Walden is proud to have more than 30 state teachers of the year—including Bob Williams, Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration student—currently working toward advanced degrees.
“The times that were most meaningful as a Teacher of the Year often involved public policy: working with policy-makers, panel discussions and work sessions with the Department of Education, and discussing education policy issues with senators, colleagues and union officials. I find the nature of public policy and its influences to be interesting and important,” Williams said.
Williams believes his greatest career accomplishment is the widespread enthusiasm for mathematics that he’s instilled in his students. “I have always felt that mathematics deserves the same attention and recognition that athletic teams get at pep rallies,” says Williams, who has organized geometry skits, mathematical poetry contests and mathematical art contests that have become school tradition at four elementary and high schools in his school district.
In the beginning, there was IBM, and for years it dominated computer hardware and software. In the 1970s, the independent software industry emerged, spawning companies like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle, which grew to be giants in their own right as corporations paid them ever-higher fees to license accounting and human resource packages, database systems, operating systems, and networking code.
But then, in the late 1990s, something entirely new hit the scene: the open source model. It harnessed the customers’ own knowledge and coding skills to create software that in many cases was superior to commercial packages. Now, not just a software firm but everyone could tinker with a program’s basic code and alter it to their liking—and share their enhancements with others, too.
How is open source faring? Has it conquered the information technology landscape, or is it confined to certain highly technical regions? Has “free software,” as open source is frequently referred to, made anyone rich? Have corporations embraced it, and if so, why? In short, has open source proven itself, yet?
Beyond Linux The answers to these questions are a jumbled mix of yes, no, and maybe. By many measures, the open source model is thriving and winning new users every day. Every Macintosh computer sold is a win, for example, because Apple Computer has relied heavily on open source code to build the Mac’s OS X operating system and Safari Web browser. Likewise, more than half of the world’s Web servers run the open-source Apache program, and the open-source Mozilla program accounts for 23% of the world’s Web browsers.
The big question is: How well has the open-source model done in the enterprise software market? That’s where the bulk of spending for software takes place and where software gets put to the test in ways that hardly matter in the consumer market. Easily the most resounding enterprise-related success for open source is the Linux operating system, specifically as used on servers, not desktops. Linux is the basis for every data center at large Web outfits like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, serving millions of people every second, and it’s the basis for virtually every other Web service such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Add numerous non-IT company adoptions and market researcher IDC estimates Linux to have captured at least 13% of the world’s server market.
Among the main reasons for this success is that Linux can be licensed at no charge, it’s rock solid in terms of uptime and security, it’s well suited for use in the cloud, and it’s enjoying much attention from software developers who constantly add layer upon layer of new functions. Perhaps equally important, many computer companies, including even IBM, once a bastion of proprietary software, have thrown their weight behind Linux if only in an attempt to counter Microsoft and its 85% share of the desktop operating system market.
Last July, IDC disclosed research showing that fast-growing enterprise acceptance and the global economic recession were driving worldwide revenues from open-source software to grow by 22.4% in 2009 and 23.6% through 2013, hitting a total of $8.1 billion. And that 2009 growth rate, IDC noted, was not only considerably higher than what it had measured a year earlier, it was 10 times the 2% growth rate for the general software market. Meanwhile, another IDC survey found that almost 75% of enterprise IT executives surveyed were actively evaluating or accelerating adoption of Linux.
Business applications Another big open source enterprise success is MySQL, a relational database manager that has racked up six million installations worldwide. It’s used by many high-volume Web services such as YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook and has become the darling of startups and enterprise groups seeking to quickly bring up new IT systems without the cost of licensing a commercial database package such as those sold by Oracle or IBM.
Still, it’s one thing for a disparate bunch of geeks to jointly create highly technical programs like Linux, Apache, or MySQL—it’s quite another for, say, physicians, or marketing managers, or graphic artists to collaborate on software specific to their jobs or industries.
It’s unlikely, in fact, that the people who understand marketing or doctoring inside and out are the same ones who know how to build good software.
Though, a variety of startup companies have been funded in defiance of this very notion. Easily the highest-profile of these is Sugar CRM, which has commercialized an eponymous customer relationship management (CRM) package. Funded by top-ranked venture capitalists to the tune of $46 million, Sugar CRM has seen its product downloaded more than four million times. The company’s software is available at no charge, but customers can and are encouraged to pay for technical support services. In 2006, company founder and CEO John Roberts talked of his firm—and others like it—eventually shrinking the enterprise apps market by 50% or more while keeping for themselves some significant percentage of what was left. After talk like that, Sugar came to be viewed as the open-source startup most likely to pull off a strong IPO.
All that was thrown into question last May, however when, with no explanation, Roberts suddenly left Sugar CRM. At around the same time, the company had begun to cut prices for its hosted CRM software, too—a sign of softening demand, some said. What’s more, while some 50,000 copies of the “free” Sugar CRM software had been installed, it turned out that only 5,000 revenue-generating copies were in use—hardly enough to win the hearts of investors, several observers noted.
Nonetheless, venture capitalists have not given up on open source applications. In late August, they poured $12 million into Medsphere Systems, which has commercialized software for managing electronic health records. Based on code originally developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Medsphere’s OpenVista product incorporates changes and extensions suggested by an active community of hospital managers nationwide.
Rockin’ the joint Another open-source app firm with VC backing is Collaborative Software Institute (CSI), which helps companies jointly define and develop vertical-industry applications. Founded in 2007, the firm has produced three products: TriSano, which monitors and analyzes data about the outbreaks of infectious diseases; SIG, which helps financial services firms manage risk; and Feedhandler, for managing high-speed financial market data. Each app’s functions were originally defined by subject-matter experts from various companies or non-profits. “We built to suit,” says Lori Williams-Peters, corporate development officer.
Once an app was sketched out, CSI’s programming team wrote the code, tested it, and delivered a working product. The programs are available in community editions, at no charge, or beefed-up commercial versions that CSI sells for a profit. In each case, an online user community continues to contribute ideas for new functions and tweaks, just as in the traditional open-source model.
A quick look at SourceForge, a leading directory of open source activity, finds 2,862 enterprise-focused projects. Some of the most popular of these are Pentaho, a business intelligence (BI) suite that has seen more than two million downloads, and OxygenOffice Professional, an enhanced version of the free OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, with 1.5 million downloads.
The community-oriented, open-source way has caught on within large enterprises as a better way to develop applications internally, too. Venture-backed CollabNet sells an open-sourced product called TeamForge that helps dispersed teams of developers and domain experts collaborate across the whole process of creating, testing, deploying, and maintaining enterprise apps. The firm has some 800 paying customers and more than 1.9 million users.
By every indication, open source is succeeding in the enterprise world. But it’s too early to start shorting SAP or Microsoft stock. Those and other large, established software companies still have advantages—sheer size, financial and technical resources, customer relationships, and more —that will keep them viable and profitable for many years to come.
Wilfredo Nieves '04, who earned a Ph.D. in Psychology, was hired by Webster University in St. Petersburg, Fla., to be their statewide counseling coordinator. He is a qualified Florida state supervisor for clinical social work, marriage and family therapy and mental health counseling. He also serves as a psychologist for the federal government’s Disaster Medical Assistance Team.
Bryna Schreier '06, who earned an M.S. in Education,
was certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
in Early Adolescence through Young Adulthood Physical Education.
Erica King '09, who earned a Ph.D. in Psychology, currently works as the
director of Little Hands Therapy, LLC, based in Avondale, Ariz. Her
future plans include expanding her free Internet-based stress
management program to include working and stay-at-home moms and
businesses in the West Valley that are interested in easily improving
their overall health and well-being.
Emmanuel Onyekwere '09, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences,
had his 2009 doctoral dissertation selected by VDM Publishing House for
publication as a monograph titled “Privatization as an Instrument of
Socio-economic Development in Nigeria: Just Learning from Latin
America's Experience.”
“There's nothing better than science!” says Pamela Harman, an earth science teacher at Spain Park High School in Hoover, Alabama. “It's constantly changing, and you're constantly learning new things. You can go outside and observe it, live it, touch it, and love it. ... It's the best thing.”
A big believer in the importance of engaging various types of learners by making science something that happens outside of a textbook, Harman is always showing her students samples of rocks she's collected from around the country or high-tech weather recording devices. Often, she conveys scientific ideas using basic household objects. One of her favorite demonstrations involves simply making popcorn. “There are three main ways that heat transfers—radiation, conduction, and convection,” she says. “We take a JiffyPop maker and see how long it takes to cook. They see that conduction is nothing but popcorn touching the surface of the plate. In the air popper, they see the kernels are moving, and that's convection. In the microwave, they're heated by the waves.”
Whenever she goes to a national conference, Harman presents a lab like this to other teachers in order to show them simple ways that they can make science relevant to students without having to invest in fancy instruments or tools. Her favorite thing is learning, she says. A fervent desire to get a good education was what drove her to enlist in the Marines after junior college—to get on the GI Bill. “If you can be a Marine, you feel like you can be anything,” she says.
Next to learning, her favorite thing is teaching. And her third favorite? That would have to be mentoring other teachers in an effort to affect the system and further inspire students. As a teacher of the year, Harman often had to travel, and says one of the best parts of her experience was the opportunity to work with and mentor a young teacher who assisted with her classes.
“The teacher that I am today is because of all the mentors that I have had,” she says. “Sir Isaac Newton said, 'If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants,' and that's really how I feel that I have achieved any level of excellence—it's because people have helped me get to that place. It's so important to have great mentors, not just in those first couple of years of teaching, but to have somebody that you can continue to talk to.”
Of course, a good teacher can only do so much without a classroom full of students—a lack of attendance, says Harman, is one of the key problems plaguing schools today.
If she could change the system, Harman believes this is a problem that could be solved.
“I would start charter schools run by national board certified teachers where students have to come to school,” she says. “They'd be contractually obligated and would have to sign an agreement that says they will come and do their homework and that their parents will be involved. If they miss assignments or are tardy or get busted for drugs or anything, then they're out. The most disheartening thing is that every student is not given the opportunity to learn. There are areas where students aren't pushed to give 100%, and that just breaks my heart.”
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“Trina George will be an important advocate on behalf of rural communities throughout the state and help administer the valuable programs and services provided by the USDA that can enhance their economic success,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
As Mississippi state director for rural development, George manages 40 housing, business and community programs aimed at improving the quality of life for rural Americans. With a staff of 179 employees in 30 offices across the state, George’s team actively works to increase the availability of broadband Internet connections, promote the benefits of renewable energy, preserve and improve natural resources and ensure a safe and sustainable food supply.
“My daily schedule has gone from working 8 to 12 hours a day to working around the clock,” says George, who has a 9-year-old son and 7-year-old twins. “In my former position, I assisted constituents in one district. Now I have the unique opportunity to help people all over Mississippi.”
Prior to her appointment, George served for 15 years as special projects coordinator and office manager in Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson’s office.
George’s new position with the USDA allows her to directly act on her social change mission: “Assisting people in underserved and unserved communities realize their potential and become activists for change.”
George, who has completed all of her Walden coursework except her dissertation, says that Walden helped her prepare for her duties at the USDA, through research, coursework and collaboration with her classmates. “My tenure with Walden has indeed been a rewarding experience,” says George. “It has prepared me to bring about real social change.”
In the global fight against climate change, one of the key strategies is switching to renewable energy. Fossil fuels are finite and running out, the argument goes, and they emit too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar do not emit greenhouse gasses.
There's just one problem. Or perhaps several.
Right now, there is almost no infrastructure set up to produce the amount of electricity the world needs through renewable means. And the cost of the technology, as it now stands, is prohibitive.
That's today's reality, says Ruben Juanes, a professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even if we don't like it. “We're not going to convert our energy systems, which are fundamentally fossil fuel-based, to solar or wind or biofuel-based in the next few years,” he says. “That's not to say we shouldn't work on it, because we should. But because these energy systems are so large, it creates lots of inertia before there can be a change.
In the meantime, he says, “Every year we keep dumping into the atmosphere 25 gigatons of carbon dioxide, so maybe we should start doing something about it now, before the next energy system is put in place.”
The solution that a lot of scientists are working on is to stop pumping all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and start pumping it somewhere else—underground. Carbon capture: the details The process is called carbon capture and storage, and it involves using technology at the source of some of the major carbon emitters—like coal power plants and oil and gas fields—to collect the carbon dioxide before it gets dispersed into the air, and then store it, either deep underwater or in geologic formations underground.
It's a process that has occurred naturally for millions of years. Stuart Gilfillan, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Geosciences, says there are fields of carbon dioxide deep underground and underwater just as there are deposits of oil and gas. The carbon dioxide tends to be dissolved in water, he says, in underground reservoirs, called aquifers. Because carbon dioxide-enriched water is denser than regular water, it sinks.
He says when engineers inject carbon dioxide underground, it tends to collect in a large cloud. Although carbon dioxide-infused water is denser than water without carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide itself is less dense than water. It's also less viscous, he says, which means it's thinner and moves more easily through the aquifer's porous rock layers.
As the cloud passes through the aquifer, it disintegrates. Bit by bit the carbon dioxide stays behind in tiny globules in the water. The key is to send down a cloud just small enough so that by the time the cloud gets to the end of the aquifer, it has disintegrated entirely.
Juanes says his work shows that, in the U.S. at least, we have enough underground space to hold at least the next 100 years of carbon dioxide emissions. Putting carbon capture to the test There are a few major pilot projects already testing these technologies around the world.
In North Dakota, the Dakota Gasification Company has built a small coal power plant that captures carbon by taking solid coal and heating it until it becomes a gas mixture consisting of methane, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. Then they use a chemical process to convert the mixture to hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen is burned as a clean fuel whose only byproduct is water, and the carbon dioxide gets stored.
Although this process sounds very complex, Stuart Haszeldine, of the Scottish Center for Carbon Storage, says it's very efficient and can produce a wide range of useful byproducts. “If you build a new coal-burning plant, that's what you'd build,” he says.
But the downside is that it can't be used to modify existing power plants. For that you'd have to use the one of two other methods. In one, currently in use in Norway at the Sleipner project, the exhaust from a power plant passes through a chemical solution that acts like a filter. The chemical attracts carbon dioxide and binds it there, and then a second stage process separates and liquefies the carbon dioxide for storage.
One challenge of this method, says Haszeldine, is that the equipment needed to achieve it is very large, at least as big as the power plant itself. But it does have advantages: unlike gasification, this method can be retrofitted onto an existing plant, and it is already pretty far along in its development. At Sleipner, Statoil gas company has been separating carbon dioxide from their gas production and injecting it into an aquifer under the North Sea for the past 10 years.
The third method that is also currently in use is the least tested. The first major pilot project just began in eastern Germany, by a Swedish company called Vattenfall. Rather than burning coal in regular air, which mostly consists of nitrogen, the project burns coal in pure oxygen. When you do that, the only byproducts are water and carbon dioxide—and it's fairly simple to separate the carbon dioxide out, pressurize it, and then store it underground.
Haszeldine says an advantage of this method is that techniques to isolate oxygen from air are well established and proven. But the downside is that the process uses a lot of energy—which means it can significantly reduce the efficiency of a coal power plant.
Another challenge the Vattenfall project has faced has little to with technology, and everything to do with politics. So far they haven't been allowed to inject any carbon dioxide into their proposed underground storage site. The local community has been fighting them, because they question what the consequences of that storage might mean for them.
Haszeldine says the evidence, from existing natural carbon dioxide fields and experience with underground oil and gas, shows “good reason to believe carbon dioxide will be safely stored for tens of thousands of years.” Plus he says, the geological formations where scientists intend to store carbon dioxide are “too deep for drinking water and too shallow for oil and gas,” which means putting carbon dioxide there won't affect other natural processes or the human population.
The counter arguments But the residents near the Vattenfall project aren't the only people worried about carbon storage. Lorelei Scarboro is a community organizer for Coal River Mountain Watch, an anti-coal organization in West Virginia.
She says this isn't the first time the coal industry has proposed injecting a byproduct of coal underground. She says the government already issues permits to coal companies to inject toxic sludge into geologic formations underground, and as a result, “a lot of people are very sick because of contaminated water.”
“That's our main concern with carbon capture and storage,” Scarboro says. “When they take the waste and drill this really long hole, or they decide to put it in sediment under the ocean, someday, somehow that will come back up and come back to haunt us.”
Michael Crocker, media director for Greenpeace, says that's not even half the problem. The most important issue, he says, is that carbon storage technology is not ready, and by the time it will be, it will be too late to use it to stop global warming. His organization advocates an immediate end to coal power and a switch to renewable technologies like solar and wind.
Additionally, Crocker says, even if the technology does get developed and implemented, “It uses from 10% - 40% of the power from the power station, which would virtually erase all the efficiency measures gained in coal-powered power plants in the last 50 years.”
Simon Shackley, a social policy researcher on carbon storage issues, says “The public does have the power to stop a lot of this happening and have been in opposition to this in a lot of countries.” Shackley says the question is “not just what's best for utility x, but also for the community.” He says governments would do better to include detractors and proponents in the initial discussion of carbon capture and storage to look for a compromise everyone can agree to.
“What does Greenpeace need?” he asks, to accept carbon capture as part of a multi-faceted solution. “Will they accept it if we change something else, or modify the design somewhat, or include a provision for some measures on energy efficiency?”
He says conversations like these have a positive impact on the overall outcome. “If you got Greenpeace involved,” he says, “they'd push that sort of line, and that would be quite helpful. It's a different way to think about energy.”
Toward a global strategy Given that the U.S. relies on coal power for more than 50% of its electricity, and huge developing countries like India and China seem to be ramping up their own coal-power initiatives, scientists like Juanes argue it's not realistic to count solely on wind and solar energy, without looking at short-term strategies for lowering the climate impact of coal.
But Haszeldine says it will be at least another 10 years or so before these technologies could be ready to be implemented on a worldwide scale. Right now, the pilot projects tend to be working with 30–40 megawatt power plants—but a typical power plant today generates 300–400 megawatts.
Shackley says scientists learn more every time they test a new technology. This learning curve allows them to make the technology more efficient and less expensive—and, he says, better they should make those improvements at an early stage, before the world invests billions of dollars in a vast infrastructure that costs a lot more than it needs to.
But as the counter-arguments show, technology is only part of the challenge. The main reason Statoil began storing carbon instead of venting it was not because the technology existed, but because the government created a tax on offshore carbon dioxide emissions. That meant that, although it cost them money to build the infrastructure and store the carbon dioxide, it cost significantly less than paying a carbon tax.
“They were really trying to promote this technology within Norway and could afford to do it,” Shackley says. “I don't think that would be repeated anywhere else in the world.” But he says governments can encourage this technology in other ways, such as allowing energy companies that capture and store carbon dioxide to charge higher prices.
Steve Caldwell, a policy analyst from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says the key is to put a price on carbon, such as through a cap and trade system. “Putting a price will make firms make different decisions,” he says, such as to “invest in carbon capture and storage, build nuclear plants, or run more energy efficiency programs.”
Haszeldine says he believes it is crucial to include carbon capture in any short-term plans to fight global warming. In his opinion, the problem is, “There aren't enough plants on the starting blocks right now.” He says projects have been proposed around the world, but “very few have actual money behind them. And even fewer countries have created a market mechanism to sell fuel from those plants for more money.”
“It's easy to delay,” Haszeldine says, but the world has reached the crunch time. “There’s no known alternative to doing this. The world's hooked on burning fossil fuel. You can wait, but you'll suffer the consequences.”
Starting a Walden University Ph.D. program requires resolution, grit and determination, but students don’t make the journey on their own. Walden not only helps doctoral students navigate through milestones, academic residencies and mentoring, it encourages alumni to share their experiences.
At the summer 2009 academic residency in Minneapolis, Dr. Jessie Kilgore Jr., who earned a Ph.D. in Education in 2009 from The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership, offered the following insights and dissertation tips to an audience of Ph.D. students just beginning their own dissertations.
Find Creative Solutions to Professional Roadblocks Kilgore’s doctoral study—a multiple exploratory case study that examined student achievement on computerized tests—required Kilgore to collect test data from two different schools. In order to use the data he collected, Kilgore had to obtain permission from each student tested, as well as students’ parents.
“I had a really hard time getting students to turn in their consent forms,” said the 40-year-old Canton, Mich., resident. Knowing that the consent forms were imperative to the future of his study, Kilgore offered students incentives such as pizza parties, iPod giveaways and even Cheetos in exchange for returning their forms. (“When I promised Hot Cheetos, all these forms started coming in, like a river overflowing. It was truly unbelievable.”) Ultimately, Kilgore received the hundreds of signed consent forms he needed to continue with his study.
Plan for the Unexpected Kilgore experienced unexpected setbacks when he was refused a set of test data due to privacy concerns, and again when a school administrator gave him the wrong date for a test he was planning to observe.
“Expect the unexpected,” said Kilgore. “That’s something that rang true throughout my dissertation process.” When faced with an unexpected setback, Kilgore said, address the problem, adjust and keep moving forward with your study.
Use Personal Challenges as Motivation As Kilgore was working toward his Ph.D., his father was losing a battle with cancer. “I had a choice,” said Kilgore. “I could allow my father’s failing health to alter my focus, or I could use it as motivation.”
He chose the latter and set a personal goal to have his dissertation approved before his father passed away. Kilgore’s dissertation was approved on Feb. 16, 2009—his 40th birthday—and his father passed away two days later.
“During the dissertation process, you will have sunshine and rain. You’ve just got to keep your eyes on the prize no matter what. Just hold on throughout the entire process.”
Look Ahead to Completion, and Keep the Greater Goal in Mind Despite the sleepless nights and seemingly endless sets of revisions, Kilgore encouraged Ph.D. students to keep the greater goal of social change in mind.
“Remember, at Walden, you become a doctor of social change. And when you walk across the stage at commencement and are hooded by your professor, it will all be worth it.”
Watch the video of Dr. Kilgore sharing his insights on successfully completing a Ph.D.
Walden is now offering an M.S. in Project Management to help equip students with the skills they need to manage complex projects with diverse teams and help their organizations achieve strategic goals. Students can gain valuable experience in applying traditional management tools to highly technical projects while learning to communicate effectively with stakeholders and to analyze and control project risks.
The course content of the M.S. in Project Management is aligned with the knowledge areas of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and will help prepare students for the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional (PMP) credential exam.*
“Demand for managers in project-oriented occupations is growing at an extraordinarily rapid pace,” said Dr. Kathleen Simmons, director of the M.S. in Project Management program. “Walden’s M.S. in Project Management is designed specifically to provide the skills required to manage projects across functional areas, geographic locations and all levels of an organization. Using proven management tools and a range of project management processes, students can prepare to make valuable contributions that will help enhance the performance of their organizations.”
*Eligibility for the PMP Credential requires individuals to first attain specific educational and project management experience, including 35 contact hours of project management education and a minimum of three years, or 36 months, of project management experience, during which at least 4,500 hours were spent leading and directing project tasks. The final step for earning the PMP Credential is passing the PMP exam. For more information, visit the Project Management Institute.
A new approach to analyzing large volumes of data, something called stream processing, or complex-events processing (CEP), is changing how companies keep up with the world and react to it. The technology’s aim is to sift through large, fast-changing streams of data as quickly as possible and identify patterns and correlations in the data that signify meaningful events or opportunities to take profitable action.
In traditional database setups, which form the basis for virtually all enterprise software applications today, data first gets collected, then organized in a highly structured way, and then cross-indexed for rapid searching, and only after all that—hours or even days after its creation—is the data finally ready for any kind of analysis.
CEP systems, in contrast, are designed to analyze floods of data virtually at the moment each item is generated, with no pre-processing. That calls for highly specialized software and, in the most extreme cases, specially engineered hardware, too.
How fast is fast? Try several hundred thousand messages processed in one second using a standard, single-core microprocessor. But more processors helps: IBM recently unveiled a CEP product called System S that, running a 1,424-core computer, analyzes five million messages per second for customer TD Securities.
How it works Potential applications for CEP run the gamut, from algorithmic trading in fast-paced financial markets to interpreting torrents of live battlefield data, from managing far-flung supply chains to enabling massive multiplayer Internet games to securing IT systems and networks against intruders. Curt Monash, principal at Monash Research, Acton, Mass., identifies two broad classes of CEP apps: one, as used in financial trading, centers on low-latency analysis of data—identifying significant data and events near-instantly—while the other focuses on filtering data to find the most significant records, which may get stored for analysis at a later time.
In technical terms, CEP achieves its high speed mainly by analyzing incoming data records entirely in main memory, a.k.a. RAM, with no need to call on comparatively slow hard disk drives. Traditional database systems, in contrast, store data on the hard disk, organized as rows and columns, and swap selected chunks in and out of high-speed memory as needed. For more speed, extra processors can be ganged together to work in parallel. And for the most extreme applications, such as analyzing data packets on a network to detect hacker activity, specialized silicon may be required—network processors designed solely for that task.
Speed, in short, is of the essence. In fact, by jacking up the speed of data analysis, CEP brings companies a big step closer to what business theorists have described as the “real-time enterprise.” Ideally, the enterprise should monitor changing business conditions moment by moment and, in response, reorient its internal operations and change its business processes on a proverbial dime. Until recently, business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing techniques, building on traditional database management, have helped managers and executives to understand and delve into a company’s past performance, but with CEP, BI tools would illuminate current performance and alert executives to situations that need immediate attention and action.
Business intelligence 2.0 Such tools might even fuse data from a variety of independent sources and, in effect, create entirely new information and unanticipated insights. For example, data indicating a particular combination of bad weather and unexpectedly low inventories in a certain geographic region might trigger a call for special logistics to move extra quantities of a much-in-demand product to store shelves in time to support an important retail promotion already underway.
CEP-based BI may have especially big implications for Web-based companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. They are able to collect mind-boggling quantities of information about their visitors’ behavior—every mouse-click on every Web page. And these firms try their best to keep up. Last year, Yahoo disclosed that it had assembled a 2-petabyte (or 200,000-gigabyte) data warehouse to analyze the activities of the 500 million visitors it serves each month. The Yahoo database processes 24 billion events a day, a huge stream of data. But with CEP technology, these events might be analyzed and acted on almost as they happen—selecting just the right content and advertising for each and every person using the site, say.
As usually happens with promising new software technologies, a handful of startup companies have been funded by venture capitalists to pursue the CEP opportunity, even as established database companies—including IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Tibco, and Microsoft—move into the arena. Among the startups are Streambase (founded by relational database pioneer Michael Stonebraker), Truviso (originally launched as Amalgamated Insight), and EsperTech. Though nobody expects CEP to rival the traditional database market in terms of size or importance, it is, for now, one of the fastest-growing and most exciting segments of the overall data management field.
More is better One obvious reason for all the excitement is the near-exponential growth in the amount of data that’s becoming available in seemingly every sector of the economy. Thanks to advances in microelectronics, the cost of physical sensors has plummeted, making it more viable than ever to measure temperatures, pressures, and speeds on seemingly every kind of machine and vehicle. BMW, for instance, builds dozens of such sensors into its cars, along with banks of microprocessors to analyze feedback from them. One future scenario: A car might warn its driver of a dangerous driving condition, such as hydroplaning on a rainy highway, or it might alert the car’s dealer to schedule a service visit to check on what appears to be a faulty part.
What’s more, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are now low enough in cost to help track the movement of goods through complex supply chains—all the way from a factory in China to a distribution center in Illinois to a specific shelf in a Wal-Mart store. But with potentially millions of tagged pallets and boxes in the world, each one registering its location as it passes through a doorway or leaves a truck, traditional IT systems may easily be overwhelmed with data. That has made the RFID industry particularly interested in CEP, and companies such as SAP and Oracle are paying particular attention to the opportunity.
Another highly interested party, albeit mum on such matters, is the intelligence establishment. The National Security Agency could use some form of CEP to filter the mountains of data it gleans from phone taps and eavesdropping on global flows of email. The CIA could use the technology to find tell-tale correlations between items in the floods of data it collects from field agents, newswires, and spy satellites.
Trucking companies, as analyst Monash points out, are interested in the technology for monitoring the movement of their vehicles—each one equipped with GPS and a radio link back to HQ. “It could provide an early-warning system, discovering if a truck were off-course, lost, or involved in an accident.”
As with traditional database management, making pattern-recognition engines reasonably easy to set up and easy to modify over time is one of the major technical problems that CEP engineers have had to solve. It’s one thing to build a program that can search for a specified set of patterns at high speed. It’s quite another to produce a generalized solution whose search patterns can be altered on the fly and not lose any speed. These are difficult technical challenges that have intrigued academic researchers for many years, and it is from their projects that most of today’s CEP companies originate: Telegraph at University of California, Berkeley, for example, and The Aurora Project at Brown University.
Still, as technical problems get solved, CEP will likely weave its way into everyday life, perhaps even finding patterns in people’s daily activities and travels, second by second. After all, what is a cell phone but a potential sensor and source of rich data just waiting to be correlated with billions of others?
This is a book for those with big ideas about the collaborative foundations of democratic governance, public administration and capacity building. It is a book of building and improving public service, as well as current issues and best practices in managing transformational trends in governance and democracy, employee empowerment, citizen participation and the rampant culture of corruption in the Nigerian system of government. This text, which includes thought-provoking normative arguments, is a powerful learning instrument for students of research methodology and a reference book for adult learners and researchers.
Dates: February 18–20, 2010 Proposal types: Paper or panel proposals that address the state of race, gender and class with respect to the Obama presidency.
Deadline: December 1, 2009
Submission instructions: To submit paper or panel proposals, and/or volunteer to serve as a Race, Gender & Class conference organizer, contact Dr. Jean Ait Belkhir at jbelkhir@suno.edu.
Cost: $125 for students; $175 for non-students. All attendees and presenters are expected to register.
This book was written in the observance of the last 100 years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the accomplishments of many leaders and branches of the Georgia State Conference. The NAACP presence in Georgia begins with the founding of the Atlanta Branch in 1917. In 1941, the late Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert convened 10 branches of the NAACP in Savannah, Ga., and organized the Georgia State Conference. Its purpose was to maintain a network of branches throughout Georgia and to work in conjunction with the national association.
Long gone are the days when biodiesel was something your granola-eating neighbor brewed in his backyard using recycled cooking oil. Rather, biodiesel is fast-becoming a mainstream alternative to traditional petroleum-based motor fuel—and a prime business opportunity for entrepreneurs with an eye on renewable fuels.
According to Emerging Markets Online, a global energy and utilities market research firm, in the year 2007, there were only 20 oil-producing nations supplying the needs of the rest of the world. By the year 2010, most countries will be biodiesel producers.
In the U.S., biodiesel is powering more and more cars and trucks. For example, the city of Mesa, Arizona, switched its entire fleet of more than 1,000 diesel-powered vehicles—from high-performance fire trucks to lowly street sweepers—to biodiesel last summer. Fueling demand The appeal of biodiesel is easy to understand. Both biodegradable and non-toxic, biodiesel is a clean-burning alternative fuel derived from natural oils from plants like soybeans as well as other renewable botanical resources. Because it contains no petroleum, biodiesel is better for the environment and has lower emissions compared to petroleum diesel.
In fact, according to the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), a 100% soybean-based biodiesel can reduce global warming carbon dioxide pollution by more than half relative to conventional petroleum-based diesel. The emissions benefits are even higher for biodiesel produced from canola oil. In the future, non-conventional sources like algae may have the potential to provide nearly 90% reductions in global warming carbon dioxide pollution.
Josh Tickell has long recognized the benefits of biodiesel. Tickell is an environmentalist whose film FUEL won the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary. He is also the author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank—The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel. “Biodiesel is energy positive, so no matter what you do, it contains more energy than it takes to make it,” he says. “It’s an efficient converter of solar energy into hydrocarbons so the promise is … that biodiesel will become the basis for a new generation of biofuels that can run in both gasoline and diesel engines.”
Better yet, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that some biofuels are less expensive per gallon than gasoline—slashing the average cost of gas by 20 to 35 cents per gallon. That’s good news to penny-pinching car owners: An average American family can save up to $300 per year by using pure ethanol.
Business is booming Such eco-friendly and cost-conscious perks are opening the doors for entrepreneurs with an interest in alternative fuels. “The opportunity for entrepreneurs is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. alone,” says Tickell. “We’re talking about a world-wide multi-trillion-dollar-a-year industry, representing the largest single conversion of cash into jobs and infrastructure that we will see within a hundred years.”
Bob Schildgen agrees. The environmentalist behind Sierra magazine’s “Hey Mr. Green” environmental advice column, Schildgen says, “Everyone is looking for an alternative to fossil fuel. Anytime you have a new technology, you’re going to have people thinking about making money off of it.” The promises—and pitfalls But winning the race to bring biodiesel to the masses is tougher than many think. Because while “anything from hemp oil to soy beans to coconuts to rendering fats in meat processing” can be refined into biodiesel, finding just the right formula can be a difficult undertaking, according to Tickell.
“Biodiesel has been dismaying because it has large quality issues,” says Tickell. “There are so many different ways of making it, it has so many different producers, you never know what you’re going to get out of that pump.”
Another obstacle facing entrepreneurs is sourcing materials. After all, some critics argue that growing enough crops to meet the demand for soybean-based biodiesel may require diverting large amounts of soy crops from food use to biodiesel production and converting millions of acres of forests to agricultural land.
“If we took all the soybean acreage now and made it into biodiesel, we’d still get far less than we’d need—a fraction of the 160 billion gallons of fuel we consume,” says Schildgen. “Plus, the price of soybean oil is $3 or $4 a gallon, so it’s not economically feasible at this point.”
Even the much-ballyhooed approach of converting algae oil into biodiesel fuel has been hampered by high processing and water disposal costs. Says Schildgen, “Many times when a technology or a new idea is launched, investors put a lot of money into it, but it doesn’t necessarily pan out or fulfill its big promises.”
Even Tickell, who is driving the first algae-powered car across the U.S. for a nationwide tour promoting his film FUEL, admits that biodiesel fuel from algae “is still cutting-edge technology. It’s not as if you’re going to go up to the pump in two weeks and pump it. But it will be available for both gasoline and diesel cars within a 5–10 year period of time.”
Researchers have been hard at work making algae-based biodiesel easier on the pocketbook. Chemists at United Environment and Energy in New York have developed what they termed the first economical, eco-friendly process to convert algae oil into biodiesel fuel. Researchers say their process is at least 40% less expensive than that of others now being used.
The playing field Innovations aside, there’s still stiff competition to consider. Earlier this summer, oil giant ExxonMobil announced that it would invest at least $600 million in algae-to-fuel research and development deals with biotech company Synthetic Genomics. Such deep pockets can make it tough for budding entrepreneurs to have any impact on the biodiesel industry.
But Tickell says heavily-funded research and development partnerships shouldn’t discourage entrepreneurs from vying for a slice of the renewable-energy pie. “As good as a large company’s research and development is, it has always been the entrepreneurs who have put forth all of the little solutions that lead to the big solutions,” he says. “There were other car manufacturers at the time that Henry Ford put the Model T on the road. He wasn’t educated; he had no engineering background; he wasn’t backed by the steel industry at that time. He was a man with a vision to put a car on the road.”
However, Schildgen says it’s important for entrepreneurs to continue looking outside the box for biodiesel opportunities. “If I were an entrepreneur, I’d put my eggs in the energy audit and conservation basket because I think that’s where you can make money the quickest,” he advises. “The real, most immediate, cheapest and lucrative solution is in conservation and efficiency. Not that we shouldn’t be looking at alternatives, too, but for the immediate future, we need to be tightening up our efficiencies to the point where we don’t need to be so concerned about developing [fuel] sources.”
In the meantime, the race continues to bring yesterday’s backyard biodiesel to the mainstream masses. “This is a wide open playing field,” says Tickell. “There will be leaders and there will be losers.” Let the games begin.
Almost immediately after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, huge expectations were placed on the technology of biometrics: Political pundits, security experts, and seemingly every variety of talking head called for using computers more intensively to automatically recognize individuals and identify those who were potentially dangerous - at arrival terminals in airports, at the entrances of baseball stadiums, and at the doorways of data centers, scientific laboratories, and other such sensitive installations.
Biometrics - a collection of techniques for identifying people according to physical and behavioral traits such as fingerprints, speaking voices, and the way they walk - promised to help secure America against even the most cunning of enemies.
But guess what? While the use of biometrics in many high-profile government applications has languished since the 9/11 attacks, corporate America, driven by the need to cut costs and boost profits, has been slowly but surely embracing biometrics for all sorts of new applications. In 2009, according to Acuity Market Intelligence, in Louisville, Colo., public sector use accounted for 60% of the total global biometric market, leaving 40% to enterprises. But by 2017, the commercial sector will account for 55% of the market. Some of the driving factors: a highly mobile population, an ongoing decentralization of the workforce, and increasing usage of cloud-based computing. In 2009, Acuity estimates, global biometric revenues will amount to slightly less than $2.6 billion, growing to $11 billion in 2017 - a 20% compound annual growth rate.
Some but not all of these are directly related to securing facilities. As visitors enter Disney World, for instance, computers scan their fingerprints to make sure that only authorized purchasers are making use of discounted multi-day tickets. In scores of corporate data centers, hand-geometry readers work alongside card-keys, badge readers, and passcodes to authenticate workers trying to enter the most secure areas. Voice authentication techniques are helping banks such as ABN AMRO, in the Netherlands, to identify customers before they’re enabled to execute transactions over the telephone.
Clocking in Arguably the most popular corporate uses of biometrics are in non-security applications, says C. Maxine Most, principal at Acuity. One of the most compelling of these, she points out, is in tracking employees’ time and attendance on the job. “This is a real bright spot,” Most says. “It’s an unsexy app but it provides definite ROI in 12 to 18 months, sometimes in just 6 months.”
By linking each worker directly to his or her labor record, aka time-sheet, employers can enjoy a host of significant cost-savings, market researcher Most says. Traditional methods of punching into a job, with a piece of paper and time-clock, easily lend themselves to fraud. Workers can enlist colleagues to punch them in and out hours after they actually enter or leave the workplace. But by identifying each worker through a fingerprint or hand-scan, for instance, this kind of “buddy punching” can virtually be eliminated.
“The cost savings are real,” Most says, including fewer conflicts between management and workers, less payroll processing, dramatic reductions in wages for overtime, and reduced administration effort. In a recent white paper, Most estimates that intentional and error-driven “time theft” ranges as high as 10% of gross payroll and costs corporate America hundreds of billions of dollars a year. “Biometrics consistently delivers accurate, reliable, and auditable real-time labor data,” she says, and that’s “the foundation of effective labor management.”
The great advantage of using biometrics to confirm identity is that the technique does not require any special effort on the part of individuals. It’s not what a person has in their possession - a key or electronic token, for instance - or what he or she knows, as in a secret passcode, that distinguishes them from other persons. Those items are easy to forget or misplace. Instead, authenticating the person depends on some unique aspect of their physical being that can be measured or analyzed directly by a computer and accurately matched against previously-stored records.
The measure of man Fingerprints were the first such characteristic to submit to computer analysis and matching, starting as early as the 1960s at the FBI, but since then, the field of biometrics has broadened to include almost a dozen other techniques. It turns out that there are unique patterns to be identified in the shapes of people’s hands, in the coloring that makes up their eyes’ irises, in the blood vessels of their retinas, and in the shapes and arrangement of their facial features. With the right equipment, unique patterns can be recorded even in the veins within fingers and hands. In addition, each person’s DNA, or genetic code, is unique.
Each individual also displays four unique behavioral characteristics that can be used for biometric purposes:
the frequency characteristics of their voice, as shaped by their vocal tract
pen pressure and speed while writing by hand
the timing of fingers typing on a keyboard
the dynamics of their body and limbs while walking
Choosing which of these various biometrics to use in a particular application is matter of weighing such factors as the cost of equipment, error rates, and susceptibility to fraud. Even DNA, thought to be as immutable and definitive as possible, is now suspect. The New York Times in August reported that an Israeli firm called Nucleix has shown that it is possible - indeed, easy, for “any biology undergraduate” - to fabricate DNA evidence at crime scenes. Quite likely, this has implications for using DNA as a biometric for security and other applications.
Permanence over time is another important factor. If a certain bodily characteristic changes as a person ages, it can’t be used without periodic refreshing of the master database holding biometric records. This is exactly the case with retinal blood vessels, which has become a particularly popular biometirc in science fiction movies.
Biometrician beware Experts warn that as unique and powerful as they are, biometrics should not be adopted as substitutes for traditional security measures. Because fooling biometric systems can be as easy as tricking a facial recognition system by showing it a photograph of a face it “knows,” these technologies must be used only in conjunction with other techniques. If people are required to provide a secret passcode or secure pass-key in addition to a fingerprint, the rates of false negatives - mistaking Joe for Bob - and false positives - identifying a photo of Joe as Joe himself - may be reduced to an extremely small number.
And because biometric records are not secrets, writes Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert and blogger, they need special attention when being captured and stored. First, there must be a way to make sure that, say, the voiceprint originally associated with Mary has actually been generated by Mary. And then, once digitized, that voiceprint must be stored in a highly secure way, because a purloined copy of its data could be used - by hacking into a remote terminal, for instance - to trick the biometirc system set up to check it. Equally important, Mary can never change her voiceprint or any other biometric, as she might a pass-key or other assigned credential, and that means that once a biometric is compromised, it is compromised for good and therefore unusable.
For now, the industry sectors most heavily committed to using biometrics are healthcare and financial services, both of which are highly regulated. For instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), sets out a strict set of rules governing the protection and privacy of medical records. Penalties for breaking these rules are quite stiff, so hospitals tend to pay special attention to securing their IT systems. Yet, they also need to make those systems especially easy for doctors to use, especially when it comes to logging in and out of different workstations as they make their rounds. Too many passwords to remember or fiddling to log in to these systems and doctors will move on to another hospital. Biometrics, and so-called proximity badges, make it possible to quickly log in to a hospital application - and perhaps even have it “follow” the physician from terminal to terminal.
Looking to the future, Acuity’s Most sees biometrics finding widespread use with mobile devices. With a technology called Near-Field Communications (NFC), cellphones can be used as electronic wallets to make purchases of soft drinks, theater or transportation tickets. Without some form of biometrics to help associate each cellphone with its proper owner, however, the risks of losing the device would be so high that this scenario would likely remain more dream than reality. “Near-field is the application that will finally drive biometrics into corporate use in a big way,” Most says.
Walden's Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership announced the recipients of its 2009 Educator for a Day Grants. Walden will award the $5,000 grants to three selected P–12 schools that host Educator for a Day events as part of this week's nationwide celebration of the National Education Association’s American Education Week. Each school will host at least one aspiring educator, who will shadow a teacher during the school day on Thursday, Nov. 19.
The 2009 Educator for a Day grant recipients are:
Colegio Radians, Cayey, Puerto Rico - Aligned with the increased focus on environmental solutions worldwide, the school will use the grant money to develop its Experimental Research Center for Sustainable Agriculture program, a “green” project where students will learn to grow several crops in a small space. The program’s goal is to also train teachers and students from other schools to extend the program’s reach. Little Oak Middle School, Slidell, La.- Located in a community affected by major economic upheaval, emotional stress and other social issues since Hurricane Katrina, the school will use the money to establish an innovative student program to instill motivation and well-being in the school and among community stakeholders.
Sterling School, Greenville, S.C. - To increase community involvement with the school and to help its students succeed, Sterling School plans to use the grant to implement “Imagine the Possibilities,” a summer enrichment program to help students avoid setbacks in their learning during the summer. The goal is to develop a student-centered camp to reinforce basic skills and establish routines and behaviors for success.
“Each recipient chosen for a grant this year demonstrates a sincere commitment to make an impact both inside the classroom and beyond. The work of these educators, and all our nation’s teachers and administrators, makes a profound and lasting difference in the lives of our children every day,” said Victoria Reid, vice president of The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership.
The winning schools were selected from nominations submitted by teachers and administrators nationwide. Walden created the Educator for a Day grant initiative in 2007, and because of its impact on the honored schools and teachers, this initiative is a fitting tribute to the valuable work of educators across the country. Previous grant recipients include schools from Maine, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Washington.
Children in special education classes often feel that they’re on the outside looking in, but students in Ann Marie Taylor’s classes are blazing a new trail—and have other students and teachers taking notice. Taylor, who teaches at Pine Tree Hill Elementary in Camden, South Carolina, has succeeded in making her classroom such a fun place that somewhat envious students and teachers are often peeking their heads in to get a glimpse of her high-energy teaching style. Lessons are taught to music blasted from surround speakers, cheering fills the air, and units are punctuated with mock “game shows” complete with prizes and costumes.
“When you’re able to share every day with a group of kids who are so real, it’s a true blessing,” she says. “I want to work to make sure that people come to see that children with special needs are different, but still beautiful. They have as much to offer as anyone else.”
As devoted as Taylor is, it is hard to imagine that working with children was not the path she originally planned to take. In college, she majored in criminal justice, but her professors saw the nurturer in her and suggested she try interning with an organization that worked with juvenile offenders. There, she was paired with Tiffany, a 13-year-old felon who would leave an indelible impression on Taylor. “She had all these awesome gifts—she was an artist and had amazing strengths. But the papers just talked about what she couldn’t do,” she recalls. “She was mentally disabled, but I didn’t see that at all. I saw someone who was a leader and very creative, but was labeled as a ‘problem child’ because of the effect her environment had had on her. Working with her, I realized that I wanted to work to help children before they got into trouble.”
In an effort to broaden the public’s understanding about educating students with special needs, Taylor is earning her Doctor of Education. “Last year, I wrote a grant through our Office of Exceptional Children at the state level in order to help create a mentoring program for all first-year special education teachers. I think it was the Teacher of the Year program that really gave me a taste for leadership. It made me want to have an effect on the experience of other teachers,” she says. Taylor’s efforts also have involved reaching out to non-teachers: In addition to encouraging conversations about special needs students in her role as director of children’s ministry at her church, Taylor was responsible for getting the county to restart a Special Olympics program that ended nearly two decades ago.
“Teaching is a great act of service,” says Taylor. “It requires you to constantly give and to be humbled every day. It’s not just what you do, it’s who you are. ‘Teacher’ is the word that describes me before anything else—before wife, before mother. I live it out in everything I do.”
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Designed and written for all physician practices—small or large, single specialty, multispecialty, physician-owned, hospital-owned and even academic practices—this book provides organizations with a framework for analyzing and quickly adapting to future challenges. And it helps board and staff members focus more clearly on a group’s priorities, while building commitment and promoting cooperation and innovation. Packed with real-world insights and practical pointers, this book shows how to find a unifying theme for success in the presence of physician leaders who are engaged and enthusiastic about strategically planning their futures, setting goals and putting those goals into action.
Many people have tried to learn a language using the most typical methods: studying grammar or rote memory. While these methods work for some people, many others struggle. The structure and content of Chinese for Everyone applies the methods of learning people use every day. The research of Carl Jung and Howard Gardner is leveraged in this book to help you learn the same way you perceive the world: through sensing and intuition. To help in your journey from beginner to intermediate Chinese, your preferred style of learning will be found in each of the 31 chapters and in the different activities. The different learning tools include illustrations, vocabulary, pronunciation, dialogues, grammar notes, exercises, puzzles, creative activities and culture lessons. The activities are designed to enable you to reach the beginner-to-upper-intermediate level.
Do you ever wonder what happens to the litter that washes down into storm drains?
Maybe it's the cigarette butt somebody drops to the curb and leaves there, or the plastic bags that fly away in the slightest breeze. When the rain runs courses down the streets, all these bits of debris float down through metal grates and into the sewers. And then what? Peter Hill of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative says, the water gushes through the sewers and “often runs straight into waterways, untreated.”
It's just one of the ways that trash gets into the world’s rivers and oceans, a global problem on a huge scale. In a single day in 2008, volunteers in 104 countries picked up nearly 7 million pounds of debris from beaches and waterways, including more than three million cigarettes, more than a million plastic bags, and nearly a million each of food wrappers and bottle caps.
“The thing to remember is that every single piece of trash has a face behind it,” says Seba Sheavly, an independent consultant who has worked on the problem of marine debris for more than 15 years. “I often try to get people to realize that a six-pack ring does not take itself off of a six-pack of beer, open the kitchen door, jump out into the yard, and find its way into a river.”
Just like many other pollution problems, Sheavly says people are behind marine debris. But she says, this one can be solved on a person-by-person scale—by making people aware of the consequences of their behavior, showing them how to do better, and making waste management tools readily available. More than just an eyesore Anyone who has shaken a slimy plastic bag off their leg during an ocean swim can tell you how they're affected by ocean litter.
But the problem has much larger consequences for aquatic wildlife, for marine navigation, and even for people, says David Osborn, who works with United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) marine and coastal ecosystem's branch.
For one thing, a huge amount of the debris littering the oceans and coasts comes from plastic. Plastics are a particular problem, Osborn says, because they don't biodegrade. Plastic just sits there, or else it breaks down into tinier and tinier pieces—eventually microscopic pieces—of plastic. These pieces create a number of problems, largely when they are ingested by wildlife or when wildlife become entangled in them. Plastic can carry invasive species, spreading another insidious environmental problem.
Osborn says plastics in the ocean have the potential to cause damage further up the food chain. “Plastics are pollutants,” he says. “They carry chemicals that can get caught in the tissue of the fish. We eat them, and we're ingesting those pollutants in their system.” Commercial fishing nets—big, bulky, and incredibly durable—are another big headache. Sometimes they get lost overboard, and sometimes there is no good way to dispose of them when they're no longer usable. When they're left in the water, all kinds of wildlife can get trapped and killed. Plus the nets can get tangled in delicate coral reefs or in the machinery of boats.
Beyond the individual impact of specific debris, the health of oceans affects everyone, says Tom McCann, who works for Ocean Conservancy. “When we're trashing our oceans,” he says, “we're really harming not only our economic well-being and our social well being, but ultimately the health of humans both here in America and abroad as well.”
Cleaning up the mess McCann's organization is one of the major players working to clean up the debris. Theirs is often a fairly low tech approach: mobilize squads of volunteers and hit the beach with trash bags. But although Ocean Conservancy expends a lot of energy on cleaning up, most experts, including McCann, say the problem cannot be solved that way.
Cleanup, it turns out, can be pretty complicated. The low-tech solution is inefficient and ineffective—and doesn't really even begin to address the problem of debris that is circling far away from land in the open ocean. UNEP's Osborn says even finding the debris in deep water can be challenging. The litter doesn't show up on satellite imagery or radar, and it moves around.
Even in the case of the “North Pacific Gyre”—aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region of ocean northeast of Hawaii where currents converge to concentrate marine litter—it's not so easy to clean up. Osborn says depending on the season, the location of the patch moves. Sometimes the litter cycles down far beneath the surface, and often the debris is spread out over a large enough area that litter density becomes minimal and attempting a cleanup becomes a monumental task.
Moreover, Osborn says, the cleanup itself can have an ecological toll. Anything that catches litter runs the risk of catching marine life as well, and he notes that the by-catch of a clean up can be as damaging as the litter was to begin with.
That doesn't mean some people aren't trying to tackle the problem. George Orbelian, a lifelong surfer and oceans enthusiast, helped found Project Kaisei, an organization dedicated to studying deep sea debris and trying to clean it up. Right now, Project Kaisei is in the research phase, in partnership with, among others, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. But Project Kaisei has also partnered with large-scale recycling companies, which think all that debris out in the water has the potential to bring in some profit.
Orbelian says there are a number of recycling possibilities. “We're actually looking at four or five different technologies that turn waste plastic into fuel and other things that can be used,” he says. “So we'll see which technology is most appropriate.” In terms of collecting the plastic, he says one new possibility would be “to create a material that acts as a magnet that attracts the plastic or something that ends up connecting to the plastic bits.” Going to the source Osborn remains skeptical that an efficient solution can be found for collecting plastic. While he welcomes the effort—as well as the publicity and research—Project Kaisei is putting into the problem, he says finding a better solution for recapturing the waste “is extremely difficult and the primary reason why a market has not already appeared.” That's why he, like many other experts, says the real solution is prevention.
“[One step] many cities invest in is gross pollutant traps,” says Osborn. “Waste that goes into storm-water channels gets caught in effectively a big net, which stops it from going into the marine environment.”
Another technological advance that could help is to improve the composition of plastic so that it biodegrades in the marine environment. “There are a number of different variations of plastic bags,” Osborn says, such as “bags made out of corn starch or bags that biodegrade when they get wet.”
These may not be ideal from a consumer standpoint, Osborn points out—imagine walking home with your groceries in the rain—but could lead to a long-term solution that minimizes the number of bags floating around.
A less technologically advanced solution might be to use fewer plastic bags to start with. Osborn says “the UN has been calling for some time for governments to phase out those flimsy film bags, and move towards recyclable, reusable materials,” like cloth. But given that we can't eliminate plastic 100%, some marine litter programs aim to make better use of plastic waste so it won't get discarded in the first place—for example, what to do with those bulky, durable fishing nets.
In many port areas, marine litter expert Sheavly says, there is no good mechanism in place to help fishermen dispose of the nets that don't work anymore, “so sometimes fishermen have no recourse other than to let it go.” Instead, some places have turned the nets into a resource. Hawaii has developed a program where derelict nets are collected, brought back to Honolulu, processed, and, in a special waste-to-energy plant, turned into electricity.
“Putting a fishing net into landfills is kind of worthless,” Sheavly says. “Being able to convert those nets into electricity, they now have a monetary worth to them, so that it makes it worthwhile to collect the nets and then process them.” And it provides an opportunity to convert the energy that was used to make that net into something else.
What you can do Keith Criddle, a fisheries and marine conservation professor at the University of Alaska and the lead author on a congressionally mandated study on marine debris, points out, “All of the man-made debris in the oceans and on the coasts was put there by people, willfully or by accident.”
“It is important,” he says, “to acknowledge that the marine debris problem and its solution can be boiled down to simple individual and social choices about the disposal of waste materials.”
Sheavly says better education can play a big role in helping individuals make better choices. For instance, “most people have been told the caps on a soda bottle aren't recyclable,” she says, and so they toss them. But recycling technology is now capable of sorting the bottles, which are made from one kind of plastic, and the caps, which are made from another, and capturing and reusing both.
Any real solution, she says, will attack the problem from a number of different angles, but the personal angle should always be included.
“In some pollution issues people don't see how they could affect it.” Sheavly says. “This is one where you can.”
Walden University is proud to have more than 20 state teachers of the year—including Deborah Fogg, education doctoral student—currently working toward advanced degrees at its Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership. Five days a week, Deborah Fogg, a seventh grade Language Arts teacher at the Lancaster School in Lancaster, New Hampshire, takes a long lunch.
Normally, teachers at her school eat in the first five minutes of the 25-minute lunch period so they can take care of other things during the remaining time. For the last eight years, however, Fogg has devoted the entirety of lunch period to her students. Her pupils, both past and present, flock each day to a sign up to be one of the four kids to eat with her.
“It lets me feel the pulse of what's going on with the kids,” says Fogg. “It's been a great way to build relationships with them. We talk about whatever they want to talk about—basketball, school, home life. Middle school kids are like that. They will pour their hearts out if you just give them the opportunity.”
In all aspects of her teaching, Fogg strives to take advantage of the unabashed enthusiasm that can start to disappear as kids slip into adolescence. “They're not too cool yet. They'll get up and act, and they'll write reams of stuff. They're little enough so they'll still be goofy for you,” she says. She also recognizes that her students are at a malleable age where a little patience and kindness can go a long way—especially at a moment when many kids and parents leave school and work only to go home and stare at a computer some more.
“It's not just Language Arts they're getting. I'm trying to teach them about being a good citizen and being a role model. And it's about building relationships,” she says. “As [kids], we sat at the dining room table and ate together, all of us. Nowadays, kids are isolated. They go into their bedrooms and don't interact. I think they're missing out. So I try to make my classroom like a living room. I want them to come in and feel like they're coming into their home. Once I build those relationships and establish that sense of community, my kids will do anything for me.”
Fogg, who is studying curriculum education at Walden University, always dreamed of teaching. Both her parents were teachers, and she grew up listening to her mother's “Three F” teaching mantra: Be Firm, Fair, and Friendly. Her father taught science and often came home with stories about the classes he had taught that day. “Dinner conversation was always about education and lessons plans,” she said.
In the 1970s, Fogg put that dream on hold, leaving college to help put her husband through law school. Over the next many years, she stayed home to raise their two children. Then, at age 42, and after testing the waters as a substitute teacher for a few years, Fogg returned to get her bachelor’s in education.
But school wasn’t where Fogg got the charisma that keeps students coming to her lunch table every day. That, she says, comes from years of watching her father teach.
“When I would walk down the hall with him, [his students] would run up to him and say, ‘Guess what I just did?' In his classroom, he was always smiling and laughing and joking,” Fogg recalls. “He had this demeanor in the classroom that made me feel like, 'When I grow up, I wanna be a teacher just like that.'”
Fogg's daughter must have had a similar feeling watching her mother: She, too, became a seventh grade Language Arts teacher recently. “She and I are always calling each other talking about an idea or something she tried or something I tried. I'm sure we drive everyone around us nuts.”
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Gregory Parker '09, who earned a Master of Public Administration degree and is a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration, was re-elected to the Comal County Commissioners Court (Texas) in November 2008. In September 2008, he was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry to the Texas Commission on State Emergency Communications, where he leads the state's initiative for Next Generation 9-1-1.
Susan Sonnier '07, who earned an M.S. degree in Nursing, published a chapter in the textbook Disaster Nursing: A Handbook for Practice (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2009), titled “Communicating in a Disaster." She also wrote two appendices for the textbook. Sonnier also was recently voted Nurse of the Year at Clear Lake Regional Medical Center in Webster, Texas.
Dr. Ellen Stoltz '01, who earned a Ph.D. in Education, recently completed two consecutive three-year terms as a commissioner for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Dr. Stoltz is the director of Special Education Instructional Support Services for Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut.
Gloria Brown Brooks '04, who earned an M.S. in Education and is now a student in the Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) program, was named a Teacher of the Year for 2008 by the San Benito County (Calif.) Office of Education. She is also the Thinkfinity presenter for the county’s Office of Education.
Vicky Panasuk '03, who earned an M.S. in Education, has been named principal at Jefferson Elementary School in Glendive, Mont.
Dr. Mario O. Barrett III '07, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences, wrote Leading from the Inside Out: Using the Barrett Leadership Model to Achieve Sustainable Happiness by Creating and Pursuing the Fulfillment of Your Life. (Dog Ear Publishing, 2008). The book has appeared regularly in the Top 10 of Buy.com's bestsellers for personal happiness books.
Dr. Dennis E. Morrow '92, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences, was recently named chair of the Business Department at Herzing University's Atlanta campus.
Dr. Ntiedo J. Umoren '00, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences, has been appointed the director of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Development at the University of Uyo in Nigeria, where he is a faculty member.
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