The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on June 9 an $11.5 million, three-year award to Earth Resources Technologies, Inc. for cloud-based unified messaging services. The agency-wide transition will modernize e-mail and calendar infrastructure, integrate collaborative tools and facilitate synchronization with mobile devices to better support NOAA’s mission and its nationwide workforce. As the largest federal agency to adopt cloud technology to date, NOAA will migrate 25,000 mailboxes to the cloud rather than utilizing in-house servers. NOAA’s decision to pursue the cloud solution supports the Obama administration’s direction to pursue a “cloud first” approach. “The cost to the taxpayer will be 50 percent less than an in-house solution,” said NOAA Chief Information Officer Joseph Klimavicz. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110609_cloudtechnology.html

In 2004, when Todd S. Nelson was chief executive of the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit college, he signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education, which found that Phoenix had “systematically and intentionally” broken the federal rules against paying recruiters for students. Mr. Nelson is now chief executive of the nation’s second-largest for-profit college company, Education Management Corporation, or EDMC, and the Justice Department and two state attorneys general are intervening in a whistle-blower lawsuit charging that EDMC also violated the ban on what is known as incentive compensation. That practice encourages aggressive recruitment of unqualified students for their federal student aid. Education Management, which enrolls about 150,000 students at Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, South University and in its Art Institutes, has said it plans a vigorous defense. This is the first time that prosecutors have joined a suit like the EDMC whistle-blower case, and the government’s unprecedented intervention in such a compensation case comes amid escalating controversy over for-profit colleges. Enrolling about 12 percent of the nation’s higher-education students, the colleges get a quarter of all federal student aid and account for nearly half of all student loan defaults. The Department of Education has released new data showing that more than 15 percent of those who had attended for-profit colleges defaulted within two years — twice the rate of those who attended public institutions, and three times as many as those who went to private not-for-profit colleges. With the explosive growth of the for-profit sector, the sums involved are immense. Education Management, which is 40 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, received more than $855 million in federal student aid in 2003-4, and more than $1 billion in 2005-6. According to the complaint, in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, it received more than $2.2 billion in federal student aid, representing 89.3 percent of its net revenue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/education/27edmc.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

When speechwriter Ken Khachigan sat down with Ronald Reagan after the 1980 election to draft his first inaugural address, the president-elect pulled out a sheaf of note cards written in his cramped hand of quotes and concepts he wanted to include. "He had all this stuff he had stored up all these years — all these stories, all these anecdotes," Khachigan recalls. "He had the Reagan library in his own little file system." When Reagan died, the stacks of cards he had accumulated over half a century were packed in a cardboard box, labeled "RR's desk" and put in storage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, only to be rediscovered recently as the library prepared to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Reagan's birth this year. Edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, a selection is published in The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom. The cards also are going on display at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. The book offers a window into the mind of the nation's 40th president. Like the handwritten scripts from his days as a radio commentator in the 1970s — published in Reagan, In His Own Hand in 2001 —The Notes displays the effort he made behind the scenes to hone his performance as a speechmaker and storyteller driving home a conservative political philosophy. From his days as a corporate spokesman for GE through his White House years, Reagan routinely kept a few blank cards tucked in his jacket. The cards aren't dated, but the stationery has signals indicating when the notes were written: blank cards from the GE years; others with Reagan's name imprinted at the top from his days as governor of California; some emblazoned with White House seals from when he was president. "If he went out to dinner with somebody in New York or Sacramento, and in the course of a long dinner, if somebody said a really funny joke or something struck him as humorous or even a political point he thought was salient, he would write it on the note card," Brinkley said. A card might have 10 items on it, written on both sides.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-08-reagan-notes-book-brinkley_n.htm

Why verb a noun when a perfectly serviceable verb 'to befriend' is already a part of the language? But language grows with need, and 'to friend' someone online is not necessarily the same as 'to befriend'. Each new verb or noun adds a new shade to the mosaic of the language. And it happens all the time. We have the verb 'serve' and the noun 'service', but we extend 'service' to use it as a verb again because 'to service' is not necessarily the same as 'to serve'. The Oxford English Dictionary has the first citation for the word friend as a verb from the year 1225. In fact, 'to friend' has an older pedigree than 'to befriend' (1559). A similar pattern emerges for the undoing part, unfriend (1659) vs. unbefriend (1884). A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Quotes from Night Fall by Nelson DeMille
The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you're finished.
The more you spend the more you have. Wrong. The more you spend, the more you spend.

Musee Rodin in Paris was created in 1916 on the initiative of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) thanks to three successive donations by the artist: his works and private art collections, his library, and his letters and private papers. The museum is housed in the sculptor's chosen location the Hotel Biron and its garden, which Rodin rented from 1908 onwards. http://www.musee-rodin.fr/

Fontainebleau is a commune in the metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located 55.5 kilometres (34.5 mi) south-southeast of the centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a sub-prefecture of the Seine-et-Marne department, and it is the seat of the arrondissement of Fontainebleau. The commune has the largest land area in the Île-de-France region; it is the only one to cover a larger area than Paris itself. Fontainebleau, together with the neighbouring commune of Avon and three other smaller communes, form an urban area of 36,713 inhabitants (according to the 1999 census). This urban area is a satellite of Paris. Fontainebleau is renowned for the large and scenic forest of Fontainebleau, a favourite weekend getaway for Parisians, as well as for the historical château de Fontainebleau, which once belonged to the kings of France, Originally called Fontaine Belle eau or Fontaine Belleaue, Fontainebleau settled on current name in 1169. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontainebleau