EXTENDED LIBRARY HOURS

The Library will have extended hours the week before final exams.
December 10-13
We will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Other hours stay the same.
Friday 6:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Saturday 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.
Sunday 12:00 p.m. -5:30 p.m.

Please don't hesitate to contact us at 860.727.6782 with any questions you might have. We wish all Goodwin students well with their final exams!

Create Family Health Report

This web site allows you to create a personalized family health history report from any computer with an Internet connection and an up-to-date Web browser. View a sample report .


Information you provide creates a drawing of your family tree and a chart of your family health history. Both the chart and the drawing can be printed and shared with your family members or your healthcare professional. Used in consultation with your healthcare professional, your family health history can help you review your family's health history and develop disease prevention strategies that are right for you.
Source: My Family Health Report, a tool from the Surgeon General

Inventor of Gatorade:Robert Cade

I watched six baseball games last weekend and all of the teams were drinking Gatorade, of course. Yesterday the university of Florida researcher who invented Gatorade, Robert Cade, died at the age of 80. Cade brought home a windfall to Gainesville by inventing the sports drink. The invention, originally designed to help the university’s football team, the Gators, started the vast sports-drink industry and has been one of the most lucrative technology-transfer products in higher-education history. The drink has earned the university more than $150-million in royalties since 1973.
Source: Associated Press

Classroom Ideas This Week

The ideas this week suggest ways to ask students to explore the messages behind public language. The English Journal article "Doublespeak Detection for the English Classroom" explores examples from literature, newspapers, and advertisements.

Advertisements are a fertile source for examples. To explore advertising's use of doublespeak, look to the analytical techniques outlined in the Teaching English in the Two-Year College article "Advertising and Interpretive Analysis: Developing Reading, Thinking, and Writing Skills in the Composition Course".
Source: NCTE

George Orwell and Doublespeak Awards

Ted Gup, author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, was the winner of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 2007 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.

The NCTE Public Language Award Committee presented the 2007 Doublespeak Award to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The award is an ironic "tribute" to American public figures who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory. These awards was announced at NCTE’s Annual Convention in New Yoirk City Sunday, November 18.
Source: NCTE

Twelve Reasons for Soaring College Costs

Today, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), a higher education think tank based in Washington, DC, released a new study outlining 12 reasons for soaring college tuition and questioning whether the government is spending too much money on higher education as a whole.
Source: New Study Outlines 12 Reasons for Soaring College Costs

Windfalls of War: Baghdad Bonanza: Useful Statistics

KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company. In fact, the total dollar value of contracts that went to KBR—which used to be known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and until April 2007 was a subsidiary of Halliburton—was nearly nine times greater than those awarded to DynCorp International, a private security firm that is No. 2 on the list of the top 100 recipients of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction funds.
Another private security company, Blackwater USA, is 12th on the list of companies and joint ventures, with $485 million in contracts.

Other key findings :

• Over the three years studied, more than $20 billion in contracts went to foreign companies whose identities—at least so far—are impossible to determine.
• Nearly a third of the companies and joint ventures on the Top 100 are based outside the United States. These foreign contractors, along with the $20 billion in contracts awarded to the unidentified companies, account for about 45 percent of all funds obligated to the Top 100.
• U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006.

Source: Center for Public Integrity Windfalls of War II: Baghdad Bonanza

U.S. Health Benefits Continue to Rise

Total U.S. health benefit cost rose by 6.1 percent in 2007, the same pace as last year, to an average of US$7,983 per employee, according to the National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans, conducted annually by Mercer and released today.

The good news is that cost increases have held steady for three years (after spiking to nearly 15 percent in 2002) and are likely to slow a bit further in 2008. The bad news is that’s still more than twice the rate of inflation. Health cost growth is outpacing wages and material costs and eroding business profitability.
Source: Mercer Consulting

Big Bucks, Red Tape for Colleges

The U.S. House of Representatives education committee unanimously approved sweeping legislation last week that would create a plethora of new grant programs for colleges and students while holding institutions accountable for skyrocketing tuition.

The 747-page bill to reauthorize, or renew, the Higher Education Act would impose dozens of new reporting requirements on colleges, requiring institutions to disclose everything from their transfer-of-credit policies to the details of their arrangements with lenders.It would also require colleges to crack down on illegal downloading and soften some of the restrictions on the receipt of federal aid by for-profit institutions.
Source Chronicle of Higher Education November 20 2007

Americans Closing the Book on Reading

Americans aren't just reading fewer books, but are reading less and less of everything, in any medium. That's the doleful conclusion of "To Read or Not to Read," a report scheduled for release today by the National Endowment for the Arts. Subtitled "A Question of National Consequence," the report piles on the bad news delivered by "Reading at Risk," the NEA's 2004 warning about the nation's rapidly declining literacy. This is not true of the Goodwin community; our library statistics show a continued increase in circulation.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Educaton Novemberr 19

Learning Languages in U.S.

Interest in language study at American colleges and universities has increased significantly since 2002, according to a comprehensive new survey released today by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA). Interest in language study has been increasing steadily since 1998. While the study of the most popular languages, Spanish, French, and German, continues to grow and together represents more than 70% of language enrollments, their dominance is slowly decreasing in the face of growing interest in languages such as Arabic (up 127%), Chinese (up 51%), and Korean (up 37%). Enrollments in American Sign Language increased nearly 30% from 2002, making it the fourth most studied language on college campuses, slightly ahead of Italian.
Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006
Source: Modern Language Association

Critical Release in Homeland Security

Every two weeks, the Homeland Security Digital Library identifies "Critical Releases in Homeland Security," a targeted collection of recently-released documents that are expected to influence homeland security policy & strategy development.
Terrorism Risk Modeling for Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure ProtectionRAND Corporation
Terrorism 2002-2005United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation
National Strategy for Information Sharing: Successes and Challenges in Improving Terrorism-Related Information SharingUnited States. White House Office
National Strategy for Combating Terrorism: Background and Issues for Congress [November 1, 2007]Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service
Critical Infrastructure Protection: Sector-Specific Plans' Coverage of Key Cyber Security Elements VariesUnited States. Government Accountability Office
Source: Homeland Security Digital Library

U.S. Loses in Math and Science

Students in the highest-performing U.S. states rank well below their peers in the world’s top-achieving countries in mathematics and science skill, according to a new study that judges American youths on an international scale.
Source: Education Week Online November 13 2007

History of the "Topping Off" Ceremony

The last steel beam of the new building at Goodwin College's river campus goes up today. The topping off ceremony includes the placing a tree on the top of the building. The beam and the tree represent one of the construction industry’s oldest customs – the "topping out" or "topping off" of a completed project.

This ancient European tradition lives on among American steelworkers. No-one really seems to know exactly how it started, but the tradition of topping out has become a cherished custom whenever the skeleton of a bridge or building is completed, a signal that the uppermost steel member is going into place. As that final beam is hoisted, an evergreen tree or a flag or both are attached to it as it ascends.

How did this custome start? Here is one version. Scandinavian mythology suggests that humans originated from trees and our souls returned to the trees after death, giving each tree a spirit of its own. Before cutting a tree, they would formally address the forest, reminding it of the consideration they had always shown toward the trees and asking the forest to grant use of a tree for construction of their home. When the house was complete, the topmost leafy branch of the tree used would be set atop the roof so that the tree spirit would not be rendered homeless. The gesture was supposed to convince the tree spirit of the sincere appreciation of those building the home. As time passed, the early conception of tree worship gradually changed, but the custom is continued across the world.

Source: Modern Steel Construction December 2000

National Book Awards

Tree of Smoke, a sweeping novel by Denis Johnson about the Vietnam War that features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers, won the National Book Award for fiction last night in Manhattan.

In the nonfiction category, Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, took the prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. Weiner, who won a Pultizer Prize for his reporting on national security programs, examined more than 50,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of C.I.A. veterans for his book, a critical history of C.I.A. failures.

The prize for young people’s literature was awarded to Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who leaves his poverty-stricken reservation school and moves to a wealthy, all-white school. Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, won the award for poetry for Time and Materials. Each of this year’s winners received a bronze statue and $10,000.
Source: New York Times

Rummaging in the Government Attic

This is a quick intro to GovernmentAttic.org, a new site digitizing materials accessed using the Freedom of Information Act. If they gain access to similar to the work being done by National Security Archive and Cryptome, they will digitize and make that available also. The aim of this web site is to make available materials unavailable elsewhere.
Source: Information Archives and Special Collections

On-Line Guide for Members of Congress

GPO Creates Its First Ever On-Line Guide To Members Of Congress
The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) creates a one stop website with easy searchable information on all Members of Congress. A simple click will bring the user to a picture and biography of any current member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. This information previously was available in separate databases, but now can be accessed from one central point.
Source: GPO

Fishy Farms: Environmental Issues

“Offshore aquaculture is not ready for primetime,” said Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive Director. “So far the industry has failed to demonstrate that the practice is environmentally sustainable, financially viable, or technically possible on a commercial scale.”

Commercial-scale open ocean aquaculture will neither ease pressure on collapsing wild marine fish populations, nor eliminate our seafood trade deficit, according to a new report by Food & Water Watch. The U.S. government has been pushing to open public waters to offshore aquaculture – growing fish in nets or cages between three and 200 miles from shore.
Source: Full Report

Brush up Your Shakespeare, Start Doing it Now

Shakespeare has been a staple of management training for a long time. But only in the last few years have programs used Shakespeare’s works to teach chief executives the vulnerabilities to which the powerful are susceptible.

“C.E.O.’s are the modern kings and queens of the global world,” says Kevin Coleman, a Shakespearean actor who dramatizes for chief executives how a mistake made in the global economy might have vast and unintended consequences.

James Dimon rediscovered Shakespeare shortly after he was fired from his job as president of Citigroup (by a man who was like a father to him). Then he was invited to talk at Columbia Business School to students who had been studying power and succession using "King Lear." That day Dimon learned that Shakespeare had written a case study predicting his dismissal from Citigroup.
Source: New York Times November 10, 2007

What I've Been Reading

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting...

The novel is relatively short (184 pages) and since it is written as one extended conversation, it is next to impossible not to read the entire book at one sitting: leaving the story even for a moment would be like leaving a personal encounter - rude. The story is superb, written with elegance, and contains views from outside our American perspective that refreshingly inform us to re-examine our point of view. For those who want a different voice, a different view of the aftermath of 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is well worth reading. Highly Recommended.

What are you reading?? Click on Comments below and let us know--even just the title will do. You will have to register briefly just once and then you can comment like crazy every day.

Live Chat: Battling Staph Infections

Live Chat
Battling Staph Infections in Schools
When: Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern standard time
Submit questions here in advance.

Please join in for a live chat about measures that school leaders can take to prevent an outbreak of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infections in their schools, and soothe students' and parents' anxieties about the illness. The key, school leaders say, is releasing accurate information to parents and students quickly, while collaborating closely with school-based and local health officials.
Source: Education Week

Norman Mailer

A major voice in American literature, Norman Mailer died Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital. From his classic debut novel "The Naked and The Dead" to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality. His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. "The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He wrote much more, not all of it as well received.

In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel."Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me." I have read that he had a great distrust for technology and wrote in long hand--usually about 1500 words a day.

Quotes from Normal Mailer:
"I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
Source: Obituaries in national newspapers

History Yesterday

1918 - The armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany in Compiègne, France, effectively ending World War I.

"When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another wild 'War to End Wars'
And another wild Armistice Day."
[Robert Graves: poem, 'Armistice Day' - 11 Nov 1918]

TurnOff the Cellphones

Like many of his colleagues, Ali Nazemi tells his students that they'd better turn their cellphones off before they come to class. But Mr. Nazemi, a professor of business administration and economics at Roanoke College, has gone to unusual lengths to drive home that message. When a student's phone rang during a recent lecture, the professor confiscated it and proceeded to demolish with a hammer. The incident was staged--Mr. Nazemi had arranged it with the student before class--but it had plenty of shock value. And that was precisely the point: As Samuel G. Freedman notes in The New York Times, plenty of professors are considering drastic measures to keep students from spending lecture-hall time fiddling with cellphones, iPods, and laptops. One such tactic seems particularly interesting. A Canadian company called Smart Technologies has developed a program, called SynchronEyes, which lets professors monitor their students' computers and freeze any machines that are not being used for note-taking.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Human Service Worker Shortage

Students in Human Services, there are jobs out there! Youth servicing agencies are having difficulty filling empty job slots. In North Carolina, for example, UNC Chapel Hill’s recruitment and retention project recently focused on action steps that frontline staff, supervisors, administrators and agency directors can take to address workforce issues. The January 2007 issue of Children’s Service Practice Notes, issued by the North Carolina Division of Social Services and the Family and Children’s Resource Program focused on issues being faced by the child welfare workforce and strategies that can be used to address these issues.

In Massachusetts, the state’s Council of Human Service Providers commissioned two reports that focus on examining the state’s workforce challenges. Help Wanted: The Future of the Human Services Workforce in Massachusetts was released in April 2006, and Help Wanted 2: Recruiting and Retaining the Next Generation of Human Services Workers in Massachusetts was issued a year later, in April 2007. In the state, there are more than 100,000 workers in the human services workforce, and these employees serve more than one in ten of the state’s residents

Help Desk Hours

With more and more students — especially those taking online courses — demanding access to technology help at all hours of the day and night, colleges are responding by extending help-desk hours. More than half are open late into the evening, according to a recent survey by Educause, the educational technology consortium, and a few are available 24/7. But colleges are not set up for the extra hours. Their staffs are too small, and their budgets too tight. So many institutions are outsourcing the service to Presidium and similar companies. Presidium Learning, Inc., is a company in a rural Kentucky town that handles technology help desks for about 450 institutions.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Librarians and Surveillance Bills

Librarians Say Surveillance Bills Lack Adequate OversightA little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight. Read the full article in The Washington Post.

Recommended site: Maps of the World

I love maps and I love Maps of the World. This site is a fantastic repository of Physical Maps, Political Maps, Outline Maps, and Location Maps of all countries. One can also find Printable World Map, Blank World Map, Continent Map, World Time Zone Map, World Geography Map, World Economy Map, World Travel Map, and many more maps in the site.This is so good I think I will put it on the library page.

Five Assessment Myths

"America has spent 60 years building layer upon layer of district, state, national, and international assessments at immense cost—and with little evidence that our assessment practices have improved learning. True, testing data have revealed achievement problems. But revealing problems and helping fix them are two entirely different things. As a member of the measurement community, I find this legacy very discouraging. It causes me to reflect deeply on my role and function. Are we helping students and teachers with our assessment practices, or contributing to their problems?" This commentary by Rick Stiggins in Education Week considers five problematic myths about assessment:
Myth 1: The path to school improvement is paved with standardized tests.
Myth 2: School and community leaders know how to use assessment to improve schools.
Myth 3: Teachers are trained to assess productively.
Myth 4: Adult decisions drive school effectiveness.
Myth 5: Grades and test scores maximize student motivation and learning.
Stiggins is the founder of the Educational Testing Service's Assessment Training Institute in Portland, Ore.
Source: "Five Assessment Myths and Their Consequences" Education Week October 16, 2007

Early Childhood Education: Reading

Much attention has been devoted to parent-child interactions that involve the reading of printed materials; such interactions have been labeled joint book reading (JBR). JBR has been identified as the most imprtant activity in which parents can engage their children that will influence later academic success. However, there is still some debate about the impact of JBR on child development. The article, "Joint Book Reading in the Second Year and Vocabulary Outcomes", in the Journal of Research in Childhood Education provides evidence supporting the positive impact of JBR. Call off the debate; now we know.
Source: Journal of Research in Childhood Education Spring 2007 (available in the library)

Teacher Professionnal Development Sourcebook

The publisher of Education Week has launched a new biannual resource guide on teacher professional development, available online for free. The first issue of the Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook focuses on the role of teacher collaborative work in improving instruction, and includes research overviews, data on current practices and requirements, a professional development calendar, and an exclusive directory.
Source: Education Week Update

Did You Know?

Did you know that the Credo Reference database accessible from the library home page has 273 full-text reference books online for you? Today we will look at just one--The Ultimate Business Library--one of at least twenty in the field of business.

Hundreds of new business and management books have been and continue to be published every year. With time as your most valuable asset how can you ensure that you absorb only the best and most influential thinking from this seemingly inexhaustible supply?
This new edition of worldwide bestseller The Ultimate Business Library is a one-stop guide to the world's leading business thinkers. It is a unique summary of those books which have had the most significant impact on management thinking, drawing out the lessons any business can learn. Navigating the cross-currents of management thinking from Tom Peters to Peter Drucker, Rosabeth Moss Kanter to Charles Handy, The Ultimate Business Library will ensure you are rapidly up to speed with the ideas shaping modern business.

Source: http://www.goodwincollege.org/library/index.htm

Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontent

Here is an excerpt from an interesting New Yorker article by Anthony Grafton on the future of reading. Reading seems to be a theme of this week's blog.

"Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books." Soon the sunlight will gleam on the varnished tables in the new Goodwin Library. Read the article here or in the library.
Source: The New Yorker Nov. 6, 2007 beginning on page 50--Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton.

Time's Invention of the Year

Stop. I mean, don't stop reading this, but stop thinking what you're about to think. Or, O.K., I'll think it for you:
The thing is hard to type on. It's too slow. It's too big. It doesn't have instant messaging. It's too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it's too cheap!) It doesn't support my work e-mail. It's locked to AT&T. And—all together now—we're sick of hearing about it! Yes, there's been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. But when that day is over, Apple's iPhone is still the best thing invented this year. Why? Five reasons:

1. It's pretty.

2. It's touchy-feely.

3. It will make other phones better.

4. It's not a phone. It's a platform.

5. It is but the ghost of iPhones to come.

Source: Time Magazine

Book Recommendation

FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION--AND EVERYONE ELSE
Proust and the Squid: The Story of and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

In her first book aimed at a general readership, Wolf (director, Ctr. for Reading and Language Research, Tufts Univ.) examines reading's extraordinary evolution. Beginning with an exploration of how the human brain evolved and adapted itself to become able to read, she then offers a history of linguistic development that concludes with the progress of alphabet-based languages. Wolf's detailed description of how children learn to read examines this process from combined social, psychological, and neurological perspectives. She illustrates how specific books and activities provide fundamental catalysts for developing cognitive paths. Wolf then examines dyslexia, providing a short historical foundation and analyzing current research. Particularly interested in how to teach those with reading difficulties, she writes from a researcher's perspective and a parent's (her son is dyslexic). Throughout, Wolf's intriguing combination of linguistic history, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience is engaging and clear. The figures and illustrations as well as the wonderful literary quotes enrich her readable prose. her text speaks to the changes the online information boom is bringing our world and provides a foundation for the importance of teaching information literacy.
Source: Library Journal Recommendation for Academic Libraries

NEEAN Fall Forum

Over the past few years, accountability issues have surfaced in higher education, much as they did for K-12 public schooling in recent years. At the New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN) fall forum Friday at the College of Holy Cross, keynote speaker Dr. Cecilia Lopez, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Harold Washington College, spoke forcefully on how current federal policy affects accreditation and assessment and why we should care. Dr. Daniel Fogel, president of University of Vermont, discussed the proposed Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) proposed by National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC.) and American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

In individual sessions, colleagues discussed key issues in higher education assessment, including: general education and general outcomes assessment, discipline and program-based assessment, e-portfolios and other tools, and best practices in assessment implementation. You will hear more about this in the very near future. (Attending from Goodwin College: Janet Jefford, Judy Zimmerman, Marilyn Nowlan)

New Books

FICTION

Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
World Without End by Ken Follett (sequel to Pillars of the Earth)
Playing for Pizza by John Grisham
Worst Thing I’ve Done by Ursula Hegi

NONFICTION
Assault on Reason by Al Gore
Proust and the Squid: Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
Yoga as Medicine by Timothy McCall
Giving by Bill Clinton
Peterson’s Two-Year Colleges 2008

Most of these were requests from the faculty and staff.

Great Thing About Reading

'The great thing about reading books is that it makes us better than cats. Cats are said to have nine lives. What is that compared to the girl, boy, man, woman who reads books? A book read is a life added to one’s own. So it takes only nine books to make cats look at you with envy.

And I’m not talking here only of “good” books. Any book—trash to classic—makes us live the life of another person, injects us with the wisdom and folly of their years. When we’ve read the last page of a book, we know more, either in the form of raw knowledge—the name of a gun, perhaps—or in the form of greater understanding. The worth of these vicarious lives is not to be underestimated. There’s nothing sadder—or sometimes more dangerous—than the person who has lived only his or her single, narrow life, unenlightened by the experience, real or invented, of others."

These are the words of Yann Martel, Canadian author of The Life of Pi. Martel is sending a book every two weeks to Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada. Why Martel is doing this is a long and intriguing story. His choices and the accompanying comments explaining his selection are priceless. If you are interested in reading along with Prime Minster Harper, the first book was The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy because, says Martel, "I can’t think of a work of such brevity, hardly 60 pages, that shows so convincingly the power and depth of great literature." So here it is online: The Death of Ivan Ilych. (Next up is Animal Farm by GeorgeOrwell.)

Social Science Resource Par Excellence

Established in 1962, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Science Research (ICPSR) is the world's largest archive of digital social science data. They acquire, preserve, and distribute original research data and provide training in its analysis. The site right now is featuring a collaborative psychiatric epidemiology service. Archives and research project websites at ICPSR provide access to data collections and other resources in many disciplines. There's something here for everyone!
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/

Early Childhood Education: StoryPlace

StoryPlace, presented in both English and Spanish, offers children the opportunity to view online stories, participate in interactive activities, and print activity pages. Five themes are currently available in the Pre-school Library: colors, teddy bears, crocodiles, animals, and monkeys. Each section features activities centered on the theme. For instance, in the teddy bear theme, children can choose to view and listen to the story 6 Little Teddy Bears, help Bella Teddy Bear choose the correct clothing for the weather, or print a teddy bear doll to cut out and put together. There is also an annotated booklist for each theme. The site developers plan to add an Early Elementary Library soon.

Homeland Security: Risk Reduction

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has adopted a focused approach to risk reduction. DHS is moving increasingly to risk analysis and risk-based resource allocation, a process that is designed to manage the greatest risks instead of attempting to protect everything. This report applies a probabilistic terrorism model that is broadly applied in the insurance industry to assess risk across cities, to assess risks within specific cities, and to assist intelligence analysis.
Terrorism Risk Modeling for Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure Protection
Source: RAND Corporation

Teacher Sourcebook

The publisher of Education Week has launched a new, twice-yearly resource guide on teacher professional development, available online for free. The first issue examines the role of teacher collaborative work in improving instructon and student achievement.
http://www.teachersourcebook.org/
Source: Education Week October 31, 2007

Campus Safety and Student Privacy

The U.S. Department of Education released new guidance on Tuesday to parents and educators about the circumstances under which information about troubled students can be disclosed under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, a federal law governing student records that is often criticized for being too complicated. The brochures have been sent to colleges and schools across the country and are available on the Department of Education's Web site.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education