Pat Uelmen Huey

An AP story on Beverly Hall’s stepping down from the post of Superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.  She leaves behind a somewhat mixed legacy…

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ATLANTA_SCHOOLS_SUPERINTENDENT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Test scores = 40% of a teacher’s value — REALLY?!? At least NY has modern marriage laws (listen up, Georgia…)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/new-york-state-teachers-u_n_887039.html

I’m excited to find out more about Google +, Google’s new social networking site.  Right now it’s in kind of a pre-beta holding pattern while they test it out, but their tour shows graphic organizer (THANK YOU) capabilities with more filtered, which I hope means safer, contact management.  You can put your name on their waitlist here.

Now I don’t think I’m the only one just a little depressed about 7B stoopid humans on the face of the earth…but just in case you’re not (yet), check out this NatGeo article on same.  Required reading for AP EnviSci 2011-2012!

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/7-billion

Check out Tim Lydon’s article on the stepwise dismantling of legislation designed to protect you and your health:

http://www.adventure-journal.com/2011/04/earth-days-best-legacy-the-clean-air-act-is-under-attack/

The spiny genitalia of the Callosobruchus analis beetle

Not my title but that of The Scientist, where I get most of my cutting-edge Sciencer news.  Check out this link to read about how deletions in the human genome may be have been the principle drive in the process of becoming human:

http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/58044/

YYE’ers, remember: climate does not equal weather!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/02/snowfalls-storms-climate-change-link_n_830104.html

…your electric car, that is…remember that there’s no such thing as a free lunch when you decide to go hybrid/electric!  The original article is in the professional journal Environmental Science Technology, but you can read Jake Yeston’s summary of the paper as quoted in Science below.

The Pros (and Cons) of Plugging In

Jake Yeston

CREDIT: RAMIN TALAIE/CORBIS

The adage out of sight, out of mind has some resonance as the first big crop of plug-in hybrid cars hits the road in the United States. People see and sometimes smell gasoline; plugging a car into a socket may make it seem like the energy is conjured from the ether. Of course, power plants actually bear the burden, and Peterson et al. are among the growing number of researchers gauging the implications. They have examined the net effect on carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur emissions of replacing a fraction of the cars in a number of Eastern and Midwestern U.S. states with plug-in hybrids. They modeled several different scenarios, such as when cars were charged and whether carbon dioxide emissions were priced or captured and sequestered. For a 10% hybrid fleet scenario, they found significant reductions in CO₂ emissions across the board, and NO_x reductions in most cases. The principal drawback was an increase in sulfur dioxide emissions as demand for coal combustion rose.

Environ. Sci. Technol. 45, 10.1021/es102464y (2011).

Anthropologists claim the early human pictured above "subsisted largely on...wait, is that really the right picture?"

Sorry for the lowbrow nature of this article, but I couldn’t resist:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/anthropologists-trace-human-origins-back-to-one-la,19191/

Read about how Japan is voluntarily (translation: being pressured into) halting (temporarily) its illegal hunting of whales for food.  Now if we can only get them to formally admit that they are actually eating the whale meat instead of conducting research on them:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/02/16/japan.whale.hunt/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn