Community works to help eighth grade cancer patient

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 4:00 am

After 14-year-old Austin Thacker, of Legacy Traditional School , was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Diffused Mature B Cell Lymphoma, fellow students and the community have come together to make things a little easier on the family.

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Guest Column: Be realistic in crediting schools like BASIS

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 4:00 am

Let’s say you decide to start a school for sixth through 12th graders that gives students a rigorous, world class education: demanding courses, lots of homework, sky-high expectations.

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Guest Column: Eric Holder’s problematic reasoning

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 4:00 am

“Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented – by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows – transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights. It is about who we are as a nation. And it goes to the core of our treasured American principle of equal opportunity.” Eric Holder, Attorney General (4/24/2013)

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What can we really do (Part 2)

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 4:00 am

It was interesting to see the response The Explorer got last week after my editorial on what we citizens can really do to reach our elected officials. While I am deeply concerned with seemingly not having a voice unless we have enough money, I am not encouraging any residents to stop trying by any means. I still work to contact my elected officials and I always will, even if at times I feel it seems pointless.

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Tips to navigate the real estate landscape and find the perfect home

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - For most Americans your home is the biggest ticket item you will ever purchase. It’s no wonder that people can take months, and sometimes even years, to find the perfect home. When you walk into a house that’s on the market, many times the homeowner or real estate agent has “staged” it to ensure that you focus on the home’s greatest assets and overlook its flaws. Your job is to look past all that to see if this house is right for you.

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Guest Column: Why are you waiting? It’s time to get things done now

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:00 am

Many people spend the bulk of their lives delaying a lot of things because they’re “waiting for the right time.” Baloney! Today’s that time, unless you’ve formulated an exceptional system that can absolutely guarantee tomorrow will actually arrive and offer the ideal setting for whatever it is you’ve been delaying.

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Laser spine surgery helps seniors find relief from lumbar spinal stenosis

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - Two recent clinical studies bring good news to the aging population. If you have lower back pain, burning pain or numbness in your legs you are probably one of the many people suffering with Lumbar Spinal Stenosis (LSS) – a condition affecting a vast majority of the over-60 age group – and this good news applies to you.

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Add economical living space with an outdoor room

Sunday, April 14, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - Adding living space to your home can be an expensive prospect. However, creating an outdoor room is a budget-friendly option that gives you more square footage, as well as additional opportunities to enjoy the season. As an extension of the home, outdoor rooms with decks or pergolas can be personalized to truly bring indoor comforts outside for relaxation and entertaining.

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Make exterior trim part of home remodeling

Thursday, April 11, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - As existing home sales continue to climb and housing prices increase, remodeling is also on the rise, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Owners of older homes are investing more in home improvement projects that add beauty and value, especially with environmentally friendly products.

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Guest Column: The benefit of beneficiaries

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 4:00 am

Establishing an estate plan is an important aspect of a comprehensive and well-rounded financial plan. A good estate plan will help ensure your wishes are carried out if you become incapacitated or die. It will help the people you place in charge of your estate to make appropriate decisions for your care if you are living but unable to handle your own affairs and distribute the things you leave behind according to your wishes. It will also help expedite your estate through probate or possibly avoid it completely.

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Mike Rice Ruled With An Iron Fist and Nobody Swung Back

Monday, April 8, 2013 8:33 am

(NewsUSA) - The situation at Rutgers is what happens when priorities are out of line.

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It's all in the details - how to accessorize your home exterior

Monday, April 1, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - When considering exterior home improvements during spring and summer, many homeowners go for updates such as the replacement of siding or windows. These projects can make the home look great while boosting energy efficiency, but no matter how much homeowners invest in siding or windows, it will only look as good as the trim used to complete the job.

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Third Age: Life’s glass: half empty or half full?

Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:00 am

I’m seriously beginning to wonder about a popular “news” website I visit on occasion and the information stream we are bombarded with every day. Recent headlines include: “Mating tortoises knock over lamp, burn down garage.” Mr. and Mrs. O’Leary, whose cow burned down Chicago, would have gotten a kick out of that one. “Man lands in court for laughing too loudly” - “How cats make decisions” - “Could you go a year without pants?”

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Solid retirement planning a must for Generations X and Y

Tuesday, March 26, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - When it comes to making plans for retirement years, today’s younger workers are struggling to make heads or tails of all the resources and products available to them through work and personal investments. Younger professionals who fit into the Gen X and Gen Y categories also are not taking advantage of financial professionals, who can provide information and education on planning for a secure retirement, according to 2013 research by LIMRA, a research, consulting and professional development organization.

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What's Up UA? - A Telescope at the Bottom of the World

Saturday, March 16, 2013 10:35 am

The brilliantly colored, sweeping nebulae featured on magazine covers and posters lining museum exhibits are the birthplaces and cradles of the stars in our galaxy.

Out of the blackness of space and swirling gasses and debris, these nebulae take form, coalescing into columns and structures that remind us of Earthly shapes: here a horsehead, there a dragon.

But how do so-called star-forming nebulae themselves form? It's is a question little understood and much debated by astronomers, and it's the topic of resaerch by the University of Arizona's Craig Kulesa and Chris Walker.

Their quest takes them to one of the most remote and coldest locations on Earth: a barren snow-covered plateau 600 miles from the nearest human settlement, where a little telescope on a tabletop in an Antarctic ice field on the Southern end of the Earth may give them the answer.

"We see all these clouds of dust and gas, but no one's ever seen one form. They're just there. Where did they come from? And what happens to them?" Kulesa asked. "Every star in the sky, including our sun, was formed in these clouds."

Stars spend their lives fusing light elements such as hydrogen into heavier elements such as helium, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen – elements needed for life. At the end of their lives, stars return much of that enriched material back into interstellar space, where it eventually becomes new clouds and fuels the next generation of stars.

Star-forming nebulae such as Orion and Horsehead contain mostly molecular hydrogen, which is very difficult to observe in cold interstellar clouds.

"We want to actually see the clouds in the process of being formed. We want to see their building blocks," Kulesa said. "So instead of looking at carbon in molecular form, we're going to build radio receivers that will show us carbon in its atomic and ionized forms."

Carbon atoms and ions that have not yet bound to any other atoms to form molecules, such as carbon monoxide, likely represent the early stages before formation of a dark nebular cloud, Kulesa said.

"In order to look at atomic and ionized carbon, we have to build radio receivers that work at very, very high frequencies, terahertz frequencies," Kulesa said. "This light is basically 1,000 times higher frequency than your mobile phone, but 1,000 times lower frequency than the light you see with your eyes."

Kulesa's tiny telescope is the first ever with radio receivers tuned to such a high frequency that they are able to detect atomic and ionized carbon in space, sited at a unique place on Earth where these observations can be done routinely.

"No one could see this until now," Kulesa said. "It turns out that even a telescope the size of a table can do stuff no one's ever done before."

With a touch of irony, Kulesa and his teammates dubbed their telescope, which functions at -40 degrees Fahrenheit and colder, HEAT: the High-Elevation-Antarctic-Terahertz telescope. The tabletop scope sits on a platform, shielded from the elements by a large blue cover that looks rather like a mailbox.

"The telescope looks like the farthest outreach of the U.S. postal service," Kulesa joked, gazing fondly upon a photo of the observatory setup. "We visit it once a year. We're out in the deep field for a week getting it ready to go for another year, and when we wave goodbye, no human will see it again until the next year. It has to run all by itself."

This is a much easier problem to address, thanks to an international collaboration with researchers Michael Ashley and John Storey at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who designed and constructed the Plateau Observatory, or PLATO, which provides HEAT with power and communications.

"It's a very green experiment," Kulesa said. "Right now, we're operating totally off of solar power." The entire HEAT telescope, including a cryocooler that chills the terahertz detectors to a scant 50 degrees above absolute zero, sips only 160 watts of power.

With batteries charged by solar panels in summer, diesel generators in winter, and using satellite modems for communications controlled by a computer using the same type of processor as an iPhone, the telescope must operate in frozen solitude for an entire year, despite winter temperatures that will fall below -100 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Choosing embedded mobile phone technology for computers turned out to be the right thing because it takes less power; it's a lot simpler, smaller and lighter," Kulesa said. "It's exactly what you need to be able to run an experiment like this."

Kulesa and his team communicate with the telescope remotely via satellite, sending it new orders and instructions throughout the year, and downloading new data. They also keep a watchful eye on their experiment through a webcam, which sends image updates from roughly 9,000 miles away roughly every hour.

Why Antarctica, though?

Even the smallest amount of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere absorbs terahertz-frequency light from space before it reaches a telescope on Earth.

"If you take all the water molecules above your head and distill them into a liquid ocean, how deep would that ocean be?" Kulesa asked. From Tucson, Kulesa said, it's about 5-10 millimeters deep in winter and up to 40 millimeters deep during monsoon season in summer. At the telescope site in Antarctica, a place called Ridge A, atmospheric water vapor is frequently one-tenth of a millimeter or less.

"The summit of the Antarctic plateau is essentially a desert like Arizona, but much colder, higher and drier. The exceptional dryness allows us to perform difficult observations routinely that can't be done anywhere else on Earth."

Once a year, the team visits the telescope to replace parts and make adjustments or repairs. Working in -40 degree Fahrenheit summer weather at a pressure altitude of 15,000 feet is not exactly a walk in the park, Kulesa said.

"No matter how you try to avoid it, sometimes you have to work on something that has small parts, but at the same time, you're also wearing giant insulated gloves," Kulesa said. "So you have to alternate working on something for about 15 seconds with gloves off, then put the gloves back on and try to warm up," he said. At Ridge A, a laptop computer typically stops working within 10 minutes of being exposed to the elements.

Despite the difficulties of experimental setup, Kulesa said: "The Ridge A site was selected from satellite measurements that said it would be essentially the best place to put an astronomical observatory on the entire planet. And it appears to be holding true: It's the driest, coldest and one of the highest and calmest places on Earth. It's about as close to space-like conditions as you can get and still have your feet on the ground."

Close to space is what you need if you're trying to understand the origins of the interstellar machinery that makes the elements of the universe.

"This life cycle of matter in our galaxy is really our own story," Kulesa said. Stars make all the elements we are made out of, he said: "This cycle sculpts every star, every galaxy in the universe, and we owe our human existence to it. So it's worth trying to figure out how it works."

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Work to restore Democratic form

Wednesday, March 13, 2013 4:00 am

The opinions against David Safier and the partisan column by Senator Al Melvin show how much work must be done to restore our State to a Democratic form of government, a Republic, a government of, by and for the majority of the people. That is what David Safier was celebrating. I am at a loss to identify anything Senator Al Melvin has voted for to help Pima County residents. He is proud to carry out the agenda of his Republican friends in Phoenix. We voted for a tax increase to be used for education. Melvin voted to put the money in the General Fund. When Melvin talks of schools, he is talking about private schools, which can be owned by individuals for a profit. It they fail, the owner can keep all the school capital assets paid for by tax monies. Melvin also voted to deny Pima County its share for the Regional Transportation Authority money and to allow the recall of the Rio Nuevo development funds. Using his “hit woman”, Terry Proud, Melvin so intimidated the Redistricting Board, that he assured his re-election by getting an 11 to 16 point advantage against other candidates for his job.

Curb appeal: 2013's hottest home improvement trend

Monday, March 11, 2013 10:00 pm

(BPT) - The busy home remodeling season is a great time for homeowners to focus on increasing curb appeal. The percentage of homeowners who feel now is a good time to spend money on home improvement has doubled since 2009, according to a recent survey among Better Homes and Gardens readers. Considering two of the top four features consumers have on their wish lists for their next home are low maintenance exteriors and a private backyard, high-performance products that come in a variety of colors, textures and designs are expected to be in high demand this year.

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Help Protect Your Home From Wicked Weather

Monday, March 4, 2013 11:00 pm

(StatePoint) With wild weather patterns impacting the country in recent years, homeowners nationwide are constantly on the lookout for better ways to prepare their homes to handle tough weather conditions.

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What's Up UA? - Reconnecting Politics, Economics and Social Justice

Thursday, February 28, 2013 11:18 am

The study of politics, economics, law and social philosophy were interconnected prior to the latter part of the 19th century. Since then, the disciplines became disjointed, largely because of shifts in the way research was conducted.

The University of Arizona's Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law, or PPEL, program seeks to bring the areas of study back together to provide students – primarily undergraduates – a contemporary liberal arts education.

"To understand the economic system and political issues, we have to understand issues of equity, fairness and social welfare," said Jerry Gaus, the James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy who directs the program. "These things are part of a common fabric."

In a 2011 column, Jim Leach, the National Endowment for the Humanities chairman, defended the importance of a liberal arts education for the benefit of, among other things, preserving and perpetuating democratic ideals.

"With each passing year, jobs evolve, become more sophisticated. Training for one skill set may be of little assistance for another," Leach noted in his article.

"On the other hand, studies that stimulate the imagination and nourish capacities to analyze and think outside the box suit well the challenges of change. They make coping with the unprecedented a manageable endeavor," Leach said, emphasizing the need for expertise in basic education.

"What are also needed are the studies that provide perspective on our times and allow citizens to understand their own communities, other cultures and the creative process," he said.

At the UA, the highly competitive PPEL program – which is taught only by senior faculty and has a minimum grade-point average of 3.25 in the core courses – connects the four main disciplines.

In the PPEL program especially, instructors work hard to provide students with legitimately challenging and interesting material, said Kaushik Kumar Goswami, an Honors College student in the PPEL program.

"The caliber of students in the major is also very high, and as a result the classroom atmosphere is intellectually stimulating," Goswami said. "Additionally, the faculty in the PPEL program is top notch, which was another reason why I took an interest in the program."

Also, students must apply for advanced standing in order to continue in the program, with only 30 students selected each year.

"We wanted to devise a major where really good research faculty would be intensely involved with the undergraduates; where students get intensive interaction with faculty," Gaus said.

Students have the option of five study tracks: pre-law, international and global perspectives, policy studies, environmental issues and moral, economic and political values – though students also can design a study track.

"It was the draw of interdisciplinary studies that led me to the program, and the program gave me a good background in thinking critically," said Brenna Keene, a UA Honors College student in the program.

Keene, who will graduate in May and is in the midst of graduate school applications, has a strong interest in serving as a research or consulting around public policy work. She believes she is especially prepared for graduate studies because PPEL has provided her with extensive practice developing her critical thinking capacity.

In their coursework, students study contemporary social and political issues, such as the right to marry, debates around welfare economics and how morality is contextualized and defined. Students also analyze issues around social welfare and investigate the Constitution. Likewise, they must construct arguments and engage in persuasive writing.

"A lot of times you can sit in class, absorb the material and not process it, but PPEL makes you do that," Keene said. "It is rare that you sit in class and not say anything about the material. The program has connected for us the ability to think, and that is an important skill."

Lisette Cole took an interest in the PPEL program after taking PHIL 205, "the Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation," and taking a strong interest in the subject of philosophy.

"I fell in love with philosophy. As I took more and more philosophy classes, I noticed a sincere lack of understanding toward economics and politics, as philosophers tend to focus on the theoretical and ideal world," Cole said.

Like Keene, Cole said she was attracted to the multi-discipline design of the program.

"Most students never get to experience the faculty or learning techniques found in other majors, but as a PPEL student, I've learned from members of many departments," said Cole, an Honors College student and double major in PPEL and philosophy.

"Being able to apply an economic mindset to philosophy, a philosophical reasoning to politics, and a deeper understanding of politics and law makes PPEL entirely worth studying," Cole said. "I thank Jerry Gaus every week for starting this major and allowing the curious students to have the opportunity to analyze, contemplate, and ultimately better our world in an multi-dimensional way."

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Guest Column: Fed up with politicians catering to rich

Wednesday, February 20, 2013 4:00 am

The recently elected State legislators from our part of Arizona seem to think that Arizona’s ongoing economic recovery is due to their leadership and ideology. This is no more the case than it would be to blame the State legislature for the Great Recession that devastated so many lives. They appear to believe that cutting Arizona’s educational system by billions in order to balance the budget has resulted in no real harm. A visit or two to some of our public schools might change their minds.

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Tips for knowing when it's time to replace products on your home

Sunday, February 17, 2013 11:00 pm

(BPT) - Owning a home means giving constant attention to the building products that go into protecting the structure of your house. While we’d like to believe items like our roof, siding and windows will last forever, that’s not the case.

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The focus should be on quality teaching (part 4)

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 4:00 am

The Times of London rated seven of the top 10 universities in the world as American; eighteen of the top twenty-five world universities are American; and fifty-three of the top one hundred world universities are American. Higher education in America is considered the best in the world.

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Guest Column - A look at online love affairs

Thursday, February 7, 2013 11:44 am

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard about the young football player from Notre Dame who has now divulged that he had been duped by an online relationship for some three years. According to the latest version of the story, he never actually met this young lady who was supposed to be his girlfriend but had a torrid love affair with her through cyberspace. She is supposed to have died of leukemia and he used that tragedy to make himself a better player. Some have opined that he really used this story for publicity and to make his stock go up in the Heisman Trophy selection. Whatever.

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Happy with focus on improving CPS

Wednesday, February 6, 2013 4:00 am

I often use this column space to criticize some of the nonsense that comes through the Arizona Legislature, but last week, I was extremely impressed with a bill that was passed with very little arguments.

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Traditional public education works where expectations are high (part 1)

Wednesday, February 6, 2013 4:00 am

Last week (Jan. 27 – Feb. 2) was National School Choice Week, so I thought it appropriate to respond to a column printed in the Explorer – “The focus should be on quality teaching.”

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