Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/302347446?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
Pre-K programs take biggest state funding hit ever
The 2011-12 school year was not a good one for pre-K funding, for enrollment, or for quality, according to a major new survey.
States' funding overall dropped by more than half a billion dollars ? its biggest one-year drop ever. After a decade of growth, enrollment in state-funded pre-K programs stalled. State funding per child fell by more than $400; counting previous drops, state per-pupil spending decreased by more than $1,100 over the prior decade. And quality also slipped in a number of state programs.
?What was surprising was not that the recession hurt [pre-K programs], but that it hurt so much,? says Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University, which released the annual ?State of Preschool? 2012 yearbook Monday. ?The one indicator that increased was inequality, because some states have continued to move ahead, while other states are moving backwards.?
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The report comes at a time when early childhood education is getting more attention than ever, at least at the federal level. In his State of the Union message, President Obama highlighted the importance of quality pre-K and urged a major expansion.
?Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on ? by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime,? Mr. Obama said in his speech. In his budget, he requested $75 billion over 10 years to help states dramatically expand preschool options for low-income children.
?If ever there was a report that makes the case for the need for President Obama's preschool-for-all proposal, this report is it,? said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaking at a release of the NIEER report on Monday.
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Not all the news is bad on the preschool front, and state funding and enrollment vary dramatically from state to state. Ten states, for instance, have no public preschool program at all, while eight enroll more than half of all 4-year-olds in public pre-K programs. Washington, D.C., has the highest percentage, with more than 90 percent of 4-year-olds and nearly 70 percent of 3-year-olds enrolled, and Florida, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin, and West Virginia all served more than 60 percent of 4-year-olds in state-funded pre-K during the 2011-12 school year. Eleven states, meanwhile, have programs but served fewer than 10 percent of 4-year-olds.
The lack of enrollment growth for that school year, according to the report, was almost entirely due to 16 states that reduced their enrollment from the previous year ? including four that reduced it by more than 10 percent.
And enrollment, cautions Dr. Barnett, is not the whole picture. Research makes clear that the benefits from preschool are only seen in high-quality programs, he says, and both the reduction in funding and the loss of ?quality benchmarks? ? things like comprehensive standards, training and degree requirements for teachers, and site visits ? are troubling to him.
Particularly notable, he says, is the fact that five states stopped conducting site visits to monitor program quality, which he sees as a shortsighted decision.
?The first thing that gets cut is state capacity to monitor quality,? says Barnett. ?That?s a recipe for seeing that the rest of the money is not going to be well spent?. The focus has to be on quality.?
Barnett cites Oklahoma and West Virginia as models of states that not only serve a relatively high percentage of children, but that also keep their quality standards high, meeting nearly all of the 10 benchmarks the report tracks.
Still, the biggest bright spot Barnett sees lies not in the state-funding picture, but in the promise of things to come if even some version of Obama?s plan is funded.
In particular, he notes, the fact that Obama has proposed a 10-year state-federal partnership with matching funds would help states during the time they need it most, as they recover from the effects of the recession.
?Some of these states have a deep hole to climb out of,? Barnett says. Seventy-five billion dollars over 10 years ?could get states to where they need to be.?
But mostly, Barnett is glad to see universal ? or at least expanded ? preschool a major part of the national conversation, more people aware of its benefits, as well as the cost to America if it continues to lag behind other nations in providing it.
?I think this is the most important moment for preschool in the 30 years I?ve been studying it, because the president has put it on the national agenda,? he says. ?If America is going to seize the future, this is the moment for preschool.?
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pre-k-programs-biggest-state-funding-hit-ever-222353890.html
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Saturday, April 27, 2013
Controllers to return; flight delays sway Congress
A United Airlines jet departs in view of the air traffic control tower at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Tuesday, April 23, 2013, in Seattle. A day after flight delays plagued much of the U.S., air travel is smoother Tuesday. But the government is warning passengers that the situation can change by the hour as it runs the nation's air traffic control system with a smaller staff. Airlines and members of Congress urged the Federal Aviation Administration to find other ways to make mandatory budget cuts besides furloughing controllers. While delays haven't been terrible yet, the airlines are worried about the long-term impact late flights will have on their budgets and on fliers. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
A United Airlines jet departs in view of the air traffic control tower at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Tuesday, April 23, 2013, in Seattle. A day after flight delays plagued much of the U.S., air travel is smoother Tuesday. But the government is warning passengers that the situation can change by the hour as it runs the nation's air traffic control system with a smaller staff. Airlines and members of Congress urged the Federal Aviation Administration to find other ways to make mandatory budget cuts besides furloughing controllers. While delays haven't been terrible yet, the airlines are worried about the long-term impact late flights will have on their budgets and on fliers. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
The control tower stands in the background as a passenger lays on the pavement outside the international terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, Friday, April 26, 2013, in Atlanta. Congress easily approved legislation Friday ending furloughs of air traffic controllers that have delayed hundreds of flights daily, infuriating travelers and causing political headaches for lawmakers.(AP Photo/David Goldman)
A passenger sits at right in the international terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, Friday, April 26, 2013, in Atlanta. Congress easily approved legislation Friday ending furloughs of air traffic controllers that have delayed hundreds of flights daily, infuriating travelers and causing political headaches for lawmakers.(AP Photo/David Goldman)
The control tower stands in the background as a passenger paces while on the phone outside the international terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, Friday, April 26, 2013, in Atlanta. Congress easily approved legislation Friday ending furloughs of air traffic controllers that have delayed hundreds of flights daily, infuriating travelers and causing political headaches for lawmakers.(AP Photo/David Goldman)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Furloughed air traffic controllers will soon be heading back to work, ending a week of coast-to-coast flight delays that left thousands of travelers frustrated and furious.
Unable to ignore the travelers' anger, Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation Friday to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to withdraw the furloughs. The vote underscored a shift by Democrats who had insisted on erasing all of this year's $85 billion in across-the-board budget cuts, not just the most publicly painful ones, for fear of losing leverage to restore money for Head Start and other programs with less lobbying clout and popular support.
With President Barack Obama's promised signature, the measure will erase one of the most stinging and publicly visible consequences of the budget-wide cuts known as the sequester.
Friday's House approval was 361-41 and followed the previous evening's passage by the Senate, which didn't even bother with a roll call. Lawmakers then streamed toward the exits ? and airports ? for a weeklong spring recess.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama would sign the bill, but Carney complained that the measure left the rest of the sequester intact.
"This is a Band-Aid solution. It does not solve the bigger problem," he said. Using the same Band-Aid comparison, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., said that "the sequester needs triple bypass surgery."
The FAA and Transportation Department did not respond to repeated questions about when the controllers' furloughs would end. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who helped craft the measure, was told by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood Friday that the agency is "doing everything they can to get things back on track as quickly as possible," said Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley.
In the week since the furloughs began, news accounts have prominently featured nightmarish tales of delayed flights and stranded air passengers. Republicans have used the situation to accuse the Obama administration of purposely forcing the controllers to take unpaid days off to dial up public pressure on Congress to roll back the sequester.
"The president has an obligation to implement these cuts in a way that respects the American people, rather than using them for political leverage," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a written statement.
"Unfortunately for this administration, the term 'sequester' has become synonymous with fear," Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., said during the debate.
Halting the furloughs was the latest example of lawmakers easing parts of the sequester that became too painful.
They previously used a separate, wide-ranging spending bill to provide more money for meat and poultry inspectors. Attorney General Eric Holder cited extra funds in that same bill as the reason the Justice Department would be able to avoid furloughs. Transportation Security Administration employees also have gotten relief.
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats ? backed by many fiscal experts ? say the sequester law gives agencies little maneuverability, requiring them to spread cuts evenly among most budget accounts. The Federal Aviation Administration was achieving about a third of its required $637 million in cuts by furloughing nearly all its workers ? including the 15,000 air traffic controllers ? one day every two weeks.
Obama and his Democratic allies want to roll back the entire sequester, with the White House proposing a substitute mix of spending cuts and tax increases that Republicans have rejected. The GOP has proposed replacing the across-the-board spending cuts with others, many of them aimed at programs Democrats defend.
That has left many Democrats reluctant to ease across-the-board cuts for individual programs that cause a public outcry because they worry that would relieve pressure on Republicans to undo the entire sequester.
"While there is a little bit of leverage and pressure, let's broaden it to the sequester as a whole," Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., told reporters before voting against the bill.
Said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: "How can we sit there and say, 'Four million Meals on Wheels for seniors gone? But that's not important. Over 70,000 children off Head Start. But that's not important.' What is important is for Republicans to hold a hard line" on budget cuts.
Even so, the complaints about flying delays became too intense, and in the end only 29 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted against the measure Friday in the House. The FAA said there had been at least 863 flights delayed on Wednesday attributed to the furloughs, with hundreds of others daily since the furloughs began last Sunday.
The bill would let the FAA use up to $253 million from an airport improvement program and other accounts to halt the furloughs through the Sept. 30 end of the government's fiscal year. The money can be used for other FAA operations, too, including keeping open small airport towers around the country that the agency said it would shut to satisfy the spending cuts.
But Democrats were bitter Friday that cuts in many federal programs remain. Besides the Head Start pre-school program, they complained about ongoing cuts for health research, feeding programs for poor women, children and the elderly and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and about furloughs of civilian Pentagon workers.
"Let's get a big deal. Let's deal with all the adverse consequences of the sequester," said No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer, whose Maryland district has many civil servants and who voted no.
Congressional approval was hailed by groups representing the airline industry and the union representing controllers.
"The winners here are the customers who will be spared from lengthy and needless delays," said Nicholas E. Calio, president of Airlines for America, representing major carriers.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said the week of problems showed that a "fully staffed air traffic control workforce is necessary for our national airspace system to operate at full capacity."
___
Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor, Joan Lowy and Nedra Pickler contributed to this report.
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Friday, April 26, 2013
Researchers use nasal lining to breach blood/brain barrier
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Neurodegenerative and central nervous system (CNS) diseases represent a major public health issue affecting at least 20 million children and adults in the United States alone. Multiple drugs exist to treat and potentially cure these debilitating diseases, but 98 percent of all potential pharmaceutical agents are prevented from reaching the CNS directly due to the blood-brain barrier.
Using mucosa, or the lining of the nose, researchers in the department of Otology and Laryngology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School and the Biomedical Engineering Department of Boston University have demonstrated what may be the first known method to permanently bypass the blood-brain barrier, thus opening the door to new treatment options for those with neurodegenerative and CNS disease. Their study is published on PLOS ONE.
Many attempts have been made to deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier using methods such as osmotic disruption and implantation of catheters into the brain, however these methods are temporary and prone to infection and dislodgement.
"As an endoscopic skull base surgeon, I and many other researchers have helped to develop methods to reconstruct large defects between the nose and brain using the patient's own mucosa or nasal lining," said Benjamin S. Bleier, M.D., Otolaryngologist at Mass. Eye and Ear and HMS Assistant Professor.
Study co-author Xue Han, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, said, "The development of this model enables us to perform critical preclinical testing of novel therapies for neurological and psychiatric diseases."
Inspired by recent advances in human endoscopic transnasal skull based surgical techniques, the investigators went to work to develop an animal model of this technique and use it to evaluate transmucosal permeability for the purpose of direct drug delivery to the brain.
In this study using a mouse model, researchers describe a novel method of creating a semi-permeable window in the blood-brain barrier using purely autologous tissues to allow for higher molecular weight drug delivery to the CNS. They demonstrated for the first time that these membranes are capable of delivering molecules to the brain which are up to 1,000-times larger than those excluded by the blood-brain barrier.
"Since this is a proven surgical technique which is known to be safe and well tolerated, this data suggests that these membranes may represent the first known method to permanently bypass the blood-brain barrier using the patient's own tissue," Dr. Bleier said. "This method may open the door for the development of a variety of new therapies for neurodegenerative and CNS disease.
Future studies will be directed towards developing clinical trials to test this method in patients who have already undergone these endoscopic surgeries."
###
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary: http://www.meei.harvard.edu
Thanks to Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127894/Researchers_use_nasal_lining_to_breach_blood_brain_barrier
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Google Currents (for iPad)
Flipboard?and a handful of other iPad newsreading apps have changed the way that we consume media, by allowing news junkies to read content in a tablet-friendly, magazine-like format.?Google entered the space in 2011 with Currents, its own take on the mobile newsreader. This free iPad?app (also available on Android) lets users read online publications in a slick, easy to navigate layout. Featuring partnerships with the likes of The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Slate, and many other publications, Google Currents has no shortage of interesting content. The biggest obstacles the app faces is overcoming some stability issues and getting users to use it instead of the entrenched champion, Flipboard.
The Reading Fundamentals
Getting started is as simple as logging into Google Currents with your Google account credentials. If you don?t have an account, you can create one from within the app. After logging in with my Gmail username and password, I watched a brief navigation and usage tutorial which gave me a quick rundown of the app's various features.
I then arrived at the Google Currents new streamlined home screen which let me add subscriptions (now known as "Editions") from the Editions Sidebar (which replaces the "Library" and "Trending Stories" sections that drove the first Google Currents iteration). The new design puts Currents in visual alignment with other Google properties such as YouTube and Google Plus, and makes navigating the app simpler.
Diving Into Content
Bring a finger to an Editions category (like Science & Tech, for example) and the apps reveals thematically related publications. There are several publications included by default, but you can easily remove unwanted ones by tapping the Edit icon. Tapping "Add Subscriptions" opens a section containing publications grouped by category. If, for example, you decide to add Space.com to your reading lists?a site listed within the Science & Tech cluster?it will automatically be added to the similarly named group in the Editions Sidebar.
Each Editions Sidebar grouping has an associated "Breaking News" subhead that lets you check out the hottest stories of the moment?through some may not be of great importance. On the day that I tested Google Currents, the Entertainment section's Breaking News was fronted by a story that detailed why Gwyneth Paltrow is the Worlds' Most Beautiful Woman.
Navigation operates in a similar fashion as other iPad newsreading apps by letting you swipe from page to page, through the animation can be a bit slow at times (as well as adding or deleting subscriptions). You can also share articles via email, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinboard, Instapaper, and Google+. Unlike Flipboard, Google Currents doesn't display updates from social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, but you can view the Google+ updates from Google Currents curators such as Tom Anderson (best known as the face of MySpace). You can also star stories to save them for future reference, and read caches stories offline.
Best of all, Google Currents syncs across all devices on which you have it installed, so you can move from phone to tablet and back again without missing a beat. That said, Google Currents doesn't sync with the soon-to-be-extinct Google Reader, so those who use both won't find articles read/unread across both services.
Like Flipboard, Google Currents gives user the opportunity to create their own digital magazines by adding a RSS feed, Flickr images, a logo, and more.
Google Currents has a major gripe that keeps me from abandoning Flipboard: It doesn't always display a feed's latest stories in chronological order. A site's most recent article may be place behind a story that published a few days before.
Should You Download Google Currents?
Google Currents is a strong entry in the iPad newsreading space thanks to a slick redesign, native offline reading, and cross-device syncing. Flipboard gets the nod thanks to its simple design, deep social networking ties, and overall swiftness. Still, Google Currents is an app worth a try if Flipboard and the handful of other newsreading apps aren't to your fancy.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/-syuraAZXq8/0,2817,2397454,00.asp
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Sunday, April 7, 2013
Obama?s benefit-cuts budget takes more from seniors than from wealthy (Americablog)
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