Greetings K-12 Newsletter Readers,

Happy reading for today.

<Karen>



Mac market share breaks 8% mark in 2007's final days:'Phenomenal' post-Christmas surge puts OS X within shouting distance of Vista By Gregg Keizer
January 02, 2008 (Computerworld) -- Mac's market share reached 8% during the
last two days of 2007, a record mark that a Web measurement company
yesterday called "phenomenal."
For December as a whole, Apple Inc.'s machines accounted for 7.3% of all
systems that browsed the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications Inc., up
significantly from 6.8% during November. At the beginning of 2007, Net
Applications pegged Mac OS X's share at 5.7%, putting the one-year growth
rate at about 28%.
But it was the post-Christmas surge that really put the Mac on the market
share map. "The really good news for Apple came at the end of the month,"
said Net Applications in a write-up on its Web site, which noted that during
Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, Mac OS X-powered machines accounted for 8.01% of those
monitored online. "This represents a phenomenal increase of 18% from
November for the Mac."

Average Salaries of Public School Teachers for 2004
Average school salaries for teachers by state. Connecticut teachers earn the highest pay with DC teachers a close second. South Dakota has the lowest pay.
Download the full survey (pdf)

State Employee Pay Growth Below Inflation Rate for Third Straight Year


Education Jobs Pay Scale


Education Salary Surveys by State



Grants
Apply For A $500 Global Youth Service Day Minnie Grant
Funded by the Walt Disney Company, Youth Service America is offering
grants of up to $500 to support youth (ages 5-14) in planning and
implementing service projects in their community. Youth are encouraged
to address issues such as climate change, diseases, human rights, and
literacy. Applications are welcome from all countries and must be
received by January 21. Download application materials

Parents Try to Avert Extinction of School Librarians
Groundswell effort of e-mails, fundraising now major force in Washington
Legislature
Libraries are open fewer hours, programs minimized, jobs combined. In many cases, part-timers with little formal library training are replacing skilled veterans. In rural Pomeroy, a school now employs a combination custodian-librarian - she opens the library after cleaning the locker rooms.

Version 70 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship.
This selective bibliography presents over 3,195 articles,
books, and other printed and electronic sources that are
useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing
efforts on the Internet.

Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency



According to Webster  w00t  First word of the Year 2007
w00t (interjection) expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

Quadrantid Meteor Shower Space Weather News for Jan. 3, 2008
METEOR SHOWER: Earth is about to pass through a stream of dusty debris from near-Earth asteroid 2003 EH1, producing the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. Forecasters expect a brief but intense peak of 50+ meteors per hour over Earth's northern hemisphere sometime between 0200 UTC and 0700 UTC on Friday morning, Jan. 4th. (Subtract 5 hours to convert UTC to EST.) The timing favors observers in the eastern USA, Europe and western parts of Asia. Winter storms frequently hide this shower from observers on the ground. To avoid such problems, a team of astronomers led by Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute plan to fly a plane above the clouds where they can train their cameras on the Quadrantids. Their data may reveal whether asteroid 2003 EH1 is the fragment of a broken-apart comet. Visit http://spaceweather.com for sky maps and more information.
JUST FOR FUN: This is a good time of year to see Orion the Hunter: the constellation rises in the east at sunset. Watching Orion ascend, you may experience the little-known "constellation illusion." The idea is the same as the Moon illusion; constellations viewed near the horizon look abnormally large. Go outside tonight and look. Can you believe your eyes?

NOVA presents "Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold" Tuesday, January 8, 2008 (NOVA airs on PBS at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

Watch the Program
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/zero/program.html
     Watch the entire program online after the broadcast date.
     (Quicktime or Windows Media required.) (Grades 6-8, 9-12)

Absolute Hot
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/zero/hot.html
     Learn in this article why whether there is a corresponding
     hottest hot to the coldest cold is not the easiest question to
     answer. (Grades 9-12)

The Conquest of Cold
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/zero/conquest.html
     Read about the impact of refrigerated railway cars on native
     cultures in this excerpt from Tom Shachtman's Absolute Zero and
     the Conquest of Cold, the book on which the NOVA program was
     based. (Grades 9-12)

 A Sense of Scale
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/zero/scale.html
     Explore in this interactive the range between absolute zero to
     what the theoretical highest possible temperature. (Flash plug-in
     required.) (Grades 6-8, 9-12)

 Ultracold Atoms
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/zero/atoms.html
     Learn the ins and outs of a new form of matter called a
     Bose-Einstein condensate in this interview with researcher and
     physics professor Luis Orozco. (Grades 9-12)

 Teacher's Guide
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/teachers/programs/3501_zero.html
     In this classroom activity, students build and calibrate their
     own bulb thermometers. (Grades 6-8)

 Program Transcript
     http://www.pbs.org/nova/transcripts/3501_zero.html
     The site includes a complete narration for this program.