K-12 Level STEM2 Education: Male African American Students and others Worldwide

NASA-Science Technology Engineering Math and Medicine (STEM2) for Male African American Students and others Worldwide

by Andrew Williams Jr (Notes) on Friday, May 17, 2013 at 5:29pm

Dr. Joe W. Conner, JWC/DS, and Mr. George Sun, United Lenton, Inc., are announcing plans to establish ten (10) Ocean and GIS/GPS Consortia in Southern California and beyond.

JWC/DS has received a preliminary agreement with a school district which is the first institution to share our desire for improving science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEM2) training - with a strong GIS/GPS component. The district is also the first systemwilling to take advantage of our ability to develop a strong financial base from individual households (i.e. $12.5+ million operational fund per hub). 

Collaborators with diverse service and skills sets have agreed to assist our district client as needed. A sample of our collaborators is attached. Resumes and documents detailing collaborations are available upon request.

PROJECT STRUCTURE -The project will focus on two broad themes:

1. We will use NASA Enterprises to spinoff ways to launch the spirit of discovery in K-12 young scholars, siblings and parents;
2. We will use GIS/GPS and related technologies to reveal how STEM2 professionals collect, analyze, and manage data.  The introduced technologies are used by ESRI and National Instruments.

                Each broad hub can bring additional domestic and international opportunities to the schools and homes of each K-12 student. The consultative efforts will locate willing prospective donors who embrace the goals established by the district. Our financial goal is to raise $10+ million for each themed hub that will allow the districtflexible options for projects and the starting of an endowment(s).

Contact

Dr. Joe W. Conner

JWC Development Systems

P.O. BOX 1515, Costa Mesa, CA 92628

Tel: 626.664.2958   Fax: 714.540.5875

E-Mail: jwconner@jwcds.com 

Created: 4-26-13 jwc

Revised: 5-6-13 db

Revised: 5-11-13 jwc

SERVICE COLLABORATIONS

Service: Workshop(s) for African-American fifth grade males

These interactive and multimedia workshows how much fun young men can have with a Ph.D.in STEM2 (science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine) fields of study. Dr. Joe will show actual marine biology and outreach field trip video and slides from California to across USA and West Africa. Students will show how they, their family members and teachers can start fun activities that match science standards, develop community resource contacts locally and beyond.The workshops can be held from one to three days with follow-up activities to establish human and financial resources.                

Fee Schedule: Available Upon Request

Service Region: State, National, International. Please specify: National and International

Contact: Joe W. Conner, Ph.D.                         Title: Senior Manager/Founder

Phone: 626.664.2958                                         Email: jwconner@jwcds.com

Fax: 714.540.5875                                             Skype: joe.conner27

Address: P.O.BOX 1515                                     City: Costa Mesa                                State: CA              Zip: 92628

Additional Comments:  Workshops are inclusive and can be tailored to meet any STEM2 organizational objects and/or target groups.

Service: RETINA (Robotics Exploration Technologies in Astrobiology)

The RETINA Program blends formal classroom instructional activities with hands-on skill development in a team-based setting conducted by the teacher and guided by national science standards. Activities are chosen carefully with the intention of integrating technology under the umbrella of a scientific process and are designed to provide consistency and a continuum of difficulty among the grades. Given the breadth of potential science and engineering topics that excite children, the RETINA Program focuses on interactive participation in the design and development of simple robotic and sensor systems, providing a range of challenges to engage all students through project-based learning (PBL). Modules are framed in science and follow accepted engineering practices. Grade-specific scientific umbrellas were chosen based on national science standards and ongoing cutting-edge research and/or technology.  Modules progress from simple activities such as making an object neutrally buoyant to writing computer code to maneuver rovers. These modules expose students to the broad range of engineering fields and the engineering processes through problem solving, creativity, and collaboration, using science as the “customer”.                               

Fee Schedule: Available Upon Request

Service Region: State, National, International. Please specify:California and National

Contact:  Dr. Geoff Wheat                                                Title: Professor

Phone: 831.633.7033                                         Email: wheat@mbari.org

Fax: N/A                                                               Skype: N/A

Address: P.O. Box 475                                       City: Moss Landing            State: CA              Zip: 95039

Additional Comments: One of the creators of C-DEBI (Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations) a NSF funded deep ocean research consortium administrated by the University of Southern California.

SERVICE COLLABORATIONS

Service: International EducationCollaboration Works

Definition: International EducationCollaboration Works to build bridges or use structures designed and built by others to facilitate exchanges.

Increasing Important Educational Innovations: The rapid emergence of new and respected higher education institutions in countries like: China, Taiwan, Korea, etc. could well lead to more choices among domestic and foreign students to study locally or in other countries.

The Information and Communications Technology: GIS/GPS and Cloud Computing technology will be the backbone of higher education or youth succeed better if they start learning the benefits of spirited collaboration in terms of developing leading-edge infrastructures.

Services: (Sample)

(1) “Become A Sister's Schools”: Under the International  Education Collaboration Plans,  Including Cultural Exchanges, Youth Ambassador Programs, Home Stay Exchange Programs.

(2) For Both Youth and Adult Students: Includes information and communication technology, musical performances, art exhibits, international cultural festivals, media, film festivals, and teacher exchanges.

(3) The Summer Programs (Summer Camps): Run summer camps for teens, older Kids, siblings and parents.

Fee Schedule:  Available Upon Request

Service Region: State, National, International. Please Specify: State, National,  and International.

Contact:  George Sun                                         Title:  President

Phone: (626)447-5119                                       Email: gsun1888@yahoo.com

Fax:  (626)447-6307                                          Skype: N/A

Address:  5917 Oak Ave.  Suite 250              City:  Temple City    State: Ca.      Zip:  91780

Additional Comments: Senior Asian Liaison for JWC/DS.

Service: STEM2 Saturday Academy Program

The Metropolitan Saturday Academy Science and Technology Programs (MSA) is a scientific and educational enrichment organization designed to create student interest in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEM2) at the elementary and middle school levels.  Since 1997, MSA has provided creative learning experiences in nontraditional formats, inspired by “NASA Underground Railroad: Connections to Freedom and Science”.  In MSA students use “hands on” activities developed by experts in STEM2fields. Students go on field trips to NASA Centers and universities across America. Our educational enrichment activities meet national education standards.  Students develop and present science projects under the guidance and direction of science and math teachers.  Research opportunities are offered to expand students’ understanding of scientific and mathematical concepts.  The program is conducted on Saturdays from December to June or during and/or after school. The major goal is to develop a cadre of multicultural youth in STEM2 fields. We strengthen each student’s educational skills, improve his/her academic achievement, provide a school-to-career focus, introduce and/or increase exposure to colleges and universities, and enhance problem-solving, critical thinking, skills in analytic, communication, presentation, leadership and interpersonal talents.

Fee Schedule:  Available Upon Request

Service Region: State, National International.  Please specify:  National and International

Contact:  Lynda Sampson                               Title:  President and CEO

Phone:  301.642.5566                                      Email:  saturdayacademy1997@yahoo.com

Fax:  301.574.0175                                          Skype: N/A

Address:  1455 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 300      City:  Washington      State:  DC       Zip:  20004

Additional Comments:  The STEM2 Saturday Academy Program is inclusive.MSA’s techniques and programs are transferable. 

Revised: 5-11-13 jwc

Different Perspective. USAID: The Soft Arm of Imperialism

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/11/24/usaid-the-soft-arm-of-imperialism/

By Dady Chery

NEWS JUNKIE POST

Nov 24, 2012 at 6:32 pm

Foreign aid is the opium of modern times

No one pushes foreign aid better than USAID (the United States Agency for International Development). The agency operates in over 100 countries. New takers arrive all the time, the most recent one being Burma, which returned for a fix after a 24-year hiatus. Unlike the current celebrations of Burma, the last major news about USAID were hardly ones to boast about. Soon after the Paraguay coup in June, the ALBA member countries – Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Nicaragua, and Venezuela – declared they would expel the agency. In mid-September, Russia accused the agency of “political meddling”and gave it less than two weeks to leave. USAID had entered Russia right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and spent about $2.6 billion in its 20 years there. Of the $50 million allocated for 2012, more than half had been intended to “promote democracy.”

What is this Orwellian aid organization that countries expel as soon as they are able? USAID is a relatively young agency: a John F. Kennedy brainchild that gathered a group of aid organizations under one umbrella with the passage of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. USAID was intended to follow in the footsteps of the Marshall Plan but function more efficiently to advance US foreign policy. The goals back then were clearly expressed and were consistent with the cold war policies to diminish the threat of communism and open new markets for the US. These have expanded to include: developing “countries’ policies and institutions” and even “rebuilding government.”

USAID’s list of top aid recipients hardly sounds like a group of coddled countries, but rather a list of places that are either formally at war or don’t know they are at war even as their very fabric is being unraveled. In 2011, for example, the number one recipient was Afghanistan, at $1.4 billion, and number two was Haiti, at $971 million. Other countries in the top 20 aid recipients include Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, West Bank/Gaza, Iraq, Colombia, and Liberia.

What happens in Haiti doesn’t stay in Haiti

Although many of USAID’s policies were initially practiced on Haiti, the agency did not get a foothold into the country until Jean-Claude Duvalier came to power in 1972. Duvalier the father had been irascible and nobody’s boy. Consequently, the Kennedy administration had cut off all aid to the country in 1963, and Haiti enjoyed an unprecedented economic independenceduring the early 1960’s to 1970’s. Duvalier the son, on the other hand, was quick to open the country’s economy to US exploitation in exchange for his own protection. USAID declared Haiti’s “comparative advantages” to be its: (1) low-cost labor force, (2) year-round cultivation and (3) proximity to the US, and it rapidly set about to reorient all Haitian labor and agriculture to export.

Part of the plan was to double the urban population to create an assembly/sweatshop sector that could be easily policed. Aid was given, not to the poor, but to rich landowners, to tie them over while the country’s agriculture was transformed from production for its domestic market to production for export. Over time, USAID carried out a series of studies to understand the support systems for Haiti’s peasants and then set about to destroy all those systems. One of these was the Creole pig, which was eradicated in 1982 presumably because of a swine-flu epidemic in the Dominican Republic, although the pig, which had adapted to the Island over hundreds of years, was resistant to swine flu. Later, subsidized rice from Arkansas was dumped into Haiti to bankrupt the country’s small rice farmers and create a market for the US.

An analogous process took place in Egypt, where Mubarak opened the country’s economy to the US in exchange for protection from his own people. All of Egypt’s pigs were slaughtered in 2009, not to prevent a swine flu, but a human flu. This wholesale killing of the animals was correctly interpreted by Egypt’s Christian minority as being a direct attack on its economy. Likewise, USAID set out to undermine the major Egyptian crop for consumption, in this case wheat, by dumping the subsidized US product on the market. Currently, Egypt imports over 10 million tons of wheat per year, about 40% of it from the US alone. Indeed, for every dollar the US has spent on development in Egypt, that country has spent about $40 on US imports.

“Napalm in the morning, candy in the afternoon”

As an aid organization, USAID principally serves US corporations. The agency subverts the economies, cultures, and even religions of assisted countries to open them as markets and transform their entrepreneurial poor into workers for subsistence wages. In this project, USAID exploits a broad array of supposed non-governmental organizations (NGO) to employ mainly Americans. Although these NGO workers live in place, they isolate themselves in small enclaves and spend so much of their funds on US goods that USAID can boast of recycling about 80% of its dollars back into the US economy. For its more than 50 years, the policy of USAID has been to “buy American”and strictly require “tied aid”: i.e. that its funds be spent on goods and services, not only from US concerns but also transported solely by US carriers, even if this means paying higher prices that undermine the local economies that are supposedly being helped.

In February, USAID announced it would relax its purchase policy to allow most goods and services to be bought in place, except for: food aid, US-patented pharmaceuticals, and motor vehicles. This sounds harmless enough, until one recognizes that, given USAID’s policy of generating the need for its goods, this policy change predicts an escalation in hunger, disease, and protest. For the most part, the aid from USAID consists of defective goods that cannot compete on the world market. Examples include unfortified rice, genetically modified (GMO) seeds rejected by the European Union countries but bought from Monsanto by assisted countries; dangerous vaccines that are nonetheless adopted into the vaccination programs of USAID clients; vehicles, many of which are defective but purchased by aided governments for their staff, police and military.

The aid is for the US, not the designated recipients, who cannot disavail themselves of the supposed help without an almost impossible effort to independence.  It is an addictive drug couriered by local despots, a soft instrument of war every bit as debilitating as the military arm of US foreign policy: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Youth Opportunity: Board of Directors. Age 16-22 yrs old.

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Washington Examiner: May 10, 2013. Internet access for seniors

Program teaches seniors how to use the Internet

May 10, 2013 | Modified: May 10, 2013 at 8:01 am

AP Staff Writer

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sitting in the basement of Shiloh Baptist Church in Northwest on Monday morning, Alice Jones placed her weathered hands on the sleek iPad as if it were a magical portal to another planet.

To the 75-year-old retired hospital worker, it was.

"I need to be out in this new world of pushing buttons," said Jones, one of 50 District residents who received iPads this week, the start of a pilot program to distribute the devices to senior citizens who are at risk of isolation and depression.

The program is aimed at the tech-uninitiated, like Jones — who doesn't use ATMs for fear they will eat her card. "I've got to get computerized," she said with a chuckle, and nine other seniors seated near her nodded. "What's that Google? I want to find out about this Google stuff."

The $250,000 pilot, which will bring iPads, computer training and home Internet service to 100 seniors over the next year, is a program of the AARP Foundation, an AARP-affiliated charity, and is being administered in the city by Family Matters of Greater Washington, a social-services organization.

The initial recipients, most of whom live in Ward 2, will attend classes twice a week for six months to learn how to use the Internet, Skype, email and social-media platforms such as Facebook. Fifty more will begin classes in July. Comcast is providing discounted Internet service, and Netgear is donating modems.

The goal of the program is to combat the isolation that can set in as seniors retire and their close friends and family members die, lose touch or move away.

Isolation is an "unrecognized crisis among seniors," said Tom Kamber, executive director at Older Adults Technology Services, which developed the program and is training its volunteer instructors. "A lot of older people feel, in the digital age, that they are not relevant or included."

A 2012 study by the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, affiliated with the United Nations, found that Internet use increases social connections, both online and face to face, among people 65 and older. And a Pew Research Center study found that last year, for the first time, more than half (53 percent) of people 65 and older were online.

Understanding the mysteries of the Web can lift a veil dividing generations, Kamber said. "What happens when someone gets an iPad in their hands — 'I felt like things were passing me by, and now I feel like I'm part of it.'?"

In the District, the program selected low-income seniors at high risk of being disconnected from friends and family, said Najeeb Uddin, the AARP Foundation's vice president of technology.

"We're targeting people on the verge of being isolated and depressed. Their spouse might have passed away," he said. "It's about connecting to the community. It just happens to be that we're using technology to do it."

Participants, whose levels of isolation were assessed at the beginning of the program, will be reassessed after six months using an evaluation developed by Cornell University. If positive changes are reported, the program will be expanded on a national level, an AARP spokeswoman said. The foundation is also considering launching a similar six-month pilot in Sioux Falls, S.D., targeting rural seniors.

At an ice cream social to kick off the program Friday, seniors took notes in careful cursive. Not a smartphone was seen among them.

Bertha Grant, 83, who lives alone in a senior citizens building in Ward 6, said she had never used the Internet.

"I didn't have any use for it," she said. "I figured at my age, I was too old."

William Goode, 72, a professional caddie wearing a bow tie and straw hat, agreed. "Why would I think I would ever need it?" he said.

But Goode is an artist, and Ali Muhammad, one of the trainers, pointed out that he could create a Web site for his art.

"Now why would I want to create my own Web site?" Goode asked.

"So people, without coming to your house, they can see your work," Muhammad said, and Goode nodded in approval.

Thelma Pugh, who declined to give her age, said she wanted to learn how to "load some tunes."

"I see people walking around," she said, putting her fingers to her ears and pantomiming a person rocking out. "I want to hear what they're listening to."

Sitting in the classroom as the instructor showed the class how to take photos of each other, Charles Triggs said that when his marriage broke up six or seven years ago, his access to a computer also dissipated.

"I left it with her," said Triggs, a 66-year-old resident of Ward 2. "I just feel left out. They say, 'Contact us on such-and-such-dot-com.' Can't do that."

With his iPad, he said, "I won't feel left out any more. I'll be part of the world again."

Patrick Saunders said he last took a computer class in the 1980s and hoped that some of what he learned would come back to him. Virginia Toney, 72, said she looked forward to having the Bible at her fingertips without having to carry the book around. Clayton Sweeney, 60, said he planned to surprise his children with his new computer savvy.

The seniors, born in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, said they have had to get used to a lot of changes since they were young. Like not being able to find a pay phone on every corner. Like seeing people walk down the street with wires trailing from their heads, looking like lunatics talking to themselves.

But a few had already begun to venture into connectivity. Sterling Patrick, 66, who had a little experience with texting, offered his classmates some tips.

"Like you want to say, 'I love you?'?" he said. "You write, 'I love' and the letter U."

That was too much for Jones. "I don't worry about that," she said. "Mm-mm. I'm not trying to rack my brains with that stuff."

May 30, 2013. Small Business Forum. Montgomery County, Maryland

The Mid Atlantic Championship invites you to join Web.com and SCORE at their Small Business Forum. This interactive Forum will focus on helping local small businesses learn how to successfully market their business online.  FREE to Attend Key areas for discussion include the following: -What are the elements of a   great website? -How do I increase traffic to my website and to my business? -Is my website "working" for  my business? -How do I market my business on Google, Facebook and Twitter? Thursday, May 30, 2013 8:00am - 10:30am  *  Registration & Continental Breakfast *  Opening Speaker: Ike Leggett *  Web.com Speaker: Andrew Gorrin, SVP Marketing *  Q&A and Networking Location Bethesda Country Club 7601 Bradley Blvd Bethesda, MD 20817 (301) 365-1700 This forum is FREE to attend, however we ask that you register in advanced. SIGN UP HERE!  The first 250 people to register and attend the Forum will receive two (2) passes to the Mid Atlantic Championship. Additional prizes will be raffled off at the Forum!