The Global Search for Education: A Focus on U.S. Education
The main takeaways are first, American schools are not failing; they are getting the best results in our history in areas such as graduation rates, pursuit of more rigorous curriculum, performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMMS), achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), parent satisfaction with their local schools, and student perceptions of their teachers compared with students around the world.
Secondly, because the consequences of a student’s failure to succeed in the K-12 setting have never been more dire, educators must become much more effective in helping all students to learn at high levels.
Finally, we know the key to helping more students to achieve at higher levels – building the capacity of educators to work as members of true professional learning communities.
These tests warrant attention but also require deeper analysis of the results. For example, the performance of American students on PISA is cited as proof that our schools our failing. But let’s look deeper. The United States has one of the highest child poverty results of all the nations who take the PISA Exam. For the first time in history, the majority of students in public schools qualified for the free and reduced lunch program. One in five public schools in America have over 75% of their students living in poverty. It is the performance of these schools that drags down our national scores. If American schools with up to 25% of students living in poverty were considered as a cohort, we would be among the highest performing nations in the world. So if the PISA tests were used to highlight and address the detrimental effects of poverty and how those effects can be overcome, they could be very beneficial. If they are used to disparage American schools with the blanket condemnation that they are failing, they are of no use.
Given the shift in focus in the global education reform debate from the 3 R’s to the 4 C’s, what are the critical steps we need to take to produce a new education framework for the US?
The United States is one of the few countries that tests all students every year. The rigor of those tests has typically rarely risen beyond recall of information on multiple choice questions. So teachers face the dilemma that their students’ learning (and the individual teacher’s effectiveness) will be judged on the basis of recall of information at the same time there is general agreement that the 21st century skills demand creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, and collaborating with others. Until high-stakes assessments begin to reflect these priorities, higher order skills will continue to get short shrift in schools. The adage, “what gets monitored gets done,” applies here. If we want the 4C’s to be the focus, we must discover ways to monitor the presence of these skills in ways that will not put teachers at risk. Teachers must also be supported with focused professional development on the nature of the skills, the pedagogical practices that foster them, and varied assessment strategies to monitor them.
We can raise the standards for entry into the profession and award full scholarships to those who agree to teach at least five years. In most high-performing nations, prospective teachers must earn the equivalent of a master’s degree before they begin teaching. In the United States, we seem to assume that any college graduate can be a teacher in six weeks. We must stop issuing teaching certificates to people who have little or no training in either content or pedagogy. We must also stop assigning teachers to teach content in which they are not trained or certified. We are one of the only nations to use this practice. We have to raise starting salaries for teachers based on average salaries of those who enter the workforce with a bachelor’s degree. College graduates in the United States in 2014 had an average college debt of $29,000. American teachers earn 68% of the average starting salary for graduates with bachelor’s degrees. In industrialized countries whose students take the PISA exam, new teachers make 88% of the average starting salary for those with bachelor degrees. In Finland, it is 109%. We must also create meaningful career ladders that allow teachers to advance through stages of a career without being required to leave the classroom. Singapore offers three different multi-tiered tracks through which teachers can advance. We need to end the relentless criticism of teachers and schools, and ill-conceived and ineffective policies that punish teachers.
Attempts to send highly effective teachers into troubled schools through higher salaries and bonuses have generally failed. Educators have consistently reported that the climate and culture of the school and the nature of its leadership have a greater impact on teacher satisfaction and retention. To keep good teachers in troubled schools, we must develop the collaborative culture, collective responsibility, widely dispersed leadership, schoolwide commitment to the learning of each student, and celebration of incremental progress that characterizes high-performing professional learning communities.
In conclusion, increasing access to education has been a hallmark of the American experience and a key to its progress. The common school, the Merrill Land-Grant Act that provided every state with the resources to build colleges for agriculture and manufacturing, the creation of public high schools, and the G.I. Bill which established that military veterans should have access to higher education are key elements of the expansion of educational opportunity. Now we must decide if we are committed simply to ensure students have access to school or if they are entitled to high levels of learning. Finally, we must change the narrative of what it means to be a teacher from the current story that paints uncaring educators as the problem of American education to one in which teachers are recognized as the crucial nation builders that they are.
(All Photos are courtesy of CMRubinWorld)
Join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. MadhavChavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. EijaKauppinen (Finland), State Secretary TapioKosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Geoff Masters (Australia), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Professor Manabu Sato (Japan), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (LyceeFrancais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.
The Global Search for Education Community PageFollow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld


In the hustle and bustle of today, it is fitting to take a moment to recall one of the greatest men who ever served as President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. A moment of recollection and reflection is fitting today because it was on yesterday’s date, 14 April 1865 — Good Friday — that Lincoln was felled by an assassin’s bullet as he and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln watched the popular comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.
Moments after the shot rang out in the theater, John Wilkes Booth, a noted actor of the day, leapt from the President’s box onto the stage, shouting “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” (“Death to Tyrants”; the motto of Virginia.) Booth broke his leg in the fall, but managed to crawl off the stage and escape in the ensuing confusion.
Lincoln was taken from the theater to a house across the street to lie abed as his physicians debated what could or should be done. Before surgery could be attempted, Lincoln died in the early morning of April 15. Secretary of War Stanton observed: “Now he belongs to the Ages.”
In one brief note, I cannot hope to sum up Lincoln’s life and his utterly crucial importance to the nation we have today, but I can note that he is almost always ranked at the top of the list of most important Presidents. And it is worth noting that the tales we learned in Childhood about Lincoln’s great public character and deep personal honesty and intergrity are well upheld under close scrutiny of the existing facts.
The world would be a different place had Lincoln not been killed in that fine early April of 1865; the world would likely be a worse place had he never lived.
Flower Mound, Texas
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. — Abraham Lincoln, 1864


Despite whatever you may have heard, fashion hasn't been around since the beginning of time. The caveman probably didn't one day wake up and wonder if the hemline on his hessian tunic was too short, too tight or too revealing. He probably didn't worry about all his other neanderthal mates looking at him strangely because he hadn't tied his loin cloth in the way everyone else was doing it.
A recent infographic, depicting the rise of fashion in the Western world shows how the very notion of it was created. In fact, it didn't really appear in the west until 1400s, which was when clothing style changed rapidly. Between this time and the 1600s, art historians used the evolution of fashion to recognise the different periods of history.
However, it was really the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century that brought with it a complete change in terms of how clothing was produced did the world of fashion really start to become fully formed.
With the textile industry improvements and technological advances came with it more garments being produced, and at one time 25% of the UK's exports were clothing and textile-related items.
Then, in the late 1800s, fashion magazines came into play. In 1876 Harper's Bazaar's first ever issue was produced and not long after, in 1892 the first ever issue of Vogue was published too. This signaled another turning point with the magazines establishing fashion as a marker of one's societal status.
Currently, £741 billion is spent on fashion worldwide, 4.2 million people are employed in the fashion industry and of those people, 19,300 are fashion designers.
Take a look at some of the incredible statistics below.
Click on the image to enlarge


During 2009, landmines were cleared from an area more than five times the size of Paris. Within that same year the Landmine Monitor, which was created in June 1998 by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines, reported 3,956 casualties from the devices globally.
Placed just inches underground, landmines can lie dormant for decades before killing or maiming their victims. Because children are more likely to veer off the beaten path, they make up a disproportionate number of the casualties. And while antipersonnel landmine use has dropped dramatically since the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning their use, there remain 39 nonsignatory states (the U.S. is one) and many thousands of square kilometers of land remain uncleared.
By design, antipersonnel landmines are difficult to detect. Typically made of plastic, the firing pin is sometimes the only metal component, frequently rendering ground-penetrating radar and metal detectors ineffective. The United States military sometimes employs heavily armored vehicles that flail the ground to intentionally detonate antipersonnel mines, after which they send in specially trained dogs and specialists with sensitive probes. Other protocols are also employed, but they are all time-consuming, dangerous and very expensive, so alternatives have long been sought.
Funded by the Army Research Office, physics professor John Scales and a number of students and colleagues may have come up with just such a solution using sound waves and extremely sensitive microwave-detection technology. “We gently shake the ground with low-frequency sound waves, and a sensitive microwave vibration sensor looks for signatures that are consistent with a buried landmine,” Scales explains.
But the sound isn’t coming from an ordinary speaker. A special ‘nonlinear sound array’ is employed, which exploits certain characteristics of air to direct a powerful low frequency ‘beam’ of sound. To explain the physics behind this phenomenon is, regrettably, beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say, the end result is a remarkably defined column of sound: “It’s like walking through a flashlight beam,” says Scales. “Standing off to the side, you don’t hear anything, but when you get in the beam, it’s really loud.”
As the beam of sound is slowly panned across a field, it shakes a limited area. As it does so, a sensitive microwave motion sensor connected to a computer interprets the resulting data in an effort to distinguish the acoustic signatures of irregularly shaped rocks and regularly shaped plastic mines. “For buried objects, the useful range is likely about 20 meters, with a ground penetration of 10 centimeters,” says Scales.
Two separate papers in the Journal of Applied Physics describe Scales’ combination of these technologies: one addresses a super-sensitive, homemade microwave vibration sensor, while the second focuses on the nonlinear acoustic methods for getting energy into the ground.
Ultimately, he envisions the technology mounted on the front of a vehicle; for now, the prototype made using off-the-shelf technology is mounted on a simple cart purchased at The Home Depot that Scales’ team beefed up with heavy-duty wheels and struts. Its price tag: $30,000.
The Army will be conducting some rigorous tests soon, but whether they are successful or not, Scales won’t be filing any patents. In keeping with his lab’s policy, all aspects of his team’s research are freely available via the web. “Our goal is simply to see whether this combination of technologies, the nonlinear acoustics and the microwaves, can be successful,” he says. “If it can be, there are lots of people out there who can make it cheap and make it fast.”
Brian Zadler PhD ’05 worked on the landmine detection system’s amplifiers and nonlinear array during his postdoc at Mines. “When you learn the statistics of how many mines are still buried on beaches, fields and roadways, and how many civilians are injured and killed every year, sometimes from decades-old mines, it’s startling. Developing technology for humanitarian de-mining is a worthy way to spend your time,” he says.
“There are hundreds of millions of landmines worldwide; they represent a huge public health and environmental cost in developing countries,” says Scales. “If we could make even a dent in this problem, I’d be very happy.”


Comparative Literature is the study of common features in the literatures of more than one culture. It can focus on a genre, a period or a theme, or it can focus very broadly on the materials of literature itself—structure, rhetoric or language. We live today in a global society where languages, literatures and cultures intersect and interbreed, and that is why it is important to broaden our scope, to see the world. We offer courses in the literature and culture of Europe and America, of China, Japan and Korea, and of East and West Africa. In comparative literature classes, you will read works in translation.
This major is perfect for anyone who enjoys reading and analyzing literature, but especially for students who are curious about other languages and cultures, or interested in global studies and international relations. Here you will study literature from all parts of the globe. Studying Comparative Literature is a great way to explore literary options beyond the English-speaking world. The major works especially well if you are also studying a foreign language: a lot of the classes will double-count, and you will be able to study foreign literature in its original languages.
In high school you might have read the Odyssey in English class. The Odyssey wasn’t written in English, of course, but in high school all literature—even if it was written in Ancient Greek—belongs to the English department. At UGA, the English Department teaches English and American literature; the Classics Department teaches Greek and Latin literature; Romance Languages teaches French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese literature. The Comparative Literature department is a little harder to pin down. We don’t limit ourselves to a single culture or language. We teach world literature. We teach the literature of one language or culture in relation to literature from another.
In other words, we compare literary works and traditions and ask questions like:
- “What have people around the world and through the centuries written about nature?”
- “What connects literature with visual art?”
- “How do literature and film compare, or literature and music?”
- “Can we compare children’s literature from culture to culture?”
- “What does the Japanese novel have to do with the English novel or the Russian novel?”
- “What kind of poetry is being written today in Eastern Europe and how does it relate to the poetry of South America or Africa?”
Our undergraduate courses pose and respond to all these questions and many more. We teach many works in translation. We also teach multiple languages, from beginning to advanced levels. We offer courses in the literatures, languages and cultures of China, Japan, Korea, and East and West Africa.
Beyond the Classroom
Comparative Literature differs from other literature concentrations largely through its international focus and broad view of culture. With such a broad focus, students majoring in comparative literature can use their degree in a variety of ways. Generally speaking, anyone who is professionally interested in the interpretation of the writtenor spoken word — whether lawyer, businessperson, writer or humanities professor — can profit from the theory and methods of comparative literature. Opportunities for graduates include education, foreign-service, and international business. This field provides students with sensitivity to international cultures and is particularly useful for careers in foreign service and international trade. Careers in translating, editing, publishing, journalism, broadcasting, public relations, politics, writing, library work, and criticism are also possible career paths.
- Bauer Publishing
- BI Incorporated
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- Chambers of Commerce
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- Developmental Learning Centers
- Educational Institutions
- Government Agencies
- Immigration Services
- Import / Export Companies
- International Banking/Business
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- Ken David & Associates, LLP
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- Language institutes
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- Peace Corps
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- Smarter Living Inc.
- The Agents' Marketing Group
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- Unisys Corporation
- US Department of the Treasury
- Vermont Counsel on the Humanities
- W.W. Norton & Company
- YES Prep Public Schools


Vegan diets have been a trending topic in recent years, as more people continue to see reasons why they should go vegan. These reasons are diverse and include health, moral standards, religious beliefs, or concerns about animal welfare. Regardless of what your reason might be for being a vegetarian, it has a positive effect on your health with several studies to prove that, including this research that shows that a vegan diet can be, in fact, healthier.
Health Benefits About Being a Vegetarian
It Encourages Weight Loss
Vegan diets require you to eat more vegetables and less fat, which means you will hardly have to consume unhealthy meals. They are low in calories, cholesterol, and saturated fat, which if taken in large quantities, are not good for your health. On the other hand, you get more fiber-rich meals in your diet, which increases satiety and makes you eat less. Subsequently, a vegan diet will help increase your metabolism, which would help you burn fat faster. If you stick to this diet and ensure you create the right balance of nutrients and portion control, you will be on the journey to maintaining a healthy weight.
It Helps with Body Building
The common consensus is that you need enough protein, which is mostly found in meats, to build muscles. However, for a vegetarian, it is not impossible. Following a meat-free diet doesn’t mean you still can’t build and maintain muscle mass, as it depends on how your diet is planned. You can follow this vegan bodybuilding meal plan to give you an idea of how to create your vegan diet from scratch. Being a vegan doesn’t mean you have to be deprived of some of the good things eating meat would have provided you.
It Protects You Against Major Diseases
Due to the meal options that you are limited to, you tend to eat healthily for the most part and this helps strengthen your immune system, thereby protecting you against major diseases. With the diet contributing to your weight loss, you are already at a lesser risk of certain health concerns such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and more. Several studies show that eating lots of fruits and vegetables can reduce your risk of cancer. This is approved by the American Cancer Society, among the things you can do to stay healthy and reduce your cancer risk.
While a vegan diet might seem like the best option to go for, it is also important to note that it lacks certain nutrients that you must make up for. It is lower in calcium, zinc, and vitamins B12 and D, as they are mostly gotten from animal products. This is why you must choose your diet wisely, even if it means collaborating with a dietitian to have the right balance of meal options. This is to ensure you get all the benefits there are to being a vegetarian.
The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.


The definitions of a bully include tormentor intimidator, aggressor and tyrant. All these types are people who impose their will on others forcefully, or sometimes in more subtle ways that are not so easy to detect. The obvious loudmouthed bully or aggressor relies on seniority, power and position to bully juniors or staff members who are lower down the pecking order. They are usually managers or middle management, who rely on ordinary workers to make an impression on executive members, motivated by reward or promotion.
Physical bullying can also present as sexual harassment which includes the more subtle psychological component, of the threat of job loss. The more subtle psychological bullying often appears as harassment, browbeating and even humiliation through teasing posing as harmless banter or ribbing.
Do you have a bully in the workplace? Have you been ignoring this negative behaviour because the bully gets results? Have you been complicit because you’re just too busy to bother? Have you noticed that workers are far more relaxed and productive on certain days? The next time you see this, check if the bully is at work. You could so easily get the same high production rate without the bullying. It may be time to do something to make a change.
- Identify Situation – bullies can disguise their behaviour so well that it goes unnoticed, often accepted even by the victim as harmless when this is not true! It creates uncertainty, stress, confusion and too much sick time off, taken just to avoid the bully and legitimate illnesses can often occur too. Sometimes the bully is given subtle free rein by an insecure manager, who wrongly perceives ‘divide and rule’ as the best management style. Creating division to encourage competition is a recipe for disaster. It does not build a team!
- Establish Cause – does the bully do so because of pressure to deliver? Or, is it a character flaw? If the former, management must find ways to change company ethos, and if the latter, then the bully must be taught to respect others.
- Implement setting boundaries – this shows how to earn respect.
- Send the bully/bullies on a boot camp that includes instruction in a management style that does not rely on bullying, but sets boundaries. You can do this as a management development programme.
- All staff members can only benefit from simply doing a course on setting boundaries – this is empowering – and this may be all your company needs. It helps the most timid worker to stand his ground. Team building exercises also help. If nothing changes at work, then a more direct approach is needed.
- Weekly management meetings highlight the negatives of bullying behaviour. A plan to eradicate the behaviour and to track improvement must be brought up during meetings.
- Staff must be encouraged to report bullying by management or fellow workers and taught to respect others in turn.
- Should executives be guilty of bullying, encourage staff to report this too. A good Human Resources department is essential for the protection of the worker but should also be effective in distinguishing illegitimate complaints from genuine. A thorough investigation is necessary in all cases.
- Track progress carefully and compare production results before and after implementation of an anti-bullying plan.
- Test the atmosphere in the workplace regularly by engaging more closely with ordinary workers. When bullies see senior staff taking an interest in workers they pay attention, and this reminds them that you are tracking them.
- If the monthly tracking reports show no improvement, you may want to think about staff changes. Promotion, redeployment or retrenchment.
- Finally – reward individuals and the team for marked progress and improvement in production due to the changes established.


01 October 2021
Despite the challenges of COVID-19, a global network of local teachers, leaders and educators is helping students and their families, particularly those in the most marginalized communities, continue to learn.
With many students having no access to technology, the internet or basic learning resources, the prospect of home schooling is even more challenging.
That’s where Teach For All’s growing global network is making a difference.
As many schools across the world continue to be closed due to COVID-19, teachers in the global Teach For All network have been innovating alongside students, parents and others, to ensure kids, especially those in marginalized communities, don't stop learning.
By sharing ideas and innovations across borders, teachers and educators are adapting promising ideas for use in their own countries.
Like the teacher in Nigeria who has reached millions of students via a program of lessons delivered online and through television.
Or in Pakistan, where a teacher created a learning program that was delivered via SMS, WhatsApp and physical learning packages. The teacher also mobilized a network of neighbours, shopkeepers and community leaders to support students by lending phones or serving as a central ‘pick up’ location.
At a global level, more than 1,000 teachers have also leveraged Teach For All’s WhatsApp groups to self-organize into the Teaching Without Internet Alliance, sharing stories, strategies and resources.
While the Teach For All network have been creating the space and platforms needed to foster the sharing of ideas and strategies over the past decade, since 2018, in partnership with the BHP Foundation, they’ve also been building the capacity of community leaders to enhance local educational opportunities.
To help teachers and the broader education community better understand how collective leadership is leading to community impact, Teach For All’s Community Impact Lab is working with over 50 communities, from Haiti to Armenia, Nigeria, Peru and the United States.
Their first ever Virtual Global Conference also brought together 2,300 leaders from 60 countries to share experiences and practices about growing collective leadership for change.
They’re also developing the Teaching as Collective Leadership framework, a new model of classroom excellence that realizes students’ potential as leaders of a better future.
Once completed this year, a host of learning experiences, resources, and tools will be developed to enable partners to adapt the framework and leverage it in the development of their teachers.
This will build an even more effective movement of collective leaders in the communities where they work.
Read more about BHP Foundation’s global commitment to education equity.


We’ve never made much noise about our emulation lab. After all, the multimillion-dollar collection of high-performance processors we use to verify and QA our chip designs is a little bit like a secret weapon. But after learning that the lab is now home to the world’s largest installation of Cadence Verification Computing Platform Systems, we decided to open up this amazing facility for a virtual tour. Hidden in an out-of-the-way spot at NVIDIA corporate headquarters is a warren of specialized machines that work around the clock as engineers test the GPUs and mobile processors of the future.
Hardware emulators re-create a specific computing environment so design engineers can test the design and performance of new processors after a chip has been designed but before it’s manufactured. It’s one thing to design a breakthrough architecture like Fermi, it’s another to make sure it works correctly in the real world. It’s simply not feasible to make physical prototypes of these chips and iterate for each design tweak. Other solutions – such as software simulators – are much too slow. Emulation speeds up the testing process a thousand fold.
Emulators are designed to provide an exact replica of actual hardware. (Software tools, in comparison, simulate or mimic what a particular piece of hardware will do.) When an emulator is plugged in to a PC, it’s exactly like placing a physical chip on the motherboard. From then on, chip designers can test away.
Due to the cost and complexity, not every company invests in emulation. But among those that do, we submit that we’re pretty intense about it. The simple reason is that having a world-class emulation lab means we can keep innovating ahead of our competition.
“Today’s GPUs, which are some of the world’s most complex devices, have billions of transistors,” said Narendra Konda, NVIDIA engineering and emulation lab director. “There’s no way around the fact that cutting-edge design tools like hardware emulators are essential for designing, verifying, developing software drivers and integrating software and hardware components of GPUs and mobile processors.”
Since 1995 NVIDIA has invested millions of dollars in emulation. Today, the lab covers a vast, roughly 6,000-foot space secreted away behind locked doors. Step inside and you’re immediately surrounded by racks of equipment. Cables and pipes snake along the floors and along the walls, vents and air conditioning units create a constant whir as they work to keep these gargantuan machines cool. The emulators themselves are sleek, water-cooled beasts, each named after a major river.
Near the front is Tigris, a snowflake-shape configuration of sixteen chassis that was built to emulate Fermi. It’s physically the biggest emulator in the lab, but no longer the most powerful. That title goes to Indus, a multimillion-dollar steel-blue piece of hardware a little longer than a minivan.
Three and a half years in the making, Indus was designed to handle Kepler, our next-generation chip architecture and the successor to Fermi. According to Nimish Modi, senior vice president for the System and Software Realization Group at Cadence, “Indus is the world’s largest installation of Cadence Verification Computing Platform systems, Palladium XP. It’s great working with a partner like NVIDIA to see how our technologies can work together to advance this industry.”
We worked closely with Cadence on Indus’ design – and although it’s smaller than Tigris, it’s more than twice as powerful. It’s stunning to look at Indus’s mass and complexity and realize that all that power represents one chip.
Filling out the lab are Rhine, Nile and a host of other emulators that might be emulating any number of GPUs designed for uses from mobile to gaming to supercomputing to embedded. If an emulator needs more power, Konda and his team can daisy chain them together in the same way gamers improve their system performance by running multiple graphics cards in SLI. The entire lab has an emulation capacity of 4 billion gates, which are the building blocks of a design.
“Deploying and managing these complex tools requires a very skilled and committed engineering team,” Konda said. “The great work that the emulation team does keeps this state-of-the-art lab humming along.”
Each emulator connects to a number of PCs which are used for testing and can be accessed remotely. So, for example, an NVIDIA engineer in India can log on, boot up, and start running tests at any time of day or night. Since all graphics processing goes back, in the end, to drawing triangles, the tests start there. Can this new chip draw a triangle? Can it draw a red triangle (not blue, not green)? Testing proceeds until everyone is satisfied that the chip can handle the most complex visual computing tasks and is compatible with all the necessary drivers, systems and so on. At any point, the designers might need to go back to the drawing board and repeat the process again. Once a chip graduates from the emulation lab, it’s sent out to be “fabbed” by our manufacturing partners in Taiwan and from there it’s released into the world.
Today, NVIDIA GPUs are powering supercomputers, in-flight entertainment systems and everything in between. They represent some of the most complex technology on the planet. It gives you a new perspective to stand in the emulation lab and think about the advances in these chips – the millions and billions in R&D, the years of work – and realize each one starts out right here, trying to draw a red triangle.


Subsurface life forms that don’t need the Sun may hold the key to understanding the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.
In February 2005, a research team led by microbiologist John Spear set out to study geothermal ecosystems in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. What they found astonished them: microbial communities in the boiling waters were thriving not on sulfur, as was previously believed, but on hydrogen. The findings, which were published in a cover story of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), provided evidence of the first hydrogen-eating microbes ever identified in an Earthly ecosystem. It may seem a minuscule advance, but it was as if an alien visitor had confirmed the existence of giraffes and could now muse about the prevalence of other possible “herbivores.”
The hydrogen-eaters Spear found ten years ago have since helped fuel a search for microbes capable of surviving in pitchblack depths, subsisting on crumbs of energy that flows from rocks exposed to water. Now, the Mines professor of civil and environmental engineering is co-leading a new five-year, $7 million NASA effort to spot evidence of such life on Mars and beyond.
Spear, who studies the habits and habitats of microbes using genetic sequencing techniques, is a co-investigator and education/public outreach lead for the new NASA Astrobiology Institute team known as ‘Rock-Powered Life.’ Led by University of Colorado Boulder geochemist Alexis Templeton, the project brings together investigators from nine institutions1 and collaborators from several others. Its aim is to narrow and refine our search for buried life elsewhere in the galaxy through a better understanding of biology here on the home planet.
For those of us who associate life with the Sun, the idea of life below the surface may take some conceptual rejiggering. As surfacedwellers, the only life we see is photosynthetic life. The autotrophs, such as plants, derive solar energy from photosynthesis; then we heterotrophs eat the plants and/or the creatures that eat the plants. But as Spear will tell you, there are vast kingdoms of microscopic life, many of them recently discovered, that don’t need the Sun at all. And that’s precisely what the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Spear’s team are looking for.
The Rock-Powered Life investigation involves a combination of field work and theory to understand the conditions in which chemolithoautotrophs (organisms that sustain themselves on energy derived from chemical changes in rock) can exist, and to identify how the very presence of these microbes alters the rocks they host. By examining the temperatures, pH levels, trace element concentrations, and energy gradients needed to support metabolism, the team hopes to identify the types of microbes and microbial communities that are undergoing the chemical processes necessary for life.
The term astrobiology may sound ‘far-out,’ but Spear’s quest will focus on deep, damp, and dark places. The team’s work will hinge on the microbes they find in serpentine rocks below sites in California, Oman, and the Atlantis Massif in the North Atlantic. Common among these three sites is a mineral called peridotite, an ultramafic rock (meaning rich in magnesium and iron) that is a mainstay on Earth, as well as in the rocky bodies of our solar system and beyond.
NASA’s interest in spending millions to shed light on buried, hydrogen- eating microbes is driven by the laws of physics and chemistry, which scientists suspect may drive universal biological forces. In particular, iron and magnesium commonly blast forth from exploding stars and unite in ultramafic rock. Where there’s enough rock and liquid water to form a habitable planet (scientists estimate there are 8.8 billon habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone), all that ultramafic rock may well be providing fuel for life.
David Des Marais, a senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and longtime Astrobiology program leader, wonders if the kinds of microbes Spear’s team seeks might be among the metabolic pioneers of life on Earth. That is, maybe the photosynthetic kingdoms we’re all so familiar with were relative latecomers and our photosynthetic bias has blinded us to our own origins. These hydrogen eaters, Des Marais said, “could be indicative of our early history.”
“Maybe they’re our ancestors,” Spear adds.
For Des Marais and NASA, the Rock-Powered Life team’s insights will be most valuable in studying our russet neighbor planet, Mars. ‘Earth is the only place in the solar system whose surface environment can support life as we know it,’ said Des Marais. ‘But Mars’ early history indicates a wetter, warmer world, so perhaps life evolved at or near the surface but then persisted only in the subsurface. Everything points to the areas of investigation the Colorado team is pursuing.’
If life had indeed established a foothold on Mars, then perhaps it’s still there. In 2014, the Mars Curiosity team announced the rover had detected methane whose origins, whether microbial or chemical, came from the subsurface. “This is a significant finding, one that opens the door a bit wider for the possibility of life elsewhere,” said Spear.
John Grotzinger, former chief scientist for NASA’s Mars Curiosity mission and now chair of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, described the team’s goal as more sharply defining the ‘environmental envelope’ of subsurface life. “The kinds of field studies and experiments the team is doing will help us fine-tune and develop a better exploration model,” he says.
The studies are particularly relevant to Mars, Des Marais added. “I expect a successful Rock-Powered Life team will help us develop a more sophisticated approach to how we would run rovers in the future, what instruments we would send, and the way we would execute the mission,” he said.
In Oman, below the Atlantic, and at the California Coast Range Ophiolite Microbial Observatory (CROMO), Spear’s team will fill mesh cylinders about the size of a cigar with crushed peridotite, obsidian, glass beads, and other rocks, and then lower the cylinders into the depths for up to a year. The depths will vary from 20 meters in California to 300 meters in Oman, with temperatures ranging from a chilly 13-18 degrees Celsius at CROMO to a near-boiling 90 degrees at the Atlantis Massif. The idea, Spear says, is to see what grows where in different environments.
Back in the lab, the painstaking work will commence, as the team inspects the rocks under scanning-electron and epifluorescent microscopes to look for cells and signs of metabolism. Next, they’ll extract DNA and use genetic sequencing techniques to assign creatures to the proper twig on the tree of life. Then it’s off to the newer techniques of modern biology, including metagenomics, etatranscriptomics, and single-cell genomics, the aim being to understand what combinations of microbes are present and how they subsist.
The metagenomics work will involve sequencing most of the DNA from the many microbes in a sample. With that, Spear says, you can infer some community traits. “Do I see hydrogenase genes, and can I infer from their presence that the community is metabolizing hydrogen? Metagenomics gives you the background in terms of what’s possible in a community,” he said.
Metatranscriptomics will look at messenger RNA to see what genes are being expressed. “It tells you not only who’s there, but who’s metabolizing and how,” Spear says.
Single-cell genomics involves isolating the DNA of an individual microbe from a community and sequencing its entire genome to provide a more thorough understanding of the microbial mass. For this step, Spear’s team will work with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the Joint Genome Institute. Spear says he wouldn’t be surprised to come across entirely new kingdoms of the tree of life.
“It’s like walking out the door and finding animals and trees for the first time,” he said.
In addition to his work in the laboratory, Spear is involved in education and public outreach efforts, such as bringing astrobiology to Native American tribal colleges and developing a ‘virtual minor’ online astrobiology course for undergraduates. The key message, he says, is that astrobiology is both far-out and not so much.
“We need to better understand us, us being this organism I call Earth,” Spear said.


Video - What should we learn next?
Help decide what's next! What do you want to learn? Created by Brit Cruise.
You have reached the first checkpoint in the ‘Journey to cryptography’-series. And now I want to talk about what’s next, because I’m working on a new series. However, this one won’t end here. If anything, we are kind of at the beginning still. So I’m going to do 3 different checkpoint videos.
This one is on ‘Advanced Lessons’. However, I also want to eventually talk about Tests and Challenges, and what we can do with more interactive explorations and computer science lessons as it applies to cryptography. But for now, let’s talk about Advanced Lessons. When I say ‘Advanced’, I don’t necessarily mean ‘harder lessons’, I mean ‘more detailed’.
Let me give you a conceptual idea for what I think this series could be and future series. I like to think of each series as the trunk of a tree, where I took you from prehistoric times to around the 20th century, which is here, with a few different threads.
And these ideas kind of branch apart. Once you get to the 20th and 21st centuries, they start getting highly specific. And way down here on the leaves are current research questions, which over here might be problems related to prime number distribution and over here some very specific work being done on randomized algorithms or hash functions, and way up here we might have new public key protocols - because RSA was just the first - or we also have encryption standards such as DES and AES.
We would have a whole new branch on quantum cryptography. So as you can see, there are so many different things that branch out of this series and I couldn’t possibly do justice to them all. So I think of this video as living right here. At kind of a junction point. Now I can branch off with help of the community and possibly other video creators to fill out this tree gradually over time.
Specifically with the help of the community. I am really excited about the Q&A community and the work being done to improve how people can help people on Khan Academy. So, for example, in terms of where one of these branches can go, I’ve noticed clusters of questions kind of leading into a common branch.
For example, under ‘the pseudo-random number generator’, I have two questions here: one by Sonny and one by Drakain. Drakain’s question is: “Why has he suggested that time in milliseconds… …is a suitable random seed?… This is a huge no-no in security. … The time it is on your machine… …is the time it is on my machine,… …give or take 100 milliseconds… (which can be brute-force attacked)” And again, this is a great question too because it speaks to the need that I didn’t present a cryptographically secure pseudo-random generator.
So the middle square’s method is back here in early 20th century, but up until today, we are not using the middle square’s method and that’s a whole interesting branch. It is these sorts of questions which cluster together and really drive new content. I want to show you a really interesting example of how this has happened already. This is a question Samuel asked on the ‘One time pad’-video he said: “wouldn’t a computer be able to test all the possibilities very fast?” and Chuck Patrol basically asked the same question. I see this happening a lot.
Similar questions all speak to the need of a new video. So I went and created a video on ‘perfect secrecy’ which really nails down how you can’t beat randomness in the world of encryption. Out of this video, Dawn made a really great comment. What they did, was basically summarise my video in two sentences. So, this is what I want to try to do more of in filling out these branches: take questions, make new content, and have this feed-back loop and see what we can do.
Now what I would really love, is for you to ask questions below this video which arise after watching the entire series. Not specific details about certain video’s, - those can go with the videos - but new questions, which are opening new can of worms.
And what I think will be fun to do, is: Your question will lead to answers, by both me and the rest of the community, so we’ll have multiple answers. And what I can do is take this body of answers, and out of this draft up a rough script for more advanced videos on specific topics that sub-sets of the community care about So hopefully, out of the discussion below, over time we can grow a bunch of new videos!
I want to be clear: this is an ongoing process. This will not happen tomorrow or next week. I hope it can happen months, even years from now. We can still be building out new videos after the series and these videos can be a collaborative effort between myself and the community and perhaps other video creators down the road. So, let me know what you think below, and let’s get started!


In this section
A colposcopy is a simple procedure used to look at the cervix, the lower part of the womb at the top of the vagina. It's often done if cervical screening finds abnormal cells in your cervix or a doctor feels that a more detailed assessment of cervix is required.
Why do I need colposcopy?
You may be referred for a colposcopy within a few weeks of cervical screening if:
- Your cervical screening sample are abnormal
- The nurse or doctor who carried out the screening test thought your cervix didn't look as healthy as it should
- It wasn't possible to give you a clear result after several screening tests
Colposcopy can also be used to find out the cause of problems such as unusual vaginal bleeding (for example, bleeding after sex).
Try not to worry if you've been referred for a colposcopy. Being offered colposcopy does not mean that you have cancer, most women who have colposcopy will not go on to develop cervical cancer. Any abnormal cells won't get worse while you're waiting for your appointment.
If you are pregnant please let the colposcopy team know, as it may still be necessary to perform the colposcopy examination. The colposcopy examination does not harm a pregnancy.
Human Papilloma Virus (HPV)
HPV is a very common virus. Most people will have been exposed to HPV at some point in their lives. HPV can easily be passed between people during intimate contact, but it should not be considered in the same way as a sexually transmitted infection.
There are many different sub-types of HPV. Some sub types of HPV are very strongly related to the development of abnormal cells (CIN, see below) within the cervix. When the laboratory processes your cervical smear sample two things are tested:
- The presence or absence of abnormal cells.
- The presence or absence of sub-types of HPV that effect the cervix, so called high-risk HPV.
If an abnormality in the cells is detected along with the presence of high-risk HPV you will be referred to colposcopy for further assessment.
There isn’t a medical treatment to get rid of the HPV virus. For most women, their immune system will get rid of the HPV. It has been demonstrated that stopping smoking can improve the immune system’s ability to get rid of HPV.
What does colposcopy involve?
A colposcopy examination is usually carried out in a hospital clinic. It takes about 15-20 minutes and you can go home the same day.
During the colposcopy examination:
- You undress from the waist down (a loose skirt may not need to be removed) and lie down in a special type of chair with padded supports for your legs
- A device called a speculum is inserted into your vagina and gently opened
- A microscope with a light is used to look at your cervix – this doesn't touch or enter your body
- Special liquids are applied to your cervix to highlight any abnormal areas
- A small sample of tissue (a biopsy) may be removed for closer examination in a laboratory – this may be a bit uncomfortable
After your colposcopy examination:
- Most women feel well enough to go about their day-to-day activities straight away, but sometimes you may need to go home and rest for a short while.
- You may notice some brown coloured discharge from the vagina afterwards from the liquids used during the colposcopy, this will settle soon after.
- If you have had a biopsy you may have some light bleeding or discharge from the vagina, this would usually settle in 3-5 days.
At the time of colposcopy examination the nurse or doctor may be able to tell you what has been found. If a biopsy has been taken it will need to be checked in the laboratory. If this happens, you will receive the results by post within 3-4 weeks of the appointment.
On your first visit for colposcopy you may be offered treatment for abnormal cells on the cervix, this is called ‘see and treat’. This may occur when you have an abnormal smear and the colposcopy examination detects changes consistent with high grade CIN. Please see the sections below for further information about CIN and treatment.
What if my result is normal?
About 4 in every 10 women who have a colposcopy examination will have a normal result.
If the colposcopy (and/or biopsy from the cervix) is normal then it means your cervix is healthy and no further action is required. You would then be invited back for cervical screening in 3 or 5 years depending on your age, as usual.
You can have a normal colposcopy result even if you had an abnormal result in your cervical screening test.
What if my result is abnormal?
About 6 in every 10 women who have a colposcopy examination will have an abnormality of the cells of the cervix. The medical term for this is CIN (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia) or CGIN (cervical glandular intraepithelial neoplasia). CIN and CGIN are not cancer, but sometimes could develop into a cancer of the cervix.
The colposcopy and biopsy results will provide the doctor or nurse with the information needed to determine if the abnormal cells should be removed or whether they can be left alone for now. This will depend on whether the CIN is low grade or high grade.
- Low grade CIN (also called CIN1) is very unlikely to develop into cervical cancer. Most often the abnormal cells will go away without treatment; if you are a smoker stopping smoking makes this more likely. You would normally be asked to have another cervical screening test (“smear”) in 12 months to check that the abnormal cells have gone away.
- High grade CIN (also called CIN 2 & CIN 3) has a higher chance of developing cervical cancer and so you would normally be offered a treatment to remove the abnormal cells to reduce the risk of developing cervical cancer. You would usually be offered a treatment to remove the abnormal cells if CGIN had been detected also.
Sometimes after colposcopy examination a woman will be diagnosed with cervical cancer. If you are found to have cervical cancer, you will be offered further investigation and treatment from a team of specialists. Fortunately, cancers found through screening tend to be detected at an earlier stage with a better prognosis.
What does treatment to remove abnormal cells in the cervix involve?
The usual treatment for high grade CIN or CGIN is to remove the abnormal cells from the cervix taking care not to damage the healthy parts of the cervix.
There are several simple and effective treatments that can be used to remove the abnormal cells, including:
- Large loop excision of the transformation zone (LLETZ) – a heated wire loop is used to remove the abnormal cells
- A cone biopsy – a cone-shaped piece of tissue containing the abnormal cells is cut out from your cervix
LLETZ is usually carried out while you're awake in the colposcopy department. Your cervix is numbed with local anaesthetic. It usually takes no longer than 10 minutes and you can usually go home straight after.
A cone biopsy is usually done under general anaesthetic (where you're asleep) and you may need to stay in hospital overnight but usually would be able to go home the same day.
You'll usually be advised to avoid:
- Driving for at least 24 hours if you had a general anaesthetic – you can drive straight away if a local anaesthetic was used
- Using tampons for four weeks (use sanitary pads instead)
- Having sex for four weeks
- Exercising, including swimming, for at least two weeks, or while there's still any bleeding or discharge
After treatment you would be asked to have a cervical screening test (“Test of cure smear”) six months later to check that the treatment was successful. About 4 in every 5 women will have a normal test after treatment. Those with a cervical screening abnormality are invited back to colposcopy but very few of these require further treatment.
What are the risks of treatment to remove abnormal cells from the cervix?
The treatments are safe and effective but occasionally some women may experience problems after treatments such as LLETZ or cone biopsy. Common side effects of treatment include:
- Mild pain, similar to period pain – this should pass in a few hours and can be relieved with paracetamol or ibuprofen
- Light vaginal bleeding and brown, watery vaginal discharge – this may last up to four weeks
There's also a small risk of more serious complications, such as:
- An infection – this can cause heavy or persistent bleeding, smelly vaginal discharge and persistent tummy pain; see your GP if you have these symptoms
- A slightly increased risk of premature birth (before the 37th week of pregnancy) in future pregnancies – this is more likely if you need repeated treatments or a lot of tissue needs to be removed
In most cases, the benefit of treatment will outweigh these risks. Talk to your doctor or nurse if you have any concerns or would like to know more about the potential risks of treatment.
Cryotherapy is another form of treatment offered in the colposcopy department. This type of treatment can be offered when a person has problems with bleeding after sexual intercourse, rarely it may be offered to treat low grade CIN changes.
Cryotherapy treatment is performed in the colposcopy suite. During the treatment a cold probe is applied to the cervix for a few minutes. During the treatment you may experience some mild period type cramps but it is unusual for the procedure to be associated with any significant pain.
Following cryotherapy you might have some discharge for a few weeks as the cervix heals. During this time there is a small risk of infection so if the discharge becomes smelly please seek advice from your GP.
Your colposcopist will give you advice regarding the follow up you need after the cryotherapy treatment.
- Cancer Research UK
- Jo’s Cervical Cancer trust
- The NHS cervical screening programme
To book an appointment with Colposcopy Clinic or discuss your appointment please contact our Colposcopy Helpline on:
York: 01904 726705
(Mon to Fri 8.00am to 5.00pm - Voicemail out of hours)
Scarborough: 01723 342061
(Mon to Fri 8.00am to 5.00pm - Voicemail out of hours)


MACA ROOT (Lepidium meyenii) has many health benefits. Known for their advanced knowledge of healing and the body’s connection with nature, the Incan civilization used the maca root in many of their natural remedies. According to ancient Incan history, the maca root was known to have special properties which were believed to enhance energy and stamina. It is also believed to increase the sexual desire and endurance. Maca is often termed as Peruvian Ginseng due to its natural stimulating qualities that are similar to the benefits found in the commonly known ginseng-related herbs.


"The Australian government is pleased to return these culturally significant decorated skulls from the Dayan and Asmat people to Indonesia, as part of our ongoing efforts to combat the international illegal trade in cultural property," Australian Arts Minister Mitch Fifield said at the Indonesian Embassy where the handover took place.
Legowo said the gesture was testament to the close law enforcement and cultural ties between Indonesia and Australia.
"The return of cultural property is not only a vivid example of our best practice, but it also signifies that Indonesia and Australia indeed always attach great importance to the protection of cultural heritages," Legowo said.
"Having noticed the growing global trends of illicit trafficking and selling of cultural property with many new forms in recent years, the return ceremony should also serve as an impetus for us to strengthen our cooperation to safeguard cultural treasures and to curb illicit activities of this kind."
The traditionally decorated skulls, two belonging to the Dayak people of Kalimantan and two belonging to the Asmat people of West Papua, were each presented in a special box crafted by onservators from the National Museum of Australia to ensure safe storage and transport.
The Arts Ministry says the artefacts provide a glimpse into the past where ornamental human skulls were used in traditional rituals. The Asmat people decorated skulls with seeds and carved sea shell rings, while the Dayak people decorated skulls with intricate engravings.
The ongoing effort to prevent the illegal trade in human remains and cultural artefacts is undertaken in Australia under the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986.


Operations Illustrated: Alternative Energy Sources
“‘Going green’ may be an overused phrase and, to some degree, abused in some circles…but if people are sincere in their desire to go green, they will eventually realize many benefits,” Williams says. “If we use less energy, we save money. If we recycle something instead of spending time and money to extract or create that product, then we are saving money. Going green shifts our notions of consuming something to saving something.”
CalPortland Co. of Glendora, Calif., has been a long-time member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. But as a direct result of the California power crisis in 2001, the company focused on curbing energy costs in 2003, says Steve Coppinger, director of engineering services for CalPortland. “That was when we began to work with Energy Star to create a formal energy program,” he notes. Almost a decade later, CalPortland has a plan and a dedicated team working to reduce energy usage and its associated costs for the company.
CalPortland currently has 16 energy managers across its various divisions. These managers and others meet every two to three months via video conference to review best practices and energy performance. “The energy managers have helped us to create and sustain a strong corporate culture for reducing our energy usage and costs,” Coppinger says.
He explains that the buy-in from employees across the company has resulted from an attitude of working together. For instance, CalPortland has eschewed energy audits, holding energy “treasure hunts” at its facilities instead. “We brainstorm and have plant walk-throughs where the onsite employees are invaluable for pointing out such things as air leaks and lighting issues,” he adds.
As part of its energy program, CalPortland has initiated both large and small projects. The eight wind turbines working “behind the meter” at the Mojave Cement Plant, as part of a long-term agreement with Alite Wind, LLC, to purchase wind energy for the plant, fall under the company’s larger initiatives. But CalPortland has also installed solar panels in smaller, remote areas to help power such equipment as water pumps.
Additionally, the company has invested in the use of renewable fuels. In 2008, the Oregon-SW Washington Division converted its ready-mix trucks, dump trucks, concrete pumps, and diesel-powered yard and plant equipment to use blended biodiesel fuel. And in 2006, CalPortland’s Rillito Quarry began to use a new “biofuel” in place of petroleum diesel fuel to combine with ammonium nitrate as its bulk blasting agent.
All of these efforts have helped CalPortland to garner recognition from Energy Star for eight consecutive years — from 2005 to 2012.
“But beyond that, it just makes sense from an environmental standpoint and a cost standpoint to explore all options,” Coppinger says. “Thirty-three percent of power generated in California will have to be renewable by 2020. That’s not that far off, so the pressure is on.”


Taking Environmental Education to the Next Level Has a Major Impact on Changing Employee Behavior.
By Joseph P. McGuire and Billy Snead
When one reflects on the amount of information that was retained from educational or training events in which he or she has participated, generally not a great deal is remembered. However, there are perhaps a few in which new information was provided and retained. The environmental education program developed and implemented by Oldcastle Materials Group Midwest Division (OMG Midwest) falls into the latter category.
Having spent more than a combined 50 years in the construction industry in environmental and safety management positions, we have seen a great number of training programs rolled out. Frequently these programs sound or feel good but produce average results. According to the U.S. Department Of Health and Human Sciences, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, “program managers are often reluctant to evaluate their programs,” and when attempts to evaluate them are performed they usually take the form of what one author (Rae) calls “reactionnaires” or “general feedback forms including a “Happy Sheet” relying on questions such as “How good did you feel the trainer was?” or “How enjoyable was the training course?” Kirkpatrick suggests in an online article these types of surveys “do not constitute proper validation or evaluation of training.”
To say a program is innovative indicates it is new, inventive, groundbreaking, original or a more unique way of doing something. Based on the following, the environmental staff at OMG Midwest believes that this environmental education program meets any or all of those definitions or terms:
1. This program was innovative in that it went beyond typical environmental training. Taking time to educate rather than just train employees cost more than traditional training but has proven to have been a good investment.
2. This program was in-depth and focused on all field employees as well as managers.
3. Measureable and observable behavioral outcomes would support this to be an innovative environmental program. These include:
- Results from surveys given to participants indicate learning took place.
- Survey results also support the premise the information was retained.
- An Outcome Hierarchy Model for evaluation was used to determine if the program had value and attained the goals established by the company.
- It has been noted by employees, when talking about environmental projects they have done or are working on they refer to those doing it as we. Working together to accomplish tasks indicates teamwork and ownership.
- A reduction in the number of Notices of Violation (NOVs) by 90 percent from 2009 to 2010, even though more inspections were conducted by regulatory agencies at plants and projects.
- Comments from both management personnel and field employees indicate environmental improvements have taken place in the past two years. In addition, new environmental best practices have been developed.
- Environmental staff has seen an increase in the number of phone calls, prior to beginning an activity, asking if it might impact the environment.
- In an effort to ensure the program is sustained, several innovative or inventive processes were developed as a result of this program. These include:
- Environmental Tool Box Talks written and sent to all plant and project managers every two weeks during the construction season. These have been useful to sustain focus on environmental issues.
- A program of environmental education for newly hired employees was developed and is provided to them during the orientation period. By doing this, newly hired employees are made to understand the emphasis the company places on environmental matters.
- An environmental compliance assistance program, following a model of audit-educate-audit, was put in place to help field managers continue to meet environmental requirements.
Examples of comments which have been received are as follows:
“The training has helped…”
“I have worked in construction for many years…We employees are thinking more green now and how we can improve more”
-Dump Truck Driver
“I believe any training on environmental issues is extremely important…I would like to see more….the Environmental Tool Box Talks are a good tool. Overall I believe we are going in the right direction….”
Again, based on these terms and employee comments we believe this to be not only an innovative program, but perhaps the one of the more powerful environmental education program currently used in the construction industries today.
Traditional environmental training, conducted by those in the aggregate production or other construction industries, generally focuses on rules, regulations and the consequences of failing to comply with them. This type of environmental training keeps companies in compliance and meets training requirements. The environmental educational program conducted by OMG Midwest took environmental awareness to the next level by providing employees with the reasons why the company responds in certain ways when dealing with environmental matters.
It was determined employee involvement could be an important, but previously overlooked, element of the company’s environmental compliance process and that developing an educational program designed to provide environmental awareness to all OMG Midwest employees, from top to bottom, would be an effective method of engaging all employees.
During the curriculum development process, documents including the company’s environmental policy and initiatives were reviewed to ensure the program and message was consistent with corporate goals. It was because of these documents that the content of this environmental education program took a different path from the one normally taken by traditional environmental training programs. In order for employees to become part of the compliance process and work to attain company environmental goals, they would need to understand corporate environmental initiatives.
It might be argued that one need only tell employees what to do and that should be sufficient to get the task done. But when it comes to environmental matters this may not be the case. As part of this environmental education program it was decided to provide employees with answers or reasons for them to perform their duties in an environmentally responsible manner. This serves to not only assist in the compliance area, but to help protect the environment in which they live and work. Involving employees and acknowledging the importance of their role will encourage them to become active participants in the program. If employees feel they are a vital part of the process they will take ownership of the program which, in turn, increases the probability of its success.
III. OMG MIDWEST GROUP: EMPLOYEE ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
As the program curriculum was being developed it became critical to provide more than a simple review of environmental rules. Because training requirements are included in many environmental rules and permits, some review would be necessary but a great deal of additional corporate and environmental information would be included to take this program to the next level. It was hoped this program would raise employee awareness of environmental matters and they would go away with a better understanding of the importance of protecting our environment and making sound decisions about environmental issues at work.
Due to the nature of the material being presented and the “makeup” of the classes, it was determined a teacher centered approach would be the best way to present the material. Late in 2009, the following sessions were developed for OMG Midwest’s environmental program.
Why Environmental Training?
The presentation provided employees with an answer to why more extensive environmental training or education was needed.
CRH/Oldcastle Materials Group Environmental Philosophy**
The second session focused on CRH/OMG’s corporate environmental philosophy, environmental policy, and OMG Midwest’s environmental mandate.
**Note: CRH is the parent company of Oldcastle Materials
Where Do We Begin?
Using examples of U.S. EPA’s enforcement actions against aggregate processing and ready mix concrete plants, the company stressed the importance of being compliant in order to avoid regulatory agency involvement.
Air Quality Overview
During this session, an effort was made to tie corporate environmental initiatives to the work employees perform. In addition employees were provided with examples of actions they could take, both at work and at home, to help reduce air quality problems.
In the fifth session, employees reviewed the permits needed to operate aggregate processing plants and other environmental areas to which they are exposed while performing their duties.
Storm Water Rules:
Because Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plans (SWPPP) require training of employees on the permits, rules and preventions plans, more time was taken to review those elements during this session.
Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) Rules/Plan
The final session dealt with the Federal petroleum product storage rules.
IV: THE EDUCATION/EVALUATION PROCESS
During late winter and early spring of 2010, all 1,064 active, field employees and mangers were required to attend one of 29 educational sessions scheduled in the five states (Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming) that made up the OMG Midwest Group. To ensure the information or message delivered to all employees was consistent the same instructors were used in all sessions.
In order to conduct at least a cursory evaluation on the effectiveness of this environmental education program, a pre- and post-survey or Likert-like rating scale was given to all participants. In addition, all managers and supervisors were given a second survey to assess their level of awareness regarding environmental matters related to their positions.
V. PRELIMINARY OUTCOMES
By late summer of 2010, preliminary data generated by the surveys and feedback indicated this to have been a successful undertaking. Feedback from senior and middle management personnel and many field employees indicated this educational experience was well received and benefited those who participated. They referred to this program as “excellent” and indicated that “they learned a lot.”
In addition, results from site inspections conducted after the program was completed, found general housekeeping to be improved, documentation more organized, and employees appeared to be more involved and proud of what they were doing. Perhaps one of the more significant indicators that change had occurred came from an increase in the number of questions asked by managers and employees prior to doing something that might have a potential environmental impact.
VI. MEASURABLE OUTCOMES
As indicated earlier, a 10 item Likert-like survey was provided to all participants both before they took part in an environmental education session and again immediately following it. Employees were asked to rate each item on a scale from 1 (Disagree) to 7 (Agree). The responses from all 1,064 employees were combined into one group so that the data could be assessed, conclusions drawn and recommendations suggested. The same was done for the responses from the surveys given to all managers and supervisors.
While in-depth statistical analysis has not yet been performed on the data generated by the surveys, a preliminary review indicates an increase in employee awareness about environmental issues and how they relate to the work they do. Based on the data this environmental education program could be termed a success.
Similarly, the data generated from the surveys given to managers and supervisors appears to support the premise that learning occurred in that subgroup. These individuals are the front line and identified in the company’s environmental policy as being responsible for compliance with all environmental activities. So it is imperative for them to be aware of corporate environmental initiatives or goals, understand the company’s environmental policies, and learn their role in relation to them.
In summation, the environmental education program implemented by OMG Midwest in 2010 appears to have been successful in terms of providing new information and increasing environmental awareness to all of its employees. The data provided from survey results, comments from employees at all levels and preliminary site inspection reports provide evidence to support its success. However, program sustainability and retained learning are true measures of long term success. To that end, a refresher environmental education program was developed and provided as part of the company’s annual employee meetings in the spring of 2011.
Note: The following graphs are provided to show that learning took place as measured by the differences between the responses to the pre- and post-survey. In all graphs which follow, the black bars (identified as should be) reflect an ideal response or the highest score on an item.
VII. 2011 ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION REFRESHER PROGRAM
The OMG Midwest environmental education program developed for 2011 was an abbreviated version of what was done in 2010. Because the environmental program in 2010 was groundbreaking and introduced employees to new environmental topics, it seemed important to reinforce what they had learned previously. Therefore, an overview or shortened versions of the seven sessions from 2010 were presented to employees and management personnel.
As with the 2010 program, this refresher program was well received by employees and they were pleased to see before and after pictures of their projects and plant improvements. This process helped them take ownership of the environmental program and practices that are a part of the tasks they perform while at work.
In an effort to continue measuring the value or effectiveness of this environmental education program two actions were taken. First, under the premise, a good measure of a program’s effectiveness is retained learning, the same two 10 item, pre-education surveys were given to employees and supervisors prior to beginning the 2011 session. Again, in-depth statistical analysis has yet to be preformed, but preliminary data indicate that both groups retained a great deal of what they learned in 2010. The results may indicate in some areas they learned, on their own, even more than was presented during the classroom experience.
Secondly, using an , the environmental education program was critically evaluated in an attempt to collect credible data to use in making judgments about the program’s effectiveness and its value to the company.
An outcome hierarchy is composed of five stages that focus on identifying company needs or the reasons why an educational program was undertaken and whether it accomplished what it intended. The five stages are:
- Needs: Activities in this stage identify or describe priority issues or problems to which the educational session must respond.
- Activities: Describes activities the program will use to engage participants.
- Immediate Outcomes: Responses to the activities by the participants are described.
- Intermediate Outcomes: Describes changes in individual and group knowledge, skills, attitudes, practices or behaviors.
- Ultimate Outcomes: Describes the impact of the overall program and attainment of identified goals.
At each stage of the evaluation process, questions were asked, performance indicators were identified, performance information was gathered and judgments about program success were made based on the data collected. From all of these, recommendations to higher level management are then made.
The needs of increasing employee involvement in the compliance process, raising employees’ level of awareness in dealing with environmental matters, and helping them understand environmental rules, best practices and their roles in the process, were identified as the reasons to conduct this environmental education program.
When the evaluation process described above was applied to each of these “needs” it was determined the outcomes at each stage were met, thus indicating this environmental education program to be successful.
The data generated by both the results of the survey and the outcome hierarchy evaluation support the position that the OMG Midwest’s environmental program was effective, has value and will help meet corporate environmental goals and initiatives.
If environmental information provided in 2010 was retained in 2011, the blue bars will be closer to the black bars than is the red bars.
OMG Midwest management made, and followed through on a commitment, to conduct a new and unique environmental education program to achieve company goals. In an effort to build on the environmental success achieved so far, it was imperative that managers at all levels work to sustain the momentum that was generated to this point in time.
To aid them in that process, the environmental staff is doing the following:
- Conducting an ongoing program of internal environmental audits at plants, projects and construction sites. These inspections will follow a model of “audit-educate-audit.”
- Writing a series of Environmental Tool Box Talks designed to provide plant managers with topics to discuss with their employees. Feedback indicates these have been useful in keeping environmental topics and issues fresh in everyone’s mind.
- Continue to provide environmental education to managers and employees in the field as needed or requested by plant/project managers.
It appears by these actions and focusing on various environmental topics the level of awareness remains high and potential problems are being corrected.
IX. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
It would seem the innovative environmental education and awareness program provided to OMG Midwest employees in 2010 and 2011 has changed behavior of some employees and made a great many others more knowledgeable about environmental issues and how they impact their lives both at work and at home.
Employees of OMG Midwest are now more aware of what is expected of them when encountering environmental matters, have gained an appreciation of the company’s environmental initiatives, and have a better understanding of how they can contribute to achieving them. Before participating in the program, employees were aware of the CRH/OMG Environmental Policy, but now appear to have a deeper comprehension of their role. They are beginning to take ownership of the company’s environmental program.
It seems evident that taking environmental education to this level had a major impact on changing employee behavior. OMG Midwest has conducted environmental training with all managers in the past, but by taking it to the next level (involving all employees) even better outcomes have been observed. The significant, positive changes which have occurred throughout this division of the company over the past two years would indicate this unique environmental education program to be successful.
Joe McGuire, Ph.D., is an Environmental Advisor for Oldcastle Materials’ OMG Midwest Division. He earned his Ph.D. in Education from Iowa State University, and Masters in Education from NW Missouri State. He has worked on the environmental side of the industry for 28 years, and has authored two booklets on the Planning and Zoning Process. In addition, he has published 14 industry related articles.
Billy Snead, CSP, is EHS Director – Central West Division for Oldcastle Materials. He has a BS in Occupational Safety & Health and has worked in the construction industry for 25 years.


Happy World Bee Day!
20 May 2020
Helping bees is part of our culture and sustainability approach, in which we strive to protect biodiversity. In celebration of World Bee Day, we’d like to introduce you to Sibelco’s sustainability approach in protecting bee species.
Worldwide, more than 20,000 species of bee exist. Some live in colonies, like the well-known honeybees, some live solitary.
One of the most common types of solitary bee, is the mining bee. Its name already gives it away. There is no surprise that this bee is especially attracted to our sites. The mining bee likes to nest in sandy soils, near or under shrubs for protection against heat or frost. Another common Sibelco site visitor is the mason bee, which has the habit of using mud or other masonry products to build its nests.
Next to solitary bees, at some sites we also welcome the honeybees. We are actively looking for partnerships with local beekeepers to place their beehives on our sites. At one of our sites in Germany, the local team is working together with a beekeeper who is giving us ‘Sibelco’ honey in return!
How to protect bees at our quarries?
Unfortunately, bees are struggling nowadays. These small but important insects, known for pollinating flowers or trees and therefore a vital element of a sustainable ecosystem, are increasingly under threat from human activities. Helping bees is part of our culture and sustainability approach, in which we strive to protect biodiversity. These are some of the initiatives our Sustainability team takes in collaboration with local sites:
- Leave open spots for ground-nesting bees in non-active parts of quarries
- Leave dead wood or make/buy a bee hotel
- Foresee enough flowers close to the quarry to guide bees to a safer spot, in case we want to avoid nesting at active quarries
- Make indigenous plants, flowering trees or meadows of wildflowers available in the area
- Foresee flowers with different ranges of flowering times, since bee pollination activities differ between species


Equal Educational Opportunity Through the Program of Studies
The concept of equal educational opportunity was accepted by the Knox County Civil Rights Task Force December 3, 1990. At the high school level, the concept translates into a comprehensive curriculum offering (1) a wide range of academic and vocational subjects, (2) a wide span of scholastic levels, and (3) courses of study in all subject areas of the Knox County system-wide Program of Studies.
While all high schools can not be identical as to specific courses (there are approximately 300 course titles in the system-wide curriculum, twice the number needed in any one school), every high school is committed to offer courses in sufficient number and variety to provide students with opportunities to achieve four goals.
Goal 1 - Satisfy graduation requirements.
Goal 2 -
Satisfy admission requirements of Tennessee public post-secondary educational institutions. Goal 3 -
Satisfy job-entry requirements from among at least eight occupational areas. Goal 4 -
Pursue personal educational goals up to the levels indicated below:
- English Language Arts: Two units in Theater and one each in Speech and Journalism; Honors and Advanced Placement levels in English.
- Mathematics: Through Pre-calculus/Advanced Algebra and Trigonometry and an optional 5th unit.
- Science: At least three units each in physical and life sciences.
- Social Studies: Four units.
- World Languages: A choice of three languages, at least one of which offers a third unit.
- Fine Arts: One or more courses every term in choral and instrumental music and visual art.
- Business Education: Four units of courses for personal rather than job-entry purposes.
- Family and Consumer Sciences: Four units of courses for personal rather than job-entry purposes.
- Vocational-Technical Education: Four units of one-credit courses for personal rather than job-entry purposes.
- Driver Education: One unit.
- Physical Education and Wellness: One unit of Lifetime Wellness and one unit of Physical Education.
Additional Course Offerings
In addition to the minimum curriculum listed above, schools may draw from the system-wide curriculum other courses for which there are sufficient student enrollment and adequate supportive resources (personnel, facilities equipment and materials).


Exploring Clean Technology
Lots of Cars, Less Carbon
In 2016, the National People’s Congress in China ratified its 13th Five Year Plan, which has been called the “most environmentally focused to date.” These plans set out economic and social goals and directives and are generally vigorously pursued. As China has 20% of the world’s population, these goals and their pursuit can have wide-ranging effects globally. Two targets in particular caught my attention: (a) an 18% reduction in the carbon emission per unit of GDP, and (b) an increase in non-fossil fuel as a percentage of primary consumption from 12% to 15%. These numbers are huge, especially in light of the continued growth of China’s GDP and electricity production.
One of the largest carbon emitting activities is personal transportation. With the sheer number of vehicles in Beijing and Shanghai and their anticipated continued growth, Beijing has introduced quotas on the number of license plates issued, while in Shanghai license plates are auctioned off. The issue of numerous vehicles is not just the carbon emissions, but just fitting all those cars on the road! Aside from putting down more asphalt, and building new ring roads to move people around, I’m not sure how to fit more vehicles in the same space. A little further in the future, autonomous vehicles will use the most efficient routes, and spread traffic to maintain a steady flow. Until that future arrives however, the world does have a solution to lower the emissions that come from all those cars …electrics or hybrid vehicles!
The policymakers in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities are way ahead of my thought process. They have already instituted a system whereby ‘green license plates’ are almost semi-automatically granted to the owner of an electric or hybrid vehicle. As car ownership has always been seen as a sign of middle class success, and as China continues to grow its middle class, we can expect more cars on the road - more of which will be “green” due to these policy incentives.
This trend has not gone unnoticed by the likes of Volkswagen and Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group (JAC). These two companies specifically will start to produce electric vehicles in China in the first half of 2018, with sales starting in the latter half of the year. The eventual goal is to produce 40 vehicles for the market, 15 on an existing internal-combustion platform that will be converted to hybrid or electric vehicles, with the rest of the new models being based on all-new platforms.
Volkswagen and JAC aren’t the only ones targeting the electric car market in China. Ford and their partner Anhui Zotye Automobile Co. recently announced plans to spend 5 billion Yuan to produce and sell small electric vehicles in China. All of these new vehicles on the roads, especially of the hybrid and electric types discussed, will be dependent upon the latest technologies and materials to meet the expectations of consumers and vehicle licensers. This includes neodymium and dysprosium motors, lithium-ion batteries and improved sensing and computing capacity. Even an increase in gasoline consumption from an increase in hybrid use will require an increased use of lanthanum as a catalyst in in oil refineries. As China prospers, so does the opportunity for those who can assist in the execution of their plans by supplying the critical cleantech materials required!
– Chris Wildman