More women than men are getting college degrees, but women still earn less than their male counterparts, according to a new comprehensive study by the Women’s Foundation of Southern Arizona.

The study was distributed Wednesday at the group’s 16th annual luncheon at the Tucson Convention Center.

The foundation created the report – using data from the 2000 census, along with 2004 and 2006 state reports – as a baseline for future reports and trends.

“We need to establish some baseline data that we can . . . compare year over year,” said Laura Penny, the foundation’s executive director. “We are very good at segregating data by age, race and ethnicity – but when you look at data by gender, it tells a very different story. We see some really stunning disparities.”

For example, in southern Arizona, the median earnings for women who work full time year-round were 73 percent to 78 percent of men’s salaries, according to 2000 data in the study.

Maura Grogan, a board chairwoman, said the report also will help the foundation make women become “economically self-sufficient.”

The study is a follow-up to its initial 2000 report. This new study concentrates on southern Arizona data and will be updated annually.

Jan Monk, member of the foundation’s advisory council, said this new report will help determine what the organization funds in the future.

Other major concerns in the report include health issues.

The leading cause of death in women ages 45 to 64 in 2006 was lung cancer in Pima and Cochise counties; in Santa Cruz County, the mortality rate is much higher with breast cancer.

“I think that reflects the fact that breast cancer is higher in Mexican-American women and also higher in Mexico so there’s some cultural and ethnic issues, but we don’t know the causes. It could also have to do with access to care,” said Monk, a professor of geography at UA.

The luncheon attracted more than 800 people and honored Helaine Levy, executive director of the Diamond Family Philanthropies.

Founded in 1992, the Women’s Foundation has invested more than $1.2 million in organizations that promote equity and opportunity for women and girls in southern Arizona.

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EDUCATION FACTS

• 55 percent of bachelor of arts degrees awarded by the University of Arizona in the 2006-07 school year were to women. This is up from 45 percent in 2000-01.

• In 2007, 1 in every 20 female students in southern Arizona high schools dropped out.

• In 2006, of the 2,669 associates degrees awarded at southern Arizona’s three colleges – Pima, Cochise and Tohono O’odham – 52 percent were awarded to females, a decrease from 57 percent in 2000.

• In 2006, 48 percent of the 4,252 certificates awarded at Pima and Cochise colleges went to females, a decrease from 67 percent in 2000.

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On the Web

Women’s Foundation of Southern Arizona

http://www.womengiving.org

In this 2008 file photo, Professor Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge, makes remarks at an event marking the 50th anniversary of NASA, at George Washington University in Washington. Hawking has been rushed to a hospital and is seriously ill, Cambridge University said Monday

LONDON — Famed mathematician Stephen Hawking has been rushed to a hospital and is seriously ill, Cambridge University said Monday.

The university said Hawking has been fighting a chest infection for several weeks, and was being treated at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, the university city north of London.

“Professor Hawking is very ill,” said Gregory Hayman, the university’s head of communications. “He is undergoing tests. He has been unwell for a couple of weeks.”

Hawking, 67, gained renown for his work on black holes, and has remained active despite being diagnosed at 21 with ALS, (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

For some years, Hawking has been almost entirely paralyzed, and he communicates through an electronic voice synthesizer activated by his fingers.

“Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague. We all hope he will be amongst us again soon,” said Professor Peter Haynes, head of the university’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

Hawking had canceled an appearance at Arizona State University on April 6 because of his illness.

He announced last year that he would step down from his post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a title once held by the great 18th century physicist Isaac Newton, and the end of this academic year. However, the university said Hawking intended to continue working as Emeritus Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

Arizona ranks 24th out of states

Child care centers in Arizona have made mild improvements in helping children become school-ready and protecting their health and safety, according to a study released by a national nonprofit group that monitors the field.

But in the same report, the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies warned states that more needs to be done.

Arizona ranked 24th out of states in the care its centers provide to children. A quality-rating program spearheaded by the First Things First initiative hopes to boost child development at the state’s at-home and child care centers.

That center directors are not required to have college degrees and lead teachers need only a high-school diploma or GED were mentioned as some of Arizona’s weaknesses in the report.

The report, released Thursday, ranked states in both the oversight and regulation they give child care centers. Arizona fell short in one of five oversight categories because child care centers are inspected once a year. The association recommends centers are visited four times a year by licensing, health and fire inspectors.

The state also fell short in one of 10 regulation benchmarks by not meeting staff-child ratios set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

The Department of Defense, District of Columbia, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Maryland were the top five entities in the report; Nebraska, Louisiana and Idaho received the lowest scores.

Although mild improvements have been made, the association concluded in its 2009 report that current state child care center regulation and oversight benchmarks fall short in protecting the health and safety of children along with promoting child development.

The average score was 83 out of 150 points, which the agencies association said is equivalent to an “F.” Arizona scored 87 points, or 58 percent of total points possible.

When discussion turns to teachers being required to have bachelor’s degrees or centers having smaller staff-to-child ratios, Bruce Liggett, executive director of the Arizona Child Care Association, worries parents could carry the burden of paying for those standards.

“The cost of child care is already prohibitive for lower- and middle-income families,” Liggett said. “So when people start suggesting overnight we should start requiring a bachelor’s degree, who is going to pay for this?”

The Office of Child Care Licensing has received a copy of the report and noted a few inaccuracies. One of Arizona’s weaknesses highlighted in the report is that family-care providers can care for up to five unrelated children for pay without a license. However, that number is four or fewer children for pay, according to the department. Also the report recommended that inspection and complaint reports be made available online, which is something the department says it already provides.

A billboard honoring the memory of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary science, has appeared along Highway 50 on Orchard Mesa above the Colorado River in Grand Junction, Colo. The billboard space was purchased by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born 200 years ago on Feb. 12, 1809.

Charles Darwin would no doubt be surprised to learn that, 127 years after his death, people around the world will be celebrating his 200th birthday on Thursday.

Biology’s “reluctant revolutionary,” as English historian James Moore calls him, was a quiet man and frequently ill. But there will be nothing low-key about “Darwin Day,” the anniversary of the English naturalist’s Feb. 12, 1809, birth.

The official celebration Web site (darwinday.org) lists 281 events in 31 nations, including more than 170 in the United States. Events range from “Evolutionpalooza!” at the San Francisco Main Branch Public Library to an all-day reading of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (its 150th anniversary year) at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.

“Darwin was it,” says paleontologist Robert Carroll of McGill University in Montreal, who is giving a public talk at the university’s Redpath Museum.

Modern biology begins with Darwin, who died in 1882 at 73, and his recognition that every living species evolved from a shared single-cell ancestor formed in Earth’s earliest days, Carroll says. “Particularly because of the anti-evolution reactions going on despite the science, we have to celebrate this anniversary.”

So, part birthday bash, part thumb-in-the-eye to creationists, part opportunity for publishers rolling out Darwin books like sausages — who and what are evolution’s fans celebrating?

“Certainly without Darwin, we would have had (discoveries about) evolution, but we wouldn’t have had natural selection,” says science historian Peter Bowler of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Darwin proposed in 1859 that natural selection — “preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious,” in his words — was the inherited mechanism of evolution, how living things endured by hanging onto the traits that helped them survive and eventually losing those that didn’t.

Upending the widespread belief among biologists that all species arose separately, Darwin’s central argument in his landmark 1859 book “On the Origin of Species” was this: “It inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct.”

The talented Mr. Darwin

Darwin didn’t make these pronouncements on a whim. At 22, he set out as a gentleman explorer aboard HMS Beagle, chartered to survey the coasts of South American and Pacific isles on a planned two-year voyage that lasted almost five years. Famously, the trip took Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, where he noted the differences between birds and tortoises on the islands.

On returning, Darwin made his name as a geologist in the Victorian scientific establishment.

His observations of how Earth’s changing geological past is shown in rocks, a revelation of the era, helped make clear to him the changing environmental conditions that might push species to evolve.

Publication in 1839 of his account of his travels, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” made Darwin famous at age 29.

In that year, Darwin first privately drew his now-familiar “tree of life” diagram, showing the ancestral links between 24 living and four extinct species groups.

“No one had previously seen (species) relationships as treelike and therefore explicitly genealogical,” writes the science historian Keith Thomson in “The Young Charles Darwin” (Yale University Press, $28), out Thursday.

For two decades, Darwin pondered the differences between the island species and continental ones in the specimens packed away and described in his notes, as he quietly raised a family of 10 children (three died in childhood). He bred birds to test his view of natural selection.

The religious climate of Darwin’s day favored “special creation,” the belief that all species, from mayflies to manatees to mankind, were created separately by a higher power.

Historians agree that Darwin feared the controversy that would attach to his name with the public release of this idea (“It is like confessing a murder,” he wrote to the botanist John Dalton Hooker.)

What finally prodded him to publish his heretical ideas was his 1858 reception of a manuscript from the naturalist Alfred Wallace, who had come to the same conclusions about natural selection.

Both scientists’ ideas were unveiled to a scientific gathering in London, with Darwin expanding on his findings a year later in “On the Origin of Species.”

Darwin’s ideas are often presented as adversarial to the concepts of creationism — the belief that life began exactly as is described in the Bible — and intelligent design, the belief that life’s evolution is the design of a higher power.

Often forgotten, in the 1800s and now, is that “Darwinism” is simply the idea of a common ancestor for all living things, with natural selection thrown in as a driver of evolution, says science philosopher Michael Ruse of Florida State University.

The controversial Mr. Darwin

“Origin” quickly sold out, sparking an 1860 debate at England’s Oxford University that presaged many of the arguments over evolution heard today. At that debate, the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce supposedly asked one of Darwin’s supporters, the biologist Thomas Huxley, whether his grandmother or grandfather’s side of his family was descended from monkeys

In the United States, the debate turned similarly acrimonious with the 1927 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” in which Tennessee prosecuted schoolteacher John Scopes for teaching evolution.

Scopes lost, but the scorn on the creationist prosecutor, Williams Jennings Bryan, by pundits such as The Baltimore Sun’s H.L. Mencken, remained the wider public image of the case, immortalized in the 1960 film “Inherit the Wind.”

Public debate over evolution has bounced from the statehouse to the schoolhouse to the courthouse since the Scopes trial. A CBS News poll last year found 56 percent of respondents would favor “teaching creationism along with evolution in public schools,” with 36 percent opposed.

Courts in 1968, 1987 and 2005 have found efforts to teach creationism and intelligent design to be an unconstitutional breach of the separation between church and state. Public debates over the teaching of evolution surfaced in January in Texas and Louisiana; bills critical of teaching evolution were introduced this month in the Iowa and New Mexico legislatures.

“We’re not out to bash Darwin, he wasn’t a God-hater out to destroy Christianity,” says Tommy Mitchell of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., who will speak there on Darwin’s life Thursday. “We would argue his observations hang on a bad starting point. He just never had a biblical worldview and that led him to his conclusions.”

On the other hand, Catholic theologian John Haught of Georgetown University, author of “God After Darwin: A Theory of Evolution,” notes that the Vatican accepts evolution. Evolution fits comfortably with religious belief, he says, unless you view the Bible as a “literal source of scientific or technical information.”

“Evolution is really kind of an anomaly in terms of the public view of science in the United States,” says political scientist Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing. Surveys show the public supports science broadly, “and even the notion of animals evolving gets people less upset. It is really the notion of people evolving that triggers a negative reaction.”

Miller and colleagues published a 2006 survey in Science, for example, finding that 62 percent of U.S. respondents agreed: “Human beings were created by God as whole persons and did not evolve from earlier forms of life.”

The prodigious Mr. Darwin

“Today we live in a second golden age of evolution,” says University of Wisconsin biologist Sean Carroll, author of “Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species,” also out Thursday. The 1953 explanation of how DNA encodes the genes inside our cells has led to an explosion of discoveries in evolution today, such as:

• “Horizontal” gene swapping among microbes and through viruses into larger creatures and plants.

• Intact “tool kits” of genes, such as the basic animal body plan from millions of years ago.

• The guiding role of gene expression, how often genes are turned on and off, in shaping the growth of living things.

Understanding DNA and genomes (genetic maps) means scientists will one day “understand the full scope of the evolutionary process at its deepest fundamental level,” Carroll says.

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THE ORIGINS OF DARWIN

• Feb. 12, 1809: Charles Robert Darwin is born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England.

• Dec. 27, 1831: Darwin set out on the HMS Beagle, where he was engaged as a naturalist. Over the next few years he would travel to such places as Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, the Falkland Islands, Peru and Tahiti, sending plant, animal and fossil specimens back to England.

• Oct. 2, 1836: The HMS Beagle arrives back in England.

• Jan. 4, 1837: Darwin speaks before the Royal Geological Society in London, presenting his findings that animals in South America had adapted as land masses rose over eons.

• Jan. 29, 1839: Darwin marries his cousin, Emma Wedgwood.

• August, 1839: Darwin’s journal of his voyage aboard the Beagle is published and sells well.

• July 1, 1858: Darwin goes public with his views on the evolution of species at a meeting of the Linnean Society, a gathering of prominent naturalists.

• Nov. 22, 1859: “On the Origin of Species” is published and becomes an immediate success.

• March, 1871: Darwin’s book on human origins called “The Descent of Man” is published.

• April 19, 1882: Darwin, who had been chronically ill for most of his adult life, dies. He is buried at Westminster Abbey, not far from the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton.

Source: AboutDarwin.com

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ON THE WEB

The official celebration Web site: darwinday.org

A small but growing percentage of high school students have passed at least one college-level course before they graduate, but participation and pass rates among some minority groups remain disproportionately low, a report says.

Black, Latino and American Indian students, in particular “are not yet always receiving adequate preparation for the rigors of college,” says Trevor Packer, vice president of the Advanced Placement program, administered by the non-profit College Board.

The group, which released the report Wednesday, has been holding up its AP program as a national measure of academic rigor. Course content must be approved by the AP program. Students who score a 3 or higher (on a 1-5 scale) on a standardized test administered nationally can receive college credit.

The report singled out 16 schools as leaders in helping black and/or Latino students succeed in particular AP subjects. They’re located in eight states: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Tennessee and Texas.

Packer said a state-by-state assessment suggests that performance improves when state policymakers provide incentives that encourage schools to make AP part of their curriculum:

• Maryland achieved the highest percentage (23.4 percent) of students scoring at least a 3.

• Maine had the largest single-year increase in high school graduates who scored a 3 or higher.

• Vermont, Maine, Maryland, Arkansas, Washington and Oregon had the highest five-year gains.

• Maryland, New York, Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts and California saw more than 20 percent of students graduate from high school earning at least one score of 3 or higher.

• Alabama has seen the largest five-year increase in black students scoring a 3 or higher.

• In no state did black students pass exams at a rate proportionate to their representation in their graduating class. Latinos achieved a proportionate rate in 18 states; American Indians, in 16.

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ON THE WEB

More report details: http://www.collegeboard.com/

Primatologist Dr. Birute Mary Galdikas, with the help of an assistant, carries an orangutan named Isabel before her release into the wild at Tanjung Puting National Park on Borneo island, Indonesia. There are an estimated 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, mostly live in small and scattered populations that are unlikely to survive the onslaught on forests much longer, with an estimated 300 football fields of trees are cleared every hour.

TANJUNG PUTING NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia – Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas.

Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his “angels,” is the only one still at it. And the red apes she studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.

Galdikas worries many questions may never be answered. How long do orangutans live in the wild? How far do the males roam? And how many mates do they have in their lifetime?

“I try not to get depressed, I try not to get burned out,” says the Canadian scientist, pulling a wide-rimmed jungle hat over her shoulder-length gray hair in Tanjung Puting National Park. She gently leans over to pick up a tiny orangutan, orphaned when his mother was caught raiding crops.

“But when you get up in the air you start gasping in horror; there’s nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rain forest. Elsewhere, there’s burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park.”

The demand for palm oil is rising in the U.S. and Europe because it is touted as a “clean” alternative to fuel. Indonesia is the world’s top producer of palm oil, and prices have jumped by almost 70 percent in the last year.

But palm oil plantations devastate the forest and create a monoculture on the land, in which orangutans cannot survive. Over the years, Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat to her “babies” as palm oil.

There are only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Most live in small, scattered populations that cannot take the onslaught on the forests much longer.

Trees are being cut at a rate of 300 football fields every hour. And massive land-clearing fires have turned the country into one of the top emitters of carbon.

Tanjung Puting, which has 1,600 square miles, clings precariously to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans — one of the two largest populations on the planet, together with the nearby Sebangau National Park — are less vulnerable to diseases and fires.

That has allowed them, to a degree, to live and evolve as they have for millions of years.

“I am not an alarmist,” says Galdikas, speaking calmly but deliberately, her brow slightly furrowed. “But I would say, if nothing is done, orangutan populations outside of national parks have less than 10 years left.”

Even Tanjung Puting is not safe, in part because of a border dispute between the central government, which argues in favor of a 1996 map, and provincial officials, who are pushing for a much smaller 1977 map. If local officials win, the park could be slashed by up to 25 percent.

Galdikas, of Lithuanian descent, was an anthropology student at the University of California in Los Angeles when she approached Leakey, a visiting lecturer, in 1969. She follows on the heels of Goodall, who today devotes virtually all of her time to advocacy for chimps, and Fossey, who was brutally murdered in her Rwandan hut in 1985.

Two and a half years later, she and her then husband, Rod Brindamour, arrived in Tanjung Puting and settled into a primitive thatch hut in the heart of one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, with millions of plant and animal species.

Twice featured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, she wrote an autobiography, “Reflections of Eden,” describing how she fell in love with the sound of cicadas, and marveled at the sudden shifts of light that in an instant transformed drab greens and browns into translucent shades of emerald.

Her first challenge was simply finding the well-camouflaged orangutans in 100-foot-high trees. But eventually she was able to track them, sometimes for several weeks at a time.

She discovered that female orangutans give birth when they are around 15 and then only once every eight or nine years, making them especially vulnerable to extinction. They also have one of the most intense maternal-offspring relationships of all mammals, remaining inseparable for the first seven or eight years.

While orangutans are at first very gregarious, as adults they live largely solitary lives, foraging for fruit or sleeping. Orangutan” means “man of the forest.”

One of her main projects today is her rehabilitation center in a village outside Tanjung Puting, overflowing with more than 300 animals orphaned when their mothers were killed by palm oil plantation workers.

With forests disappearing, the red apes raid crops, grabbing freshly planted shoots from the fields.

“Many come in very badly wounded, suffering from malnutrition, psychological and emotional and even physical trauma,” says Galdikas, as she watches members of her staff prepare six young orangutans for release one overcast Saturday afternoon.

It is a three-hour journey along bumpy roads to the release site. By the time they arrive, it is raining and the last gray light is feebly pushing its way through the deep canopy of trees.

After years of being cared for, fed and taught the ways of the woods, the young orangutans scramble nimbly to the tops of trees. Branches snap as they make their nests for the night.

“It is getting harder and harder to find good, safe forest in which to free them,” says Galdikas, who today spends half her time in Indonesia and most of the rest teaching at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

Forestry Minister Malem Kaban says the government is committed to protecting Indonesia’s dense, primary forests and that no permit should be granted within a half-mile of a national park. Even so, one palm oil company has started clearing trees within Tanjung Puting’s northern perimeter, leaving a wasteland of churned-up peat and charred trunks. Four others are seeking concessions along its eastern edge.

Derom Bangun, executive chairman of the Indonesian Palm Oil Association, says while his 300 members have vowed to stay clear of national parks, others have been known to operate within areas that should be off-limits. Sometimes it is not their fault, he notes, pointing to the need for better coordination between central and local government on border issues.

Galdikas, a passionate field researcher, says one of her great regrets is that she does not share Goodall’s skills in raising awareness and funds for the great apes. But she is happy Tanjung Puting has over the years grown into a popular tourist destination. She says there’s no better advertisement for conservation than being in a rain forest.

Some visitors are even lucky enough to come face to face with an orangutan on a slippery jungle trail.

“As he passes you, you nod and he nods back to you and continues on his way,” she says, adding that looking in the eyes of a great ape, it instantly becomes clear that there is no separation between humans and nature.

“If they go extinct, we will have one less kin to call our own in this world,” says Galdikas, who is also president of the Los Angeles-based Orangutan Foundation International. “And do we really want to be alone on this planet?”

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ON THE WEB

Orangutan Foundation International: www.orangutan.org

While Congress spends — and plans to spend — like the proverbial drunken sailor to “bail out” various industries for practices that are largely their fault and the fault of those in Congress who were supposed to provide oversight, another deficit looms which is at least as troubling as the economic one.

For the third straight year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has found that a large number of Americans cannot pass a basic 33-question civic literacy test on their country’s history and institutions.

The multiple-choice questions ask about the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 series of government programs (The New Deal) and the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial).

No, I didn’t peek at the answers. I received a good education.

The random sample of 2,508 American adults, ranging from those without high school diplomas, to people with advanced degrees, revealed a minimal difference in civic literacy between the uneducated and the highly educated.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed could identify Paula Abdul as one of the judges on “American Idol,” but only 21 percent were able to recognize a phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I had to memorize that speech in high school. What are they memorizing now?

Not much of any use, it appears. Ignorance of America’s history and heritage is a setup for politicians and others who want to manipulate us into a way of thinking that allows them to make decisions that are unconstitutional and unwise.

More than repeating phrases and figures, knowledge of the past prepares us for a future based on unchanging principles. That’s why knowledge matters and ignorance endangers our government and threatens our way of life even more than terrorism.

Civic illiteracy in the United States crosses all educational lines, including the vaunted Harvard where, according to the ISI survey, seniors scored 69.56 on the test, or a D-plus. And they were the best.

The survey found that up to three-fourths of Americans believe teaching America’s heritage is fundamental to a good education and to producing good citizens. So why is it not being done?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the continued embarrassment by the liberal education establishment over America and what it means to be an American.

From their guilt about prosperity and our freedoms, to their opposition to “dead white males,” college professors, especially since the ’60s, have favored the trendy and quaint over the established and proven.

Remarkably, a college degree does not increase civic knowledge.

According to the report, “The average score among those who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree is 57 percent, or an ‘F’. That is only 13 percentage points higher than the average score among those who ended their formal education with a high school diploma. Only 24 percent know that the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.”

That’s pretty basic information, isn’t it? One might expect the Bill of Rights to be part of any class on government, even as early as elementary school.

Other findings: “Elected officials score lower than the general public,” which tells us all we need to know about Washington.

“Television — including TV news — Dumbs America Down,” says ISI.

In the midst of important hearings in Washington on the economy and a possible bailout for the big three automakers, one cable channel carried a story about a 44-year-old stripper who is suing for age discrimination.

ISI calls on everyone involved in education, including parents, to re-evaluate curricula and standards of accountability and to emphasize to students the fundamentals about our country.

It notes Thomas Jefferson’s admonition: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

Read the report at www.isi.org and weep. And then demand of yourself and others that something be done to fix the intellectual deficit.

Cal Thomas is an author and broadcast commentator. His e-mail address is calthomas@tribune.com.

Problems cited include negligence in medical care, lack of programs for detainees

A University of Arizona researcher presented some findings of her forthcoming report on female immigrants in detention Thursday afternoon, claiming some have been mistreated.

The Mexican American Studies & Research Center hosted the lecture at UA’s Cesar Chávez Building, 1110 E. James E. Rogers Way, where Nina Rabin, gave a summary of her report to students and faculty.

“Unseen Prisoners: A Report on Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizona” is a collection of interviews, concerns and possible solutions to the conditions women live in while detained and awaiting deportation, Rabin said.

“Some women are deported quite quickly, but for those who want to exercise their legal rights, it could be a really long process, sometimes up to two years,” Rabin said.

In the past year, students and researchers from the Southwest Institute for Research on Women conducted more than 50 interviews with current and former detainees, attorneys, and social service providers in southern Arizona.

In her research, Rabin said she found negligence in medical care, severe conditions in detention and an absence of programs for women in detention. She said the hardest aspect of detention for the women was separation from their families.

Rabin would not elaborate on details or specific cases until the report is made public at the beginning of next year.

“We have asked immigration officers to sit down with us, go over our report and give them a chance to get involved,” Rabin said. “We’re still waiting to hear back.”

Rabin is the director of Border Research at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women and the co-director of the UA’s Immigration Clinic at the James E. Rogers College of Law.

But ‘the risk is not zero and . . . that should give people some pause’

Lake Mead's receding levels can be seen.

SCOTTSDALE – There’s a less than 5 percent chance that Lake Mead – one of the nation’s largest reservoirs – could dry up by 2021, contradicting a study earlier this year predicting a more dire possibility, according to research presented Tuesday in Scottsdale.

The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Colorado, was presented at a Colorado River symposium at a Scottsdale resort. The findings are expected to be published sometime next year.

Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border, is one of several large reservoirs on the Colorado River that hold drinking and irrigation water for millions of people in western states.

A study released in February said there’s a 50 percent chance that climate change would leave Lake Mead dry by 2021. The study, conducted by the San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, stunned water managers in the West, with one calling it absurd.

The more recent research shows there’s less than a 5 percent chance that the lake will dry up by 2021, and a 40 percent chance it will go dry in any given year after 2050.

Although they came up with different numbers, the scientists who conducted the conflicting research agree that Lake Mead is in trouble.

“The risk is not zero and it’s not even at 1 percent or 2 percent, and that should give people some pause,” said Bradley Udall, director of the University of Colorado Western Water Assessment and co-author of the recent findings. “Even a 5 percent chance of a dry reservoir in any one year, it’s significant, and 20 percent is very very high, and 40 percent is off the charts with regard to making a reliable water system.”

Tim Barnett, a research marine physicist at the Scripps institution and co-author of the study released in February, said he did not make any errors in conducting his research, but that’s beside the point.

“The point is, whether it’s 40 percent in 2050 or 40 percent by 2030, that’s a hell of a problem,” he said. “The main factor is we’re taking more water out of the system than Mother Nature is putting in. And as long as that’s true, you can tell what’s going to happen – you don’t have to be a rocket scientist.”

In December, seven Western states and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne signed an agreement to conserve and share scarce water if the Colorado River drought continues.

The agreement established triggers that would reduce river water deliveries to states if the lake’s water level falls to 1,075 feet above sea level. It also calls for states to create agreements for further restrictions if the level drops to 1,025 feet.

The lake is currently half full at 1,107 feet.

Tucson uses about half of its 47- billion-gallon share of Colorado River water by blending it with groundwater and pumping it to homes, mostly in midtown. The water comes through a pipeline from Avra Valley and enters the city near Tucson International Airport.

Last summer, the city completed the Southern Avra Valley Storage and Recovery Project, a series of nine large ponds where the water trickles down into the groundwater. The facility and a similar one to its north will eventually provide almost all of the city’s water.

For now, half the water is being stored underground in Avra Valley. By 2011, the city plans to have the pipes needed to bring that water to the city.

More than 90 percent of Tucson’s water will then come from the Colorado River, and hundreds of groundwater wells in and around Tucson will be shut down.

Citizen Staff Writer B. Poole contributed to this report.

A new research center at the University of Arizona will solidify the state’s position as a global leader in the mining industry, organizers said Tuesday.

The Institute for Mining Resources will leverage mining history to ensure the state remains a force in mineral extraction, said Gary Jones. The Science Foundation board member spoke at a news conference announcing the institute, a collaboration among mining companies, state universities and Science Foundation Arizona.

The center, funded initially by an $8.7 million grant from the foundation and $8.8 million from the industry partners, will keep the state up to speed in the 21st century’s “competitive knowledge economy,” Jones said.

A key focus at the institute will be sustainability and environmental sensitivity. Planned projects include seeking ways to reduce water consumption and increase use of alterative energy, said Mark Barton, a UA geosciences professor.

The center will link the universities in a long-term partnership to educate the mining work force, foster university research and develop technologies that keep Arizona ahead of the curve, Barton said.

“We need to be thinking very much toward the future in what we’re doing,” he said.

During the first four years, the institute will study:

• New technology to track miners underground

• Using computer game software for mine rescue training

• Use of alternative energy

• Biodiesel’s effect on miners

• Effects of dust on communities near mines

• Using robotics to increase mine efficiency and get minerals from extreme environments

The institute will build on more than a century of mining in Arizona and work toward a strong future for the state’s industry, Barton said.

“There clearly is the capacity for another century, if not more,” he said.

The institute will be supported by 15 private companies – including Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold Inc., Rosemont Copper, Asarco and Resolution Copper Mining – in addition to the Science Foundation and Arizona’s three universities.

The announcement of the mining institute comes as copper prices have plummeted. The metal was trading at about $1.65 per pound Tuesday after a high of about $4 earlier this year, according to the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Freeport McMoRan on Monday announced it would lay off 597 of its 8,796 Arizona employees. The company, a partner in the institute, laid off 40 employees Nov. 12, said spokesman Richard Peterson.

He declined to comment on the company’s investment in the institute during the apparent downturn in the state’s mining industry.

The University of Arizona and the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System are seeking military personnel and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan for sleep-study focus groups.

The groups will help in a UA-VA joint study to create a non-medication-based therapy to help veterans and active-duty personnel learn ways to improve their sleep.

Statistics show approximately 70 percent of soldiers returning from war zones have sleep difficulties.

UA is recruiting military personnel and veterans who have returned from deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan within the last two years to participate in the focus groups.

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For more information

Individuals interested in participating should contact Monica Kelly at 626-2178 or restlab@gmail.com.

The Santa Rosa Branch Library, 1075 S. Tenth Ave.

Pima County Public Library system officials are hoping to avoid trimming hours and services in the face of budget cuts ordered earlier this week.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry on Wednesday directed department and agency heads to come up with 2.5 percent cuts on top of the 5 percent across-the-board cuts contained in the current county budget.

The county is $3 million to $4 million short of revenue to support its $1.37 billion budget that took effect July 1. Huckelberry said the red ink could hit $12 million to $14 million by the end of the fiscal year, June 30.

“It looks pretty stark,” Nancy Ledeboer, library system director, said Thursday.

Ledeboer hopes the county-operated system doesn’t have to consider closing its doors one day a week or reduce spending on new materials and services, as officials of the Phoenix Public Library are considering.

“That’s the last thing we want to do,” said Ledeboer, who will address the situation and possible options with the Pima County Library Board at a meeting Wednesday.

The library system is in a hiring freeze, Ledeboer said.

The library system has about 378 full-time workers for 23 branches, including the Joel D. Valdez downtown library.

The system already is running on tight financial practices, Ledeboer said.

“Last year, we didn’t replace our older computers,” she said.

That accounted for one-fourth of the system’s staff and public use computers.

If that replays this year due to financial constraints, the system will see half of its computers out of date next year, she said.

The library budgeted $35.6 million for the fiscal year ending June 30. It is funded mostly through a secondary property tax of about 34 cents per $100 of assessed valuation.

The annual operational costs of the system used to be split between the county and Tucson.

The county assumed full financial responsibility and control of the system in 2006, under an agreement with the city. The city is to pay $2 million to the county in this final year of the pact.

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On the Web

www.library.pima.gov/locations

Most people think of affirmative action in the context of access to education. Whether we call it affirmative action or diversity, there is a widely shared belief that any process that considers race or gender in evaluating an application for admission is unfair.

Actually, the reverse is true.

Those of us who support affirmative action also oppose an admissions policy that relies exclusively on numbers because we believe that a person is more than a number.

Schools and testing agencies promote the use of test scores or an index created from the grade point average and the test scores to decide who is in and who is out.

In the rarified world of psychometricians, a point difference on a test score may be meaningless, but in the imaginations of parents and students, “fair” means who is “first” or who has the highest number.

What most parents do not know is that the game is rigged. Just as an “A” in an honors English class is worth more than an “A” in a regular English class, an “A” from an elite school is worth more than an “A” from a school farther down the educational pecking order.

A fair admissions process would evaluate our children as individuals, not as numbers. Who are they, what have they done, what might they achieve if they are given an opportunity to attend this school or university? Merit cannot be assessed in the abstract. Merit is about achievement and it is about character.

There is an old cliché: “You are where you are from.” Each of us is from a place and also from a family and a community. All of these have an effect on our character.

If we can refer to the way our religious beliefs shape our commitment to social justice, why can’t we talk about the history of our own families and how they have struggled to overcome racial prejudice or discrimination?

Is this any less relevant than the struggle of a student who grew up poor or in a home with a single parent who struggled to make ends meet? Why would we seek to erase from any consideration of character the very things that make each person unique?

If life experiences matter, then why can’t we consider the obstacles that had to be overcome by a student raised on an Indian reservation, in a racially segregated neighborhood, in Appalachia or by parents who immigrated to this country when the student was just a child?

The idea that a consideration of race and gender is a preference is an absurdity. Eliminating race and gender from consideration when we continue to examine other life experiences that applicants use to explain why they should be admitted disadvantages women and minorities.

It impairs the ability of admissions officers to evaluate candidates fairly.

Let’s say that one applicant describes the experience he had on a sports team where he learned about team work and leadership. Could a young woman describe her experience on a woman’s volleyball or soccer team without running the risk that the authors of the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative would say that she is asking for a “preference” on the basis of gender?

The fact is that sports are segregated by sex and that a federal statute mandates equal funding for women’s sports.

Colorado and Nebraska had affirmative action referenda on the ballot Nov. 4, but advocates for “colorblind” programs have threatened to eventually place similar initiatives in all 50 states.

While they don’t touch the federal statute, in some cases they would make a boy’s discussion of sports appear “neutral,” but a girl’s discussion of sports would raise questions of “preference” on the basis of sex or gender.

In reality, there would be no “preference” when race and gender are considered along with any number of factors that create the character of applicants to any institution of higher education.

Proponents of these referenda would have you believe that is the case, but it is simply not true. The only thing these referenda would do is turn our children into ciphers and the admissions process into a numbers game.

Are your children more than a number?

Jose J. Soto is vice president for affirmative action, equity and diversity at the Southeast Community College Area, in Lincoln, Neb. Deborah Waire Post is a professor of law at the Touro Law Center and co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, in Central Islip, N.Y. This commentary was distributed by the American Forum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational organization that provides views of state experts on major public concerns to stimulate informed discussion.

By Jose J. Soto, Deborah Waire Post

Joyce Snay shows off part of her collection of presidential and war memorabilia at her home in Yuma.

YUMA – Joyce Snay knew her collection of patriotic memorabilia had reached monumental proportions when folks started calling her Betsy Ross and suggesting she lead tours through her home.

Snay’s house is decorated with everything and anything with patriotic colors. In addition, it’s filled to the brim with a Mount Rushmore-sized collection of historical photos, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, postcards and trinkets, all related to America, her presidents and the history of various wars.

“Oh, I’ve got tons of stuff in here,” Snay said, laughing. “I have five boxes in my closet and under my bed. A flea couldn’t crawl in there. It’s loaded. And it’s all over my house. I live with it! I feel like I live in a museum.”

Some of Snay’s treasures are original documents, but most are copies or articles written about whatever thing or subject – and that’s OK with her.

She has postcards from the late 1800s bearing the faces of Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. A copy of President Lincoln’s menu from an inaugural dinner. She also has an American flag that was flown in Iraq.

Her favorite treasures are a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt woven into a piece of silk and a tiny statuette of Lincoln.

“I just love Lincoln. I think Lincoln was just one of the most wonderful people who ever lived.”

Some of Snay’s pieces tell both the history of this country and her family. She has copies of a great-great-grandfather’s discharge papers from the Civil War. She also has a poster depicting volunteers from her home state of Maine – like her grandfather – joining the Spanish- American War.

But that’s only the tip of Snay’s patriotic iceberg.

There’s a lot to see and the good news is that Snay is more than willing to share her collection with the people of Yuma. But instead of letting everyone traipse through her house she’s loading everything up for a public presentation. Her collection will be on display from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Gila Mountain United Methodist Church. Admission will be free.

Snay has held three other public showings of her collection, but previously the events were only open to her RV park.

“People are just flabbergasted,” she said.

Snay began collecting patriotic goodies as a young mother living in Michigan. If she came across a picture of George Washington that she liked Snay would simply glue it onto a page in a magazine. She says that’s what you did back then, when scrapbooks were just too expensive.

So, Snay has been collecting ever since and has her mountain of goodies ever grown. But getting an exact count of all the items is pretty much impossible. So curious folks are left with their only unit of measure being the loudness of Snay’s laughter when she’s asked to give a firm number.

“I’m sorry I’m laughing,” she said, following a veritable volley of guffaws. “I’m going through boxes right now, putting things in order with their years. Oh golly, I’ve got tons of stuff in here.”

But Snay isn’t laughing when she explains the inspiration behind her collection. She’s a patriotic who loves her country and to her that’s certainly no laughing matter.

“I just call myself a good patriotic person,” she said. “I just think it’s important to keep this stuff. My kids probably think I’m crazy, but I’m just interested in this stuff.”

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are racing down the stretch of the 2008 presidential race with substantially different ideas about how to improve American education.

Hopefully the next president will draw lessons from the 50 states currently serving as laboratories of education reform. Florida, in particular, has enjoyed enormous success in boosting both early childhood literacy and the percentage of minority students prepared college.

Florida’s education reforms have slashed fourth grade illiteracy by 32 percent in 10 years. During the same period, the percentage of Florida students scoring “proficient” on the Nation’s Report Card’s fourth grade reading test increased by 54 percent and the percentage scoring “advanced” doubled.

Minority students have been a large contributing factor to that success.

Florida’s Hispanic students now outscore the statewide averages for all students in 15 states on national fourth-grade reading tests, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Florida’s African-American students outscore two statewide averages – Louisiana and Mississippi – and are within striking distance of several others.

Florida’s lawmakers achieved these gains with a combination of policies: standards and accountability, instructional reform, expanded parental choice and alternative teacher certification.

But Florida’s education reformers did not stop at improving childhood literacy. They also have prepared more minority children for college. Gov. Jeb Bush pushed the One Florida Initiative, which replaced race-based affirmative action with effective classroom instruction. The theory was better preparation rather than lower standards.

Working in partnership with the College Board, the One Florida plan sought to increase the academic achievement of Florida’s students, particularly of demographic groups that are underrepresented in universities.

The comprehensive plan included professional development for teachers and counselors and free PSAT exams for students. Florida officials created AP Potential, a Web-based tool to identify promising students for advanced placement coursework.

The program relied heavily on incentives, creating an AP teacher bonus, $50 for every student who passed the test, up to $2,000.

The program also created an incentive for the school, an additional $650 per student who passed an AP exam. Florida officials carefully wrote this bonus into the funding formula so that it went to the school, not to the school district.

The reformers didn’t stop there, either. Using Florida’s A-plus designations, which assign letter grades to schools based upon overall student performance, One Florida provides an additional school bonus of $500 per student passing an AP exam for schools rated “D” or “F.”

Florida’s education reformers set high expectations and created rewards for success. The results have been extremely impressive.

The National Math and Science Initiative recently collected data on the number of Hispanic students passing an AP test per 1,000 Hispanic junior and senior high school students in each state.

Florida led the nation with 78 out of every 1,000 Hispanic students passing an AP test.

In Arizona, only 10 out of 1,000 Hispanic students pass an AP test. For states with sizable Hispanic populations, Arizona ranks dead last.

Do schools respond to incentives? You bet they do. Between 1999 and 2007, the number of Florida students passing AP tests increased by 154 percent. The number of Florida Hispanic students passing an AP exam more than tripled, from 5,611 to 18,882 students.

The number of African-American students passing AP exams also more than tripled, from 1,314 to 4,401. Florida achieved these results in response to what amounts to a tiny portion of the K-12 budget.

The next time the public schools calls for additional resources, the question should be, “in return for what?” In Florida schools and teachers make more money the old fashioned way, they earn it.

The days of “provide money first, hope for results later” must come to an end.

Matthew Ladner, Ph.D., is vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute (www.goldwaterinstitute.org).