Gleanings of the Week Ending December 29, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

Daphnia micrograph - a stacked image of a water flea

12 Things to Know about Mistletoe

2013: Hello. Goodbye. - from Richard Watson. How many things on the goodbye list are already gone for you?

6 top health benefits of kale

Top 25 Photographs from the Wilderness #3 - my favorite is the next the last one - the backlit leopard

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #32 - the first one is my favorite

Is Your Fridge Eating your Savings?

The Joy of Salt Licking: Contest Turns Farm Animals into Fine Artists - Cows and their salt licks

Geography in the News: Lake-Effect Snow - from National Geographic

Characteristics of US Science and Engineering Doctorates Detailed in New Report

2012: The year in space - My favorite is the Space Shuttle Endeavor making its final journey across the US

2012: The year in weather - from around the world. My favorite picture of this group is the mother of pearl clouds in Scotland 

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 10, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

Genetic Roulette - The Gamble of our Lives - 1.5 hour video about GMOs….even if you want to dismiss the issue as unimportant to you, you should understand why many people and countries are not.

Non-GMO Shopping Guide - Even without labels…you can

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #26 - Which one is your favorite? I like the painted sandgrouse this week although the great blue heron is always a favorite too.

Eight National Park Lodges Join Historic Hotels of America - Don’t all of the sound inviting…for themselves and where they are located.

Are Facebook and Internet Addictions Affecting Our Minds? - infographic

Golden stollen - wonder how one could make a gluten-free version of this

9 New Tree-Loving and Endangered Tarantula Species Discovered in Brazil - includes pictures of 6

Five Parks Where Winter Is Anything But Off-Season - Acadia, Biscayne, Channel Islands, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite

The most important education technology in 200 years - What will the surge in free instruction online do to the education business?

9 Varieties of Nutrient-Rich Winter Squash

Sandy Superstorm Development Animation - From University of Delaware using 800 infrared images from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 13, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

IGNITE - Inspiring Girls Now In Technology Evolution - the program in Seattle schools that is a best practice for educating young women about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers, well documented and is spreading to other school systems. There is a toolkit available.

Prairie seeds - a collection of seed pile pictures - guess what they are! The answers are at the bottom of the post. The rose hips are the only truly easy one!

Fall prairie pictures - from the Prairie Ecologist

Evolution of Milkweed Eating Insects - I actually propagated milkweed at the woods edge in my yard….for the monarch caterpillars!

Doctors Speak out About Unnecessary Care as Cost Put at $800 Billion a Year - As a patient….how does one distinguish the unnecessary care? How many times has a side effect from unnecessary medical treatment created another problem? This is not only expensive…it is also dangerous to health.

Nora Denzel Keynote Speech at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2012 - youtube video

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2012 wiki - links to information about each talk

Coursera - take the world’s best courses, online, for free

Extreme Weather Photo Contest Winners - From NASA. Shelf clouds, thunderstorm, walls of dust, lightning

Is reading in the dark bad for your eyesight? - It depends. Take a look at a summary of research on the topic.

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 12, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Yosemite Range of Light (video) - Series of time lapse images of Yosemite accompanied with well selected music. Whether you’ve been to Yosemite or not…worth looking at. Double click to see it full screen (then esc to go back to smaller format)

Moon Jellies (photo) - an intersection of life and art

A Look at Solar Growth in the US - (infographic) show top 9 states (Maryland is 9th!) and the demographics on who is installing solar

Find out your city’s air pollution grade from the American Lung Association - infographic and tool using zip code or a map to search the data for your city

Encyclopedia of Life Reaches Historic One Million Species Pages Milestone - If you haven’t already discovered the Encyclopedia of Life web site, it is well worth a look

Carbon Disclosure Project - (infographic) what local governments are doing

Backyard Color of the Week: Blue - collection of photos of blue life (mostly birds)

Top Countries for Higher Education - the environment for higher education around the world....it’s a different look than we get from looking at single institutions

UK stat: growing population over 100 years old - tremendous increase projected between now and 2066. The picture is the best part of the post - implying that this increase in older population will benefit the youngest of us!

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 21, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Trekking Poles - A comparison of 3 hiking sticks. I am eventually buy a pair

Innovate or Evaporate commentary - from Norm Augustine - After a major study of the ever widening education gap, Management Consultant McKinsey and Co. concluded that "if U.S. youth could match the academic performance of students in Finland, our economy would be between 9 and 16 percent larger."

4 feet of hail near Amarillo TX on 4/11 - Wow…and then came flash flooding when it melted

Traveler’s Checklist: Petrified Forest National Park - Things to do and see

1000 Days of Infrared Wonders - 10 images from the Infrared Array Camera aboard NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (there is a ‘tornado’ nebula!)

Magnifying the Universe - Click on the graphic…and start looking at the relative size of things…from the observable universe to a hydrogen atom

Space Shuttle Discovery Flies Over the National Mall - En route to its museum home on 4/17

Atul Gawande: How do we heal medicine (TED talk)

The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap - Almost half the readers of Wikipedia are women but they make up only 13% of those that contribute…and it appears to be impacting the content

State of Flux - NASA’s images of change…mining growth in Chile, Dead Sea, plus more…in time for Earth Day on 4/22 (look at the bottom to see more before and after images…there is a series of pictures of the Dallas-Fort Worth area from 1974 to 2003)

15 Earth Day Tips that Really Make a Difference

Quote of the Day - 2/2/2012

The nation at war had formed the habit of summary action, and it was not soon unlearned. - Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

~~~~~

Wars result in more than just winners and losers…changes in country boundaries. They are disruptions that often change life in fundamental ways. The quote today is about the impact of World War I on the US - pointing out that the pace of life had changed significantly. The faster pace of the 20s must have seemed quiet alien and not even the depression damped it back to the pre-World War I level.  It was a step increase rather than a more gradual trend that has happened since.

World War II set the stage for college education being opened to a much larger portion of the population. Prior to that time, the people that went to college were mostly from elite families that could afford to subsidize their children into adulthood. The GI Bill meant that almost all men could earn the opportunity to go to college. It took a while for the trend to spread to women but it did. Again - it was a step increase initiated by the war and then a gradual increase in availability and accessibility of college education after that.

Think back on your family history and talk to family members that remember the time before World War II if you are fortunate enough to have them with you. How did the war change the lives of your family?

  • Did fewer of them remain farmers?
  • Did they migrate from wherever they were before? How many ended up on a ‘suburb’?
  • Where were babies born (hospital or at home)?
  • What kind of school did the children go to (building, size of classes, type of teacher, school sponsored activities)?

Did the Korean, Vietnam, and 1st Iraq Wars have an impact that was significant? Perhaps these conflicts should have taught us more than they did.

It is probably too early to determine the most significant change the Afghanistan/Iraq war has had on our nation. Based on the amount of time and the lives lost, we should expect that there is something.

Perhaps it will be our acceptance of a dramatic reduction in personal privacy initiated by the increased surveillance in our lives (for example, airport security checkpoints). Of course, the advent of social media and data mining on the internet has happened concurrently and that did not happened because of the war. Taken together the ‘step’ erosion of privacy is probably already a reality.

Perhaps it will be our use of surrogates - drones flown by remote pilots or computer controlled vehicles - that will change things over the long haul. It depends on how the technology is translated from the military world into the day to day lives of people. Certainly driverless cars on our streets and highways would change our day to day lives.

What else might be the most significant change from the Afghanistan/Iraq war?