Memo Examples

To:Don Wagner
From: Susan Liccion
Date: September 10, 2006
Re: Warning: Problems on Syracuse Campus

Syracuse students should heed caution when walking in the university area. Syracuse and ESF students have received various memorandums in the last few days as to the crimes occuring in the university area. The email went as follows:

"Over the past several days there have been several reports of robberies
occurring on the perimeter of campus. These crimes have occurred during
the early morning hours, and the individuals targeted by the suspects
have been walking alone. The Syracuse Police Department and SU's
Department of Public Safety (DPS) are working closely to apprehend the
suspects in these crimes. Additional patrols have been placed along the
streets bordering the campus."

Take note to walk in numbers and groups and be safe! Escorts from public safety are available 24/7 to make sure students aren't walking alone. Students should not talk on cell phones while waling alone and should be consciously aware of their surroundings.


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Recycle for Health

To: Students at Syracuse University and SUNY-ESF.
From: Aaron Forisha
September 28, 2006

Why: Each time a bottle (or anything) is recycled, that much less material is incinerated at the local incinerator. Fly ash, dioxins, furan, and other fallout (including mercury) from the incinerator are potentially dangerous to your health.

How: Both the Syracuse and ESF campuses each have an extensive network of recycling containers that are clearly labeled. Many of the beige rectangular trash receptacles at Syracuse also have recycling slots for paper, glass, and plastic. You can also call the City (448-2489) to get a Blue Bin in which you can place recyclables for curbside pick-up.

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Attention

Cll 410: Pizza Party Planning

Don Wagner's section of Cll 410 will be planning a pizza party to be held the last day of class.

WHERE: Room 130 Moon Library

WHEN: Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006

TIME: 11:40 am to 12:35 pm

Payment for the pizza, where to order the pizza from and what beverages to serve along with other details will be discussed at this meeting.

Stem Cells Derived from Dead Human Embryo

Scientists say they have created a stem cell line from a human embryo that had stopped developing naturally, and so was considered dead. Using such embryos might ease ethical concerns about creating such cells, they suggested. One expert said the technique makes harvesting stem cells no more ethically troublesome than organ donation. But others said it still carries scientific and ethical problems.

Scientists want to use human embryonic stem cells to study diseases and create transplant tissue for treating illnesses such as diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Such cells are taken from human embryos that are a few days old, and the harvesting process destroys the embryo. That raises ethical objections. The new work, published online Thursday by the journal Stem Cells, comes from Miodrag Stojkovic of the Prince Felipe Research Center in Valencia, Spain, with colleagues there and in England.

They studied embryos donated by an in vitro fertilization clinic with consent of the patients. Part of the work focused on 132 "arrested" embryos, those that had stopped dividing for 24 or 48 hours after reaching various stages of development. Thirteen of these embryos had developed more than the others, reaching 16 to 24 cells before cell division stopped. Scientists were able to create a stem cell line from just one of these embryos. These stem cells performed normally on a series of tests, Stojkovic said in a telephone interview.

He said he did not know whether the result indicated a solution to ethical concerns about embryonic stem cells. The point of the research was to show that such embryos provide an additional source of the cells beyond healthy embryos, rather than to set up any kind of a competition, he said. Both sources should be used, he said.

Dr. Donald W. Landry, director of the division of experimental therapeutics at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who proposed the idea of getting stem cells from arrested embryos in 2004, called the work an important addition to the field. "Regardless of how you feel about personhood for embryos, if the embryo is dead, then the issue of personhood is resolved," Landry said. "This then reduces the ethics of human embryonic stem cell generation to the ethics of, say, organ donation. So now you're really saying, 'Can we take live cells from dead embryos the way we take live organs from dead patients?'" Landry is part of a consortium that is pursuing the approach.

But others said the approach fails to solve the ethical problems. There is no way to prove that an arrested embryo would have stopped growing if it had been put into a woman's womb rather than a lab dish, said Robin Lovell-Badge of the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in London. So that leaves open the possibility that it was the lab conditions that halted their growth, he said.

The Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, said he believed an embryo may not be dead if individual cells are still alive and able to create stem cell lines.

Landry says an embryo is dead if its cells irreversibly stop working together to function as a single organism. But even under that definition, Pacholczyk said, scientists know too little about early embryos to discern when one is truly dead.

Dr. George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute said the new paper's approach also raises a scientific concern: Stem cells from arrested embryos might carry the risk of some undetected defect.

"If there was something wrong with the embryo that made it arrest, isn't there something wrong with these cells?" that could cause problems with their use, he asked. "We don't know."

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Vitae, also known as curricula vitae or c.v., are documents that detail your academic and professional accomplishments. Vitae are more comprehensive documents than resumes. They are most often used for academic or research positions, whereas resumes are the preferred documents in business and industry. [Note “vitae” (vee-tie) is the plural form; “vita” (vee-tuh) is singular]
Vitae are commonly used in applying for the following:

-Admission to graduate school or as part of an application packet for a graduate assistantship or scholarship
-Grant proposals
-Teaching, research, and upper-level administrative positions in higher education
-Academic departmental and tenure reviews
-College or university service appointments
-Professional association leadership positions
-Speaking engagements
-Publishing and editorial review boards
-Research and consulting positions in a variety of settings
-School administration positions at the superintendent, principal, or department head level

While resumes are rarely more than one or two pages long, vitae can be many pages in length. Although there is no limitation on the length of vitae, it is important that they, like resumes, be written concisely. Common lengths for curriculum vitae are one to three pages for bachelor’s and master’s degree candidates; one to five pages for doctoral candidates; and five or more pages for an experienced academician or researcher.

Besides conveying information about who you are, your education, and your professional experience, a curriculum vita also includes information about professional publications, presentations, committee work, grants received, and other grants based on each person’s experience. The following list is provided as a guide for determining which categories of information to include in your c.v.:

-Education
-Master’s thesis or project
-Dissertation title or topic
-Course highlights or areas of concentration in graduate study
-Teaching experience and interests
-Research experience and interests
-Consulting experience
-Internships or graduate practica
-Fieldwork
-Publications
-Professional papers and presentations
-Grants received
-Professional association and committee leadership positions and activities
-Certificates and licensure
-Special training
-Academic awards, scholarships, and fellowships
-Foreign study and travel abroad
-Language competencies
-Technical and computer skills

Although curricula vitae are often similar to resumes, the preferred style, format, and content varies from discipline to discipline. Before writing a c.v., you should become familiar with the requirements of your academic field by asking faculty members in your department and contacting professional associations for additional guidelines and examples.

Class Minutes 9/18 by Chris

This is long be sure to read the entire thing!
What we discussed today:

-The possibility of doing a web based task such as a podcast.

-Anomalon and quark (quantum physics terms), and how these terms may alter one's perception of them selves and the universe they live in by viewing reality from different perspectives ( what would you see if you were riding on a beam of light ( wave particle duality) verses looking from outside the milky way or from inside a blackhole).

-The SU career center is located on the third floor of the Hall of Languages

- Military in shcools, do they have the right to be there? Yes if school accepts government funding of any kind. Started to discuss wheter or not we agree with this .

-Student loans, are people with student loans indentured servant? When you die do loans get discharged? Yes! in fact they do:
(I think important enought to include)
Cancellation Conditions Amount Forgiven Notes
Borrower's total and permanent disability1 or death 100% For a PLUS Loan, includes death but not disability of the student for whom the parents borrowed.
Full-time teacher for five consecutive years in a designated elementary
or secondary school
serving students from low-income families Up to $5,000 of the aggregate loan
amount that is outstanding after completion of the fifth year of teaching.

A borrower might qualify for loan forgiveness under the Direct Consolidation
and the FFEL Consolidation Loan
programs. If so, only the portion of the consolidation loan used to repay Direct Stafford Loans or FFEL Stafford
Loans qualifies. For Direct and FFEL Stafford Loans received on or after October 1, 1998, by a
borrower with no outstanding loan balance as of that date. At least one of the five consecutive
years of teaching must occur after the 1997-98 academic year. (To find out whether your school is considered a low-income
school, visit http://www.studentaid.ed.gov.
Click on "Repaying," then click on "Cancellation and Deferment Options for Teachers."
Or, call 1-800-4-FED-AID.)
Bankruptcy (in rare cases) 100% Cancellation is possible only if the bankruptcy court rules that repayment would cause undue hardship.
Closed school (before student could complete program of study) or false loan certification 100% For loans received on or after January 1, 1986.
School does not make required return of loan funds to the lender Up to the amount that the school was
required to return. For loans received on or after January 1, 1986.
(ED.gov)

-White lieing (Don's words, paraphrased), don't lie about somthing verifiable (in other words don't lie if you can get caught)

-heuristic->A heuristic is a replicable method or approach for directing one's attention in learning, discovery, or problem-solving (wikipedia)


What we have to do for Wednesday:

-word of the day: colpocoquette (hint: not in dictionary.com)

-cover letter draft taylored to individual job description (the same description being used for your resume)

- Carla can do the class minutes for wednesday because she met my parents at the grocery store ( she can tell you the story)

If you have any questions send me an e-mail or call me

Assignment 1 -- Learning Organization

At the center of what Senge hopes we'll understand about a "learning organization" is that real learning gets to the heart of what it is to be human, and how we can re-create ourselves through dialogue, systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. Pick something from the article, and discuss how it may "threathen" to expand your traditional views about learning.