. . . . . . .

Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at (504) 826-3355 or at jdeberry@timespicayune.com.

Red Sox over the Yanks

2006-05-10T08:45:00.000-05:00

In the Bronx...by 12 runs...enough said...problem is...we are only up by one game...and it is still May.

Computer System Slowed SBA storm loan response

2006-05-10T08:40:00.000-05:00

This is one conclusion of a report that evaluates the performance of 22 federal agencies in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Computer Glitch

Yeah...Right...

12 Men On the Field....

2006-05-10T08:31:00.000-05:00

The Texas A&M Aggies dealt a blow to the the Seattle Seahawks of the NFL...a tradition dating back to 1922, when E. King Gill came in a game from the stands...when the pro league agreed to "terms" for use of the phrase under license from A&M...a school which can be noted just by that label..."A&M"...even though their are hundreds of Agricultural and Mechanical schools around the country...whether or not the 12th Man is a trademark...i do not know...but this allows the NCAA to rebound from losing the rights to schools using Native Americans as mascots.

On the Barry Bonds Watch..Swing and Miss !!

2006-05-04T10:50:00.000-05:00

Barry Bonds was standing behind the cage during batting practice when Giants infielder Kevin Frandsen fouled a ball back into the net -- and into Bonds's forehead. Bonds yelped, then let out an expletive. Appearing stunned, he laid down while the Giants' medical staff tended to him. He played in the game, going 0 for 4.

Hotels Abandon Vertical Evacuation

2006-05-04T10:45:00.000-05:00

GET VERTICAL

Notables from NOLA

2006-05-04T10:31:00.000-05:00

The Justice Department is tightening the screws on Rep. Bill Jefferson...but he still proclaims innocence...a Kentucky bizz guy testified to he paid the Rep. over 400 large for favors in establishing a tech company.
BRIBES

RTA is in deep trouble as it approaches the FEMA deadline on June 30...ridership has fallen from more than 800,000...down to less than 200,000...and revenue has plummeted from $110 million to 25 million...now RTA is defauting on debt payments...as Blanco's admin stumbles and bumbles around getting funds released to help.
RTA