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Saturday, October 26, 2013

Apple's iPad Air event roundup: new tablets, refreshed MacBook Pro with Retina display, Mavericks and more

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/22/apple-ipad-air-event-roundup/?ncid=rss_truncated
Tags: Blue Is the Warmest Color Brian Hoyer lil kim Jared Remy Cyclospora

Training the future biomanufacturing workforce

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

24-Oct-2013

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Contact: Kathryn Ruehle
kruehle@liebertpub.com
914-740-2100
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

Industry-academia partnerships are highlighted in a roundtable discussion



		IMAGE: Industrial Biotechnology, led by Co-Editors-in-Chief Larry Walker, PhD, Professor, Biological & Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and Glenn Nedwin, PhD, MoT, CEO and President, Caisson Biotech, LLC,... Click here for more information.

New Rochelle, NY, October 24, 2013To maintain strong growth of the bioeconomy, a pool of skilled workers is needed to fill biomanufacturing jobs in the areas of bioenergy and biobased products. A proven strategy for building a high-quality regional workforce is for colleges and industry to work together to develop innovation solutions that combine education and hands-on training, as described in a Roundtable Discussion published in Industrial Biotechnology (IB), a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Industrial Biotechnology website.

Moderator Sonia Wallman, PhD, Executive Director, Northeast Biomanufacturing Center and Collaborative (NBC2, Blue Bell, PA), leads a panel comprised of corporate executives, the directors of two academic biotechnology programs, and graduates of those programs who now work in the biofuels and renewable materials industries. In the Roundtable Discussion "Training Technicians to Support the Bioeconomy: Defining the Need; Designing and Implementing Innovative Solutions," the participants discuss industry workforce needs and the development of biomanufacturing degree programs that combine classroom learning with hands-on research and scale-up experience within a college laboratory or onsite in an industrial setting.

The Roundtable Discussion is part of an IB IN DEPTH Special Section on the Biomanufacturing Workforce published in the October issue of Industrial Biotechnology. The section also includes an Overview entitled "Meeting Current Needs and Assessing Future Opportunities to Drive the Global Bioeconomy;" and three Catalyzing Innovation articles: "Putting Life to Work: Tales of Community and Collaboration in Industrial Biotechnician Education," by Michael Fino, Director, Biotechnology Program, MiraCosta College (Oceanside, CA); "Strategic Alliances Create Path to Commercialization for a Microalgae-Focused Start-Up," by Adelheid Kuehnle, PhD, President, CEO, and Co-Founder, and Mark Ritchie, Chief Business Development Officer, Kuehnle AgroSystems (Honolulu, HI); and "Undergraduate Research: A Platform to Enhance Community College STEM Education," by Daniel Kainer, PhD, Director, Biotechnology Institute, Lone Star College-Montgomery (Conroe, TX).

"This issue of IB seeks to underscore the importance of hands-on education and training in developing the next generation of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and policy makers that will help drive the development of the global bioeconomy. Partnerships like those featured in this issue are essential to developing innovative educational and training programs to encourage young people to engage the bioeconomy and to support life-long learning for all those who desire to be part of the bioeconomy," says Larry Walker, PhD, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Professor, Biological & Environmental Engineering, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).

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About the Journal

Industrial Biotechnology, led by Co-Editors-in-Chief Larry Walker, PhD, Professor, Biological & Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and Glenn Nedwin, PhD, MoT, CEO and President, Caisson Biotech, LLC, Davis, CA, is an authoritative journal focused on biobased industrial and environmental products and processes, published bimonthly online with Open Access options and in print. The Journal reports on the science, business, and policy developments of the emerging global bioeconomy, including biobased production of energy and fuels, chemicals, materials, and consumer goods. The articles published include critically reviewed original research in all related sciences (biology, biochemistry, chemical and process engineering, agriculture), in addition to expert commentary on current policy, funding, markets, business, legal issues, and science trends. Industrial Biotechnology offers the premier forum bridging basic research and R&D with later-stage commercialization for sustainable biobased industrial and environmental applications. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Industrial Biotechnology website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Environmental Engineering Science and Sustainability: The Journal of Record. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Training the future biomanufacturing workforce

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

24-Oct-2013

[

| E-mail

]

Contact: Kathryn Ruehle
kruehle@liebertpub.com
914-740-2100
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

Industry-academia partnerships are highlighted in a roundtable discussion



		IMAGE: Industrial Biotechnology, led by Co-Editors-in-Chief Larry Walker, PhD, Professor, Biological & Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and Glenn Nedwin, PhD, MoT, CEO and President, Caisson Biotech, LLC,... Click here for more information.

###

About the Journal

About the Publisher

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| E-mail

Share

]

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/mali-ttf102413.php
Related Topics: the league Asap Rocky Zayn Malik

'Ready For Hillary' SuperPAC Gains Backing From Soros

George Soros, seen at a forum in Berlin last year, joined a superPAC backing a Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

George Soros, seen at a forum in Berlin last year, joined a superPAC backing a Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

It may not officially have a candidate to back quite yet, but for months Ready for Hillary has been revving up for 2016. Now, the superPAC has earned the support of a prominent Democratic donor.

Billionaire investor George Soros on Thursday joined the group, which is encouraging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to run for president, as a co-chairman of its national finance council. He also contributed $25,000 — the cap Ready for Hillary voluntarily set on individual donations — even though superPACs may raise unlimited funds.

"He brings a lot of prestige as a progressive donor who has supported grass-roots causes for decades," Ready for Hillary spokesman Seth Bringman said.

Soros had flown relatively under the radar during the last two presidential election cycles. He became a well-known political figure in the 2004 campaign, when he gave nearly $24 million to groups opposing President George W. Bush.

However, Soros has since still been a reliable Democratic benefactor. In 2012, he gave around $2.8 million to four Democratic-leaning superPACs — including $1 million to Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama group, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Other Ready for Hillary national finance council co-chairmen include Texas attorneys Steve and Amber Mostyn and the co-founder of the clothing line Esprit, Susie Tompkins Buell, all of whom are major Democratic donors. The council, whose members include those who have given at least $5,000 to the superPAC, is scheduled to meet in New York City on Nov. 12.

Ready for Hillary raised $1.25 million in the first half of the year. But it's unclear how much the group has brought in since then, as its next campaign finance report isn't due until January.

As the group waits for Clinton to make her decision, it has been mobilizing support for former Democratic National Committee chairman and Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe in the Nov. 5 Virginia gubernatorial election.

Bringman said Ready for Hillary also plans to help get out the vote for Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio, whom Clinton endorsed, and to be active in 2014 midterm races where Clinton chooses to throw her support behind a candidate.

Although Clinton hasn't publicly stated her opinion of Ready for Hillary, former aides in President Bill Clinton's White House, such as Harold Ickes and Craig Smith, have been advising the group.

Clinton has yet to announce her intentions for the 2016 presidential race. She has hit the speaking circuit over the past few months and has a new book set for release next year.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/25/240768788/ready-for-hillary-superpac-gains-backing-from-soros?ft=1&f=1014
Category: Red Sox Schedule cory booker Michael Girgenti

NPR Bestsellers: Paperback Nonfiction, Week Of October 24, 2013

At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington state — and she would do it alone.

Source: http://www.npr.org/books/bestsellers/paperback-nonfiction/2013/week43/?ft=1&f=1032
Tags: Doug Martin Government Shutdown Over Mexico vs Panama parenthood aaron hernandez

NPR Bestsellers: Paperback Nonfiction, Week Of October 24, 2013

Source: http://www.npr.org/books/bestsellers/paperback-nonfiction/2013/week43/?ft=1&f=1032
Category: act LC Greenwood burn notice nadal Karen Black

Farrah Abraham Comes under Fire on "Bethenny"

Never failing to conjure up drama wherever she goes, former "Teen Mom" starlet Farrah Abraham made an appearance on Bethenny Frankel's gripping TV talk show, "Bethenny." Both Frankel and the audience asked all of the difficult questions of the controversial reality star. One viewer was highly unsatisfied.

The guest stood and took the mic, slamming Abraham for waxing her 4-year-old daughter, Sophia's eyebrows while she was sleeping, and the "discussion" got so heated that Bethenny cut in on the conversation, breaking up the hurt feelings.

The interview took a turn for the worse when Farrah defended herself, saying, "After that whole situation in the media, I actually got a lot of fan mail from girls who were younger, who did have unibrows, and they only wished that their moms would have helped them."

"My head is going to pop off, I swear," the audience member said. "That is crazy. You're making a little girl believe that without you plucking her eyebrows, she won't have pretty pictures. She's 4 -- she's beautiful."

"It's not even pictures, and it's not that I'm telling my daughter she's not beautiful," Abraham said. "To be honest with you, she was sleeping, so it was like..."

However, before she was able to finished, the audience member cut her off, accusing her, "Oh my God. So that makes it better?" She turned to Frankel, saying, "She's out of her mind, I'm sorry."

Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/farrah-abraham/farrah-abraham-comes-under-fire-bethenny-950099
Category: Eileen Brennan

Friday, October 25, 2013

A School's iPad Initiative Brings Optimism And Skepticism

Students at Coachella Valley Unified School District use iPads during a lesson. The district's superintendent is promoting the tablet initiative as a way to individualize learning.

Coachella Valley Unified School District

Students at Coachella Valley Unified School District use iPads during a lesson. The district's superintendent is promoting the tablet initiative as a way to individualize learning.

Coachella Valley Unified School District

A growing number of school districts across America are trying to weave tablet computers, like the iPad, into the classroom fabric, especially as a tool to help implement the new Common Core state standards for math and reading.

One of California's poorest school districts, the Coachella Valley Unified southeast of Los Angeles, is currently rolling out iPads to every student, pre-kindergarten through high school. It's an ambitious effort that administrators and parents hope will transform how kids learn, boost achievement and narrow the digital divide with wealthier districts.

But, as with tablet efforts across the country, this one faces skeptics and obstacles. Some wonder if its projected benefits are being grossly oversold.

Personalizing Education

Before becoming Coachella Valley's superintendent of schools, Darryl Adams was a keyboardist and singer with the '80s pop rock band Xavion. It was a one-hit wonder, complete with '80s hairdos and a slot on a Hall & Oates tour. He says it was the first all-black rock band on MTV.

Today, Adams still has a touch of the showman as he talks about his school district's latest project.

"Everyone will have an iPad!" he says with a broad smile. "It's gonna be exciting!"

Music was Adams' passion when he was young; it was what inspired him in school. And he sees the iPad plan as central to exciting kids in school today. He argues that since the federal No Child Left Behind initiative 10-plus years ago, school districts have often failed to inspire kids. Instead, he says, they've been teaching them how to take tests.

"And that's not what education is about. So for the first time in our history as a nation, I think in the world, we're going to be able to individualize and personalize education," Adams says.

The district has leased the tablets from Apple at a cost of nearly $9 million. Voters here approved a bond issue, backed by property taxes, to pay for most of it. Funds from Title I — a federal program designed to help low-income schools — and from California's Common Core initiative are also being used for training and implementation.

Some 80 percent of kids in his district live in poverty, Adams says. He sees the tablet plan as a civil rights issue, noting that the bond measure passed with nearly 70 percent support. "Some of our families live in trailer home parks. Some are migrant farmers," he says. "But they're putting money on the line for each other, and that's a true indication the community cares about each other."

'No One Is The Expert Anymore'

The district has set up headquarters in a trailer to coordinate the massive distribution of nearly 20,000 iPads and accompanying training, security, curriculum changes, parental consent forms, and more. Inspirational quotes dot the walls — not from famous educators, but from Apple's late founder, Steve Jobs.

Matt Hamilton, the district's educational technology coordinator, says educators and students are learning from each other. "No one is the expert anymore," he says. "The whole paradigm has really shifted. Teachers are no longer the possessors of knowledge. They're more the facilitators of learning."

Students in seventh grade and up can take their tablets home on evenings, weekends and every school break except summer. Sixth grade and below will have to leave the devices in a locked classroom cart.

“ The whole paradigm has really shifted. Teachers are no longer the possessors of knowledge. They're more the facilitators of learning.

- Matt Hamilton, educational technology coordinator

The district set up a training program to highlight the best teaching practices and to brainstorm classroom curricula. Music teacher Michael Richardson, one of 120 pilot teachers, says he has involved students in figuring out the devices. One student, for example, found a promising music app and "he taught the class and taught me. It was kind of great," Richardson says.

Middle school English teacher Patricia Inghram was also in the pilot program, which tested the tablets in every grade and every subject matter throughout the district. She says she's been using them extensively and successfully in her classes for more than a year. Even though she's a longtime teacher who started out teaching on chalkboards, she says, "I feel comfortable enough to use it at this point, and I think they're fantastic tools."

High school geometry teacher Patrick Beal says the challenge is to make the tablet more than a glorified notebook. "The goal is to transform what I do in the classroom into something completely different: to take them outside of class, spark curiosity and inspire the learning process," he says.

Security Concerns

It's not clear how many schools or districts across the country are using tablets in the classroom. The U.S. Department of Education doesn't track the number, and an Apple spokesman declined to comment or provide numbers on how many schools have worked with iPad classroom initiatives.

Some districts have publicly stumbled with their initiatives. Los Angeles Unified students easily got around restrictions on their district-issued iPads last month: They simply deleted their personal profile info and then could surf the Web without restriction. LA quickly put on the brakes on its billion-dollar iPad rollout to boost security and make other changes. Several other districts across the country have also delayed their tablet plans because of security concerns.

Coachella Valley is trying to learn from LA's problems. It's working with Apple to strengthen profile security and will block harmful and inappropriate online content, as required under the rules for districts that receive federal tech dollars. For now, social media sites and YouTube will not be blocked.

Inghram says some security measures should be a classroom management issue. She has kids take a "tech oath" on digital citizenship and proper use of the iPad: no cyberbullying, harmful or inappropriate pictures or content, or social media during class time.

Some of the projects she's done in class include using the tablets to produce podcasts and link via Skype with experts at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Her favorite: virtually visiting the historic Globe Theatre in the U.K. during a lesson on Shakespeare.

Many of the kids never leave the area, Inghram says. "But being able to talk to someone who is sitting in the Globe Theatre and show them around the building and answer their questions about Shakespeare while you're reading his sonnets is an experience that, you know, it opens their eyes."

Lack Of Connection

But some teachers, parents and kids worry that there's a kind of iPad boosterism here that borders on naive. While school district officials are promoting the tablets as central to improving academic achievement, research on that so far is mixed at best.

At Coachella Valley High School, one of two high schools in the district, junior Cheyenne Hernandez says she's open to new media in the classroom but wonders if the iPad money might be better spent on other things. She says people will most likely steal them, break them or wear them out.

"And in a student's opinion, most of the kids are going to go on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram," she says.

“ That's where I see the difficulty. The disconnect is between giving students an iPad to use and making it relevant to the classroom.

- Rebecca Flanagan, high school librarian

And it's not clear how the district will integrate the curriculum with its ambitious tablet plan. Coachella Valley wants to make the iPads a central part of efforts to meet new Common Core state standards for math and English, and there are new Common Core apps coming out regularly.

But the head librarian of Desert Mirage High School, Rebecca Flanagan, wonders which ones the district will use, how well it will work and how it will all be integrated into a coherent plan.

"That's where I see the difficulty. The disconnect is between giving students an iPad to use and then making it relevant for the classroom," she says. "I mean, it's a toy for them."

Perhaps the biggest bug is connectivity: Large parts of the Coachella Valley are not covered by high-speed Internet. And even where it is available, many families here simply can't afford the service.

Tenth-grader Eli Servin is in a special education class at Coachella Valley High School. His teacher says he "really blossomed" using the iPad at school to help coordinate a recycling project. But at home, he has no Internet connection unless he's connecting to a hot spot on his sister's cellphone or using the Wi-Fi connection at a local McDonald's.

The district is using funding from the bond measure to boost Internet capacity and accessibility for its far-flung schools. But Adams, Coachella's superintendent, acknowledges that expanding connectivity to homes, especially in the district's many rural and impoverished pockets, will be much harder.

"I've told my staff: If we have to park a bus in the neighborhood with a Wi-Fi tower on it or whatever, we will do that to make sure that our students are connected," he says.

It's one of many issues that schools across the country will be intensely observing as the former pop rocker tries to pull off his biggest show yet.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/25/240731070/a-schools-ipad-initiative-brings-optimism-and-skepticism?ft=1&f=1013
Tags: Maria de Villota Nick Pasquale