Books on Reserve for Pease's English Class

The class is researching U.S. immigration issues. On reserve currently for this class:

Immigrant America by Portes and Rumbaut
--A thoroughly updated and revised edition of a classic in the immigration field.
Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis by Otis L. Graham, Jr.
--reflections on the consequences of large-scale immigrationin the United States.
Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity by Samuel P. Huntington
--Hungtinon's thoughts on reasserting the core values that he considers make us Americans.
(Huntington is well known for his controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order.)

National Book Awards: "Oscars" of the Book World

The National Book Awards winners were announced last night in Manhattan. Fran Lebowitz, writer and humorist, was the evening's host. Winners each receive a bronze sculpture and $10,000, although the award's greatest benefit is often in increased sales, especially when little-known authors are suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
Powers tells the story of a youg man who develops a rare brain disorder after an automobilie
accident.

Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Times: The Untold Story of Those Who Surved the Great American Dust bowl by Timothy Egan
Egan gives an account of the dust storms that descended on the Great Plains during the
Depression.

Young People's Literature: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: "The Pox Party" by M. T. anderson

Poetry: Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey

In case you have forgotten, last year's fiction winner was Europe Central by William T. Vollmann. Joan Didion won the nonfiction prize for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.

November is American Diabetes Month

Every November, the American Diabetes Association encourages us to learn more about diabetes and the risks associated with the disease.

Diabetes is a serious disease that affects the body's ability to produce or respond properly to insulin, a hormone that allows blood glucose (sugar) to enter the cells of the body and be used for energy. Nearly 21 million children and adults in the U.S. have diabetes. It is the fifth deadliest disease in the U.S. and it has no cure.

Here are some ways you can become involved in this year's American Diabetes Month. The National Women's Health Information Center has also put together some November recipes for diabetics.

Africana: New Reference Books

Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience edited Kwame A. Appiah & Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
REF DT14.A37435 2005 (5 Volumes)

Thoroughly revised and massively expanded, this monumental work merits a place in any college collection. Alphabetically arranged but backed up by both a detailed index and a topical list of headers in the final volume, the nearly 4500 entries delve into both African and African-American history, from wide-angled studies of "Slavery in Africa" and "Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Interpretation," to close-focus mentions of Malcom X's "Aardvark" references and major "Zydeco" musicians. Most articles are signed and close with "see-also" references. Illustrations are uncommon but well chosen, a blend of clearly designed maps, charts. and graphs, and sharply reproduced prints or color photos. Students seeking information about African music, insight into the failure of school desegregation in the U.S. or the significance of Curt Flood's challenge to baseball's reserve clause, background on the history of colonialism, or hundreds of other historical topics will find both facts and ideas in plenty here. I don't know how we managed to get along without it.

Get Ready to LOVE YOUR LIBRARY

It's that time of year again - the Love Your Library holiday bookfair with Barnes & Noble is coming up! This year's event will take place Friday, December 1st through Sunday, December 3rd at all Barnes & Noble stores in Connecticut, plus select MA and RI stores.

Barnes & Noble will donate to Connecticut's libraries: 10-20% of the proceeds of all purchases made on Friday 12/1, Saturday 12/2 or Sunday 12/3 that are accompanied by a LoveYourLibrary voucher (PDF). Vouchers are also available in the Goodwin Library.
All purchases must be accompanied by a LoveYourLibrary voucher
Voucher may only be used with in-store purchases.

Last year's pilot event raised over $7,000, which helped to underwrite the Historical Hartford Courant database now freely available on iCONN to the Goodwin community.
This year's proceeds will go toward InfoAnytime - the statewide virtual reference project coordinated by the Connecticut Library Consortium.

Health Statistics-Early Release

This release, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) updates estimates for 15 selected health measures based on data from the January–March 2006 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and presents estimates from 1997 through 2005 for comparison. The 15 measures included are lack of health insurance coverage and type of coverage, usual place to go for medical care, obtaining needed medical care, receipt of influenza vaccination, receipt of pneumococcal vaccination, obesity, leisure-time physical activity, current smoking, alcohol consumption, human immunodeficiency virus testing, general health status, personal care needs, serious psychological distress, diagnosed diabetes, and asthma episodes and current asthma.
Source: Naional Center for Health Statistics (CDC)
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/nhis/released200609.htm

DNA Testing: Homeland Security Students

DNA Testing: an Introduction for Non-Scientists
With our criminal justice system relying more and more on science most of us don't understand, this attempt to explain in layman's language and diagrams how DNA testing works should be useful (though even this may be a hard slog for people without science backgrounds).
Source: Scientific Testimony: an Online Journal
http://www.scientific.org/tutorials/articles/riley/riley.html

Is Islam Compatible with Western Values?

With more than 1 billion adherents, Islam is the world's second-largest religion after Christianity. Within its mainstream traditions, Islam teaches piety, virtue and tolerance. Ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, however, many Americans have associated Islam with the fundamentalist groups that preach violence against the West and regard “moderate” Muslims as heretics. Mainstream Muslims and religious scholars say Islam is wrongly blamed for the violence and intolerance of a few. But some critics say Muslims have not done enough to oppose terrorism and violence. They also contend that Islam's emphasis on a strong relationship between religion and the state is at odds with Western views of secularism and pluralism. Some Muslims are calling for a more progressive form of Islam. But radical Islamist views are attracting a growing number of young Muslims in the Islamic world and in Europe. The entire report is available online for the Goodwin community.l
Source: CQ Researcher

Grants: Eligibility Rules at Issue

The U.S. Education Department has dismissed concerns among college leaders about the burden of administering two new federal grant programs for academically talented low-income students. (From the issue dated November 10, 2006)

In final rules that the U.S. Education Department issued last week for two new federal grant programs for academically talented low-income students, agency officials largely dismissed concerns that college leaders and lobbyists have expressed about the burden of carrying out the requirements. At issue is the role colleges must play in determining who is eligible to receive grants through the programs, which Congress created last year. The grants are available to students eligible for Pell Grants and, for the first time, introduce criteria not based solely on need into federal-aid programs for undergraduates from low-income families.

More American IT Jobs Than Ever

Now hear this! If the declining enrollments in college computer-science programs are any indication, students are not especially confident in the IT job market. But they need not fret, according to Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering in Rice University's Computer and Information Technology Institute.

Speaking last week at Stanford University, Mr. Vardi said there were more high-tech jobs in the country today than there were six years ago, during the halcyon days of the dot-com boom. "IT is still a good career," he told members of the Stanford Computer Forum, an industrial-affiliates program run by the university. "We have nothing to fear but the fear of competition itself."
Mr. Vardi's statistics came from a study commissioned by the Association for Computing Machinery that he completed this year. The report acknowledges that "offshoring" has had an impact on the IT industry, but it argues that the migration of high-tech jobs has done little to hurt the quantity or quality of openings in the United States.
Source: Chronicle of Hgher Education


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Democratic House and Higher Education

"Democrats picked up more than the 15 seats they needed to gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in Tuesday's midterm elections, and for the first time since 1994 will steer the chamber's legislative agenda, with plans to push forward on a full range of campaign promises, including several higher-education issues: making college more affordable, training more scientists and engineers, and expanding federal financing of stem-cell research.

The prospects for several other higher-education issues before Congress will also change with Democratic control of the chamber."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/free/2006/11/2006110801n.htm

Does "Value Added" Add Value?

Critics of higher education say colleges and universities need assessments to measure student progress. However, some academic administrators say there is much more assessment going on right now than policymakers realize, and making assessment matter is more difficult than policymakers think.
Inside Higher Ed., November 3, 2006
http://lists.ncte.org/t/704523/1293328/5668/0/

Writing Essays in Math Class

Schools emphasize writing, Even in math class . (NPR, November 1, 2006) (audio player required) More and more high schools are emphasizing the need for students to be good writers. In an Indianapolis high school, math teachers are requiring students to write an essay as part of the math curriculum. Hear the report as it aired on NPR's November 1 broadcast of Morning Edition at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6415434&sc=emaf

As scrutiny of higher education intensifies, colleges and universities of all sizes are working overtime to better understand their successes and failures. The scrutiny is coming from many quarters and community colleges in particular are feeling the pressure: They now educate about 45 percent of undergraduates nationwide, and are being asked to bolster their local economies while equipping a growing number of academically at-risk students with the tools to succeed in the global economy.

In response, numerous two-year colleges have rolled out new student-support services and community-outreach efforts in recent years. Steps that five colleges have taken to produce better results for their students and their communities are outlined in this report. One of the colleges is Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

IT Security and Legal Liability: Chronicle Chat

Not a week goes by, it seems, without a reported security breach on some college's computer network. The problem is growing, and so are the potential legal liabilities awaiting colleges that don't take appropriate steps to avoid such troubles -- or that flounder in trying to address them. Tracy Mitrano of Cornell University answered questions about threats to IT security and about colleges' legal liability as they protect their systems from hackers and other data breaches. If you missed the live discussion October 26, a transcript is available at the Chronicle of Higher Education online.
www.chronicle.com

Body Worlds 2 Exhibit: Doing the Research

A Goodwin College field trip will go Friday to the the internationally renowned exhibition, BODY WORLDS 2: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, created by Dr. Gunther von Hagens. The exhibition at the Boston Museum of Science explores human and comparative anatomy, health science, anatomy, and physiology through the study of real human bodies that have been preserved using the ground-breaking process called Plastination — providing people with the unprecedented opportunity to discover the wonders of the human body. More information about the history of plastination can be found at the museum site and on the InfoTrac OneFile database available through the library on and off campus.
www.mos.org
www.iconn.org

Contemporary Youth Culture

The library has just purchased the two volume encyclopedia, Contemporary Youth Culture. This encyclopedia describes the current image of youth, as created by youths themselves, society, the media, and technology, which has brought the youth of the world together through the Internet. In the past, adolescents developed identity and status; now, in addition, they have tremendous buying power. Worldwide communication has produced an international youth culture that affects economics, politics, music, film, and nearly everything else. Containing information on subjects from homelessness, sexuality, and race to the new body image, hip-hop culture, and video games, this encyclopedia offers powerful insights into today's youth culture and the forces behind it. An introductory essay provides historical background for both adolescents and older generations, and a time line illustrating the development of international youth culture enhances the text. Poetry and lyrics by young writers, and entries on what young people think about a variety of issues, add to this fascinating work. Scholars, teachers, parents, and young people will find this authoritative source useful for research and for starting discussions on a variety of topics--highly recommended.

Elephants recognize their image

The Republicans are on to something. Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining only humans, apes and dolphins as animals that possess this kind of self-awareness, researchers now report.

Happy, a 34-year-old Asian elephant at the Bronx Zoo, faced her reflection in an 8-by-8-foot mirror in a 2005 experiment and repeatedly used her trunk to touch an "X" painted above her eye. She could not have seen the mark except in her reflection. And she did not respond to a similar mark above her other eye that was invisible except under a black light.

"This would seem to be a trait common to and independently evolved by animals with large, complex brains, complex social lives and known capacities for empathy and altruism, even though the animals all have very different kinds of brains," researcher Diana Reiss, a senior cognitive research scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Could this include compassionate conservatism?

Hopefully, she added, this will encourage people to protect elephants. No similar research has been reported on donkeys.
Source: Livescience.com

Institute for Healthcare Improvement

This organization's aim is "to engage US hospitals in a commitment to implement changes in care proven to improve patient care and prevent avoidable deaths." The site offers case studies (called Profiles in Improvement) and How-To guides and tools on a variety of topics (preventing adverse drug events, preventing surgical infection, improving care for myocardial infarction, etc.)
http://www.ihi.org/ihi
Source: Marylaine Block

Librarything.com

Did I ever tell you about LibraryThing? It is what I am using at home to organize my book collection. At its most basic, it enables users to build their own web-based catalog, using information from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress and over 40 other major libraries.
It's fairly easy to add titles to your online collection; note that you can make your collection private or public. You can add your own tags, edit any of the fields, and even note what date you purchased the book, when you started reading it and when you finished. You can import your Wish List from Amazon.com. Your catalog can be sorted by author, title, tag, publication date or even by how many other LibraryThing users also own the book. LibraryThing has tools to generate what must be the geekiest stats you can imagine from a catalog.

I know, I know. You think this a site only a librarian could love. But it is still wicked cool!
Source: http://www.librarything.com