In-school banks dispense financial sense

When students at Carter High School in Strawberry Plains, Tenn., forget their lunch money, they don’t have to worry about going hungry.

Instead, they wander over to one of the five tellers who work at the student-run bank, where they can withdraw money from their savings accounts or fill out short applications for a $5 loan, all without leaving the building, says Lynn Raymond, a banking and finance teacher at the school.”We’re easing them into learning about borrowing money and the responsibilities that go along with that,” Raymond says of the experience students receive at the bank, which opened Feb. 16 in partnership with First Century Bank.

“It’s just so important because so many people get in trouble financially,” she says.

To read the full story: In-school banks dispense financial sense

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Study: People would donate kidney for money
Paying people for living kidney donations would increase the supply of the organs and would not result in a disproportionate number of poor donors, a study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center concludes.

The study, published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, asked 342 participants whether they would donate a kidney with varying payments of $0, $10,000 and $100,000. The study called for a real-world test of a regulated payment system.The possibility of payments nearly doubled the number of participants in the study who said they would donate a kidney to a stranger, but it did not influence those with lower income levels more than those with higher incomes, according to Scott Halpern, one of the study’s authors and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

To read the full story: Study: People would donate kidneys for money

Eco-conscious rest easy going green eternally

If you’re living a green lifestyle, it turns out you can take it with you.

Cemeteries and funeral homes across the USA are offering environmentally friendly burials featuring formaldehyde-free fluids for embalming and biodegradable caskets made of pine, wicker or even cardboard.

Green burials are available in nearly 30 cemeteries nationwide, up from a handful at the start of 2008, says Joe Sehee, executive director and president of the Green Burial Council, a non-profit organization that encourages environmentally sustainable death care.

To read the full story: Eco-conscious rest easy going green eternally

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Sales of personal breathalyzers spike

A growing number of people are using personal breathalyzers to test themselves, family members and friends for alcohol impairment.

The personal breathalyzer market is valued at $215.2 million, up from $27.9 million in 2005, according to Susan Eustis, president and CEO of WinterGreen Research, which does market analysis for industries such as health care and telecommunications.

Both AAA and law enforcement officials question the accuracy of personal breathalyzers and discourage their use in making decisions about driving.

To read the full story: Sales of personal breathalyzers spike

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Energy Dept. awards money for electric cars

The federal government and some states are plugging into the future of electric cars with subsidies to develop charging stations. But their plans are generating opposition.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $2.4 billion in stimulus money in August to build electric vehicles and support them with charging stations. The goal is to promote clean energy and reduce U.S. dependence on oil, says David Sandalow, assistant secretary of Energy for policy and international affairs.

The largest of 48 approved projects — out of 250 proposals for stimulus grants— is with Arizona-based Electric Transportation Engineering Corp. (eTec), which signed a $99.8 million contract with the Energy Department last month. Some of the money will pay for charging stations in 11 cities in five states by 2011, according to Colin Read, vice president of corporate development for Ecotality, eTec’s parent company.

To read the full story: Energy Dept. awards money for electric cars

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A new line dance is created each year and is performed hourly to help keep the dancers motivated. Here’s a soundslide I created at this year’s event (which took place Feb. 20-22) for my multimedia class. You will see I experimented half-way through with a technique I’ve been waiting to try for quite some time. I’ll post more soundslides later of additional photos from Thon and from the two photojournalism classes I took this year.

Working with horses, a passion from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

For Suzanne Myers, waiting for the end of work at her job isn’t just a matter of wanting some time to relax; it’s looking forward to being at the part-time business she operates — Myers Stables. For her, working with horses is a passion and lifelong dream.

From a very young age, Myers was adamant about training the horses she would compete with in 4-H events and began to develop her own techniques as she learned from good horsemen and horsewomen.

Myers developed into a successful horsewoman, eventually opening Myers Stables in Port Matilda with her husband, Glenn Myers, in 2001. She started her own training program called Next Level Horsemanship about a year ago. She accomplished this while continuing to work full time at Penn State’s Animal Diagnostic Lab and being the mother to an 8-year-old daughter, Brooke Myers, who also rides and has begun to train her own horses.

Suzanne Myers has been training horses professionally for 20 years. Developing the Next Level Horsemanship program allowed her to market her business on a broader scale.

“The decision to train professionally was one that I made a long time ago. It’s truly my passion without a doubt and it’s all consuming in my mind,” she said. “I live, breathe and sleep wanting to work with horses.”

Last year Myers earned national attention in the horse community when she won the 2008 Mustang Challenge the first time she entered the competition.

Trainers competing in the Challenge are given 90 days to take an unbroken mustang and train it to allow a rider on its back and to perform basic maneuvers. The mustangs are then sold at an auction. The sale proceeds benefit the Mustang Heritage Foundation. Myers used her winnings to purchase Jazz, the mustang she competed with in the event.

“To not hear your number called until the top 3 was just amazing. To think that after all of the hard work, time and consistency that it might actually pay off was just very exciting,” she said. “And then they announced the second place winner and we knew that we had done it.”

Following the challenge, Myers became involved with a trainer incentive program, which places mustangs into successful adoptive homes by first gentling them with a trainer, through the Mustang Heritage Foundation.

“It was a great learning experience for us and a great networking tool as well. We’ve met a lot of people, different trainers from across the country,” she said. “It’s been a very good thing both on a personal level and as a trainer and as a professional to have those contacts in the industry.”

Handling mustangs during the training process is different than dealing with a typical horse — their instincts for survival have been honed over several years, Myers said.

“This difference primarily addresses the need for us to spend more time desensitizing these horses to us and the things we’re using around them in an effort to retrain their flight instinct and to get them to understand that we are not going to hurt them,” she said.

Myers says she hopes to move her business into a full-time venture within the next year, hosting more clinics and taking on more clients.

“We’re in a stage of aggressive growth right now and we’re doing a lot more clinics this year than we did last year and hopefully next year we’ll even bring it to a more far-reaching national scale,” she said.

As for how she juggles working a full-time job, being a wife and mother all while running a successful business on the side, Myers just brushes it off.

“Sometimes it’s exhausting,” she said, “but you just do it.”

Daughter follows in mother’s footsteps

Brooke Myers, 8, is already training and riding horses and even plans to compete this summer with the mustang her mother trained, Jazz.

Daughter follows in mother’s footsteps from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

Childhood memories

Like her daughter, Suzanne Myers became interested in riding and training horses when she was a little girl.

Childhood memories from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

After entering your Twitter username, TweetStats will compile a bunch of cool information about how often you Twitter, who you reply to the most and more. Here’s some screenshots:

The number of tweets per month/day — which also shows your addicted-ness level or whether you just dropped off the face of the earth for 3 months.

You can find out what day(s) you Tweet the most. Saturday makes sense for me — Tuesday not so much, I have class from 10-4… hmmm. And when you post the most Tweets / how often you’re not going to bed until 3 a.m. And your tweet density which combines the days and hours you tweet into a neat looking graphic.

Finally, my fave is the tweet cloud! You can see how often you write about certain words — obviously my most used are new, blog and news. I wonder if ‘new’ though includes ‘news’?