Moments of Awareness

Educators are giving YouTube — long dismissed as a storehouse of whimsical, time-wasting and occasionally distasteful videos — another look. As Google, YouTube’s parent company, fine-tunes a portal that lets schools limit students’ access to selected content, the video-sharing Web site is gaining popularity as a trove of free educational materials. Schools across the country commonly block access to YouTube, shielding students from the irresistible distractions of, say, the cat in a T-shirt playing a piano , or worse. So in December, Google started YouTube for Schools, offering schools the ability to pluck only the videos they want, scrubbed of all comments and linked only to other [...] Full article at nytimes.com   Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

Ms. Sandijean Fuson will be the Citizen honoree at Vale, Oregon's 5th Annual Chamber of Commerce Banquet & Auction at Vale High School, 6PM, Friday, March 16, 2012. (She deserves it, in our experience; her community is her first priority, and 'community' for her means her family, friends, clients, and anyone else with whom she comes into contact.) Tickets are available for $15 at Vale City Hall, Malheur Drug, Logan's Market & Scout's Books. The honorees also include Volunteers Dave Shira & Clayton Perry, K-8 Educator Barb Anthony, and High School Educator Mark Redmond. Check it out if you're out Vale way next weekend! Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/the-practical-effect-of-cultivating-sel...   A UCLA researcher argues that rather than assuming people are basically selfish, government could more profitably encourage pro-social behavior. via notphil.posterous.com Just one of many worthwhile reads at Mr. Weir 's Posterous page. Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

GEOMAGNETIC STORM UPDATE: A CME propelled toward Earth by this morning's X5-class solar flare is expected to reach our planet on March 8th at 0625 UT (+/- 7 hr). Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, who prepared the CME's forecast  [...] MAJOR SOLAR FLARE (UPDATED): Big sunspot AR1429 has unleashed another major flare. This one is the strongest yet, an X5-class eruption on March 7th at 00:28 UT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme UV flash: [...] THE MOON AND MARS: This week, Mars is at its closest to Earth for all of 2012. The ...

This was originally posted as a response to a blog comment that expressed concern over our use of trapped beaver as bait for our camera stations.  The comment also questioned the need for the project and our decision to study wolverines.  We hope that this response will adequately address these issues and provide a greater insight on why we do what we do. *********** We understand and appreciate the frustration with our use of beaver as the preferred bait species for the rare forest carnivore study. They have been historically overharvested for their pelts and castor, and there have been many struggles in rebuilding a stable beaver population in our region.  As wilderness advocates, we [...] Full article at  scotchmanpeaks.org Interesting points on hunting/trapping, conservation, and roadkill reclamation (plus, wolverines are cool; there was one at the bottom of RCR a couple months ago, trundlin' around just off the road in the middle of the night, ...

The Booth family was graced with the presence of these awesome little critters for an entire summer two years ago... and no one got sprayed! :) Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH MARS: Today, Mars is at its closest to Earth for 2012. The Red Planet is only 101 million km away and shines about six times brighter than a 1st magnitude star. Look for it in the eastern sky at sunset. The burnt-orange color of [...] STRONG SOLAR ACTIVITY: Solar activity is now high. Big sunspot AR1429, which emerged on March 2nd, is crackling with strong flares. This morning brought the strongest so far--an X1-class eruption on March 5th at 0413 UT. NASA's Space [...] [...] LOOK, THEN TURN AROUND: Just after sunset, as the evening sky fades to blue, Venus and Jupiter ...

(Health.com) -- Children who are the youngest in their class are more likely than their older classmates to be diagnosed and given medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) -- suggesting that immaturity may be part of the problem, not ADHD. The finding is from a study of more than 900,000 Canadian children aged 6 to 12, and it dovetails with two U.S. studies that found the same thing in 2010. In fact, the youngest boys were 30% more likely than their oldest classmates to get an ADHD diagnosis, and the youngest girls had a 70% greater chance, according to [...] Full article at  cnn.com   Posted via email from Moments of Awareness