Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
JANE WELLS, Correspondent - CNBC
Stephan: This report represents what I hope is going to be a new trend in education, one which discards the inappositely named No Child Left Behind educational programs of the Right, with standardized tests and rigid pedagogy, for truly innovative approaches to public education, such as this one. That this program emerged in a small Southern city is, itself, significant, in my view.
A group of students in a high school gym hovers over a remote controlled robot while it shoots basketballs from the free throw line with better precision than Dwight Howard. They built and programmed the robot themselves, and it won first prize in a global robotics competition.
In a classroom nearby, other students are studying leeches recently used in microsurgery to reattach a severed hand.
And down the hall, a third group of students is working on a team building exercise-competing against each other to build the tallest tower using nothing more than marshmallows and toothpicks. ‘We need to break these right here,’ says one student, as the exercise tests their communication skills and math. (Read More:Broken Education System To ‘Destroy Everything’ If Not Fixed: Langone)
You might think you’ve landed in a high-priced private high school, prepping teenagers for America’s top colleges. Instead, this is a public high school in a small town in Northern Arkansas.
Mountain Home Career Academies High School has taken a big gamble over the last decade. It transformed itself from a traditional high school into one consisting of three academies–engineering, communications, and healthcare. Unlike many high schools which have career mentoring programs tucked inside a regular curriculum, Mountain […]
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Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Once again, another institution -- in this case the media -- has become compromised by becoming non-fact based in the service of ideology. There is never a good outcome when this happens, and it corrodes the underpinnings of our democracy.
When it comes to reporting on what scientists say about climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists told Raw Story that their research shows Fox News can be counted upon to mislead its viewers.
In a study (PDF) published Monday, the group takes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to task for consistently misleading their audience on climate change. Data collected over six months showed that Fox News was the worst offender on climate issues between the two, allowing misleading statements to permeate ’93 percent
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Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
ANNIE-ROSE STRASSER, - Think Progress
Stephan: In addition to the financial aspects this inability on the part of American society to recognize the fundamental equality of women once again tells us that we place bias above facts. The money, in this sense, is just how the bias is counted.
Those societies with the most neurons firing on their behalf as a proportion of their total population prosper. Those with proportionally the least neurons firing -- because some social policy or bias keeps a large part of the population off the field, and out of the game, suffer and fail. This is what has eaten away from the inside the Arab-Persian Islamic world, the most extreme example of this principle.
Click through to see a chart listing the ten worst Congressional districts.
Women are earning less than men in 97 percent of Congressional districts, the National Partnership for Women and Families has calculated. That means that only 13 members of Congress have the privilege of representing an area where women are out-earning or making equal pay to men.
Nationally, women make just 77 cents to a man’s dollar on average, but in some districts, that number is as low as 61 cents:
The gender pay gap manifests itself in several ways. Some dispute the top-line average, claiming that women make choices about the amount they work and the type of work they pursue, which limits their earning power. But these ‘choices
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Monday, September 24th, 2012
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN ERLANGER, - The New York Times
Stephan: As I have been writing for years now, the result of the Neocons wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately produce only one toxic fruit -- virulent anti-Americanism, that will curse American Islamic relations for a generation, or more. Bombers and jihadists are the extreme. Here from the mouth of the Egypt's new president Mohamed Morsi is the moderate position. We need to pay attention. If we don't this trend spirals downward very quickly.
CAIRO - On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.
A former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi sought in a 90-minute interview with The New York Times to introduce himself to the American public and to revise the terms of relations between his country and the United States after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, an autocratic but reliable ally.
He said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt, long a cornerstone of regional stability.
If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.
And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn […]
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Monday, September 24th, 2012
KRISTEN GWYNNE, - Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Gosh, it seems like every week there is a new study reporting the benefits of marijuana in medicine. That this plant is illegal is so perverse as to almost be a social evil.
Two scientists at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco have found that cannabidiol (CBD), a non-toxic marijuana compound that delivers many of weed’s benefits without the high, might stop metastasis in aggressive cancer, ‘potentially altering the fatality of the disease forever.
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