Norton Scientific: White learns his fate

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20120220/EDIT07/302209998/1021/EDIT

The saga of ousted Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White continues Thursday, when he is sentenced on six felony counts, including voter fraud, perjury and theft.

White is hoping the judge will reduce his charges to misdemeanors, which apparently would allow White to resume office – at least for now.

But White has shown no remorse and accepted no responsibility for his actions. In fact, after his conviction, White went on the offensive and accused Gov. Mitch Daniels of listing a false residency. Given White's behavior, it seems doubtful any judge would be inclined to lessen the charges against him.

Water rate increase

The Fort Wayne City Council is likely to make a decision on Fort Wayne City Utilities' proposed water rate increase on Tuesday.

At the request of several council members, City Utilities leaders revised their proposal to increase water rates by 40 percent over three years rather than two. The Fort Wayne Board of Public Works approved the revised proposal last week.

If the rate increase is approved, utility customers will see their bills increase each year from 2013 to 2015, but the increases will be slightly smaller.

Council members seem to accept that the increase is needed to keep up with maintenance demands for water pipes but wanted the Henry administration to soften the blow for city residents already dealing with a difficult economy.

The revised proposal helps address those concerns.

U.S. and Canada

Roy B. Norton, the consul general of Canada, will be speaking at IPFW on Thursday.

Norton, who is based in Detroit and represents Canada in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky, will discuss the two countries' long-standing mutually beneficial relationship and history.

The U.S. shares the world's longest border with Canada and can also boast of the largest two-way trading relationship.

Film discussions

Cinema Center will host two films on current issues on Sunday.

Jonathan Walker, a Fort Wayne physician and regional administrator for the Northeast Indiana Chapter of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan, is sponsor of "The Healthcare Movie." It will be shown at noon Sunday.

The documentary is an account of Tommy Douglas' effort to establish a national health care system in Canada. It is narrated by Douglas' grandson, actor Kiefer Sutherland.

A discussion on health care will follow the free film.

At 4:15 p.m. Sunday, a newly established group of public education advocates will sponsor "Waiting for Superman," a critique of the American educational system as seen through the eyes of students hoping to be selected for admission to urban charter schools. A repeat showing is set for 4 p.m. Monday at Cinema Center.

On March 4 and 5, the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education will sponsor a free showing of "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman," a counter view in defense of public education directed by a teacher-filmmaker.

Discussion sessions will follow each film. For more information on the local education group, go towww.neifpe.blogspot.com.

Omnibus speaker

Award-winning journalist Michele Norris will speak Monday as part of the IPFW Omnibus Lecture Series.

The host of NPR's "All Things Considered," Norris is also the author of "The Grace of Silence: A Memoir." It was named one of the best books of 2010 by The Christian Science Monitor.

Free tickets can be picked up at the Larson Ticket Office in IPFW's Athletics Center between 12:30 and 6:30 p.m. today.

They also ran

What do these men have in common?

DeWitt Clinton, Rufus King, William H. Crawford, Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, John C. Fremont, John C. Breckinridge, Horatio Seymour, Samuel J. Tilden, Winfield S. Hancock, James G. Blaine, Alton B. Parker, Charles E. Hughes and James M. Cox

They all ran for president on a major party ticket, and all lost. Generally, Americans have made good choices.

You could argue, for example, that Seymour would have been better than Ulysses Grant, Tilden than Rutherford B. Hayes and Cox than Warren G. Harding.

But history changes the further you get from the events. So today being Presidents Day (actually, Washington's birthday holiday, the third Monday in February), take a moment to think not so much how lucky the country has been as how well the system has worked more often than not.

Norton Scientific: Testimony by Neil deGrasse Tyson Before the Committee on Commerce Science & Transportation

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=40192

Testimony to the US Senate
Committee on Commerce Science & Transportation
March 7, 2012
Russell Senate Office Building, Room 253

Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York City

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine St. Exupery

Currently, NASA's Mars science exploration budget is being decimated, we are not going back to the Moon, and plans for astronauts to visit Mars are delayed until the 2030s --on funding not yet allocated, overseen by a congress and president to be named later.

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, every few weeks an article, cover story, or headline would extol the "city of tomorrow," the"home of tomorrow," the "transportation of tomorrow." Despite such optimism, that period was one of the gloomiest in U.S. history, with a level of unrest not seen since the Civil War. The Cold War threatened total annihilation, a hot war killed a hundred servicemen each week, the civil rights movement played out in daily confrontations, and multiple assassinations and urban riots poisoned the landscape.

The only people doing much dreaming back then were scientists, engineers, and technologists. Their visions of tomorrow derive from their formal training as discoverers. And what inspired them was America's bold and visible investment on the space frontier.

Exploration of the unknown might not strike everyone as a priority. Yet audacious visions have the power to alter mind-states --to change assumptions of what is possible. When a nation permits itself to dream big, those dreams pervade its citizens' ambitions. They energize the electorate. During the Apollo era, you didn't need government programs to convince people that doing science and engineering was good for the country. It was self-evident. And even those not formally trained in technical fields embraced what those fields meant for the collective national future.

For a while there, the United States led the world in nearly every metric of economic strength that mattered. Scientific and technological innovation is the engine of economic growth--a pattern that has been especially true since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That's the climate out of which the New York World's Fair emerged, with its iconic Unisphere - displaying three rings - evoking the three orbits of JohnGlenn in his Mercury 7 capsule.

During this age of space exploration, any jobs that went overseas were the kind nobody wanted anyway. Those that stayed in this country were the consequence of persistent streams of innovation that could not be outsourced, because other nations could not compete at our level. In fact, most of the world's nations stood awestruck by our accomplishments.

Let's be honest with one anther. We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we're not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect is.

But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That's the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America's capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Chordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics...) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.

As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The "tomorrow" articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible --the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed theApollo voyages to the Moon--the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.

All these piecemeal symptoms that we see and feel - the nation is going broke, it's mired in debt, we don't have as many scientists, jobs are going overseas - are not isolated problems. They're part of the absence of ambition that consumes you when you stop having dreams. Space is a multidimensional enterprise that taps the frontiers of many disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics, geology, atmospherics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. These classic subjects are the foundation of the STEM fields - science, technology, engineering, and math - and they are all represented in the NASA portfolio.

Epic space adventures plant seeds of economic growth, because doing what's never been done before is intellectually seductive (whether deemed practical or not), and innovation follows, just as day follows night. When you innovate, you lead the world, you keep your jobs, and concerns over tariffs and trade imbalances evaporate. The call for this adventure would echo loudly across society and down the educational pipeline.

At what cost? The spending portfolio of the United States currently allocates fifty times as much money to social programs and education than it does to NASA. The 2008 bank bailout of $750 billion was greater than all the money NASA had received in its half-century history; two years' U.S. military spending exceeds it as well. Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that--a penny on a dollar--we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.

How much would you pay to "launch" our economy. How much would you pay for the universe? 

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Note: The views above are derived from Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, W W Norton 2012.