academic earth

academic earth

The University of Nevada, Reno is known for the quality of its journalism school and the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, according to the 2010 edition of "The Insider's Guide to the Colleges."

However, the guide, compiled by the staff of the Yale Daily News, faults UNR for a "too limited student population" in which 82 percent come from Nevada high schools.

While some students complain it's as if they're going to a bigger version of their high schools, one freshman said being with old high school friends made the transition easier, the guide states.

Overall, the guide's 36th edition paints a favorable picture of the Reno campus.

"With its renown specialized academic programs, a unique student population, a lively social scene, and a beautiful campus, UNR gives students the opportunity to receive a first-rate education at a great value."

The guide was published before Nevada's Board of Regents voted to approve a 10 percent increase in tuition this fall for all of the state's seven higher education institutions, with another 10 percent increase scheduled in fall 2010. But tuition at Nevada's public colleges and universities traditionally has been low in comparison with other institutions in the Western region.

The guide also points out that although UNR is a "dry" campus and fraternities and sororities are not allowed to serve alcohol, "students agree that it is 'definitely possible' to find alcohol at parties."

Students who are 21 or older and those who have fake IDs "can look forward to wild nights of drinking, dancing and gambling in downtown Reno," the guide said.

The 952-page book devotes slightly more than three pages to UNR, but does not include the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Of UNR, it concludes that the state's "generous Millennium Scholarship continues to draw many in-state students, but more and more out-of-state students are discovering UNR's educational benefits."

Earlier this month, both UNR and UNLV made Forbes' list of America's 500 best private and public colleges for 2009. UNR placed 406th and UNLV placed 486.

The Forbes' ranking is based on 25 percent student satisfaction with course instruction, 25 percent on indicators of postgraduation employment and 20 percent on estimated loan debt. It also is based 17 percent on the likelihood of graduation within four years and 13 percent on student and faculty academic and research awards.

name voyager

name voyager

Launched from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 20, 1977, Voyager 2, as the name suggests, was the second of two identical deep-space probes originally dispatched by NASA to gather data on Jupiter and Saturn. Their primary mission completed, Voyager 2 continued on to make observations of Uranus and Neptune, while Voyager 1 hightailed it toward the edge of the solar system. Voyager 2’s flyby of Triton was the spacecraft’s last contact with a major heavenly body before heading off in the direction of Voyager 1 and interstellar space.

Triton was certainly worth a look-see.

Neptune’s largest moon, discovered in 1846 by British astronomer William Lassell, was named for the Greek god Triton, the son of Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans). Its diameter of 1,677 miles makes it roughly half the size of our own moon, unremarkable enough. But Triton is the only large satellite in the solar system with a retrograde orbit, that is, orbiting in the opposite direction of its planet’s rotation. It is also the coldest known object in the solar system, with a mean surface temperature of minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 Celsius). Unlike Earth’s moon, Triton has an atmosphere, albeit a very thin one, composed mainly of nitrogen and methane.

Voyager 2 returned a series of crisp photos of Triton’s surface, including closeups of ice formations, impact craters and other general surface characteristics. It also photographed a plume of frozen material in the process of being ejected at the surface, which is believed to be either liquid nitrogen or methane. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited Triton. (Voyager 1, launched on a shorter trajectory, took a different route than its sister and bypassed Triton entirely.)

As Voyager 2 passed beyond Neptune and Triton, the mission’s planetary exploration phase officially ended.

If that had been the end of it, the twin Voyagers mission would have been an unqualified success. Although designed and built to complete an exploration of only Jupiter and Saturn, both Voyager 1 and 2 proved far more durable. So NASA extended the original mission include to the outer two planets. But more was, and is, yet to come. Thirty-two years after launch both craft are sailing through the heliosphere at 38,000 mph, still returning data to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory through the Deep Space Network.

NASA expects to continue receiving data from both probes until at least 2025, nearly a half-century after their launch.

baby name wizard

baby name wizard

If you think making a name for yourself is hard, try making one for someone else.

Once a mere reflection of the times, baby names are now considered shorthand for everything from the parents’ values to the likelihood of future child-therapy bills. Choosing a title that’s at once unique but not precious, stylish but not trendy, meaningful but not obscure, is seen by many expectant moms and dads as the first test of their prowess as parents.

It’s not quite a prenatal exam, but it feels like one.

“It used to be that a very large percentage of parents wanted a good, solid, ordinary name for their child,” says Laura Wattenberg, a noted name researcher. “But today, parents treat ordinary as a dirty word.”

The appeal of unusual baby names drew international attention last week, when news broke that a New Zealand judge had ordered a nine-year-old girl be made a ward of the court long enough to change her name: Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.

A 2007 California State University study of turnover rates in baby names found fashions change because of a small minority of innovators amidst a majority of copycats. Tweaking the spelling of conventional names has become a predominant trend in Canada because it allows parents to choose an in-vogue moniker that still seems unique. Madison, for example, can become Madisson, Madisyn, Madisynne, or Madison.

“We all want our kids to be distinctive, and that’s created a kind of arms race because we might want to be different from one another but our tastes are very much the same,” says Wattenberg.

While parents have always suffered some degree of prenatal naming anxiety, the digital age has upped the ante exponentially.

Over 100 niche baby-name websites offer everything from popularity graphs to searchable databases, opinion polls and historical birth certificate data; For about $50, online consultants will do name research on parents’ behalf. At sites such as Celebrity Baby Blog, parents can obsess over the choices pop icons are making, which this year have included Ignatius (Cate Blanchett), Knox (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), Clementine (Ethan Hawke), Sunday (Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban) and Callum Lyon (Kyle MacLachlan).

“Parents type a first and last name into Google and feel panicked when it’s taken, or when the domain name is taken,” says Wattenberg, founder of babynamewizard.com.

“When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt named their daughter Vivienne, I had multiple people writing to me who had that name, or a similar name, chosen and felt like it had been ruined.”

Factor in the cultural din of academics whose research warns of the damage a “bad” name can do to a child, and it’s no wonder parents are stressed before changing their first diaper.

For Jody Szabo, a 29-year-old mother of two from Calgary, the pressure of finding the right names for her sons was “overwhelming.”

“It was difficult, time-consuming and stressful,” she recalls. “There’s nothing worse than being nine months pregnant, due any day, and having no clue what you’re going to call this child.”

After poring over online name databases, combing through thousands of possible monikers in baby books, and launching an epic battle against her husband’s preferred choice of Argus - a name plucked from a Greek myth about a 100-eyed giant - Szabo happily settled on Jeremy for her first-born and Austin for her second.

For her part, 37-year-old Karen Markovics is suffering “namer’s remorse.” Five years after giving birth to Nicole Josephine, the North Carolina mom is considering legally changing the girl’s name to Josephine Marie; she has informally been calling her Josie since she was a year old.

“A lot of people were really cruel when it came out that we wanted to change her name,” says Markovics. Other parents have accused her of being superficial and “a flake” for wanting a mulligan on the birth certificate.

“I just wanted a name that when I yelled it on the playground, I didn’t get 12 kids running.”

Misty Verlik Kelleher, 26, blames a combination of information overload and having too many cooks in the kitchen for her own prenatal naming anxiety.

“These days, it doesn’t seem like any name, no matter how ridiculous, is off the table,” she says, citing actor Jason Lee’s son Pilot Inspecktor as an example.

After taking great pains to create a shortlist of names with her partner, it seemed everyone the Edmonton native knew wanted to weigh in on the couple’s choices.

“Let me tell you, no one was shy in the least,” says Kelleher. “All I heard for months was, ‘I don’t like Brandon, that reminds me of this jerk I went to high school with …’, and on and on it went.”

Kelleher ended up naming her son Valentin (val-in-teen), after her father.

“While I know he’ll definitely be made fun of in school, he’ll still have it easy compared to the kids whose parents named them after some kind of beverage, stereo equipment or someone else’s occupation.”

If current trends persist, however, the kids who stand out won’t be the ones with the exotic names but rather the ones called Ann, Joan, Todd or Ralph, all of which barely register in the most recent Canadian name listings.

Fifty years ago, 40 per cent of boys and 26 per cent of girls had Top 20 names. In 2005, the Top 20 accounted for just 19 per cent of boys’ names and about 14 per cent of girls’ names, according to Harper-Collins’ Best Baby Names for Canadians.

As ludicrous as some contemporary names sound, a leading branding expert says memorable monikers - and especially those with three syllables, such as Moon Zappa, daughter of Frank - can prove valuable later in life.

“People tend to favour the familiar; and unusual names, ironically, are more familiar to people because they only need to hear them once, or perhaps twice, to remember them,” says Harry Beckwith, author of You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself.

Ultimately, the branding advice he gives to businesses - to choose a name with backstory and meaning - applies equally to parents.

“Precious, contrived, meticulously-searched-for names always will eventually reveal their artifice, and artifice loses to authenticity every single time.”