http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052703151.html?referrer=delicious
The principal was an immigrant from Germany and went through most of her elementary education not speaking English, but still getting A's Here is my favorite quote from the article:
When she became principal of Ocean City Elementary 11 years ago, Kordick initiated a policy called Ask and Answer. The school abolished the practice of teachers asking questions, students raising hands and the teacher picking one to provide the answer. Instead, students pair off and answer the question between themselves.
In a kindergarten class on a recent morning, students recited the plan for a morning activity: "We will construct caterpillars and butterflies." Teacher Chris Lieb then said, "Think about what 'construct' might mean. Pair with your partner and tell your partner." Chatter filled the classroom.
In an adjoining class, kindergarten student Hunter Wolf peered through a framed sheet of transparent plastic held against a window, the better to gauge the day's weather. He turned to the class: "According to my picture, it is cloudy and rainy today." Another schoolwide rule dictates that students speak in complete sentences.
There has to be something here that i can use for my classes. At the very least it shows how lectures can be deadening. You have to actively participate to learn anything.View Larger Map Management area in the Waynesboro Reservoir.
“The prices are, they’re where they were 20 years ago,” says Woodyard, who has more than two decades in the business. “To be profitable you’ve got to watch all your P’s and Q’s and eliminate all the fat in the payroll.”
Prices vary by factors such as species and grade, as well as negotiations with buyers, but Woodyard says the price of cabinet-grade lumber has slumped in some cases to $900 for 1,000 board feet. For years that price was $1,200 and at times as much as $1,400.
Another factor has been the change in styles that are now favoring light colored hard maple and poplar over the darker red oak.
Employment in the logging and sawmill industries has dropped dramatically in recent years.
How to survive the changes in the industry is the biggest challenge for sawmills, loggers, and landowners. Urs Buehlmann from Virginia Tech:
... thinks Europe may have a solution. Surviving Western European mills have shifted to made-to-order furniture and cabinet manufacturing. “They’re pretty much customizing the kitchen to your specifications,” he says. “I strongly believe this will be the guide.”
This reminds me of other stories I have heard about organic farmers. They are able to make a profit by producing high quality vegetables and fruits that they sell in farmer's markets in big cities. The sawmill owners would have to create relationships with home builders and designers in high-income areas of larger cities, but it could certainly pay off.
Another solution that the article mentions is banning log exports, but that brings its own problems.
View Larger Map
Mount Washington is the highest point on the east coast of the USA. I am not sure how they select the contour interval. It seems to be 40 feet. Here is another map of the Waynesboro Reservoir: View Larger Map
This one also seems to have a 40 foot interval, too. It will be interesting to check other regions, such as the Rockies. I do like the effect of contours and shading to show elevation. This is a great option. It turns the online maps into much more of a professional tool.
In spite of all the criticism of the vertically integrated companies over the years, they had at least a long term, multi-dimensional interest in their lands. The new owners have mostly a short-term, maximize profit goal. No matter how you look at it this can't be healthy for the forests in the long run. Fragmentation and parcelization are just part of the problems. The unwillingness to engage in long term investments in the forest is another.
What really surprised me from the article I used in class, was that this is in large part a by-product of the tax policies. Companies wanted to limit their taxes. A VIFPC has to pay both corporate income tax (35%) and stockholders pay capital gains taxes (15%). The new ownership arrangements only pay the capital gains taxes, if that.
I have always thought companies should be required to pay corporate income taxes. But maybe there is some justification to the idea that companies don't really pay taxes, they just pass them on to their customers. At the very least, Congress has to be very careful when they are creating new tax law to avoid unintended consequences like this.
The 90 mile trip over the mountains to University Park was well worth it to attend the Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium 2008 yesterday. Because of the concurrent sessions, I had to pick and choose what I wanted to see.
At the session on reference managers I learned about some new options. Zotero is an add-on for the Firefox browser. It sits on the bottom of the screen ready to capture reference information and store it in a folder. It is supposedly good for web resources including images. I plant to install it soon. One issue that came out in the questions is that it has to be installed in a browser, which makes it hard to use in the labs. There is apparently a way to run Firefox from a USB drive independent of the computer configuration.
Refworks is currently in a trial phase at the Penn State library. You can sign up for it with a Penn State account. It will work in any browser with no add-ins. A decision will be made this summer as to whether or not to keep it, although it sounded positive.
The Cadillac of reference managers is still Endnote. It has the best synchronization with MS Word. However, it is the most expensive, and the publisher upgrades almost every year. So Endnote is pretty well limited to faculty and graduate students.
ANGEL 7.2 will be rolled out this summer. The format won't change much. The biggest change to me was the consolidation of the mail utility. All a user's courses sections and groups can be reached in the same place. Another point brought up in response to aquestion, is that it's best to think of ANGEL mail as an intra-program utility. It's not really meant for outside users.
Another development is an in-line html or rich text editor everywhere text can be entered. The pop-up editor is going away for good. The editor will also sport a better equation editor and be available for students. In my own classes I have nearly stopped using the ANGEL editor in favor of Google docs or other alternatives. Maybe I will reconsider?
A big theme of the day is the increased use of the Digital Commons by students to create short videos for class. This has really given a voice to students who don't stand out otherwise. The Chancellor of Greater Allegheny campus is even offering a $1,000 scholarship to the student who creates the best video on why they like Penn State Greater Allegheny! Students are also taking advantage of videos for oral history projects and to practice speeches for communications courses.
There was an information table encouraging people to use TWITTER during the conference. TWITTER is a mini-blog or instantaneous blog community where people write one or two lines to update what they are doing throughout the day. I'm not sure that I want to stay that connected!
The keynote speaker, Lawrence Lessig, delivered a fascinating talk. He has been working on the issue of copyrights in the digital age for a long time. He has developed the Creative Commons project as an alternative to the all rights reserved copyright. He said that we are now in the "remix" culture where users want to take existing items (pictures, video, music) and recombine them into something new. This runs right into the large media companies who demand ironclad copyrights. If this situation isn't remedied we will stifle creativity and worse, criminalize a whole generation. There was a lot to think about here.
One way to judge a meeting is how good was the swag. The tote bag and notebook were impressive. For me, the cloth name tag with storage pouches and pen holder was that best I've seen in a long time!
At one point the authors discuss how they had noticed increased parcelization over a period of time and a strong tendency for liquidation cuts before the sale. The owners harvest a large portion of the volume to capture its value before sending.
This was essentially anecdotal evidence; meaning that they had heard of it in stories from other people or seen it themselves. Andecdotal evidence is not scientific evidence, however. That means there wasn't a systematic, scientific study to study the extent and severity of parcelization. Their research project, which included a survey of landowners, a detailed forest inventory of sampled tracts, and a statistical analysis, was designed to give reliable answers. If the scientific studies couldn't give definitive answers, it can tell us what is the missing information.
Anecdotal evidence alerts us to a problem and gives us some indication as to what is going on. The scientific studies are needed to get some rational answers.
I decided to export the data from the blogs and then import it into my main blog on the Penn State Movable Type platform. It seemed easy enough to do when it was time to change from version 3 to 4 of the blogging software. Even when I looked at the documentation it wasn't entire clear. Not all the options seem to have been turned on in this version.
The solution I blundered into was to select Import. That brings up a menu with both import and export options. Everything worked well after that. All my blogs are consolidated. I will just have to eliminate the old blogs. Then I will change the links on my web page and on the ANGEL course pages. Is this busy work or progress?
