Walden University Alumni Association Blog

Walden Think+Up Case Study: The Internet is Running Out of Numbers

Who knew? When first laying the foundations of the Internet back in the 1970s, computer scientists could hardly foresee that this network of networks would sprawl across the globe as quickly and pervasively it has.

But guess what: The Internet has grown so large that it’s now pushing up against some of the limits of its original design. The moment is fast approaching when it will no longer be able to incorporate additional hardware: No more PCs, no more servers, no more routers, no more mobile phones. Unless something changes deep inside, the Internet will simply cease to grow any more, and only those machines and devices lucky enough to be attached already will enjoy its many benefits.

Or maybe not. All this is the subject of a big debate in certain information technology circles these days. In fact, a major update to the Internet’s foundations, an update designed to enable the Internet to grow billions of times over, is already in place, just waiting for the switch to be thrown.  

The gist of the problem is this: Each piece of hardware attached to the Internet must have a unique numerical address, assigned to it by one of the authorities that governs the Internet. This set of numbers—generally hidden from view behind a URL, is similar to area codes and telephone numbers that enable calls to take place between telephones. These addresses are key to the movement of mail, Web pages, videos, and other data between the Internet’s millions of machines. But due to the format of the Internet’s addressing scheme—namely, the fact that the number of digits in each address is fixed—the number of unique addresses available is finite.

The Internet’s addressing scheme is defined as part of the Internet Protocol (IP), which describes exactly how to assemble the information in each packet of data sent through the Internet. One of the fields of data therein is the address of the packet’s intended destination, and in the current version of IP, called IPv4, this address field contains 32 bits. That’s enough to create approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses—a big number but not nearly enough, it appears, to handle the flood of new devices that people want to attach to the Internet.

The world’s several hundred million desktop and laptop PCs and Web and email servers turn out to represent only the start of the Internet’s growth ramp. Also potentially in need of their own addresses are potentially billions of mobile phones. And in the wings are tens to hundreds of billions more electronic devices, from home DVD players to refrigerators and individual light switches to every kind of industrial machine—all potential objects of remote monitoring and control—and all needing their own IP address. 

Fortunately, the possibility of so many billions of new devices joining the Internet was envisioned many years ago, when a much-advanced version of IP, known as IPv6, was worked out. IPv6 includes an address field of 128 bits, which in theory makes available 2 to the 128th power, or 3.4×10 to the 38th power unique addresses. That’s enough for each of the 6.5 billion persons living today to have 5x10 to the 28th power IP addresses of their own.

So why, then, a decade after IPv6 was defined and with IPv4 addresses running out, is there such little interest in the new protocol? In fact, millions of PCs and Macs have IPv6 built into their operating systems, but usage remains extremely rare among the Internet’s larger host computers, which run Web sites and so forth. According to a survey conducted by Google, only about 1% of hosts are using IPv6, but without significant host participation, the new protocol doesn’t help anyone.

One reason for the lag is that, as often happens with technology, the networking industry has worked out alternatives that have enabled IPv4 to handle more devices without a wholesale changeover to IPv6. Techniques called Network Address Translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), for instance, enable Internet Service Providers to share a relatively small set of IP addresses across many customer computers. These techniques don’t scale forever, though, and have difficulty handling peer-to-peer (P2P) connections, so the conversion to IPv6 looks inevitable. And the sooner, the better.

How to speed the transition? One approach might be to create a market in IP addresses, which today are essentially free for the taking. Once the price for increasingly scarce IPv4 addresses starts rising, the theory goes, buyers would naturally opt for IPv6 as a way to save money. In analyzing this idea, Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, points out that measures likely would be needed to discourage rampant speculation in addresses and to help with certain technical issues that arise inside the Internet’s routing structure as IPv4- and IPv6-based traffic coexisted for a period of time.

But in a widely-circulated working paper published in early 2009, Edelman says, “Experience in other markets indicates that trading resource rights can achieve large efficiency gains. For example, tradable pollution rights reportedly reduced pollution for 55% lower cost than ordering across-the-board cuts by all firms thanks to variation in firms’ costs of abatement. Networks feature similar variation in their initial address allocations, in the suitability of transition technologies to serve their requirements, and in their staff and equipment costs of migration. Through transfers, networks with low transition costs can move to v6 first—at lower cost than transitions in random order.”

Not everyone is convinced. As it turns out, market mechanisms for allocating scarce IPv4 addresses have been proposed for many years. They’ve not caught on, experts say, because markets are viewed as helping only for a few years; because ownership of IP addresses is explicitly prohibited by key Internet policy documents; and because trading in addresses would tend to fragment the Internet’s so-called “address space” and create severe technical and service complexities. In short, ISPs would be better off paying for the conversion to IPv6, some observers say, than to constantly reshuffle IPv4 addresses as they buy and resell those.

Exactly when the IPv4 address space will be fully exhausted is difficult to predict. A few years ago, 2009 was given as the date, but increasing reliance on NAT gateways and other IPv4-based workarounds has helped ISPs to push the date back. What’s more, large blocks of unused addresses still remain in the hands of government agencies and mounting political pressure could free those addresses up for use by the private sector. But everyone agrees that demand will continue to rise and it’s clear to all involved that by 2016, IPv4 addresses will certainly be all used up.

Fortunately, the old and new versions of IP can co-exist, as they have been for several years now. But eventually, system-wide adoption will be necessary. Several Asian countries already are well ahead of the United States in bringing ultra-high-speed Internet service to homes—100 Mbps service is common in Singapore and Hong Kong, for instance—and they are leading the way in IPv6, too. A major showcase for IPv6 was the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, held in Beijing. If only to keep its national economy competitive, the U.S. will have to find one way or another to speed adoption of IPv6.

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Think+Up Case Study: "Cow Power: Creating Natural Gas from Manure"

If someone were to ask, “What are the greatest threats to the environment today?” most people would answer “gas-guzzling cars” or “smoke-spewing manufacturing plants.” Yet surprisingly, cows are responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming—more than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation put together, according to a United Nations report. What’s worse, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that in the U.S. alone, cattle emit about 5.5 million metric tons of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, per year into the atmosphere—20% of U.S. methane emissions.

Fortunately, a growing number of dairy farmers are discovering a unique way to curb their cattle’s environmental impact while converting cow manure into a renewable source of energy. Better yet, by forming key partnerships with public utilities, these farmers are tapping into a potentially lucrative business opportunity—provided they can work within stringent government regulations and raise the necessary start-up funding.

A meaningful partnership
Just ask David Albers. A third-generation California dairy farmer and environmental attorney, Albers owns the first dairy farm in California to deliver pipeline-quality, renewable natural gas to utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Here’s how the system works: Manure is collected in a holding area on Albers’ farm which is sealed to create an oxygen-free atmosphere. As this manure decomposes, microbes break down the compounds and produce methane gas. Pumps draw the biogas from beneath the lagoon covers and blowers push the biogas through an underground pipeline. Finally, PG&E collects this biogas and scrubs it to create renewable natural gas that can be used to produce electricity.

Moooooo-re money, fewer emissions
Albers has been piping gas to PG&E since October 2008—about 200,000 cubic feet per day—which is enough to power 1,700 homes. While it’s not unheard of for dairy farmers to install biogas recovery systems to power their own farm operations, teaming up with a utility such as PG&E heralds a new direction in biogas usage as well as dairy farm revenue.

“We are paid a substantial premium for our renewable gas so it’s much more advantageous for us to sell it to a company that’s willing to pay us that premium than it is for us to use it to run our own operation,” says Albers.

But that’s not all. Albers’ 2,600 Holstein cows produce emissions that are more damaging to the planet than carbon dioxide. However, by capturing the emissions using a methane digester, he achieves a significant emissions reduction. In fact, a recent report from the University of Texas, Austin, estimates that using the approximately one billion tonnes of manure produced annually from the livestock industry in the United States to generate electricity could supply up to 3% of total U.S. electric demand. In turn, 99 million tonnes of net greenhouse gas emissions could be eliminated.

“If not for the digester, that manure would still break down and all that gassing off would go into the atmosphere,” says Albers. “We’re capturing all of that now and either destroying it or putting it in the pipeline.”

Allen Dusault recognizes both the environmental and business value in converting cow manure to biogas through public-private partnerships. Dusault is the director of sustainable agriculture at the San Francisco-based Sustainable Conservation. By partnering with the privately-owned Hilarides Dairy in Lindsay, Calif., Sustainable Conservation helped turn two diesel-powered trucks into vehicles that can run on biomethane produced from cow manure.

“The vast majority of dairies in California and some other states produce a lot of methane from decomposing cow manure. Being able to capture that gas reduces the impact of methane, which is 21 times more powerful [as a greenhouse gas] than carbon dioxide,” says Dusault. Not to mention the added business opportunities it creates for countless industries, he adds.

Biogas beyond borders
Currently, Albers is working hard to create a biogas network of dairies, each responsible for running  methane digesters and linking to an expanding pipeline system. To date, Albers says 39 dairies have agreed to collaborate with him on the system. And long-term goals might even include replicating the system in developing nations where biogas has huge potential. In Nepal, for example, nearly 80% of the population lives in rural areas with no electricity. Over the past two decades, Biogas Sector Partnership-Nepal (BSP), a non-governmental agency, has installed around 210,000 biogas plants that use cattle manure to provide biogas for cooking and lighting. According to BSP, each plant reduces the country’s carbon emissions by around 4.7 tonnes a year.

“There are a lot of opportunities globally for biogas,” says Albers. “We get calls from all over the world.”

What’s more, converting cow manure into renewable energy reduces the transmission of disease, especially in countries known for their poor sanitation. “One of the benefits of installing methane digesters in developing countries is pathogen reduction,” says Dusault. “E.coli and other pathogens in animal and human waste that get into the food chain are a real problem.”

Obstacles ahead
For all its benefits and business opportunities, there’s nothing easy about getting a biogas system off the ground—with or without the help of a deep-pocketed utility company. For starters, a methane digester can cost upward of $3 million, an elusive amount of money for most dairy farmers. Moreover, a tough economy has made it difficult for many farmers to corral the necessary funding for eco-friendly projects.

“We got a very warm reception [from investors], but what we found out is that, in 2009, everybody decided that they weren’t going to invest in anything,” says Albers. “That has really hurt us.”

But that’s not all. Complicating matters further is the fact that there are a whole host of federal and state regulations governing the design and operation of biogas systems. These days, dairy farmers must be prepared to contend with soil erosion regulations, air quality stipulations, complicated permit application processes, on-going planning and reporting requirements, costly legal fees—even odor complaints from disgruntled neighbors.  

Fortunately, there are some regulations working in farmers’ favor. Currently, 31 states have enacted Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) programs requiring that a certain percentage of a public utility’s electricity come from a renewable energy source. As a result, utilities such as PG&E are now looking to join forces with providers of renewable resources. Dairy farmers operating methane digesters may fit the bill.

Without a doubt, cow manure strikes most people as an unlikely fuel for the future. But by forming key private-public partnerships and satisfying stringent government regulations, today’s dairy farmers are finding out that the answer to global warming—and increased farm revenues—may just be blowing in the wind.

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Think+Up Case Study: Open Source Software Offers Profit and Peril

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.

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Alumni Accolades

Walden’s alumni are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

Dr. Allen J. White '91, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences, received the John F. Kennedy Jr. Community Service award by the Hyannis (Mass.) Area Chamber of Commerce for his volunteer service in the community, which includes housing for veterans, initiatives on homelessness and raising funds for Red Cross disaster relief.

Dorsey L. Kendrick '94, who earned a Ph.D. in Education, received two prestigious awards: one from the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund and another from the Connecticut State Conference of NAACP.
 
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.

Derek Kouwenhoven '08, who received a M.S. in Nursing, was appointed director of critical care services at Central Vermont Medical Center.

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.”

Walden Think+Up Case Study: Carbon Capture and Storage for Climate Management

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.”

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Ph.D. Survival Tips: Expect the Unexpected During Your Dissertation Process

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 Think+Up Case Study: Businesses Harnessing the Power of Complex Events Processing

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?

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Faculty Author: Dr. Darlington Mgbeke

Public Policy Implementation in a Democratic Governance Society: A Roadmap to Empowering Citizen Participation: An Empirical Study
Dr. Darlington Mgbeke, faculty member in the Center for Undergraduate Studies
AuthorHouse, 2009

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.

Walden Alert: Race, Gender & Class Conference call for Papers and Proposals

 The following is an open call for papers and panel proposals in 2010:

Association: The American Sociological Association, Section on Race, Gender & Class

Journal: The Race, Gender & Class journal

Conference: Race, Gender & Class 2010 conference

Location: Hampton Inn Hotel, New Orleans

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.

Walden Think+Up Case Study: Biodiesel Moves from Backyard to Mainstream

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.

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Think+Up Case Study: Is There Any Solution to Plastic Marine Debris?

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.”

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden students and faculty presenting at APHA Conference

Graduate students, alumni and faculty from Walden’s College of Health Sciences are among those presenting their research, best practices and public health experience at the American Public Health Association (APHA) 137th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Philadelphia this week. The APHA’s annual event is the oldest and largest gathering of public health professionals in the world, attracting more than 13,000 national and international physicians, administrators, nurses, educators, researchers, epidemiologists and related health specialists.

The poster and oral presentations will be part of APHA’s meeting program and will address current and emerging health science, policy and practice issues in an effort to prevent disease and promote health. Contributors will include:

• Nina Bell, student in Ph.D. in Public Health program, “Adolescent Alcoholism: A Literature Review of Parental/Familial Modeling and Intervention Implications”
• Tammy Chavis '09, Ph.D. in Public Health, “A Mixed-Method Study Pertaining to the Level of Knowledge about Alzheimer's Disease Among African-American Caregivers”
• Dr. Talmage Holmes, School of Health Sciences faculty, “Epidemiology Instruction in the Virtual World—Opportunities and Challenges With Online Classroom Instruction”
• Kirk Morehead, student in Ph.D. in Public Health program, “Primary Care Resource Gaps and Healthcare Reform” and "Using Epidemiologic Models to Quantify and Respond to Physician Resource Need”
• Dr. Amany Refaat, School of Health Sciences faculty, “Effects of Education on Gender-Based Violence in Egypt”
• Sarel van der Walt, student in Ph.D. in Public Health program, “Ethical Implications of Complexity Theory and Public Health Research Ethics in the 21st Century

Walden Alumni Authors: Malinda Daniel, Mary Gallagher

Fallacy or Truth: The State of American Education Today
Dr. Malinda Daniel '08, Ph.D. in Education
Highway, 2009

Many Americans have questions about the quality of education in the United States and whether it will get worse before it gets better. Many newspapers report the dire circumstances of education and the struggles that schools are facing to meet Adequate Yearly Progress. Understanding the child’s world is the place we must begin. Society can play the blame game by saying it’s their (parents’, teachers’, schools’) fault, or businesses and communities can support learning and teaching. Teachers desire to provide the best support to learners. The foundation for a solid society in the future will require more time for professional development, better community support, financial resources and innovative teaching.


Teach a Child to Read with Children’s Books, 4th Edition
Mark Thogmartin and Mary Gallagher '07, M.S. in Education
New Learning Concepts, 2009

Timing is the key to success with emerging child readers of all ages. Teach a Child to Read with Children’s Books skillfully presents and guides the reader through a process of recognition and reinforcement that customizes reading instruction to the specific child. Foundational reading skills are introduced as the child’s natural desire to learn develops. When the skill being introduced is relevant to a child’s desire to learn, both teaching and learning become exciting, even joyful experiences! Teach a Child to Read with Children’s Books approaches reading instruction from a particular perspective: nurturing lifelong learners. Written specifically for parents, tutors and teachers who work one-on-one with children learning to read, Teach a Child to Read with Children’s Books provides a comprehensive approach that provides tools to identify and implement research-based instruction strategies without dampening a child’s enthusiasm for reading and learning.

Walden offers new PhD in counselor education and supervision

Walden University is now offering a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. The degree counseling professionals with the skills and experience they need to assume leadership positions in clinical, community, nonprofit, academic or research settings.

Earning a doctoral degree in this profession is important now more than ever with national standards that require new faculty members of Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Program (CACREP)-accredited programs to hold doctoral degrees in counselor education and supervision by 2013.

Aligned with national standards for counselor education and reflecting Walden’s mission of social change, the program helps mental health professionals:

• Advance their career in clinical, community, academic, or research settings.
• Conduct effective counseling-related program evaluations.
• Gain clinical and related experience to enhance their professional development by participating in both a doctoral practicum and internship.
• Develop counseling expertise in a relevant area, including forensic mental health counseling and crisis counseling.
• Design, implement, and analyze individual research related to the counseling profession.

“Whether counseling professionals want to advance their clinical counseling supervision skills or pursue a career in academia or research, Walden’s Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision can provide them with the skills and knowledge they need to implement change in their communities and organizations,” says Dr. Carl J. Sheperis, program director for Walden’s Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. “As the demand for doctorate-level counseling professionals increases in the coming years, this program can help students expand their career opportunities and become true leaders in the profession.”

Students can choose from the General Program or five specializations to develop expertise in a focused, highly relevant area. The General Program allows students to choose two elective courses in their area of interest with the option of applying those electives to complete a specialization:

• Consultation
• Counseling and Social Change
• Forensic Mental Health
• Nonprofit Management and Leadership
• Trauma and Crisis

Walden Student: Eric Kinkaid, West Virginia Teacher of the Year (2008)

Walden University is proud to have more than 20 state teachers of the year—including Eric Kincaid, education doctoral student—currently working toward advanced degrees at its Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership.

For some students, science education begins and ends in high school. For others, however, it's a course of study that knows no beginning or end.

For 2008 West Virginia Teacher of the Year Eric Kincaid, science was something that was part of his earliest days, even if he didn't use that word for it. “I was always collecting specimens in middle school,” says Kincaid, a biology teacher at Morgantown High School in Morgantown, West Virginia. “'Specimens' is what my mother called them. I'd come home with little bugs and rocks and stuff like that in my pocket.”

Early on, this helped him see that education was something larger than just what happened at school. Learning could clearly take place anywhere, at anytime—something Kincaid says he learned from his grandfather who, although he had to drop out of school at age 13 to work, continued to educate himself. “He read everything he could and learned everything he could,” says Kincaid, noting his admiration. “His knowledge really blows me away even though he only has an eighth grade education.”

In his classes, Kincaid tries to help students see that education isn't always about a scholastic context. He works to show them that scientists are doing research outside of the classroom walls all the time. What's more, they're often doing research that looks a lot like the genetic work he does with his AP kids—analyzing DNA, trying to diagnose genetic disorders, and even manipulating the genome.

“I like finding new articles or videos, because the kids really like getting those news stories. I like showing the kids what the potential is. A couple of times I've found things that were published the day I showed it to them, so they can see it's not just coming from their text books—this is information that is coming up all the time,” he says. “I also want to try to get kids to get the information on their own—to teach them how to use the tools that we have that will allow them to get information, and remember it, and use it, and apply it. If I can do that, then I'm pretty happy, because the amount of information we're getting now is amazing. There is no way you can actually remember it all. If we can give them the tools to get information on their own, then they have a better chance of being successful.”

Of course, there's also the learning that goes on for students after they leave his class—that's the kind of learning that may end up taking students much deeper into science than their teacher will ever go. For Kincaid, a student who can outdo him is a dream come true.

One of his favorite memories of teaching involves a very reserved pupil who had just lost her father and didn't seem engaged in class. “It was amazing what her academic ability was, but she was very quiet—never said a whole lot,” he says. “That was just as I was starting to try to teach genes and different genome studies, and she ended up taking what I taught her and going into that research on her own.”

Today, that shy, reserved student is working on a combined M.D./Ph.D. at Harvard University. “She is doing cancer research—she wanted to fight the cancer that killed her dad,” says Kincaid. And now, she's the one offering words of encouragement: “She writes, 'Keep up those genomic studies, keep looking at those techniques and all that, because that's what enabled me to get ahead,'” he says. “That's why I'm here now.”

Visit ConnectEd to read other education-related articles.

Walden awards faculty with research grants

To support research that leads to real-world solutions, Walden University awarded four faculty members and six faculty teams the 2009 Faculty Research Initiative Grant, totaling $139,500. With the goal of supporting excellence in scholarly work, the grant program helps fund select faculty research projects that are deemed exceptional in merit. The grants provide seed money for the development of faculty research agendas.

Walden University congratulates the following individuals and research teams for their standout projects:

Assessing a Predictive Modeling Technique for Proactive Patient Management of Diabetes
 
Principal Investigator: Dr. Howard B. Schechtner, School of Management
Co-Principal Investigator: Mr. Nithyanandam Mathiyazhagan, School of Management
Grant Amount: $15,000
Project Abstract: Diabetes affects nearly 25 million Americans and is estimated to cost approximately $125 billion annually. It is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. The human cost can be measured in terms of hospitalizations, drug costs, amputations, blindness, nerve damage, pain management and other health problems. The societal cost is in the trillions of dollars and is stressing a health care system whose costs are soaring. This study will create and assess predictive models for patients to proactively treat their blood sugar levels. It is difficult for patients to predict blood sugar as current technology gives them only a momentary reading without indicating whether levels are rising or falling. If insulin boluses are injected when sugars are high but actually falling, a serious hypoglycemic event requiring hospitalization could transpire. The model will take into account a number of variables such as insulin dose, blood sugar level, food intake (grams of carbohydrates), calories consumed, food timing, physical activity, type of activity, duration of activity, time of day, day of week and historical blood sugar readings. These explicit and tacit knowledge variables will guide the creation of the predictive model. The goal of the research is to tighten the control of blood sugar range which typically means reducing the running average of blood sugar level readings and reducing high and low readings. The theoretical basis for the study rests with Nonaka and Takeuchi’s Spiral Process Theory of Knowledge which will guide the creation of the model. This knowledge-based, technology-leveraged approach has the goal of greater adherence to self-controlled diabetes management through tacit and explicit knowledge conversion and internalization.
 
Formative Research to Identify Barriers to Completing Prenatal Care Services in HIV-Positive Communities in Rural South India
 
Principal Investigator: Dr. Vishnu-Priya Sneller, College of Health Sciences
Co-Principal Investigator: Dr. Raghu Korripati, School of Management
Grant Amount: $20,000
Project Abstract: The study proposes to use qualitative and quantitative methods to assess the prenatal services available to women in rural India. In collaboration with a local non-government agency that provides HIV prevention services in three different settings in Andhra-Pradesh. Participants will be residents from communities where HIV is known to be present. Participating communities will be identified by locating HIV-positive women who were lost to follow-up during the third trimester of pregnancy and missed an opportunity to prevent perinatal transmission of HIV. The project proposes to use qualitative and quantitative methods to identify barriers to prenatal care and health status of HIV-positive women who were lost to follow-up. Qualitative methods will use focus groups and non-structured interviews. The quantitative method will use structured interviews. Focus groups composed of women 16 years and older and couples from these communities will inform the development of communication messages and print material promoting prenatal care. Focus groups will also be used to develop the questionnaire, which will be used for individual interviews. Women 16 years and older from these communities will participate voluntarily in the structured individual interviews. Univariate and logistic regression models will be used to describe the barriers to prenatal care and risk for HIV infections in these communities.
 
About the Faculty Research Initiative Grant
The Faculty Research Initiative Grant program is open to all faculty who have been employed by Walden for a minimum of six months. Grant funds can be used to support pilot research projects and small-scale research studies, and to supplement new areas of investigation that are spin-off studies or sub-studies of larger ongoing research projects.    

Walden Community News

Walden’s students, faculty and staff are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

Dr. Lorraine Cleeton and Dr. Gil Cleeton, faculty members in The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership, published Controlling the Levees of the Mind (Adaptability, 2009).
 
Erikson Daniel Conkling, a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration student, has begun a faculty professor of social and behavioral sciences position at the Logansport, Ind., campus of Ivy Tech Community College.
 
Todd Daniel, a Ph.D. in Psychology student, was awarded the 2009 Best Student Poster Presentation for his poster, "On Thin Ice: Listening to Methamphetamine Users in the Ozarks," at the Walden University summer residency held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
 
Jacqueline Derby, a faculty member in The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership, presented “Second Life: What Type of Professional Development Is Available?” at the 30th Annual National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, DC, on June 30, 2009.

Dr. Nicholas Johns, a faculty member in the College of Management and Technology, co-published “Building Reflective Practitioners on Business Programmes: An Action Research Study” in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education.
 
Dr. Bernice Kennedy, a faculty member in the College of Health Sciences, published “Psychosocial Model: Racism as a Predictor of Adherence and Compliance to Treatment and Health Outcomes Among African Americans” (Journal of Theory Construction & Testing, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2009).
 
Dr. Anthony Leisner, a faculty member in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, co-published “Alleviating Poverty: A Macro/Micro Marketing Perspective” in Macromarketing (Sage Publications, 2009).

Dr. Jason Seacat, a faculty member in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, co-published two articles: “Dental Students Treating Patients Living With HIV/AIDS: The Influence of Attitudes and HIV Knowledge” (Journal of Dental Education, Vol. 73, Issue 4, 2009) and “Stereotype Threat and the Exercise/Dietary Health Intentions of Overweight Women” (Journal of Health Psychology, May 2009).
 
Dr. Carl Sheperis, a faculty member in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, co-published Counseling Research: Quantitative, Qualitative and Mixed Methods (Pearson, 2010).
 
Dr. Jeff Snodgrass, a faculty member in the College of Health Sciences, co-published “Faculty Perceptions of Occupational Therapy Program Directors' Leadership Styles and Outcomes of Leadership” in the Journal of Allied Health (Vol. 37, 2008).
 
Dr. Janice Spangenburg, a faculty member in the College of Management and Technology, co-published “Leadership and the Future: Gen Y Workers and Two-Factor Theory” in the September 2009 issue of The Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge.

Walden Think+Up Case Study "Restoring Wildlands: Two Business Models"

Many Americans think of parks and rainforest when they think of Costa Rica—an exotic vacation destination with scuba diving and hiking. But not too long ago, the only creatures hiking through a large swath of northwest Costa Rica were farmers and cows.

Originally wooded with dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest, by the 1960s and ‘70s, most of the land had become dry savanna. But from one couple's initiative and a many private donations, 500 miles of savanna has been restored into national parkland.

Restoration minimalism
Dan Janzen, the field biologist, who, along with his wife, fellow field biologist, Winnie Hallwachs, pioneered the effort to restore the land, said the most important thing they needed to do to restore the land was to buy it.

“We don't plant any trees,” Janzen says, “wind and animals bring the seeds. We don't plant anything. What you have to do is stop anybody or anything from stopping animals.”

Of course, the reality is somewhat more complex. The Area de Conservacion Guanacaste has a staff of 150 people and an operating budget of about $1.5 million. Among other projects, the staff fights fires, researches wildlife, educates students in the surrounding areas about biology, and yes, in some areas, even plants some trees.

But Janzen says all that is practically beside the point. “Biologically, restoration is a breeze,” he says. “If you're willing to let a large area restore itself, that will happen.

“The real world is that every square foot out there is owned by someone,” Janzen says, and they're using it for something. If you want to use it for something else, for instance, if you want to let the forest grow back, you just buy the land.

William Allen documented the restoration process in his book Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. “The restoration effort was incredibly successful,” says Allen. “There’s been nothing like it anywhere, as far as I’ve been able to learn by talking with a wide range of leading and lesser tropical ecologists who know this world.”

Janzen says in another 100 years, the average observer would never know there had been anything but forest on the land. (He says it'll take about 500 years for the true balance to be restored.)

He raised most of the money to buy the land through private donations—although he worked with the Costa Rican government, and the park continues to be run in cooperation with the government. But he says whether you raise money through tax dollars or private investment or winning the lottery is irrelevant.

A wider look
A more important question might be whether this model—large-scale buy back of degraded landscapes for the purpose of restoration—can be repeated successfully elsewhere.

One of the elements that made Janzen's plan for restoration possible was that undisturbed parts of the forest remained. Janzen says almost all the old species still existed in pockets on the land. Perhaps equally crucial, Janzen was able to buy a large enough amount of land to allow the natural process of succession to restart.

Allen says Janzen was helped by the fact that “in the 1980s the farm economy, especially for cattle production, was experiencing a major economic downturn, and many folks were glad to sell off and get out. For many of them, the restoration project’s interest in buying their land was a godsend. The restoration project was fortunate to have such an economic scenario make the land relatively available.”

But in other places, agriculture is still profitable, or the land has been used for other reasons, like building people's homes. Those owners might not be so interested in selling—or the price might be too high no matter how many people click on the donation button.

This, says Rob French, is largely the case in the Florida Everglades. What was once a “river of grass”—a wetland that covered much of south Florida—now contains cities, roads, sugar plantations, and farms.

In order to make the swampy land ready for development, the army corps of engineers built canals, dykes and levees, and engineered the water to flow where they wanted, when they wanted.

French, an environmental engineer who has spent much of his 30-plus-year career in Florida, says he  “thinks it is virtually an impossible task now to go back and restore the Everglades.” He says the best shot is to try to fix some of the damage.
 
For instance, the water quality in Everglades estuaries has been deteriorating, because of the way the water flow has been controlled. During the  rainy season, water is stored in Lake Okeechobee until it reaches a certain level, at which point water is released toward the ocean. But the stored water is freshwater, and when a large amount blasts through the brackish estuaries (a mix of salt and freshwater), it changes the salt content of the estuaries. It essentially kills everything in there, says French.

A solution along the lines of the Guanacaste restoration project would be for someone to buy up all the land and destroy all the levees, dykes, and canals to restore water flow to its natural state.

Restoration buy-back in Florida
In some places, this is exactly what the Everglades restoration project, funded through a joint agreement with the federal government and the state of Florida, is doing.

Randy Smith, media relations specialist for the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), gives an example: Picuyune Strand, in southwest Florida, a 55,000 acre tract bought by developers in the 1950s and ‘60s that was going to be a city. The owners went bankrupt, Smith says, but before they did, they put in roads and dug canals. Smith says, “the state of Florida bought that and we have been very successful in filing in one of the canals, and removing roads and the handful of houses that were there. And in the areas where we've gone in and filled up the canal, the sheet flow of water has gone back to a normal state.”

Engineering restoration
But Fred Sklar, the director of the SFWMD's Everglades division says, “we often find that it's very hard to just let nature take its course.” For instance, he says, thanks to invasive species like the Brazilian pepper, the ecology is changing. Invasive plants and animals crowd out the ones that lived there naturally—and that can have consequences all the way up the food chain, when animals can no longer find as much of what they’re used to eating. “Right now nature is having a hard time, and it's on a trajectory that often it means we have to go in and do something actively.”

So to improve water quality in the estuaries, the SFWMD is engineering a new system of storage and release that would vent the water in a more natural cycle, rather than in bursts. Their approach has its critics. Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University says that, with the billions of tax dollars being spent—current estimates hover around $10–12 billion—they could absolutely do more.

Pimm says real restoration requires restoring the natural flow, not building ever more complex systems to manage the water in new ways. He calls the restoration at Guanacaste “spectacular” but says, “what's happening in Everglades is really a very, very different kind of event.”

Ultimately, SFWMD's Sklar says, “I think the idea that we are just engineering restoration rather than allowing nature to take its course is something that we struggle with everyday. We always are trying to create an environment where we can let nature take its course.”

To read more case studies, visit Think+Up.

Walden Alumni Author: Dr. Nancy Appleton

Suicide by Sugar: A Startling Look at Our #1 National Addiction
Nancy Appleton '96, Ph.D. in Health Services
Square One Publishers, 2009
 
Once associated only with cavities and simple weight gain, sugar is now linked to a host of devastating health conditions including cancer, epilepsy, dementia, hypoglycemia and obesity. In Suicide by Sugar, sugar addiction expert Dr. Nancy Appleton and health writer G. N. Jacobs not only expose the exorbitant levels of sugar we ingest but also document the connection between our current health crisis and our collective sweet tooth. Suicide by Sugar begins with the story of Dr. Appleton’s battle with her own sugar addiction. Next, the authors examine all the frightening (and unknown) things that can go wrong when people consume too much sugar, from increased susceptibility to disease to imbalanced body chemistry. They go on to discuss the various ways scientists measure sugar’s impact on blood glucose and explain why these statistics cannot be solely relied on when choosing foods. The authors provide shocking information about the amount of sugar found in many popular foods and beverages and an in-depth discussion of the ailments now associated with excessive sugar consumption. Finally, Dr. Appleton’s easy-to-follow, effective lifestyle plan—complete with recipes—guides you in eliminating sugar from your life.

Walden Community News

Walden’s students, faculty and staff are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

Cherri Brown, a Ph.D. in Psychology student, was invited to the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Ninth Annual Conference poster presentation on Oct. 9, 2009, in Atlanta. Her topic was “Grandparents Parenting: Mediation Needs for Public Education.”
 
Dr. Tom Cavanagh, a faculty member in The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership, published “Creating a New Discourse of Peace in Schools: Restorative Justice in Education” (The Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, Vol. 18, Issue 1/2, 2009) and co-published “Te Kotahitanga: Addressing Educational Disparities Facing Maori Students in New Zealand” (Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 25, Issue 5, 2009).
 
John E. Cech, a Ph.D. in Education student, published “Dual Enrollment, Multiple Paths and Diverse Students: A Look at Options for Enhancing Entry Into Postsecondary Education” in the Spring 2009 issue of The Montana Professor.
 
Summer Clayton, a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) student, has been named director of the Palouse Prairie School of Expeditionary Learning in Moscow, Idaho, a public charter school that is based on Outward Bound’s Expeditionary Learning Schools model.

Dr. Ron Hirschbein, a faculty member in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, published “Nuclear Strategists in Wonderland” in Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy (Wiley, 2010).
 
Dr. Ronald P. Hudak, a faculty member in the College of Health Sciences, co-published “The U.S. Army Wounded Warrior Program (AW2): A Case Study in Designing a Nonmedical Case Management Program for Severely Wounded, Injured, and Ill Service Members and Their Families” in the June 2009 issue of Military Medicine.
 
Sonya Jackson, a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) student, was selected as interim school superintendent of Hernando County Schools, Hernando County, Fla.

Raymond Marbury, a Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A.) student, was hired as a management analyst in the Internal Revenue Service Chief Counsel's Office. In addition, he is serving as an adjunct professor at Shenandoah University, Winchester, Va.
 
Dr. Darlington Mgbeke, a faculty member in the Center for Undergraduate Studies, published “The Dynamics of Inept Administrative Leadership In Nigeria Public Sector: A Guide To Civic Engagement” (International Culture Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2009).

Dr. Robert Parent, a faculty member in the College of Management and Technology, published “Approaches to Measurement” in Knowledge Translation in Health Care: Moving From Evidence to Practice (Wiley, 2009).
 
Dr. Cheryl Parker, a faculty member in the College of Health Sciences, co-published “Moving Along: Using Mobility Technology to Improve Pharmacist Workflow in the PICU Rounding Process” in the fall 2008 issue of The Journal of Healthcare Information Management and “Mobile Device Improves Documentation Workflow and Nurse Satisfaction” in the summer 2008 issue of CARING Newsletter.