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See which town ranked highest in BusinessWeek's fourth annual survey of the Best Places to Raise ...4 days ago
You'd think that the character of a village that grew from 12,000 to 60,000 residents in less than 40 years might have changed with the population. But young families move into Tinley Park , Ill., a proud village 25 miles southwest of Chicago , for the same reason that Edward and Emily Zabrocki chose to raise their children there in 1970. "We looked at the schools and the community services," said Zabrocki, a retired high school guidance counselor who has been Tinley Park's mayor since 1981. "And we found a house that was good for our pocketbook." More from BusinessWeek.com » Best Places to Raise Your Kids: 2010 » Best Affordable Suburbs 2009 » America's Cheapest Homeownership Markets Tinley Park , with its top-rated schools, low crime, beautiful parks, relatively affordable houses, and easy access to jobs, is the winner of BusinessWeek's Best Places in America to Raise Kids. Working with OnBoard ...19 days ago
Do American children still learn handwriting in school? In this age of the keyboard, some people seem to think handwriting lessons are on the way out. We asked a literacy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Steve Graham says he has been hearing about the death of handwriting for the past fifteen years. So is it still being taught? STEVE GRAHAM: "If the results of a survey we had published this year are accurate, it is being taught by about ninety percent of teachers in grades one to three." Ninety percent of teachers also say they are required to teach handwriting. But studies have yet to answer the question of how well they are teaching it. Professor Graham says one study published this year found that about three out of every four teachers say they are not prepared to teach handwriting. STEVE GRAHAM: "And then when you look at how it's taught, you have some teachers who are teaching handwriting by providing instruction for ...19 days ago
Silk is a smooth, shiny and costly natural material. People usually get their silk supply from worms. But spiders make silk, too. In fact, their silk is even lighter and softer than silk from silkworms. But getting silk from a spider might seem more difficult. Especially from a big spider that can bite. Recently, two men in Madagascar proved it can be done with extraordinary results. Mario Ritter has more. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has a most unusual object on exhibit. It is a beautiful wall covering made of shiny, bright golden silk. The tapestry is about three meters long and one meter wide. It is light as a feather but strong as steel. The tapestry was woven with silk provided by the golden orb spider. It took more than a million of them to produce that much silk. Simon Peers is a British art historian and expert in woven materials. He moved to Madagascar about twenty years ago. He started a textile business in that ...19 days ago
In eighteen thirty, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, Ohio, lay a huge and almost endless forest. The area had a few settlements established by people of the frontier. Many of them had already left the area for settlements further to the west. But among those remaining was a man who had been one of the first people to arrive there. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest. He seemed a part of the darkness and silence of the forest, for no one had ever known him to smile or speak an unnecessary word. His simple needs were supplied by selling or trading the skins of wild animals in the town. His little log house had a single door. Directly opposite was a window. The window was boarded up. No one could remember a time when it was not. And no one knew why it had been closed. I imagine there are few people living today who ever knew the secret of that window. But I am one, as you shall see. The man's ...
40 days ago
STRAUBING, Germany – A German artist is posing 1,250 garden gnomes with their arms outstretched in the stiff-armed Hitler salute in an installation that he calls a protest of lingering fascist tendencies in German society. Artist Ottmar Hoerl posed the gnomes in the historic central marketplace of Straubing , a town in southeastern Germany , on Wednesday. The exhibit called "dance with the devil" is to run through Oct. 19. Most of gnomes are black plastic, but about 20 are painted shiny gold. Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany but a court ruled earlier this year that Hoerl's gnomes were clearly satire and thus allowed. Hoerl says: "the fascist idea, the striving to manipulate people or dictate to people ... is latently dangerous and remains present in our society."
