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| 2010 Contest Guidebook |
http://www.arborday.org/kids/postercontest/index.cfm
Pennsylvania’s 2009 Arbor Day Winners:
1st Place Winner: Nancy Duong, Henry A. Brown School
2nd Place Winner: Gabby Wright, New Bloomfield Elementary School
As part of continuing efforts to raise awareness of the need to support school music programs, MENC is working with Department of Education officials to launch a series of student performances on the plaza in front of the Department of Education building in Washington, DC.
On October 16, MENC Executive Director John Mahlmann (right) and Education Secretary Arne Duncan attended the Principal’s Institute and Awards Banquet in Washington, DC, sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals to honor the Principals of the Year. At the event, the two discussed developing plans for student performances at the Department of Education.
The student performance initiative is supported by the SupportMusic coaliton, of which MENC and NAMM, the International Music Products Association are major sponsors.
—Elizabeth Lasko, October 28, 2009. © MENC: The National Association for Music Education
YouTube’s Promoted Videos program has spread again. In addition to Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S., promoted videos are now available in Australia and Japan.
If you’re not familiar with the Promoted Videos program, the following video does a pretty good job of explaining its purpose (odd motorcycle accident metaphor aside):
As for what the effect of the expansion will be, a post on the YouTube Biz Blog explained, "This is great for content creators in Japan and Australia — who will now be able to drive views of their videos in-country — but it also makes it possible for our existing Promoted Videos advertisers to get their content in front of a truly global audience. Anyone who runs a Promoted Videos campaign can choose to have their video promoted in any (or all) of these ten countries."
And it’s reasonable to bet that the number of countries will soon increase. The inclusion of nine nations (Promoted Videos launched in the U.S.) in two weeks’ time established quite a pace, after all, and with the holiday season almost here, YouTube has a special reason not to slack off now.
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The Future University (cool name) in Hakodate, Northern Japan, presented the Ikabo, a giant squid robot at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo (that ended on Sunday). Not only is the robot tall (2.2m), cute and pretty heavy (weight: 200kg), but it also mimics your hand movements via Wii motion controllers.
Ikabo is based on an air servo system, and you can also move his head and even his eyes with the Wii controllers. It makes noises to scare potential alien invaders away (the robot was actually part of a promotional campaign that used this scenario to boost the numbers of tourists in Hakodate). Ikabo has a total of 12 joints that make him move like a real squid (well, kind of).
Here’s a short video I took at the expo that shows how Ikabo works:
Apple is putting a lot of emphasis on its “green” initiatives lately. But is it the real deal?
For example, Apple’s new energy efficiency page says that because 53 percent of Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions are a result of the power its products consume, it’s designing these products to be as energy efficient as possible employing three strategies to reduce energy consumption: more efficient power supplies, components that require less power, and power management software. Every new Mac is claimed to meet the strict low-power requirements of the Energy Star specification.
However, the operative questions are how much does “green computing” matter to consumers, and whether corporate marketing of “green” IT devices amounts to more image-spinning than substance.
Some critics, such as MacNewsWorld’s Rob Enderle accuse Apple of doing the “barest minimum necessary” to justify its “green” claims — indeed less than its major competitors, but viewed pragmatically that’s a sensible approach because based on his research into the matter, in Enderle’s view Apple’s customers mostly don’t care. Is that an accurate assessment, or exaggeratedly jaundiced? After all, environmentalist poster boy Al Gore sits on Apple’s board of directors.
Enderle claims that Apple tried to ignore green computing entirely until the eco-activist organization Greenpeace began relentlessly slagging the company as an environmental foot-dragger and laggard.
Apple’s website highlights several key areas in which it’s addressing its environmental footprint, citing engineering innovations such as the unibody MacBooks, whose light, fully recyclable housing is sculpted from a single billet of aluminum, and the lightness of the current iMacs which contain less than 20 pounds of materials.
Apple also claims to be at the industry forefront in eliminating toxic chemicals, such as arsenic, brominated flame retardants (BFRs), mercury, phthalates, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from its products.
Cupertino has reduced packaging bulk, and, somewhat questionably in my view, bundles fewer peripherals with its systems, which arguably has some minimal environmental benefit, but also saves Apple a fair bit of money while diminishing value to the consumer of what is a premium-priced product.
For example, the new WallStreet PowerBook I bought in 1999 came with video, Ethernet, and modem cables and a decent hard copy manual. To connect the unibody MacBook I bought this year to an external monitor I need one of several varieties of Mini DisplayPort adapters, have to supply my own Ethernet cable, was obliged to buy a USB modem, and documentation amounted to a quick start pamphlet. Environmental sensibilities notwithstanding, I don’t perceive this as progress.
Apple’s claims of cleaning up its environmental footprint act do have substance in terms of operational energy consumption. One reason using laptops has long appealed to me is that because they must be able to operate on battery power, they’re engineered for energy efficiency. However, even Apple’s mass market desktops have very decent energy consumption profiles these days, with iMacs reportedly using about as much energy as a 60-watt lightbulb, and Mac minis substantially less than that.
But how much does the average Mac-buyer care? I’ve been almost exclusively a laptop user for the past 13 years, but even back when I used desktops, I almost always shut them down if I would be away from the keyboard for a half-hour or more. My observation was that most people were inclined to just leave their computers up and running all day, and even in many instances all night as well.
My inference, not only in the context of personal computers and other IT devices, is that while people like to think of themselves as being “green” and environmentally conscientious, their resolve tends to flag quickly when reducing their personal environmental footprint begins to involve more than minimal inconvenience and/or significantly increased cost, so that for many a commitment to “greenness” is heavier on politically correct rhetoric and feel-good exercises that let one imagine they’re “doing something” virtuous to save the planet with empty symbolic gestures rather than substantive behavior changes, like, say, taking fewer showers or washing clothes less often, or shutting off (or sleeping) their computer when not using it.
A Pew Research study found the average North American’s definition of what constitutes “necessity” these days includes a car (91 percent), washer (90 percent), dryer (83 percent), home air conditioning (83 percent), microwave (68 percent), TV (64 percent), car air conditioning (59 percent), and home computers (51 percent). Substantial minorities also included cell phone (49 percent), dishwasher (35 percent), cable or satellite TV (33 percent), and high-speed Internet (29 percent), and a few even considered a flat screen TV (5 percent) and an iPod (3 percent) “necessities.”
Am I being overly cynical? How much do Apple’s and the other computer-makers’ green efforts impact your buying intentions and user behavior?
Brooks writes “For once it looks like the NFL isn’t the bad guy in an intellectual property dispute, and actually are the ones trying to explain some of the issues with copyright maximalism to colleges. The problem is that the company who records scouting tapes for eight major conferences has convinced colleges that the NFL should pay for the right to use those tapes to scout players, in particular juniors who are trying to decide whether to enter the draft.
From the NFL’s point of view, the junior scouting program exists to help keep kids in school if they’re unlikely to succeed in the draft in their junior year (it’s certainly in the NFL’s interest to have those kids continue to develop their talent for one more year). The colleges, of course, see the “value” the tapes bring to the NFL and want a piece of that pie. So far, the NFL seems to be sticking to its guns and basically saying “fine, we just won’t scout your players.” The dispute has escalated to the point where some colleges aren’t even letting NFL scouts look at tape on campus.
There’s a bit of a sweet good-for-the-gander element to the story, since the NFL has been on the other side of the content value argument pretty much forever. It does kind of suck, though, that some college juniors will be entering the draft based on overoptimistic expectations. And it can’t be good for a college’s football program if it becomes known that it doesn’t allow NFL scouting.”
Yes, you read that right. It seems that the in this era of copyright maximalism, a company is trying to claim copyright on scouting tapes that are helpful to everyone (teams get better scouting info to make decisions, players are more accurately ranked, etc.). A friend who follows minor league baseball mentioned this week that Major League Baseball just took down its own scouting videos that had been online, so I’m wondering if baseball is now facing a similar problem as well.
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It’s only been a day since Tekken 6 hit retail (officially, at least), and already it’s making its way into the record books – the Guinness Book of …
We’ve been told that in conjunction with the DROID launch, Verizon is going to be creating a “first-of-its-kind” interactive experience in New York City. What’s the name of it? “DROID Does Times Square.” Our connect says that this experience will let people control two of Times Square’s largest digital billboards — the NASDAQ and Reuters signs — using only voice commands. What you see above is a “sneak peak” of what it’s going to look like.
The Federal Communications Commission has its eye on television broadcast spectrum, an analyst group has confirmed. At stake is about 300 MHz of spectrum currently delivering the nation’s NBC, CBS, ABC and other broadcast channels over the airwaves. Just months after forcing broadcasters to go through the process of switching spectrum through the digital television transition, the FCC wants to take part of the broadcasters’ new home back so carriers can deliver mobile broadband. They should.
As we treat our wireless devices like mobile computers (and even access the web on our laptops via cellular connections) data use is going up exponentially. Cisco estimates a 66-fold growth between 2008 and 2013 on mobile networks.
Based on Cisco’s findings that global average broadband consumption on wired networks was 11.4GB per month, the U.S. would need at least 120 MHz per carrier to fulfill that demand on the current generation wireless networks, Peter Rysavy, a wireless consultant with Rysavy Research, told me in an email a few days ago. Currently most carriers in large markets have about 100 MHz. The U.S. has about 50 MHz in the pipeline and 409.5 MHz of spectrum currently assigned for commercial wireless use, according to the CTIA. The CTIA filed a report with the FCC on Friday asking for it to release a total of 800 MHz for mobile broadband.
With this mobile demand doomsday scenario in mind, the FCC has approached a reluctant broadcast industry about auctioning off some of that spectrum to carriers and sharing the proceeds of that auction. (A CES study issued last Friday put the value of that spectrum at $62 billion.) Given that unlike the carriers, broadcasters have never paid for their spectrum, some people think this plan is kind of like paying squatters to get off useful land. However, Stifel analysts think any effort to get the spectrum released would require an act of Congress and a considerable legislative fight. Given recent history, I think the Stifel guys are right.
The broadcasters have 6 MHz of spectrum to use in order to deliver their programming. An HD stream conservatively requires between 2 MHz and 3 MHz to broadcast, so the FCC is interested in appropriating the other 3 MHz or 4 MHz. Some broadcasters are keen to use the excess to deliver over-the-air mobile television through a standard proposed by the Open Mobile Video Coalition. Here’s most of the chunk of spectrum we’re talking about:
In a perfect world, where everyone had fat broadband pipes, this wouldn’t even have to be up for much debate, because television, even broadcast TV, could be delivered via home broadband connections, as is the case with services like FiOS TV and U-verse. However, folks have to pay for that service rather than just buy a television capable of receiving digital signals, and since 10 percent of the population don’t have a pay TV subscription, that’s a lot of people who would be forced to buy a previously free service. The government has bent over backwards for those people before.
Plus, even the cable guys and telcos get their broadcast signals over-the-air and then packetize them and send them to subscribers, although this could change. So in a way, the idea of allocating more spectrum for broadband at the expense of TV is an example of an older technology being forced to make way for a newer one. I don’t think that’s what the FCC plans to do here, since broadcasters do hold more spectrum than they can currently use to deliver shows like “30 Rock” or “CSI,” but I expect the broadcast industry to hold onto their megahertz as tightly as they can.
Health care reform will be high on the list of topics for President Barack Obama’s meeting next Thursday with representatives of the nation’s 564 federally recognized tribes. The president said he looks forward to talks with tribal leaders about ways to “improve their lives and the lives of their peoples.”
The president will be looking for political support from Indian Country for his broader reform proposals, while tribal leaders will be seeking improvements in the health care system for American Indians and Alaskan Natives.
The U.S. Indian Health Service is the closest thing this country has to a single-payer system, serving nearly two million American Indians and Alaskan Natives in 36 states. The agency represents the promise of health care for American Indians made through treaties and other laws and is a full health care delivery system. The IHS operates hospitals and clinics, funds tribal and urban facilities and manages programs ranging from sanitation to diabetes care.
But virtually everyone recognizes the IHS is seriously under-funded.
“Putting all the legal aspects aside, I think the trust responsibility can be summed up by saying that something is owed to American Indians for the lands that were both voluntarily given to the United States and forcefully taken, as well as the atrocities that were committed against their peoples,” said Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey at an Oct. 20 hearing about Indian health care. “But the federal government has consistently failed to live up to this responsibility in almost every respect.”
The Indian Health Service, in fact, doesn’t even count as an acceptable insurance plan under any reform bill. This is ironic because those same health proposals exempt American Indians from the individual mandate to purchase health insurance because of that IHS promise. But unless funding improves, health care reform will guarantee a permanent disparity in just about every Native American health statistic.
At a meeting of the National Congress of American Indians last month tribal leaders said they would ask the president for at least a “no harm” statement protecting the “already strained” Indian Health Service from future cuts.
Yet no one is asking the president for full IHS funding — at least directly.
One idea is to improve the IHS’ ability to tap Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Indian Health Service was left out of the original Medicare and Medicaid legislation and was not added until the Indian Health Care Improvement Act in 1976. It now receives about $650 million a year from Medicare and Medicaid, a figure still considerably less than it could be because entitlements promise money for every eligible person. However, the IHS is funded by annual appropriation.
These days Medicare is considered a nearly universal system for America’s elders, There is a 20-fold difference in the actual number of Native elders 65 years of age and older not covered by Medicare than and the U.S. general population (or 15% versus 0.7%). Native elders do not have enough quarters of work to qualify for Medicare, but do qualify for Medicaid.
Enrolling more Native Americans in Medicaid is complicated by the partnership between federal and state governments. States write the rules, under broad guidelines, while the federal government pays for nearly all of the cost for Indian health programs. The Government Accountability Office found that the range of Medicaid reimbursements at IHS facilities ranged from 2 to 49 percent and not surprisingly, “the facilities with higher reimbursements had additional funds to hire staff and purchase equipment and supplies.”
The practical problem for Medicaid is its administration by state governments, which have uneven relationships with tribes and Indian organizations. Even if those states work well with tribes, imagine the complexity for tribes with members living on their home reservation, but in different states. For example the Navajo Nation program managers must help clients navigate the eligibility process under specific rules for Medicaid programs in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
This is a way to save money by cutting waste. Instead of sending federal dollars to state Medicaid (and Children’s Health Insurance Program) offices, there ought to be a way to transfer money directly to IHS. There could be a new set of flexible rules written for Native Americans with far less administrative overhead than the 36 different systems. The federal government could treat Indian Country, at least for health programs, as the 51st state. This seems to me a practical application of the nation-to-nation relationship.
Mark Trahant is the former editor of the editorial page for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He was recently named a Kaiser Media Fellow and will spend the next year examining the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health reform debate. He is a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.
While I’m not quite down with a lot of Watchismo’s aesthetic choices, you gotta respect his drive. This guy loves Swiss quartz, crazy designs, and even goes nuts over Hamilton Electrics, watches that are so odd that only one person in the world can fix them.
Dudes like Watchismo and ABlogToRead really took up the watch coverage torch and they’re doing some of the freshest watch reporting out there. Good on ‘em.
The Government has condemned today’s bomb attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan which left dozens of people dead, including United Nations staff.
The Prime Minister told the House of Commons that he had sent a message to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to express his condolences following the explosion in Afghanistan.
At least five UN workers were killed when Taliban suicide bombers attacked a guesthouse in the capital Kabul.
The PM said:
“On behalf of the British people, this morning I have sent a message to the UN Secretary General offering our condolences and support following the Taliban attack on the UN in Kabul this morning.”
About 100 people were killed and 200 injured when a car bomb went off in a market in Peshawar, Pakistan.
During a phone call to Ban Ki Moon later in the day, Mr Brown passed on his deep condolences for the deaths of the UN staff in Kabul, saying the atrocity should strengthen further the resolve to see the job through in Afghanistan.
Read Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s comments on the attack in Peshawar
Mytrus, a stealth-mode provider of clinical trials for pharmaceutical customers, has secured $1 million of a $3 million funding round, according to a regulatory filing. No investor information was disclosed by the Mill Valley, Calif.-based company.
Nodality Inc. of South San Francisco has secured $3.5 million of a $10 million funding round, according to a regulatory filing. Past backers have included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Maverick Capital and TPG Biotech Partners. According to the TPG website, Nodality focuses on “personal diagnostics targeting cell-signaling pathway “nodes” detected in well defined cellular sub-populations from individual patients.” www.nodalityinc.com
Godengo, an Emeryville, Calif.-based provider of a Web publishing solution for local and regional magazines, has raised around $2.16 million in new funding, according to a regulatory filing. No investor information was disclosed. www.godengo.com
CorNova Inc., a Burlington, Mass.-based coronary stent maker, has raised $3 million in new VC funding, according to a regulatory filing. Past backers have included Siemens Venture Capital, CardioTech International Inc. and Implant Sciences Corp. www.cornova.com
Today, Obama Administration officials released a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by nine Federal Departments and Agencies to make it faster and simpler to build transmission lines on Federal lands. The goal of the agreement is to speed approval of new transmission lines, reduce expense and uncertainty in the process, generate cost savings, increase accessibility to renewable energy and jump start job creation.
The MOU has been signed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and Department of the Interior.
The agreement will cut approval time off the normal Federal permit process and help break down the barriers to siting new transmission lines by:
Designating a single Federal point-of-contact for all Federal authorizations;
Facilitating coordination and unified environmental documentation among project applicants, Federal Agencies, states, and tribes involved in the siting and permitting process;
Establishing clear timelines for agency review and coordination; and
Establishing a single consolidated environmental review and administrative record.
Instead of applicants going to multiple agencies, a single lead agency will coordinate all permits and approvals. The new process will keep applications on track by requiring agencies to set and meet clear deadline and improve transparency by creating a single record to be posted on line. The MOU does not alter the authority of any participating agencies, and all existing environmental reviews and safeguards are maintained fully.
Read the Memorandum of Understanding
Good news, everyone. (I hope people understand that reference.) Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City comes out tomorrow, and to help grease the wheels a little bit, this weekend will be a free-play weekend on Xbox Live for GTA IV. That is, if you have GTA IV but don’t subscribe to Xbox Live Gold, you’ll be able to play online multiplayer this weekend.
The deal goes from Friday to Sunday, and works for all the various GTA IV releases (The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony).
A couple of Rockstar people will be playing all night Saturday night, and their Gamertags are GwRockstar1 through GwRockstar16. Presumably there will be much trash talking and exploding cars.
Also, on Sunday, from 1pm to 3pm ET, you’ll be able to play with Henry Santos Jeter, who’s a singer in the band Aventura. So that’s neat, a successful musician taking time out of his day to run rampant throughout Liberty City with y’all.
The Prime Minister has met President Pratibha Patil of India in Downing Street as part of a three-day state visit to the UK.
President Patil and Gordon Brown discussed topics such as business, investment and education, climate change, terrorism and global poverty during their meeting this afternoon.
Last night, Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah attended a banquet for the Indian President hosted by the Queen at Windsor Castle.
During the remainder of her visit, President Patil will speak at the UK-India Business Council’s Annual Summit and co-launch The Queen’s Baton relay ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
