Finding State Finance Data

I didn’t have any trouble finding state financial data. I googled Pennsylvania campaign finance data and it took me to campaignfinanceonline.pa.us. Then I went to the independent expenditures list. After that I sorted the information to find data on donations received by Tom Wolf in 2014.

Mod 7 Story R

Tags

Story R

By Sally Stringer

Updated: 2:20 PM

WILMINGTON — Members of the East Dakota University System’s Board of Governors held their monthly meeting in Wilmington this week. At the meeting they got a sneak peak at a website that will function like a Facebook for researchers. The website, dubbed REACH-EDU, is still in beta and only includes data from two public universities. It’ll show off connections between researchers, their work, grants they’ve earned and people they’ve worked with. The Board also met with EDU Chancellor Holden Caulfield and Atheltic Director Brad Richardson to discuss an ongoing NCAA investigation of the football team there. Finally, tuition plans were discussed.

REACH-EDU takes existing data and makes it easier to see the relationships between the system’s 15,000 faculty members, 1,000 baccalaureate programs and $1.4 billion in annual research funding.

Look up “asthma” and it’ll show every faculty member with an expertise on the disease, the research they’ve produced, the classes they’ve taught on the subject and the grants they’ve received.

Search among EDU’s chemistry department, and the most prolific researchers show up along with who they work with and the patents they hold. A department head could look for junior faculty that would benefit from mentorships with more experienced faculty. The site should make it easier to see potential candidates for grants. Research Director Courtney Thorton said her office frequently gets calls asking who in the system is doing research on a particular topic, and the website will make it easier to answer that question. Because it can drill down into such specifics, others could use it to poach faculty from within the University system, a concern raised by several board members.But all the information on the site is already public, Leath said. Someone intent on poaching from EDU would already know the major players and have access to the information elsewhere. Right now the site draws data from East Dakota University and the State College of East Dakota. All University-system schools will be included by summer 2011, and partnerships with private universities are being explored. Dakota Digits International, a nonprofit research organization based in Greenville, has also expressed interest in being involved. Few other schools have such a way to organize their data. There are similar sites in Michigan and Georgia, but they don’t include information outside the biomedical fields and don’t include data from as many sources as EDU’s site will.

http://gra.org/

The site should go live either late this year or early next year. Anyone will have access to it, although the system is still trying to work out the extent to which some information will be displayed.

“We want to get it right and then we’ll promote it,” University President Andrew Card said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Card

Caulfield said the NCAA investigation into academic misconduct by individual players is “very near the end.” The University is still looking into academic sports services and how to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Richardson said the investigation could go back further than the last academic year but wouldn’t comment further. Neither man would elaborate on how far back the academic misconduct goes. When asked if he anticipated it extending back multiple seasons, Baddour said yes.”We will go where the information takes us,” he said to the board.

Caulfield and Richardson are leading the school’s internal investigation of academic misconduct alongside the NCAA’s look into whether players had improper contact with agents.

http://www.ncaa.org/static/mff/index.html

Card said that the investigation was being handled well. “I think you can be very, very proud of the way they are handling this,” he said as he put his arms around Caulfield and Richardson.

Board members asked questions about the timeline of the investigation and the extent of the violations but repeatedly expressed their confidence in EDU’s leadership.

“The board was completely satisfied,” Chairwoman Hannah Gage said afterwards. “Everyone is completely confident. “People just have to be patient.”

Gage restated her belief that the investigation was a “campus responsibility” and said she had no reason to think the board would need to get involved beyond lending support.

Now the school is looking to determine each player’s eligibility on a case-by-case basis. “I feel like we have most of the facts,” Caulfield said after the meeting.

Also at the meeting, Board of Governors member Bill Daughtridge voiced exploring the option of raising international student tuition relative to out-of-state residents. Stephen Farmer, director of undergraduate admissions at EDU, said he thinks that the demand of international students is highly elastic. Basically, higher tuition at EDU means international students are more likely to attend another, more affordable university. Daughtridge said that the impact these students have as well as the effect any increase in tuition would have on the applicant pool is being looked into. A report by the NAFSA Association of International Educators states that foreign students contributed nearly $280 million on net to the state economy in the 2008-2009 fiscal year. This revenue will likely go up, Farmer said, because EDU has seen an increase in the number of foreign students attending in the last few years.

Mod. 7 Story Q

Tags

story q

By Rose Thornburg

Updated: 9:32 AM

More than two years and $490,000 later, no one is quite sure how Orange County should take out the trash. Local governments are currently trying to sort out the ramifications of the county’s latest decision: come 2012, when the local landfill reaches capacity, county trash will be trucked directly to a transfer station in Franklin. Members of the county Board of Commissioners say the December decision, which brought an end to a contentious search process, is a temporary fix. But it also has its consequences, from higher greenhouse gas emissions to the potential of millions of dollars in higher costs. And the longer the county spends deciding what to do with its garbage, the longer it will have to absorb the costs of its choice. In the end, it might have to restart the search for a transfer station site.

“It’s like punting,” said Commissioner Barry Jacobs, who is also a local sports writer. “Sometimes you can get better field position.”

The county has a few options it is considering. It could build a transfer station, a new landfill or convert waste into energy.

Commissioners have put the transfer station option on the back burner for now. Many residents took issue with the county’s two-year search process, particularly the Rogers Road community, which has been affected by the landfill for decades. But waste management experts say a local transfer station will be necessary no matter what the county chooses. A waste transfer station serves as a central collection point for trash before it is shipped somewhere else. Smaller garbage trucks, which typically serve homes and businesses, bring their waste to the facility each day. That trash is then sorted, consolidated and loaded onto bigger trucks headed for a landfill or other disposal facility.

Commissioners have ruled out building another landfill in Orange County, but the possibility of a sharing one with neighboring counties remains. Building a landfill, however, faces stringent regulatory hurdles and vehement community backlash. The Orange County Landfill, located in the historically black Rogers Road community, is expected to reach capacity in early 2012. The landfill opened in 1972, and community members have accused local governments of environmental racism. Commissioners explored the transfer station option for two years but failed to settle on a site as divisions emerged between groups of residents, waste management staff and consultants managing the process.

http://www.orangecountyvoice.org/

Commissioners might look at technologies that convert trash into energy, usually by burning it. Most are still in development phases and have yet to be used on a wide scale. Orange County does not produce enough waste to operate its own facility, making regional partnerships a must. A waste-to-energy facility is also sure to face its own siting, regulatory and financial challenges and possible opposition from environmentalists concerned about emissions.

One impact of the latest decision is clear: the move will mean more pollution. Shipping the trash to Franklin means garbage trucks will spend more time on the road, often on highways, increasing the county’s carbon footprint. That jump in emissions could make it hard for towns to meet long-term sustainability goals. Towns and institutions are analyzing the Franklin decision and other options’ potential effect on these goals. Springfield, for example, has made plans to reduce its emissions 60 percent by 2050.

“If we’re adding miles, then naturally we add more CO2,” said John Richardson, Springfield’s sustainability officer. “From that perspective, we would need to figure out ways to try and counter balance that.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

The latest estimate by Olver Inc., a solid waste management consultant on retainer with the county, stands at more than 46 million additional pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The estimate, which was approved by towns and county government, is about 1 percent of the 5.6 billion pounds of CO2 the county produced in 2005, the last time emissions were comprehensively measured. Springfield, along with Clinton, will shoulder the lion’s share of the increase, since the towns are farther from the Franklin transfer station. By shipping trash to Franklin, the county also loses some control over what will get landfilled, said Gayle Wilson, Orange County’s solid waste manager. Orange County has posted the third-best waste reduction numbers in the state, decreasing its trash output by 54 percent since 1991. Franklin, however, has gone backwards, producing 1 percent more. That could mean more greenhouse gas producing materials, like most organic waste, will not be properly disposed.

“There’s the as yet unknown impact of not being able to apply our regulations,” he said. “We’re worried about a little waste reduction slippage.”

The county’s decision could also affect East Dakota University, which aims to be carbon neutral by 2050. The University wants to find a place in-county to send its trash. But in an effort to free up space in the county landfill, the University has been shipping its waste to a private transfer station also in Franklin for about a year. That means an increase in hauling distance and a spike in emissions that could complicate sustainability goals, said BJ Tipton, EDU’s solid waste program manager.

“It’s one that we haven’t analyzed directly, but it’s a possibility,” she said. “The change has added some hauls.”

The exact financial costs of the decision have yet to be worked out. Officials and consultants in waste management say trucking trash to Franklin will cost the county more than building a local transfer station would have, especially in the long-run. Olver estimates that a local transfer station would have saved the county up to $15 million. The decision will also expose the county to more risk as variables like gas prices fluctuate, Jan Sassaman, chairman of the solid waste advisory board, and Wilson agreed.

“Logic tells me that there are other ways of doing things that are cheaper,” Sassaman said.

Springfield and Carrboro, which have a longer trip to the Franklin transfer station, face an annual increase of about $223,000 and $109,000, respectively, in hauling costs over shipping to an in-county transfer station, according to Olver. Hillsborough, which is closer to the Franklin station, will actually save about $3,000 annually by shipping to Franklin. But commissioners seem reluctant to rely on that data.

“There are fiscal and environmental costs no matter where we go,” Jacobs said. “We need to decide what the actual costs are in a process that is not consultant-driven.”

Orange County Voice, which played a prominent role in defeating attempts to site a transfer station in the county, has endorsed the Franklin option as the most fiscally sound. “Olver misinformed the public and the county on costs,” said Bonnie Hauser, a spokeswoman for Orange County Voice.

Bob Sallach, Olver president, said the numbers were as accurate as possible and approved by town and county staff.

How long local trash will be headed out of the county ultimately depends on one factor: how long it takes the county to develop an alternative solution. The commissioners plan to start the process this month in a meeting with local governments. But given the many options available, from relatively unproven waste-to-energy technologies to regional partnerships, it could be years from conception to ribbon cutting. “Unless there’s some violent upheaval in the current direction that we’re going, I doubt that it would be in 10 years,” Sassaman said.

Developing a partnership with nearby towns, counties and possibly EDU, meanwhile, could be logistically challenging, especially since the county’s neighbors are not facing the same time crunch. While the Orange County landfill is scheduled to close in early 2012, Madison County has 20 years more of life left in its landfill, while Marion County has up to 60, Wilson said. EDU is also not on the clock, since it began shipping its waste to a different private transfer station in Franklin about a year ago.

“We have a great working relationship with the county,” Tipton said. “But I think when it comes to actual infrastructure, they’re a little bit more challenging.”

Past collaborative projects, like one to capture methane at the current landfill, have consumed large amounts of resources and time. Tipton said whether Orange County has a waste management solution in 20 years is a “flip of a coin.” No matter what Orange County decides to do down the road, waste management experts say a local waste transfer station will remain a necessity.

“If we get an alternative technology, that you’re still going to have to get the waste to that facility,” Wilson said. “The issue of a transfer station will continue to reoccur in the meantime.”

Not all parties are convinced, however. Jacobs said there could be other viable alternatives. Ultimately, the county might find that its waste management problems just don’t have a clean solution.

“At some point we’re going to have to decide what is the best option, as opposed to the option that we feel cornered into taking,” Jacobs said. “If those two happen to coincide, then so be it.”

http://townofchapelhill.org/index.aspx?page=235

Mod 7 Story P

Tags

Story P

By Louie Louie

Updated: 9:32 AM

Bernice Littlejohn anounced her decision to step down as EDU’s executive vice chancellor and provost in May 2009 to become chancellor at the University of Kansas. When it came time to hire a new provost, East Dakota University did everything by the book. But when another search begins, administrators might need to find a new approach to solve the hiring equation. For this year’s search, EDU followed a well-worn path. They formed a search committee, settled on a job description and followed most national higher education trends by hiring R. William Funk and Associates, one of the best-known search consulting firms in the field.

HOME

But at the end of the search, the University did not come up with a new provost. The executive vice chancellor and provost is the chief academic officer and No. 2 administrator at the University who oversees all academic departments, research and student affairs.

As the experience showed, search firms are drawing from a narrow pool of people, limiting the diversity and range of candidates available to universities for consideration, and the last three expensive search processes all ended with EDU hiring from within its ranks. At the moment, EDU has no searches on the horizon — due in part to Chancellor Holden Caulfield’s decision to keep interim Carey Bruce in the job permanently after none of the finalists worked out. Until then, Caulfield says he will be looking for a new solution.

“I think the question is not whether any individual group — be it the committee or Bill Funk or anyone else — failed in this,” Caulfield said. “The question is, ‘Are we going about this in the right way?’”

The University’s Budget Committee allocates funds for administrative searches. A majority of the funds designated for searches are paid to search firms, but they also cover expenses related to travel and bringing candidates to campus. The money is not from state appropriations, but rather from investment income. It also comes from facilities and administrative funds — “overhead” from research contracts and grants that reimburse the campus beyond the direct costs of the research project. To replace Littlejohn, EDU formed a 13-member search committee and hired Funk’s company to facilitate the search, paying them $72,800 in non-state funds, plus expenses. The University’s budget committee allocated a total of $144,700 for the search.

In recent years, EDU has spent nearly a half-million dollars on national searches for candidates, only to eventually hire from within its own ranks. In 2007-2008, the search for a new chancellor cost $213,581, much of which went to search firm R. William Funk and Associates. The final candidates included at least six finalists including Caulfield, two black males and two white females. In 2008-2009, the search for a new dean of the college of arts and sciences cost $131,791, much of which went to search firm Witt/Kiefer Executive Search Firm. The final candidates included Joel Martin of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Karen Gil of EDU, Paul Armstrong of Brown University and Katherine Newman of Princeton University. The University hired Gil. In 2009-2010, the search for a new executive vice chancellor and provost cost $144,700, much of which went to search firm R. Willia Funk and Associates. The final candidates included Philip Hanlon of the University of Michigan, Anthony Monaco of the University of Oxford, Jeffrey Vitter of Texas A&M University and Scott Zeger of Johns Hopkins University. Bruce eventually filled the position.

http://umich.edu/

Across the nation, the decision to hire a search firm is becoming an expected part of the hiring process. Universities pay large sums to these companies to identify, vet and interview potential candidates. Officials have cited the firms’ abilities to conduct background checks and recruit candidates as the tangible services worth paying for. But whether that increasingly common process results in the most effective hires is still in question, both in terms of the types of candidates who are pulled from the Rolodex files and the degree to which they can be matched with an institution. EDU administrators have said the process does not always achieve positive results even under the best of circumstances. Caulfield said he thinks traditional search firms like Funk’s look at too narrow a pool of applicants and need to broaden their scope to find a more unconventional range of candidates.

“I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t know they want to do these jobs,” he said. “They don’t know they would be good at these jobs. Higher education does need to rethink the way we do this. We definitely don’t look in enough places. I think higher education can do a much better job of looking more broadly for talent.””

Jean Dowdall, senior vice president at Witt/Kieffer, a search firm that has worked for EDU before, said the nature of a search for a provost, in addition to the position itself, inherently limits the number of qualified applicants. She also said most candidates for provost are deans or mid-level administrators who view the provost position as a transitory one in their ultimate quest to become president or chancellor of a university.

“You want to hire someone from a peer institution, not from a smaller, less well-regarded institution. And then they just have to have incredibly impressive academic credentials,” Dowdall said. “So you look at how many deans are out there, and how many are at the right kind of institution, and then how many are women and people of color, and you’ve reduced the number of people by a lot.”

Caulfield and other administrators were criticized for a lack of diversity among the candidates — the four finalists for the provost position were all white males with science backgrounds, much like Caulfield, Bruce and Shelton Earp, chairman of the search committee. Administrators are quick to point to the women and minorities who have served in top positions in recent years, including former vice chancellor for student affairs Margaret Jablonski. Littlejohn and former Senior Associate Provost for Finance and Academic Personnel Elmira Mangum are black women. But those administrators have all left in the past year, and the majority of the current top administrators could retain their jobs for a significant period of time before another search occurs. Dowdall agreed that it can be difficult to find minority candidates who come from diverse backgrounds.

https://www.questia.com/library/education/higher-and-adult-education/minorities-in-higher-education

“It may be that the smaller number of women and people of color have the background experiences to make them ready for that, and that there just aren’t that many in the pipeline yet,” she said.

Bruce’s hiring represents at least the sixth time in recent years that EDU has hired an internal candidate for a top administrative job. While the four finalists in the search were all external, and Caulfield said he was open to outside candidates, administrators have also said they appreciate candidates who have a familiarity with how EDU operates — an attitude that experts said fits with national trends in hiring. Dowdall said she has seen an increase in schools hiring internal candidates as a result of budget shortfalls, both as a result of candidates being less willing to move across the country and of universities looking for individuals who already understand the politics behind the allocation of funds. She acknowledged that there are downsides to hiring from within the school.

“There really does seem to be a pattern right now of continuity in a time of turmoil,” she said. “The biggest theme you would be missing here is new blood, new ideas, more creative and different ways of doing things,” she said.

Caulfield said he thinks changes need to be made to the types of people the search firms target, but isn’t sure how to go about making that happen. But the need to look outside the established pool of people will certainly stay on Caulfield’s mind, despite the lack of searches at the moment. Caulfield pointed out that Bruce, who is 63 years old, will eventually step down from the job, at which point he hopes he will have found a better way to conduct searches.

“One day, Carey (Bruce) will come in here and say ‘I’m tired of doing this.’ And we’ll gear up for a new way to find a replacement,” he said. “And hopefully I will have found people to give me good new ideas by then.”

Module 6 Exercise 6

On Anthony Doerr’s Wikipedia page, multiple changes have been made since his New York Times best seller “All the Light We Cannot See,” has been ranked at the top of the list.

Changes have been made to his early life and education sections as well as his career section. There were also changes made to the external links section and his personal life section.

There are mainly two users making changes to Doerr’s Wikipedia page. TeriEmbrey and CSLatWSU are the two that are making the changes to this page. They are most likely making changes to his page so people can know more about the author behind a best selling book.

I don’t think this information is news value for a story. I just can’t see an audience needing to know about this right away.

Module 6 Exercise 4

I was not able to determine which board member lived in the most expensive house but I was able to see some of the houses that the board members live in. The hardest part about the research was finding the addresses of each board member. I was not able to find all of their addresses but for the ones I did find I just put the addresses in Google Maps and look at the houses through the satellite view. Wayne Koch lived in one of the nicer houses I saw. The picture quality was not great so I can’t actually tell who’s house was the nicest.

Seo Strategy Memo

This SEO strategy memo is about the Fox29 News Philadelphia website, fox29.com. The fox29 website has its advantages and disadvantages, and I’ll be discussing that in this post.

One of the best parts about the site is the use of its article headlines. The headlines are easy to read, short, and contain all the necessary information needed to let the reader know what the story is about. The headlines have a good font size so the reader has no trouble seeing it.

I think one area I see room for improvement for fox29’s website is the use of metadata on the homepage. From what I see there is not much metadata used on the homepage of the site. I also think the section fronts on the page could be improved. The pages are a little unorganized and the picture at the top of the page is too big. I think they also need to space out each article on and put a picture on top of the article instead of in the background of the headline. This will give the reader a better understanding of what the article is about. Although the article pages are well done. The picture sizes are a good size and so is the size of the font.

The only issue I have with the article pages is putting advertisements in the middle of the article. Most readers are annoyed by advertisements and having it interrupt the article may turn the reader away. I also think they should not put the related stories in the middle of the article as well. The article should flow straight through and then you can put ads and related stories at the end of the article. Other than that the layout of the articles is great. The paragraphs are broken up well to make it easier for the reader to stay focused.

Although the leads on the articles are very good. They give the information that is necessary but keeps it short. The leads are also interesting enough to keep the reader engaged and wanting to continue reading the story.

Fox 29 had a page rank of 6 according to Google which measure favorably to the top 10 competitors it has. The only site that ranked better from the top 10 was staradvertiser.com which had a page rank of 7. This shows the quality of the website is as good as any that compare to it.

 

City Council Votes on Bank Depository

Tags

bank depository, city council, facts a, Voting

Description: This post is based on the set of facts labelled ‘Facts A’.

City Council Voted on its choice for the official Bank Depository for the town.

Last night city council met at its regular meeting to vote on the town’s official bank depository. Locally based Adams & Bank Trust won in a 4-2 vote over the Bank of America. The mayor did not vote on the issue, and the decision came with a condition that the Office of Thrift Supervision remove the restriction it placed on Adams & Bank trust after it lost about $1 million in the 2008 economic downturn.

Council member Sammy Slade emphasized how they want to support local business and banks. “If this black mark isn’t taken off, I would hope that we would definitely consider Adams in the future. I hope the decision will demonstrate the kind of support we give local businesses and banks to establish themselves,” Slade said.

Harrington Bank President and CEO seemed to be happy about the vote as well. “It’s good news. It’s somewhat out of my hands,” he said.

The Office of Thrift Supervision has until December 31st to remove its restrictions or the city will keep its money at the Bank of America

 

Volkswagen Shows Why Drivers Eyes Should Always be on the Road

Tags

Driving, Safety, Volkswagen

Volkswagen shows what can happen to a driver if he takes his eyes off the road even for a split second.

Malala Yousafza an Inspiration After Surviving Terrorist Attack

Malala Yousafzai has become an inspiration for young girls around the world after surviving a terrorist attack.