slamboard

Most sites that were hyping the toxic toy that is a big story today have already made changes. Right at this moment, this site is still selling them in the UK. If the text is still unchanged when you visit, you will get to see how people convinced parents and kids that little beads ‘that magically join with water.’

This just in…THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MAGIC!!!

Here is a US site that has a big RECALL notice up, but still has the promotional copy saying that they are MAGIC!!!

Just because the reactive agent that caused the chemically coated beads to stick together was water, consumers could be lulled into thinking that it was an innocuous toy. Wake up you idiots!!!

Here is the CNN Story on the Toxic Beads: Bindeez / Aqua Dots.

I have an outsider’s perspective on health care employment in the USA. I have spent most of my life in Canada and I experienced a Doctor shortage that was exacerbated in part by head hunters who would come up from the USA and recruit some of our best family practitioners. There were also semi-regular job fairs put on by large HMOs that aimed to attract nurses and other professionals.

Canada’s health care system gets touted as a preferable model to that of America, but the reality for workers has been long hours and comparatively modest pay. My own family doctor, the friendly, brilliant man who gave my babies their first year of checkups, headed south. I wished him well.

Nursing is a smart career choice for young Americans as there is a need for more people at all levels in the majority of specialties. The RN Nursing Degree at Hondros College in Cincinnati is suitable for people starting out in nursing or experienced people working towards advancement. Nursing education may soon be starting on other Hondros campuses to meet demand.

Among some social circles, saying that you’re in sales will get you funny looks and cold shoulders. I always find this to be a huge hypocrisy. I contend that everyone is a salesman in some way, shape or form. I think that any technical or vocational training program should have an element of sales training included. The Sales Training Courses UK plumbers can get from Avand.co.uk is a great example of what I am talking about. This company has gotten involved in sales training after recognizing a need. Their original field of expertise is in training plumbers to do, well plumbing. When I sat here trying to empathize with a plumber, I realized that they often find themselves in a position that many salesmen would envy. I don’t mean the position where they are crouched under a sink with their butt-crack showing. I mean that they are standing inside the inner sanctum of a homeowner that has needs. I recently spoke to a man who mentioned that he gained his wife’s good graces with a tasteful upgrade in bathroom fixtures. A plumber who has good sales skills could plant the seed of that strategy in a client while fixing a toilet.

I think it is horrible that the news media chooses to devote countless hours to dysfunctional celebrities and yet this is the first time that I have ever heard about the tragic death of Martin Anderson. I did not even find out about it through the news media. I found out about it on an internet forum. I hope that somebody will find out about it from me.

I tagged this with the word education. I think that children who are detained by the State of Florida and everywhere else should be learning skills that might provide them with options other than crime. It seems like the now closed ‘boot camps’ may have had a secondary purpose of grooming people for the army. Yes, you can be an army of one even if you stole your grandmother’s car.

Until this morning, I did not know that the accreditation of degree granting schools in the USA is performed by private peer review councils. In most other major countries, the government is in charge of accreditation.

The present situation with accreditation policies and procedures in the USA got its start after WWII, when the GI Bill put a lot of money up for grabs to support post secondary and vocational education for the veterans. As you can imagine, there were opportunists eager to cash in. It is almost a given that when a government makes a bold financial gesture, there will be corruption and fraud.

With all the dubious schools trying to cash in on the GI funding, some oversight and control was needed. The government chose to put this in the hands of the private sector.

The present educational landscape includes accredited schools in good standing, schools that have had their accreditation removed by the granting body, and schools that never seek accreditation. Many religious schools do not seek accreditation. Operating a non-accredited school is not fraud. Using a degree from a non-accredited school to obtain employment under false pretenses is a crime in many states. Some states have special laws that allow them to shut down what are commonly called ‘diploma mills’.

I should disclose the fact that I used Wikipedia as a resource for this post. Wikipedia is not an accredited university.

I often get distracted by issues that have nothing to do with me personally. This is an example of one such story. I was actually doing a web search to verify the term discard as being applied to library books slated for donation or destruction. This was research in relation to my childhood exposure to novels. My aunt was a librarian and we occasionally got a box of discards from her.

This is an interesting post. I was writing as I did my research and I wrote all of this quoted text before I found an entirely different side to the story…

Earlier this year a librarian at a state run university in California became upset by the school’s plan to destroy 200,000 books to make room for a Starbucks. He created a website with the goal of communicating the situation and his opinion to a wide audience.

I am not surprised that an institution would plan such an action. These are books that have been in boxes for years and nobody has borrowed any of them for ten years. It makes sense to me to use the space that they are taking up for something that the students and staff will enjoy and something that generates revenue for the school and probably some employment for students.

If the assertion that they made no effort to donate the books is true, it is unfortunate. People with stronger views might think that it is shameful.

There is only one detail of the story that I find shameful. The school used a law to censor this librarian. It is against the law to publish the name of the school without permission. They threatened the librarian with criminal proceedings. He took down his website.

Here is a link to the floor descriptions for the library. There is no actual mention of Starbucks.

The librarian’s name is Bruce Emerton and I am not sure if the books still exist.

The source for an alternate viewpoint placed a comment in one of the blogs that has been repeating and amplifying Bruce Emerton’s alarm. The comment came right after a comment from Bruce himself that included his contact information and a link to a petition that is no longer there.

The other viewpoints are at MacManX.com and come from Bruce’s coworkers who dispute what Mr. Emerton says point by point. The most compelling part of their argument is the fact that the university is paying $70,000 per year to store the books in question. They assert that while they are in storage during the library expansion, normal procedures related to discarding books are ongoing.

I have to wonder how many people find this story and form an opinion based on only one side.

TheIntelligentCommunity.com, makes it obvious simply by their web address that they are ready for an argument. They have a very interesting product that is now available for download. It is a file for the iPod that is meant as a companion audio critique that you can listen to as you read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. The podcast points out 200 instances where the author’s facts and/or statistics may be called into question.

The Intelligent Community Website presents this as a tool to help teach critical thinking. I am already pretty good at that task, and I have reasoned that the website is supported by individuals or groups that are on the other side of the theism versus atheism debate.

They encourage everyone who has critically read the book with the aid of their podcast to add their voice to the reviews of the book on Amazon.

Taking a course in an effort to improve your Business English can result in a tremendous return on your investment.

The Presidents of two countries recently had a very terse moment that is, in hindsight, being chalked up to language difficulties. That may be spin, but it’s interesting to think about how different the exchange would have been if both men had been able to effectively communicate in English.

Executive Language Training offers courses that are designed to suit the individual needs of business professionals. I am trained in teaching English as a foreign language. All my practical training was with young students who were ostensibly there to learn English, but they were in vacation mode to varying degrees. I wish I had been given the chance to teach some businessmen the finer points of this difficult language.

I can imagine that some business men wish to broaden their language skills while others might want to refine them. I was acquainted with a business man during the weeks that I took my teaching course. He had heavily accented English and he used some unnecessary verb forms, but I overheard him on his mobile phone dictating a business letter and his skill in composing a written correspondence rivaled mine. A customized course from Executive Language Training would not waste his time teaching him stuff that he already knows. I actually remember a great deal of emphasis being placed on assessing student ’s knowledge when I was taking my course. It’s obviously inefficient to review skills and information that a student already has down pat.

I just used a phrase that many EFL students would be unfamiliar with; down pat and other idioms need to be explained to students of language, they are not things that can be intuitively understood. Businessmen for whom English is a first language may habitually interject idioms that come from sports or other interests and a non native speaker is placed at a disadvantage if he has not been taught any of these phrases…

Let’s hit it out of the park, baby!!!, Whoo!!!

Healthcare is very labor intensive. There will never be a self serve hospital.

Healthcare jobs can be very specialized and the job market fluctuates and changes with relation to what specialties are in demand. GuideToHealthcareSchools.com appears to be a great resource both for people who hope to enter the workforce and for people who are already in healthcare and want to adapt to change or increase their earning power. A healthcare management degree seems like a great step for people with skills and experience in healthcare.

GuideToHealthcareSchools.com is a well designed and very searchable site that has links to some well respected schools. The emphasis is on degree programs in medicine and dentistry. I like the fact that when you search based on specialty and state, you get the in state, on site schools first followed by any available online courses.

Educational philosophies are often a cause for heated debate. My children were enrolled in an alternative school for some time. I took an active role at the school, first as a parent with voting rights in important decisions at the school, and later as a volunteer. The volunteer work transitioned into an elected position as a staff member. Our school was modeled on the Sudbury Valley School. The main aspects of these schools are full democracy and complete academic freedom. The school was very up front about its core philosophies.

One thing that happened repeatedly at this school was that during interviews with parents prior to their children enrolling, they did not come to a full understanding of the philosophy. They would take issue with the degree of freedom that their child was provided with weeks or months after they entered the school. Some parents had practical or social reasons for placing their children in the school. In many parts of North America, governments do not legislate or enforce any type of standard of education in private schools. They consider the oversight to be the responsibility of parents. I don’t think all parents even understood that.

While looking on the Internet for controversies related to alternative schools, Waldorf schools have risen to the top. The main thing that critics point to is the deceptiveness with regard to the underlying beliefs and philosophies. The obvious reason for concealment is the fact that the founder Rudolf Steiner had views that are understandably repulsive to modern parents. Modern parents are the main source of income for Waldorf schools. Personally, I would never consider such a school for my children. Any organization that develops a culture of concealment is no place for children.

Realistically, parents have to face the fact that every teacher in every school, public or private, has a set of beliefs.