Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Education Week: Urban Ed. Group Offers Management Tool

The Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 67 of the nation's urban school districts, is launching its first commercial venture by selling a management tool that allows district financial and information officers to track key performance indicators...

Already have an account? Please login.

Source: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/09/19/04brief-7.h32.html

timothy leary jonathan frid pujols watchmen hitch justin beiber lamar odom

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

CDC: US kids eat too much salt, as much as adults

CHICAGO (AP) ? American children eat as much salt as adults ? about 1,000 milligrams too much, or the same amount as in just one Big Mac. Extra salt is linked with higher blood pressure, even in kids, but government research says those who are overweight and obese may be most vulnerable to its effects.

The new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Previous research has shown similar results in adults but studies on salt, weight and blood pressure are scarce in children.

The CDC researchers looked at data on 6,200 kids aged 8 to 18 involved in 2003-08 national health surveys. The children were asked twice over several days to detail all foods they'd eaten the previous day; the researchers calculated salt intake from their answers.

Overall, 15 percent had either high blood pressure or slightly elevated blood pressure called prehypertension.

Those who ate the most salt faced double the risk of having elevated blood pressure, compared with those who ate few salty foods. But among overweight or obese kids, the risk was more than triple.

The recommended daily salt or sodium intake for kids and adults is no more than 1 teaspoon daily, or about 2,300 milligrams. On average, study kids ate 3,300 milligrams daily.

CDC researcher Quanhe (SHWAH'-nuh) Yang says it's unclear why heavier kids would be more sensitive to salt but it could be due to obesity-related hormone changes. The results raise concerns because studies have shown that elevated blood pressure in childhood, even just prehypertension, can lead to full-fledged high blood pressure in adulthood and potentially premature heart disease.

Prehypertension and high blood pressure in children younger than 17 depend on age, height and gender.

In those 18 and up, readings between 120 over 80 and 140 over 90 are prehypertension; 140 over 90 and higher is high blood pressure.

___

Online:

Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov

Blood pressure charts: http://tinyurl.com/8k6egur

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cdc-us-kids-eat-too-much-salt-much-042142987.html

trump 2012 groundhog day groundhog phil pee wee herman ketamine tracy morgan ground hogs day 2012

Dark energy camera opens its eyes

The highest-resolution camera ever built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe.

The Dark Energy Survey's 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years.

The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorised to be responsible for the ever-faster expansion of the Universe.

Its first image, taken 12 September, focussed on the Fornax galaxy cluster.

In time, along with its massive haul of individual galaxies, it will study 100,000 galaxy clusters - the largest stable structures we know of - and 4,000 supernovae, the bright dying throes of stars.

This enormous survey is a collaboration between US, UK, Brazilian, Spanish and German astronomers.

The phone box-sized Dark Energy Camera or DECam is mounted on the 4m Victor M Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert.

DECam is particularly sensitive to red and infrared light, to better study cosmic objects as distant as eight billion light-years away.

More distant objects are moving away from us - and each other - faster than nearer objects, which causes a shift of their apparent colour toward the red end of the spectrum - a "redshift".

Continue reading the main story

What is redshift?

  • The term "redshift" arises from the fact that light from more distant objects shows up on Earth more red than when it left its source
  • The colour shift comes about because of the Doppler effect, which acts to "stretch" or "compress" waves from moving objects
  • It is at work in the sound of a moving siren: an approaching siren sounds higher-pitched and a receding one sounds lower-pitched
  • In the case of light, approaching objects appear more blue and receding objects appear more red
  • The expansion of the Universe is accelerating, so in general, more distant objects are moving away from us (and each other, and everything else) more quickly than nearer ones
  • At cosmic distances, the shift can profoundly affect the colour - the factor by which the wavelength is "stretched" is called the redshift

Careful studies of the shifted light from distant supernovae were what first demonstrated this expansion, leading to the 2011 Nobel prize in physics.

What is believed to be causing this increase in the speed of expansion is called dark energy, making up more than 70% of the "stuff" of the Universe and the focus of the DECam's mission.

Other efforts hope to get to the bottom of the mystery, including the Boss survey and a future space telescope dediated to the effort called Euclid.

But for now, Will Percival from the University of Portsmouth, a Dark Energy Survey collaborator, said DECam is an exciting prospect.

"This will be the largest galaxy survey of its kind, and the galaxy shapes and positions will tell us a great deal about the nature of the physical process that we call dark energy, but do not currently understand," he said.

The survey will tackle the problem in four ways.

It will study the same kind of supernovae that led to the Nobel prize, in a bid to unravel the "expansion history" of the Universe - when its expansion increased and decreased over billions of years.

It will also map out in 3D the distribution of galaxy clusters, measuring what are known as baryon acoustic oscillations - literally relics of the sound echoes of the Big Bang.

Continue reading the main story

Dark energy and dark matter mysteries

  • Gravity acting across vast distances does not seem to explain what astronomers see
  • Galaxies, for example, should fly apart; some other mass must be there holding them together
  • Astrophysicists have thus postulated "dark matter" - invisible to us but clearly acting on galactic scales
  • At the greatest distances, the Universe's expansion is accelerating
  • Thus we have also "dark energy" which acts to drive the expansion, in opposition to gravity
  • The current theory holds that 73% of the Universe is dark energy, 23% is dark matter, and just 4% the kind of matter we know well

By counting the clusters and plotting out when they evidently formed, the survey can feed back to computer models that map out how we think the Universe organised itself in its earliest years.

And studies of the way galaxies and galaxy clusters bend passing light - in a process called weak gravitational lensing - will help to pin down the equally mysterious "dark matter" that is believed to make up more than 80% of the Universe's mass.

DECam will now be run through a series of tests and will begin the official survey in December.

With each snapshot it acquires, it will see an apparent area of the sky 20 times larger than the full moon.

In its full five-year run, it should capture an eighth of the full sky.

"The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of the cosmic frontier," said James Siegrist, associate director of science for high-energy physics at the US Department of Energy, which oversaw the instrument's construction.

"The results of this survey will bring us closer to understanding the mystery of dark energy and what it means for the Universe."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19634700#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

doug fister rick warren the perfect storm hard boiled eggs sound of music mickelson how to tie a tie

NFL 2012

Greg Schiano Tampa Bay Bucs head coach Greg Schiano.

Photo by J. Meric/Getty Images.

Ask an NFL player about rule changes designed to make the sport safer?penalties for decapitating defenseless receivers and the like?and he'll tell you that the suits in the league office are ruining football. "I think the safest thing to do is leave the game alone,"?Ray Lewis said recently. "The game will take care of itself. It always has. ? When you adjust so many [rules], sometimes it makes it worse."

What Lewis wants is for the NFL to become a self-policed state, with on-field retribution standing in for penalties, fines, and suspensions. Some of this is tough-guy posturing?this isn't flag football, they're turning us into sissies, etc. But it's also a statement of personal responsibility: a belief that the men on the field are accountable to each other, above all, for their own health and safety.

This was essentially the argument the Giants made after the Bucs crashed their "victory formation" on Sunday. From the Giants' perspective, Eli Manning's kneeldown with five seconds to go signified that the contested portion of the game was over. For Bucs coach Greg Schiano, the game wasn't over until the clock ran out, so he ordered the?Tampa Bay defense to cannonball through the line. "I don't think you do that at this level," Giants coach Tom Coughlin said. Manning, for his part, called it "a little bit of a cheap shot." He said: "Going down, we are taking a knee, in a friendly way. They are firing off, and it's a way to get someone hurt."

What Manning is saying here is at once ridiculous?the gridiron equivalent of "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!"?and totally reasonable. Schiano, who's in his first season in Tampa after a long tenure at Rutgers, is a classic example of a coach who preaches that the corrective to losing is a "new attitude." Submarining an opponent's kneeldown is a classic "new attitude" move?an attention-getting display of faux hustle that looks tough but accomplishes nothing.

"I don't know if that's not something that's not done in the National Football League, but what I do with our football team is we fight until they tell us game over," Schiano said after the game, pulling off a rare triple negative. And what did the Bucs accomplish by fighting until the game was literally over instead of fundamentally over? Instead of just losing, they managed to lose and make their opponents really angry. New attitude, indeed.

The unwritten rule that the Bucs violated is one that makes a lot of sense: Don't risk injuring yourself or others for no good reason. This is why the starters don't play in preseason, why nobody tries too hard on PAT attempts, why the Pro Bowl is a joke. Football is dangerous enough that there's no sense in hustling yourself into additional knee-wrenching and brain-rattling situations. The players need a code to keep themselves alive.

This is the intersection between pro football and pro wrestling. If two guys from the WWE understand the rules of engagement, they can pummel each other without anyone getting seriously hurt. If one of them doesn't know the routine, someone's getting an elbow to the face. The Bucs, with their college coach who's all about giving it the old college try, went off the script. And now, somebody's going to get hurt.

On?Football Night in America, Peter King related something a Giants player had told him: "If the Bucs keep doing this, they're risking getting some cheap shots on their own players and maybe risking further injury." What Schiano will soon learn is that the NFL is a league of grudges and grievances, and the guy who makes the rules on the field is Hammurabi, not Roger Goodell. So, if we're talking eye-for-an-eye justice, a word of caution for Josh Freeman: Kneel at your peril. The game will take care of you soon enough.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=463e4c1bbe454703b1ab8651fd8ff15a

jets air jordans pecan pie recipe prince philip sugar cookie recipe sugar cookie recipe how the grinch stole christmas

Monday, September 17, 2012

Chicago Teachers Union Won't Vote on Contract Deal; Strike Continues

Chicago teachers union delegates declined to vote today on a tentative agreement reached in negotiations this week, so the city's first teachers' strike in over two decades will now continue into a second week.

Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said at a news conference held after a meeting of the union's delegates that the earliest public school classes will take place will be Wednesday. The delegates will meet again Tuesday.

"A clear majority wanted to stay out. That's why we're staying out," Lewis said of the delegates at today's meeting.

"Our members are not happy," she said. "They want to know if there is anything more they can get."

There had been hope that the strike would end this weekend after a five-day lockout full of heated negotiations resulted in both sides reaching a "tentative agreement" that could put about 29,000 public school teachers and 350,000 students back in the classroom Monday.

Representatives from both the teachers' union and the city announced Friday that they had agreed on the framework of a deal and that they hoped to finalize it by Sunday, at which time the union's members would vote on it.

Robert Bloch, the attorney for the teacher's union, said negotiators had reached "the outlines of an agreement on the major issues."

"We are hopeful that we will have a complete agreement done by Sunday," he said.

That sentiment was echoed by David Vitale, the president of the Chicago Board of Education, who noted that "the framework" of a deal was in place.

Signs of a potential resolution had first emerged Thursday morning when the tone of top negotiators turned from angry bitterness to cautious optimism.

"We had what we think is pretty good movement, but of course the board always has to do a little bit of backsliding," Lewistold reporters Thursday outside the Hilton on Michigan Ave., the site of the negotiations.

After a marathon bargaining session Thursday, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief education officer for Chicago Public Schools, told reporters Friday morning that it had been a "beneficial night" that had brought the two sides "closer."

The two main sticking points in the talks had been the city's new proposed teacher evaluation system and the process for re-hiring laid off teachers.

The teachers' union has argued that the proposed evaluation system would emphasize students' standardized test scores too heavily and unfairly penalize teachers, while the district countered that the system already includes input from teachers and can be adjusted to change the weighting of the test scores.

That is just what the district did Friday, reducing the emphasis on student testing and making the evaluation system more forgiving for teachers.

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chicago-teachers-union-wont-vote-contract-deal-strike-125043374--abc-news-topstories.html

abc store nate diaz vs donald cerrone ufc 141 lesnar vs overeem appetizer recipes alistair overeem alistair overeem

Libya sacks Benghazi security chiefs after U.S. attacks

{ttle}

{cptn}","template_name":"ss_thmb_play_ttle","i18n":{"end_of_gallery_header":"End of Gallery","end_of_gallery_next":"View Again"},"metadata":{"pagination":"{firstVisible} - {lastVisible} of {numItems}","ult":{"spaceid":"2145892301","sec":""}}},{"id": "hcm-carousel-875635877", "dataManager": C.dmgr, "mediator": C.mdtr, "group_name":"hcm-carousel-875635877", "track_item_selected":1,"tracking":{ "spaceid" : "2145892301", "events" : { "click" : { "any" : { "yui-carousel-prev" : { "node" : "a", "data" : {"sec":"HCMOL on article right rail","slk":"prev","itc":"1" }, "bubbles" : true, "test": function(params){ var carousel = params.obj.getCarousel(); var pages = carousel._pages; // if same page, don't beacon if(("_ult_current_page" in carousel) && carousel._ult_current_page==pages.cur) return false; // keep track of current position within this closure carousel._ult_current_page = pages.cur; return true; } }, "yui-carousel-next" : { "node" : "a", "data" : {"sec":"HCMOL on article right rail","slk":"next","itc":"1" }, "bubbles" : true, "test": function(params){ var carousel = params.obj.getCarousel(); var pages = carousel._pages; // no more pages, don't beacon again // if same page, don't beacon if(("_ult_current_page" in carousel) && carousel._ult_current_page==pages.cur) return false; // keep track of current position within this closure carousel._ult_current_page = pages.cur; return true; } } } } } } })); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {Y.namespace("Media").ywaSettings = '"projectId": "10001256862979", "documentName": "", "documentGroup": "", "ywaColo" : "vscale3", "spaceId" : "2145892301" ,"customFields" : { "12" : "classic", "13" : "story" }'; Y.Media.YWA.init(Y.namespace("Media").ywaSettings); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {(function() { try{ if (Math.floor(Math.random()*10) == 1) { var loc = window.location, decoded = decodeURI(loc.pathname), encoded = encodeURI(decoded), uri = loc.protocol + "//" + loc.host + encoded + ((loc.search.length > 0) ? loc.search + '&' : '?') + "_cacheable=1", xmlhttp; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); else xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); xmlhttp.open("GET",uri,true); xmlhttp.send(); } }catch(e){} })(); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {if(document.onclick===YAHOO.Media.PreventDefaultHandler.newClick){document.onclick=YAHOO.Media.PreventDefaultHandler.oldClick;} }); }); });