Veterans find financial relief
September 28, 2009
When Shane McCracken was relieved of active duty from the Marine Corps, he planned to use his GI Bill benefits to fund his college education.
But actually receiving the benefits proved difficult.
“I came from Metropolitan Community College and … I was getting the Montgomery GI Bill and they were just absolutely a terror when it came down to getting my cash and paying off school to the point where they would not let you attend classes till the government coughs up cash for it,” McCracken said.
Source: http://www.unews.com/news/2009/09/28/News/Veterans.Find.Financial.Relief-3785683.shtml
SIFE discovers whole new world
September 28, 2009
With seven days, six schools and a world much different than our own, the UMKC SIFE team became trail blazers for the future of international education.
From Sept. 12-19, nine members of the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) travelled through China, speaking to more than 1,600 Chinese students interested in studying abroad about what it’s like to be a student in America.
Source: http://www.unews.com/news/2009/09/28/News/Sife-Discovers.Whole.New.World-3785684.shtml
Cruising through recycling
September 21, 2009
A drive through small mountains of what some might call trash was an educational experience for students, staff and faculty last week.
The UMKC Sustainability Team sent two groups of team members to the Deffenbaugh Recycling Materials Recovery Facility to get the inside scoop on recycling.
Source: http://www.unews.com/news/2009/09/21/News/Cruising.Through.Recycling-3778012.shtml
Growing Roo gardners
September 14, 2009
Cases of “green thumb” are sprouting up across campus.
All evidence points to a formerly vacant lot at 54th and Charlotte streets, just behind the Education Building.
The culprit is the student-organized UMKC community garden.
“It’s a really neat thing,” said student gardener Suzette Spitzmiller, who has been helping with the project.
Source: http://www.unews.com/news/2009/09/14/News/Growing.Roo.Gardners-3770731.shtml
New technology transforms classrooms
September 14, 2009
Technology around the world is expanding every day.
Now education and technology have paired up at UMKC to help both students and professors.
In fact, podcasts and video are now the up-and-coming tools for education in the eyes of Vishal Kurup, software support analyst for UMKC Information.
Source: http://www.unews.com/news/2009/09/14/News/New-Technology.Transforms.Classrooms-3770735.shtml
Step right up and lock it down! Alpha Five Security Webinar!
September 14, 2009
How safe is your Web application? You see it in the headlines every week. Some malicious hacker manages to make off with credit card numbers, personal information, or security secrets. The latest, and most notorious concerns a 28-year-old from Florida who allegedly stole over 150 million credit card numbers from TJ Maxx, Dave and Busters, Heartland Payment Systems, and 7-11.
But security breaches and cyber crimes aren’t limited to just big companies. Any business that has valuable or sensitive data needs to keep that data protected and available to users on a need to know basis. And no reputation — from the smallest Mom and Pop shop, to the world’s largest corporation — can come out unscathed from a security breach.
- Businesses want to be confident that their customer information is protected and private.
- Colleges and schools want to feel that student academic and payment records can only be viewed and modified by authorized users.
- Medical professionals don’t want to worry that patient health records could become available to anyone other than the patient and their doctors.
- Cities and towns, police departments and government agencies need to assure the public that information in their systems is secure.
And many laws have been (and will be) introduced that obligate you as a developer, administrator, or business owner to keep your data safe. Some of this legislation includes HIPPA (for health insurance), FERPA (for student and education records), GLBA (for banking and insurance) as well as the PCI DSS regulations (for anyone who handles credit cards). Similar legislation exists in other countries worldwide. And the penalties for non-compliance are high. In the case of PCI DSS, you could be fined $10,000 for each credit card account that is stolen or compromised.
That’s why Alpha Five has built-in security. It’s easy to implement, and we’ve created our newest webinar to show you how. The Alpha Five Security Webinar will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 29, from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. (EDT). That’s 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. Pacific Time, and 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. UK Time.
Registration is open now, but hurry because the early bird $99-pricing ends this Thursday, Sept. 17.
See How to Use the Alpha Five Built-in Security Module
Since Version 8, Alpha Five has had a comprehensive Web Security Framework integrated right into the product. But in order to take full advantage of it, you need to know how it works and how to use it effectively.
In this webinar, Jerry Brightbill — the creator of Alpha Five’s Security Framework — will explain everything you need to know to implement security in your Alpha Five Web applications with confidence. During the tw-hour session, you will:
- Learn how to avoid common mistakes that could render your application vulnerable.
- See how Alpha Five’s architecture protects your data tables.
- See how to set up security groups with different access rights.
- Learn how to tie your application into the built in security module using the ULINK field.
- Learn about the new component level security, which allows components to show different fields to different users.
- Be able to assure your clients with confidence that their applications and data are secure.
We received a ton of great feedback from attendees of our Alpha conference in August, and as a result, we wanted to make an additional security webinar based on Jerry’s presentation at the conference available to those of you who could not attend. This is not a replay. Rather, it’s a live, two-hour event given by Jerry and recorded so that you can review it later for reference.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AlphaSoftware/~3/ABY7EJWLkqg/step-right-up-and-lock-it-down-alpha.html
Baldock petition set to be approved by the
September 14, 2009
Baldock petition set to be approved by the clerk
I have been advised that Larry Baldock has submitted the question, “should Citizens Initiated Referenda seeking to amend or repeal a law be binding”, to the clerk, who has indicated that it will be approved for a petition. Should the petition be successful and a referenda is called on the question as currently worded we would have wasted up to $18m on referenda for no substantial gain. If the votes go the way Baldock wants them to, and the Government agrees, any referenda to change or amend any law will be binding even if only 5 percent of registered voters take part – that’s hardly a mandate. Yet referenda seeking to create a new laws won’t be binding.
Consequently, this means, hypothetically, that that if a successful referendum was sought on “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand”, under such a law, the Government can simply repeal or amend the law how it wants to, because the question does not specifically direct how the Government should amend or repeal the law. It merely has to ensure that only smacks as part of “good” parental correction have to be addressed by an amendment or repeal of the law .
Meaning the term “correction” in the act can merely be amended to “correction that is not part of good correction”, or similar wording.. And who decides what is “good”, and if it is part of correction? Because, under this scenario, if a smack it is not part – even a minor part – of correction – it will still be a criminal offence as currently. And only “good” correction that is reasonable would be illegal.
Another example raised by the Beretta blog. Imagine living in Germany, where home schooling families are treated like criminals, parents are imprisoned and children removed from the household if they were schooled from home. If the majority in a referendum – say 2.6 percent of the voting population in a 5 percent vote – supported an amendment of existing education law, cementing the right of authorities to immediately and permanently remove children from families suspected of homeschooling, should the state be bound to obey?
Although I support the motives behind this approach – to have the government adhere to the wishes of the people in certain circumstances – the petition question needs to be reworded to achieve the aim of the petitioner, I would have thought. Or perhaps the aim of this petition is merely publicity for the petitioner, not legislative change.
Berkman Center Lecture / Webcast > Transforming Scholarly Communication | September 18 2009 |
September 13, 2009
Lee Dirks / Director, Education & Scholarly Communication / Microsoft External Research
Friday/ September 18, 1:15pm / Pound Hall Room 100 (Map) / Free and Open to the Public /
In Person > RSVP Requested / Webcast > Live at 1:15 pm ET.
This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Business School Knowledge and Library Services, Harvard Law School Library, and the Office for Scholarly Communication.
In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives.
There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research – from bio-informatics and earth systems science to social science and archeology. There will also be an explosion in the amount of research data collected in the next decade – petabytes will be common in many fields. These future research requirements constitute the ‘eResearch‘ agenda.
Powerful software services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to form the necessary ‘Cyberinfrastructure‘ to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community.
The difficulties in combining data and information from distributed sources, the multi-disciplinary nature of research and collaboration, and the need to move to present researchers with tooling that enable them to express what they want to do rather than how to do it highlight the need for an ecosystem of Semantic Computing technologies.
Such technologies will further facilitate information sharing and discovery, will enable reasoning over information, and will allow us to start thinking about knowledge and how it can be handled by computers.This talk will review the elements of this vision and explain the need for semantic-oriented computing by exploring eResearch projects that have successfully applied relevant technologies — and anticipated impact on scholarly communication as we know it today.
It will also suggest that a software + service model with scientific services delivered from the cloud will become an increasingly accepted model for research.
About Lee
Lee Dirks is the Director of Education & Scholarly Communications in Microsoft’s External Research division, where he manages a variety of research programs related to open access to research data, interoperability of archives and repositories, preservation of digital information as well as the application of new technologies to facilitate teaching and learning in higher education.An 20-year veteran across multiple information management fields,
Lee holds an M.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as well as a post-masters degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University. In addition to past positions at Columbia and with OCLC (Preservation Resources),
Lee has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining the company in 1996 – namely as the corporate archivist, then corporate librarian, and as a senior manager in the corporate market research organization.In addition to participation on several (US) National Science Foundation task forces, Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington Libraries as well as the iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Science program.
During his career, his team’s work on the library intranet site at Microsoft was recognized as a “Center of Excellence Award for Technology” in 2003 by the Special Library Association‘s (SLA) Business & Finance Division. Additionally, Lee was presented with the 2006 Microsoft Marketing Excellence Award by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer – for a marketing & engineering partnership around a breakthrough market opportunity analysis process which is now a standard operating procedure across Microsoft.
Source
[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/09/dirks]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Scholarship20/~3/_JhrCpvkrVg/transforming-scholarly-communication.html
Gen. ed. in focus
September 8, 2009
Higher education is changing and, along with it, so are general education requirements.
On Wednesday, Dr. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), spoke to faculty about adapting general education requirements to meet the needs of today’s higher education.
Source: http://www.unews.com/news/2009/09/07/News/Gen-Ed.In.Focus-3765565.shtml
Oyez! Oyez! Court set for Sotomayor ceremony – USA Today
September 8, 2009
Oyez! Oyez! Court set for Sotomayor ceremony – USA Today
 Washington Post |
Oyez! Oyez! Court set for Sotomayor ceremony
USA Today Tuesday at 2 pm, the Supreme Court will hold an investiture for new justice Sonia Sotomayor. USA TODAY previews the ceremony. A: It is the ceremonial commissioning of a new justice. Sotomayor will place her left hand on a … Elections for sale? A Threat to Fair Elections Court Hears Pre-term Case on Clinton Film |
Airline bomb plot: investigation ‘one of biggest since WW2′ – Telegraph.co.uk
 Telegraph.co.uk |
Airline bomb plot: investigation 'one of biggest since WW2'
Telegraph.co.uk Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Tanvir Hussain and Assad Sarwar, the Islamic terrorists who plotted to cause death “on an unprecedented scale”, in the words of the former home secretary John Reid, were finally brought to justice after one of the most complex and … British Court Convicts Three in Plot to Blow Up Airliners Britain Convicts Three in Plot to Rival 9/11 Three Britons convicted of plot to blow up planes |
Report: Obama administration improves openness – The Associated Press
 Washington Post |
Report: Obama administration improves openness
The Associated Press WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's policies on secrecy get higher grades for openness than those of President George W. Bush, yet there's still room for improvement, says a coalition of public interest groups. In a report issued Tuesday, … Obama's speech to schoolchildren Schools say no to Obama's speech Speech protests teach disrespect |
