“CNN Student News Transcript: May 5, 2010” plus 2 more |
- CNN Student News Transcript: May 5, 2010
- Nevada grad illustratescolorful children’s book
- Book review: Getting Organized in the Google Era
| CNN Student News Transcript: May 5, 2010 Posted: 04 May 2010 04:56 PM PDT (CNN Student News) -- May 5, 2010 Download PDF maps related to today's show: • New York, New York Transcript THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. CARL AZUZ, CNN STUDENT NEWS ANCHOR: We are CNN Student News, and this is Teacher Appreciation Week. So of course, we're going to have some of your tributes to teachers later in today's show. I'm Carl Azuz, welcoming everyone! AZUZ: First up, officials have arrested a suspect in connection with a failed bombing plot in New York City. Authorities say that Faisal Shahzad has admitted he was involved with the incident. They're now calling that a "terrorist plot." Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen. That means he was born in another country -- in this case, Pakistan -- but he became a U.S. citizen about a year ago. Officials said that they plan to charge Shahzad, whom you see in these pictures from Orkut.com, with an act of terrorism and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Those charges filed in court yesterday. Attorney General Eric Holder said that since he's been in custody, authorities have been questioning Shahzad and that he's been giving them "useful information." But we're gonna back up for you right now and go through the timeline to show you how we got to where we are right now. Saturday night, someone leaves an SUV in Times Square. A couple of street vendors notice it, tell police. Police find a makeshift bomb inside and disarm it. Now, we're into the search for a suspect. The SUV helps with that. Authorities figure out whom it belonged to, they contact that person, find out that he had sold the vehicle to Shahzad. So, where is Shahzad? He's trying to get out of the country. In fact, when police arrested him, he was on a plane that was about to head to the United Arab Emirates and then on to Pakistan. A couple things helped tip off authorities here. One: Shahzad was on the no-fly list. That helped officials track him down. Two: He paid for his ticket in cash at the counter; no reservation. That raised a red flag for the airline, which told airport security. Hours after Shahzad was arrested Monday night, security forces in Pakistan conducted a raid and took two or three people into custody. Pakistani officials say that raid was in connection to the Times Square plot. Nashville Flooding AZUZ: Well, over in Tennessee, the Cumberland River is going back down and the weather forecast is looking better. But it's going to take a while to recover from this week's severe floods. Experts say the river topped out at nearly 12 feet above flood stage. It left homes underwater, destroyed roads. Officials are blaming the severe weather for more than two dozen deaths, including ten in the Nashville area. That city's mayor declared a state of emergency on Sunday. That lets Nashville ask for help from state officials, and it helps make it easier to get and give out supplies and services. More than a thousand people were rescued from the water over the weekend. Downtown Nashville, hit hard by the storms. Here, you can see some of the flooding in the city's football stadium. In addition to being Tennessee's capital, Nashville is also known as the "country music capital of the world." It's home to the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry. The lower levels of both of those landmarks were flooded, too. AZUZ: Florida's governor has also declared a state of emergency for 13 counties in his state. This is a response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, every Gulf Coast state, from Louisiana to Florida, has asked the National Guard to help fight the spill. Meantime, BP -- that's the company that owns the well that this oil is gushing out of -- is trying to stop the leak at the source. Plan A -- use remotely operated subs to close a valve -- hasn't worked. Plan B? Brian Todd tells us about that. (BEGIN VIDEO) BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.: I'm Brian Todd in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, where we have access to something that you've never really seen before because they haven't really tried it before. This large, box-like structure right here is called the "pollution containment chamber." It looks like a huge rusty box. But after so much futility, this might be the device that stops the massive oil flow in the Gulf. Forty feet high and weighing nearly a hundred tons, the pollution containment chamber is almost ready to be lowered on top of the leaking wellhead from the destroyed rig. They've been working on this device for about a week now, and they're essentially cutting it to specs to fit this particular pipe that's leaking. We can't go up to the top there where those guys are welding because of the dangers, the hazards here. But here's how it's going to work: These two openings are going to be lowered on top of the leaking well. The leaking end of it's going to come out that window right there. There's another part of the well that's jutting out that will come out that opening right over there. This will be lowered and those flaps there in the middle will be sitting on the ocean floor to prevent this from sinking any further. The idea is for this to plant down, clamp, then channel the oil to waiting surface containers. This is what they call the "top hat," the cap to the dome. It's going to be placed on top of it, essentially acting as the top of the funnel that's going to siphon the oil to the surface. A riser's attached to the other side, almost like a straw going to the surface to a ship that will carry the oil out. Smaller versions of this have been successful before. Officials say this dome may be able to capture as much as 85 percent of the oil spewing from those pipes. Is this the last, best hope to contain this spill? JASON HOLVEY, WILD WELL CONTROL: I don't believe that's the case. If for some reason this did not work, there are a lot of brilliant minds working for BP right now. I'm sure there are multiple efforts going on parallel to ours. TODD: But at the moment, those other efforts either aren't working or won't be ready as quickly. They're also building a smaller version of the pollution containment chamber. You see it going on right there, with this guy welding here. That's not going to be ready quite as quickly as the larger one. Now, the timetable for that larger one: they hope to finish that here in the yard by Wednesday. Then they've got to do some quality controls, get it onto a ship to transport it out there. They hope to lower that onto the leaking well by the end of this week. Brian Todd, CNN, Port Fourchon, Louisiana. (END VIDEO) Shoutout MATT CHERRY, CNN STUDENT NEWS: Today's Shoutout goes out to Mr. Edwards' history classes at Niobrara County High School in Lusk, Wyoming! This is a picture of Timothy Geithner. What's his job? You know what to do! Is he the: A) NFL Commissioner, B) President of Harvard, C) Treasury Secretary or D) U.S. Poet Laureate? You've got three seconds -- GO! Timothy Geithner is the 75th secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department. That's your answer and that's your Shoutout! Tax on Banks? AZUZ: Because that's his job, one of Secretary Geithner's responsibilities is to try and keep the U.S. economy stable. He thinks one way to do that is through a tax on banks. He talked about this on Capitol Hill yesterday. Specifically, the tax would be aimed at large banks that might have gotten help from the government during the financial crisis. Secretary Geithner says more than 99 percent of the country's banks won't be affected. But some people who are opposed to this tax argue it could cause problems for small businesses because it might be harder for them to get loans. A big part of all of this is risk. Banks sometimes make risky investments and loans. And under the proposed tax, the banks that take more risks would have to pay more. AZUZ: Another part of the financial crisis is job cuts. You know that by now. A new survey looks at how many might be coming up where you are right now, in school. According to the report, more than 80 percent of U.S. school districts expect to cut jobs in the 2010-2011 school year. The survey interviewed administrators from 49 states. They're predicting that more than a quarter million positions will be let go. We're talking about teachers, nurses, administrators, cafeteria workers. Districts that don't cut jobs will probably put a freeze on hiring. The head of the group that took this survey says that while there are some signs that the U.S. economy is getting better, so far, it's just not happening in schools. Teacher Appreciation Week AZUZ: A few months ago, Anastasia wrote that the economy was forcing her school to cut back, but that it made everyone proud to see teachers trying to cheer students up, even though the teachers were losing their jobs. She appreciates the work teachers do, and so do these folks: Jared says, "Mr. McBurrows doesn't just teach; he makes the lesson fun and interactive." Mrs. Yribe -- I might not be saying it right -- but has helped Allison better understand science. Lyn writes that "Mr. Chmil changed her mind about history and cultures." Moses sends a shoutout to Mrs. Herman, saying "she's the awesomest teacher ever." Cameron says, "Mr. Langhorst always finds a way to make class fun." Thanks to Mr. Sumner, Quinton says he can play multiple instruments and wants to be a musician. And Gracie and Ellie thank their mother for homeschooling them and being the best teacher they could ask for. Thank your teacher at CNNStudentNews.com! Before We Go AZUZ: And before we go, we like to end the show with something light hearted. For example, this YouTube video of a nice, warm campfire... no, it's the top of a birthday cake! And check this out, watch what happens next. There it is! Blowing this sucker out is gonna be tough. But you gotta admit it looks really cool. But the candle creators did miss one detail, though: They forgot to disconnect the smoke detector, and they heard all about it. They'll definitely know better for next time. Goodbye AZUZ: But it definitely makes this a truly enlightening experience. I guess they can't be all crazy animals and eating contests, however much I love them. All right: Facebook comment of the day comes from James, who asks if I could have any color hair, what would it be? James, would be the color of thunder. We'd love for you to write on our wall at Facebook.com/cnnstudentnews. If you have a random question or comment about the show, you know where to find us. Have a wonderful day. We'll see you soon. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Nevada grad illustratescolorful children’s book Posted: 04 May 2010 11:31 PM PDT You may not be familiar with the name Sami Mac, although you've probably seen her work—she was one of the artists who helped paint the Character mural in downtown Nevada. If you don't think the name sounds familiar, that's probably because it's just a moniker that she uses. Her real name is Becky McIntosh, and she chose the name Sami to honor her father, who taught her to draw, and the last name Mac to represent the last name McIntosh of her children. McIntosh is a graduate of Nevada High School, an artist and graphic designer with more than 20 years under her belt, and daughter of longtime Nevada resident MaryAnn Gardner. Recently Sami Mac teamed up with native Iowa author, LaVina Varnony-Barcus, to illustrate Barcus' newest children's book, "Perfect in Mother Nature's Eyes." "My roommate in college hooked me up with this gal. She's written a couple other things—she's kind of figured out the self-publishing process and wrote this children's book, and my friend got us together so I could do the illustrations for her," McIntosh said. Doing artwork is nothing new to McIntosh, who graduated from ISU with a degree in graphic design. After college, she started out working as a graphic designer for about five years. During that time she also started doing freelance work for a T-shirt company, making character maps of cities. "I worked that to where I could do it full time and then take care of my kids at home. So it was all work at home and then I would just take the illustrations in. I worked that for 11 years, and then started homeschooling my kids," she said. While homeschooling her children, she slowly started slipping out of the field of graphic design. Since McIntosh graduated from ISU, the graphic design field has seen some very large technical changes. Graphic design elements used to be produced largely by hand, but now the industry has become evermore reliant on computer programs. "I kind of got out of the technical aspect of doing graphic design—I didn't know how to use (Adobe) Illustrator or InDesign, so I couldn't just hop back into doing a graphic design job after my kids got older and I was ready to go back to work." So, for the time being, she took two part-time jobs at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, where she lives. But despite not knowing some of the cutting-edge technology, she hasn't left artwork behind. McIntosh has been creating artwork for various purposes. She had a hand in creating the character mural, just off of main street, and has donated artwork to the Leukemia Society, to name a few. "I've been keeping my hand in it, but I've been trying to get back into something that I could do for a living at some point," she said. Recently she was given the opportunity to illustrate "Perfect in Mother Nature's Eyes," which she took. McIntosh said that doing the 20 water- color illustrations for the book took her about 70 hours of work, but not all of that was spent just on the illustrations. She said that the author wanted to her to include some specific animals and flowers, and McIntosh wasn't familiar with all of them, so she had to spend some time researching what the author wanted and fine-tuning her artwork. After McIntosh finished the artwork it, was all sent to the publisher to be scanned into computers and prepped for printing. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Book review: Getting Organized in the Google Era Posted: 04 May 2010 03:46 PM PDT Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest. Skip to next paragraph Trent Hamm The Simple Dollar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: people fighting debt and bad spending habits while building a financially secure future and still affording a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough without having to compare five hundred mutual funds – we just want simple ways to manage our finances and save a little money. Recent postsI'm pretty passionate about organization – after all, I named David Allen's book Getting Things Done as one of the ten books that changed my life. I'm also (obviously) passionate about how information technology and the internet can change people's lives. This book, Getting Organized in the Google Era by former CIO of Google, Douglas C. Merrill, hits the joint between those two passions quite firmly. It looks at how people organize all of the information they need to maintain their life on a daily basis and talks about how recent advances in technology (particularly cloud computing – where you save your data on a web server, a la Gmail or Facebook) have potentially changed or improved how we organize ourselves. Intriguing stuff, but is there enough meat there to fill up a whole book with ideas? 1 | Cocktail Parties & Cap'n Crunch Think of our schedules. Most of us who have a lot of appointments to keep maintain some sort of written schedule – I sure do. Why? Because without it, you'll have a lot of little pieces of information floating around in your brain (each appointment) and if you forget one, it's a major problem. So we get into the routine of storing it all externally and just remembering to check the schedule all the time. 2 | Summer Vacations, Suburbia & Factory Shifts Instead of just forcing yourself into these inefficient structures, why not see if you can change a rule or two. Do some homeschooling during the summer. Ask if you can shift your work schedule to two hours earlier – or two hours later – so you can avoid the morning and evening rushes. Look into telecommuting if your job allows it. If something seems inefficient – and every time you're sitting idle, there's probably an inefficiency – look for ways around it so you can actually fill your time with meaning. 3 | Racecars, Basketball Shorts & Opera Take naptime, for example. I used to view this as a pretty long constraint on other activities, as I'd stay near the kids until they were asleep (they're good at going to sleep by themselves at night, but during naptime when the sun is shining outside, they can sometimes get antsy). What I eventually learned is that the constraint was much smaller than I imagined. Once a story is read and they're laying down, the perfect time has arrived to open my laptop and get a few things done. What constraints in your life are real constraints? 4 | Climb That Mountain or Chill in the Barcalounger? What do I want to achieve above all else? I want to be a successful writer and a successful father. Those are my front-and-center goals – the other goals I have are almost always subordinate to those two things. Other things really don't matter in comparison. What does success mean in those areas? That's a much longer answer, but after a lot of reflection, I think I know what success is there, too. 5 | Beyond Taylorism & Trapper Keepers Today, though, information technology allows us to have all of that data electronically and, more important, it's all searchable. Instead of digging for a file in a huge filing cabinet, we can just search for it if we have it stored electronically. This gets around a lot of differences: different filing methods, different constraints, different personal quirks. Everyone simply searches for what they want. Think about Wikipedia versus an old printed set of World Book encyclopedias, for example. 6 | Paris, France or Paris, Vegas? Using Google means more than just going to the search field and typing in what you want, for example. There's quite a lot of syntax that goes into really narrowing down what you want, from using the "site:" prefix to narrow down searches within a particular site to using "-" as a prefix to exclude terms. There's even more useful syntax within specific programs like Gmail when you're searching through old emails. 7 | Colored Markers & Filters Merrill suggests starting with your goals. For example, you're probably reading The Simple Dollar because you have personal financial or personal success goals: paying off debt, building up some savings, getting a better job, or so on. This means that some posts apply to you and your situation and some do not. If it doesn't apply, filter it out immediately. Use your energy to read something else. This is also true when it comes down to the information you save – old emails and the like. Why are you saving it? What's your goal with that information if you retain it? This often helps you figure out how to retain it. 8 | Day-Timer or Digital? For example, I keep my schedule electronically because it takes far less time to enter repeated appointments or to share my schedule with others than it does with a written schedule. On the other hand, it's often easier to receive statements in the mail because electronic distribution of paper statements is still sometimes very poor. Paper is still also superior when it comes to jotting down quick notes, though that may change in the near future. 9 | Beyond Send & Receive Much of this chapter focuses on Gmail power tips. In fact, Merrill often argues in favor of just emailing information that you need to retain to your own Gmail account because of the ease of searching it in the future. 10 | Thanks for Sharing I find Gmail and Gcal to be essential tools for my work and for my personal life thanks to things like integrating weather forecasts into my personal schedule (so my calendar alone can indicate whether today is a good day for an outdoor activity). 11 | A Browser, an Operating System & Some Cool Stickers While Merrill does focus pretty heavily on the Google apps, he's right on in terms of two key points. First, the more searchable all of your emails, documents, schedules, and other information is, the more useful it is. Second, no one is putting this all together as smoothly as the Google apps do – and they're free. 12 | Avoiding Brain Strain If your job and life seem to constantly push you to switch focus with frightening regularity, seek out spaces in which you can minimize those focus switches. Turn off your distractions (like your phone) and shut your door so you can bear down on a task. 13 | Checking Email from the Beach Yes, that does mean you should do things like check your email during a fifteen minute downtime on a Saturday. Doing that, however, frees you up to spend more sustained time involved in activities you care about later. The more efficient your tools are, the easier it is to do these microbursts of tasks. 14 | Dealing with the Unexpected The book closes with one of the best parts – a long list of "stuff we love," web applications that solve particular personal information management concerns. Is Getting Organized in the Google Era Worth Reading? This book isn't a useful read if you're not already pretty organized. If you're in that group, the stuff in this book won't necessarily help you get organized – it's not an organization system in itself, but a bunch of tactics to help improve what it is you already do. If you're starting from scratch, I really recommend David Allen's excellent book Getting Things Done (which I'm planning to cover in detail in an upcoming series). I got a lot of good ideas from this book. You might, too. Add/view comments on this post. ------------------------------ The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above. 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