The fact the Feds even considered paying $430 million in 2011 bonus payments to government bureaucrats sickens me.

This one hits home, literally.

North Dakota passes Alaska as #2 Oil Producer, Anchorage Daily News.

This is a killer article on Mantis Shrimp and their visual capabilities. They both see and utilize a very unique and interstellar light/energy spectrum like a chameleon to disguise themselves from predators. The key is not why, but how.

http://arthropoda.southernfriedscience.com/?p=2964

So here it goes…I believe the CPL spectrum (interstellar in origin) to be the key to understanding photosynthesis, not Sunlight.

Here is a hilarious video on the mantis shrimp solving a rubrik’s cube:

This is cool, eh?

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-04/inside-first-production-ready-electric-airplane

We’ve been getting a higher number of close asteroid flyby’s the past few months and 2012 looks to be an unusually active year.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

“You’d be a fool to hold anything but cash now, and maybe a few bars of gold.”

This is a very interesting article on the dangerous role the Fed has played the past three years pumping away the value of our dollar into the bubble machine known as Wall Street. The article, titled  ”Why David Stockman isn’t buying it” summarizes the former Reaganomics wunderkind and Budget Director’s assertion that Wall Street and the Fed have colluded on establishing another enormous bubble that is about to burst in epic proportions and that these are very dangerous and unstable economic times ahead.

Here is a good excerpt from the U.S. article interviewing Stockman:

” . . .Q: What will 10-year Treasurys yield in a year or five years?

A: I have no guess, but I do know where it is now (a yield of about 2 percent) is totally artificial. It’s the result of massive purchases by not only the Fed but all of the other central banks of the world.

Q: What’s wrong with that?

A: It doesn’t come out of savings. It’s made up money. It’s printing press money. When the Fed buys $5 billion worth of bonds this morning, which it’s doing periodically, it simply deposits $5 billion in the bank accounts of the eight dealers they buy the bonds from.

Q: And what are the consequences of that?

A: The consequences are horrendous. If you could make the world rich by having all the central banks print unlimited money, then we have been making a mistake for the last several thousand years of human history.

Q: How does it end?

A: At some point confidence is lost, and people don’t want to own the (Treasury) paper. I mean why in the world, when the inflation rate has been 2.5 percent for the last 15 years, would you want to own a five-year note today at 80 basis points (0.8 percent)?

If the central banks ever stop buying, or actually begin to reduce their totally bloated, abnormal, freakishly large balance sheets, all of these speculators are going to sell their bonds in a heartbeat.

That’s what happened in Greece.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The Fed is a patsy. It is a pathetic dependent of the big Wall Street banks, traders and hedge funds. Everything (it does) is designed to keep this rickety structure from unwinding. If you had a (former Fed Chairman) Paul Volcker running the Fed today 7/8— utterly fearless and independent and willing to scare the hell out of the market any day of the week — you wouldn’t have half, you wouldn’t have 95 percent, of the speculative positions today. . . . ”

Read it here.

Russian Times article:  It’s interesting given the timeframe of this possible 2012 DA-14 asteroid strike and the fact it’s within one month of the interpreted Mayan calendar end date in December, 2012…if the threat is legitimate it will come down to the composition of the 60-meter asteroid (heavy materials = not good). The fact it will pass underneath a number of orbiting satellites means a very close shave.

http://rt.com/news/paint-asteroid-earth-nasa-767/

NASA is claiming the chance of impact at 0.022%, but this may be a bit low based on the asteroid’s trajectory.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2012da14.html 

Teaching 2030, by Barnett Berry.

Teaching 2030 is an interesting take on what our education system may evolve to in the year 2030 and suggested approaches for successfully navigating these turbulent technological and sociological waters. There were a few points of interest that I’ve highlighted, including the author’s four Emergent Realities:

 
1.  Personalized learning and transformed learning ecology for students and teachers “whereby digital tools provide a surfeit of choices for instant and accessible information, communication, and self expression” (Barnett, 17).

2.  Seamless connections in and out of cyberspace – “where virtual collaboration and new technologies expand learning opportunities beyond geographical limits and the traditional 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day” (Id.).

3.  Differentiated “professional pathways along which teachers develop specialized skills and work in flexible roles that contribute to the educational enterprise” (Id. at 18).

4.  Evolution of “teacherpreneurism and a future of [educational] innovation. Teachers will be come an adaptive profession that empowers and rewards members who develop their pedagogical talent, spread and ‘sell’ their expertise, and find innovative solutions to the challenges their students face ” (Id.).

Also, I found of interest Barnett’s take on the expanded role of teachers and other educational service providers in the bureaucratic model:

1.  Learning fitness instructors – help learners build and strengthen the basic cognitive, emotional, and social abilities essential to learning.

2.  Personal educational advisors – assigned to help families create, nurture, and maintain personal learning ecologies.

3.  Community intelligence cartographers – tap the collective local intelligence of their communities.

4.  Education sousveyors – keep the learning process transparent.

5.  Social capital platform developers – provide accounting of people’s contributions to teaching and electronically track outcomes to resources and collaborative processes.

6. Learning journey mentors – work with the other team members to coordinate and navigate learning itineraries.

7.  Assessment designers – assess media literacy and other innovative forms of instructions (Id. at 114-15).

I especially liked the author’s statement near the end of the book:

 
Finally, teachers need to band together to “document their professional practice and assemble both empirical evidence and compelling stories about what works in their classrooms and communities – and therefore what matters most for public policy” (Id. at 210).

I highly recommend this book to any educator or person interested in the topic of our nation’s public education future.

Interesting Anchorage Daily News article on the Baby Boomer’s new work slogan…”work ’til you drop“.  I’m not sure our service-orientated economic model supports this philosophy. Time will tell.