6 Things You Can
Do Today To Launch Your Dream (Part Two)
by Graciela Sholander
Stephanie Ngo Pham came to the United States in 1979 as a Vietnam
War refugee, arriving at New York’s JFK Airport cradling her
three-month-old son and firmly grasping her two-year-old daughter’s
hand. She had no material possessions other than a few clothes and
the documents that granted Stephanie and her family entry into their
new country. When she tripped and broke one of her thong sandals,
she took off both her shoes (her only pair), stuffed them into her
plastic bag, and proceeded to walk barefoot out into the snowfall.
This is how she arrived in America, with no coat to keep her warm
and not even a dollar to her name. She was cold, hungry, and
humiliated as others pointed and laughed at her bare feet. But she
was determined to make it, for herself and for her children...
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Free Online
Materials Could Save Schools Billions
by Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Since
March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly
experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the
foundation of how schools do business.
A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter
School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net,
a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and
share lessons with colleagues.
He can visit the website and comment on what works and what doesn't.
He can modify lessons to suit his students' needs and post the
modifications online: Think of a cross between a first-grade reading
workbook and Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia written and
edited by users.
If Deutsch wants to see a lesson taught by someone who already has
mastered it, he clicks on a YouTube video linked to the site and
sees a short demo. "I find it's more teacher-friendly than a
textbook," he says...
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Researchers
Develop 2-D Invisibility Cloak
from PhysOrg
O Harry Potter may not have talked much about plasmonics in J. K.
Rowling's fantasy series, but University of Maryland researchers are
using this emerging technology to develop an invisibility cloak that
exists beyond the world of bespectacled teenage wizards.
A research team at Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering
comprised of Professor Christopher Davis, Research Scientist Igor
Smolyaninov, and graduate student Yu-Ju Hung, has used plasmon
technology to create the world's first invisibility cloak for
visible light. The engineers have applied the same technology to
build a revolutionary superlens microscope that allows scientists to
see details of previously undetectable nanoscale objects.
Generally speaking, when we see an object, we see the visible light
that strikes the object and is reflected. The Clark School team's
invisibility cloak refracts (or bends) the light that strikes it, so
that the light moves around and past the cloak, reflecting nothing,
leaving the cloak and its contents "invisible."
The invisibility cloak device is a two-dimensional pattern of
concentric rings created in a thin, transparent acrylic plastic
layer on a gold film. The plastic and gold each have different
refractive properties. The structured plastic on gold in different
areas of the cloak creates "negative refraction" effects, which bend
plasmons—electron waves generated when light strikes a metallic
surface under precise circumstances—around the cloaked region...
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Pre-Historic Nuclear War? Reflections on Worlds Before Our Own
by Brad Steiger, The Canadian
I find myself now in the seventh decade of life still asking two
questions that in one way or another the great majority of my 165
published books have sought to answer: 1.) Who are we as a species?
2.) What is our destiny?
The basic reason that I wrote Worlds Before Our Own (G.P. Putnam‘s
Sons, 1978; Anomalist Books, 2007) is that I have always found it
incredible that such sophisticated people as we judge ourselves to
be, do not really know who we are.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and various academicians who play
the "origins of Man" game, reluctantly and only occasionally
acknowledge instances where unique skeletal and cultural evidence
from the prehistoric record suddenly appear long before they should
-- and in places where they should not. These irritating artifacts
destroy the orderly evolutionary line that academia has for so long
presented to the public. Consequently, such data have been largely
left buried in site reports, forgotten storage rooms, and dusty
archives where one suspects that there is a great deal of
suppressed, ignored, and misplaced pre-historical cultural evidence
that would alter the established interpretations of human origins
and provide us with a much clearer definition of what it means to be
human...
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To Fight Drought,
Georgians Get Creative
by Patrik Jonsson, The
Christian Science Monitor
A roof, two tanks, and a pump
are key tools for one Atlantan's do-it-yourself rain harvesting.
Even as the state's main reservoir, Lake Lanier, shows a cracked
lake bottom, Steve Carr has water splashing out the top of his
tanks.
His secret: A roof, two 550-gallon tanks, a pump, a couple of
filters, and a little "head pressure" to prime the system.
Mr. Carr, a parts dealer who lives in a track-side industrial
warehouse in the Grant Park neighborhood, built one of Atlanta's
first personal "rain harvesting" systems.
"Hey, if I can build something like this, anyone can do it," he
says.
In the midst of Georgia's most severe drought in 100 years, some
state residents like Carr are taking responsibility to supply
themselves with water. Many others are changing their behavior
to conserve water, including how often they wash clothes, flush
toilets, and use faucets, according to a Peach State Poll
released Dec. 17. Four in 10 Georgians now say the drought is
the most important problem facing the state today...
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