One Year Ago: "Did a Bridge Fall Down?" on Minnpost.com
By G.R. Anderson, Jr. | Thursday, July 31, 2008
Friday is the first anniversary of the I-35W bridge collapse. Three survivors--two who made it across the river, one who didn't--recall the day and reflect on what a difference a year makes.
You can read the full story at Minnpost.com:
http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/07/31/2787/one_year_ago_did_a_bridge_fall_down
Source: Kenny Ronnan, MinnPost Staff
Facts listed in the March/April 2008 issue of Training. You can read the full article, "It's Not Easy being Green" in EBSCO Business Source Premier.
Photo by kenofseattle
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets.
• 1 ream of paper (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree.
• The average cost of a wasted page is $0.06, and the average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day--1,410 wasted pages per year at a cost of $84 per employee.
• The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages a year.
• In 2004, the U.S. used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams)--the equivalent of 178 million trees.
• The U.S. uses enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot-high wall that's 6,815 miles long. That's more than the distance from New York to Tokyo.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (the same amount of energy an average household uses in 10 months).
• Making a single sheet of copy paper can use more than 13 ounces of water--more than a typical soda can.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 19,075 gallons of waste water; 2,278 pounds of solid waste; and 5,690 pounds of green house gases (the equivalent of 6 months of car exhaust).
• It takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of copy paper.
SOURCE: GREENPRINT, A SOFTWARE COMPANY DEVOTED TO ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION, http://WWW.PRINTGREENER.COM/EARTHDAY.HTML.
Via Reference Services Blog
The first schoolteacher to become First Lady, Abigail Powers Fillmore (1798-1853) had a passion for literature. Educated at home by her mother, she read all of the books in her fathers’ library, and began to teach school at the age of 16, while continuing to go to school. After her marriage to Millard Fillmore, she continued to teach school, the first First Lady to have a job outside of her home.
Books were an important focus of Abigail’s life, and she founded the first circulating library in Sempronius, New York. Her husband often purchased books for her when he was traveling, and in the years of their marriage they collected over 4,000 books.
As First Lady, Fillmore was dismayed to find that there were no books in the White House, and she got Congress to appropriate $2,000 to purchase several hundred books. Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Burns, travel books, biographies, histories, law books, religious works and other novels were chosen.
An 1842 ankle injury had lasting effects on Abigail’s life and she limited her activities as First Lady during her husband’s abbreviated term of office (he succeeded to the Presidency with the death of Zachary Taylor). Standing during the snowy inauguration of President Franklin Pierce on March 4, 1853, she grew ill soon after, and died of pneumonia on March 30th.
Source: The World Almanac blog
From the July 2007 World Almanac Newsletter:
Lost in Translation: A Rose By Any Other Name
Who are you planning to vote for in the presidential primaries? Virtue Soup? Oh Bus Horse? Sticky Rice? Massachusetts State Secretary William Galvin has pointed to these candidates names as a few of the ways identities are lost in translation when candidates’ names are translated into Chinese characters on the ballot as required by a justice department agreement. Finding no Chinese character for Romney, however, translators select characters that could be used to match the sound of each syllable, muddying the meaning of names. "Virtue Soup" is a potential transliteration of Fred Thompson. Barack Obama might be read as "Oh Bus Horse," and Mitt Romney could be either "Sticky Rice" or "Uncooked Rice." Galvin’s own name could be construed as "High Prominent Noble Educated," for one, or as "Stick Mosquito."
While the translations are amusing, there are serious issues at stake, most prominent among them keeping voters from being disenfranchised for lack of a readable ballot. Galvin advocates translating the ballots into Chinese for the most part, but wants the names to remain in Roman characters. But voting rights advocates say there are other options to avoid awkward translations, such as allowing candidates to offer their own character variations or mimicking the way Chinese newspapers transliterate the names.
Read the whole June newsletter: http://www.worldalmanac.com/newsletter/200707WAE-Newsletter.html
From the U of MN Parking and Transportation Services:
4th Street South Reconstruction
4th Street South on West Bank, from 21st Avenue S to West River Road, will close to vehicular traffic on Tuesday, June 26 for resurfacing. The project is scheduled to last approximately two weeks. Sidewalks will remain open to pedestrians and bikers who walk their bikes.
During the project, West River Road can be accessed from the north side of West Bank on 1st and 2nd Streets South.
The Law School's own T.O.R.T. is reported on in the May-June 2007 issue of "Minnesota: The Magazine of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association." An excerpt is below:
"Stage Fright
Standing center stage, Dr. Frankenlaw shrugged with wicked glee. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a heart in any law student, so I just put in an extra spleen instead!”
In Frankenlaw, an irreverent send-up of law school life, a mad professor sets out to create the perfect law student— using the body parts of inadequate students from Hamline, William Mitchell, and St. Thomas. The play was the latest incarnation of a tradition that started five years ago at the University of Minnesota Law School. Each year, more than 70 students get involved in T.O.R.T.—Theatre of the Relatively Talentless—penning the script, acting, operating the lights, and sweeping the stage afterward...."
Read more at: http://www.alumni.umn.edu/About_Campus4.html (the 2nd article on the page)
During April 25 to May 11, part of the first floor of the Law Library is designated as a QUIET ZONE.
We have posted signs near the area and would appreciate your cooperation in keeping this part of the library as quiet as possible.
When studying in this area please be sure to:
• turn-off the sound on your laptop,
• turn-off or silence your cell phone,
• and refrain from talking.
Please avoid walking through this area, unless you plan to study there, and please keep your voices low in nearby areas as well.
If you are looking for a place to study in a group, please check at the circulation desk for an available study room.
Thank you.
As we near the end of the semester, it will soon be a good time to start your spring cleaning in your office or carrel. Perhaps there are some books or other library materials that are ready to come back to the library circ desk? Students, all study carrel keys are due May 11.
If you are planning on discarding personal or sensitive documents, there are bins in the law school designated for secure paper disposal (shredding). In the "public" areas, a large bin is at the law library circ desk and another is on the 4th floor in the hallway past the HR office.
Here is a link to the UMN retention policies for certain records: http://recmgmt.finop.umn.edu/retention.htm
Happy cleaning!
FYI: Beautiful U Day 2007 is April 19: http://www.buday.umn.edu/
"Lawyers as Leaders"
ESSAY by Ben W. Heineman, Jr.
"In this Essay, I argue that graduates of law schools should aspire not just to be wise counselors but wise leaders; not just to dispense “practical wisdom” but to be “practical visionaries”; not just to have positions where they advise, but where they decide. Put another way, I wish to re-define (or at least to re-emphasize) the concept of “lawyer” to include “lawyer as leader.” The profession and the law schools should more candidly recognize the importance of leadership and should more directly prepare and inspire young lawyers to seek roles of ultimate responsibility and accountability than they do today. Why do I advance this thesis? First, our society is suffering from a leadership deficit in public, private, and non-profit spheres. The core competencies of law are as good a foundation for broad leadership as other training. Second, the legal profession, by many accounts, is suffering from a crisis of morale, from a disconnect between personal values and professional life. Providing leadership can affirm—and test—our vision and core values. Third, other professional schools—business and public policy—have as their explicit mission the training of leaders for the public, private, and non-profit sectors. The graduates of our law schools are at least as talented as those who enter other professional and graduate schools. And law schools should have a similar vision to enhance the careers of their outstanding students, thus serving society and addressing the values crisis that affects portions of the profession. But today’s law schools are muted or ambivalent about leadership (Yale Law School has no mission statement on its web-site)."
From Stark Co Law Library blog, quoting:
The Pocket Part, 16 February 2007
Excerpted from the Feb. 8 issue of UMN News:
Why players might seek his counsel
How many Division I head basketball coaches have law degrees? Without crunching the numbers on that one, the guess here is somewhere around one.
[Jim] Molinari gained a juris doctor from DePaul University in 1980 while helping coach the Blue Demon basketball team. After passing the bar and working as a summer associate at a big firm in Chicago ("I was a tax drone," he quips), Molinari decided to turn his attention to coaching.
Coach Mo believes having a law degree helps make him a better coach, and made the following observation: "We tie our goals to our values--like effort, like discipline, like unselfishness. Whether it's a law firm or coaching, a lot of those principles are the same."
Read the whole article at: http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/A_love_of_teaching.html
Did you lose something this semester? A sweater, book, or bike helmet?
We have set up a lost and found claim area at the circ desk. If you lost something, please claim it by Monday Dec. 18. All unclaimed items will be recycled after Dec. 18.