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It proposes a new "learning support co-ordinator" in each school with a more "flexible package of support" to meet every student's needs.
The plan, which is open for consultation until October 31, implements some of the recommendations agreed by what are now the three governing parties Labour, NZ First and the Greens in a joint minority report on a select committee inquiry into dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism in 2016.
At the time the Ministry of Education opposed creating a central register of students with learning differences, saying it would be costly and "could encourage reliance on diagnosis or categorisation of learning difference, which is inconsistent with the way learning support is provided based on need rather than diagnosis".
International studies suggest that dyslexia affects between 5 and 11 per cent of children and dyspraxia affects between 1.7 and 6 per cent.
Altogether, one in five of New Zealand's 800,000 schoolchildren access the Education Ministry's learning support services including special schools, the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS), behaviour services, speech language therapy and English as a second language.
Martin said schools had been asking for a central database on these children.
"What we want is a national data system so when a child shows up at a school, the school can go into the system and click the name of the child and see all that was going on at the last school, and a tag for an Oranga Tamariki child," she said.
"The tag might just say, 'This is an Oranga Tamariki child, this is the contact for more information.' But the schools have been asking for that for some time."
• Age 3: Universal health check (Ministry of Health).
• Age 5: Consistent school entry measurement tool (schools).
• Age 6-8: Screening for dyslexia (reading problems), dyspraxia (clumsy movement) and giftedness (schools).
• Age 13: Health and wellbeing check at entry to high school (Ministry of Health).
The neediest students, currently 1.2 per cent, will continue to get ORS funding.
For all other students, the plan says the ministry and the sector would "co-design a flexible package of support for neurodiverse and other children and young people who are not eligible for ORS, including tools for neurodiverse learners" - likely to include laptops, headphones and other technology for students struggling with reading and handwriting.
The plan includes a "learning support co-ordinator" in each school. More than 80 per cent of schools already fund such roles, usually called special needs co-ordinators or "Sencos", but there is currently no central funding for them.
Martin said the new roles would be full time in large schools and would be funded on a ratio related to either total rolls or the numbers of students needing extra support.
However the plan does not include any costings and says the learning support coordinator role "will require a funding decision before it can be confirmed".
Martin said the ministry would appoint a "learning support facilitator" to work with each cluster of schools and preschools to arrange the support that each child needed.
"Once we have some screening, actually provide what the child needs to be the best learner they can be," she said.
"What we are trying to do is to get away from pots of money that you have to justify how bad you are to get them."
She said schools would not have to join a formal community of learning (Kāhui Ako) to access services.
"I actually don't care if it's a Kāhui Ako, or a cluster of schools, or a group of schools," she said.
The Labour/NZ First/Greens minority on the 2016 select committee also recommended national funding of teacher aides and learning support training, expanding ORS to cover the neediest 3 per cent of students and removing the funding cap on an Intensive Wraparound Service (IWS) which is now limited to 365 students.
The draft plan does not include any of these changes, but promises broadly to "respond to pressures across specific supports such as residential special schools, Early Intervention, Te Kahu Tōi/IWS, NZ Sign Language and Deaf education".
There is also no mention of the minority report's recommendations that speech language therapy should be available beyond the current maximum age of 8, or that the law should provide "an enforceable right to meaningful education".
Martin said those issues were beyond the scope of the draft plan.
"That's another piece of work," she said. "I was just trying to get this piece of work on the ground."
Researchers from Harvard, Brown, and the University of Massachusetts have developed a new method for measuring delirium severity in older adults. A release from the Hebrew Senior Life Institute for Aging Research, a affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Boston explains that delirium is defined as the sudden onset of confusion or change in mental status that is often brought about by physical illness, surgery, or hospitalization. Delirium is a common and often costly condition that is a leading complication among older adults who are hospitalized. In fact, studies suggest that delirium in adults ages 65 and older is associated with hospital mortality rates of up to 33%, with estimated annual healthcare costs of more than $182 billion per year.
The new scoring system, CAM-S, is based on the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM) and standardizes the measurement of delirium severity for both clinical and research uses. Details of this study were published in April 2014 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The release quotes Sharon K. Inouye, M.D., M.P.H., Director of the Aging Brain Center and Harvard Medical School Professor of Medicine, as saying, "Currently, the CAM is the most widely used tool in the world to screen for delirium. Our study is the first to develop and test this important new methodology, and to demonstrate the validity and reliability of the CAM-S, a novel approach to measure delirium severity."
The team developed and validated the CAM-S in two groups of patients. The first was a group of 300 patients 70 years of age or older who were scheduled for major surgery as part of the Successful Aging after Elective Surgery (SAGES) study. The second group was part of the Project Recovery study and included 919 older adults 70 or older who were admitted to the hospital. Researchers developed the CAM-S from the 4-item short form and 10-item long form versions of the CAM, and examined the impact of the CAM-S scores on hospital and post-hospital clinical outcomes.
CAM-S scores displayed a strong association with all clinical outcomes including length of hospital stay, nursing home placement, functional and cognitive decline, death, and hospital and post-hospital costs. The study found that length of hospital stay increases with the degree of delirium severity measured by the CAM-S short form from seven days for no delirium symptoms to 13 days for patients with severe delirium. The CAM-S long form showed similar increases in length of stay from six days to 12 days between no symptom and severe symptom groups.
Additionally, mean hospital costs increase with the degree of delirium severity measured by the CAM-S short form from $5,100 for patients without delirium symptoms to $13,200 for those with severe symptoms. Similar results were seen across all levels of the CAM-S long form scores with mean costs increasing from $4,200 to $11,400 across delirium symptom groups ranging from none to severe.
Dr. Inouye concludes, "Our findings demonstrate that the CAM-S provides a new standardized severity measure with high inter-rater reliability, and a strong association with clinical outcomes related to delirium. We believe that this measure holds great promise to improve understanding of the effects of delirium on clinical care, prognosis, pathophysiology, and response to treatment. Ultimately, we hope that this measure will help to prevent the effects of this devastating condition and improve quality of life for older adults."
Homebuilder confidence in the housing market remained flat in December as builders brace themselves for a slow holiday season. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo (WFC) Housing Market Index remained unchanged at 16 after increasing slightly in November. The index measures builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and expectations for the next six months. Any number over 50 indicates that more builders view conditions as good. Bob Jones, chairman of NAHB, said that while the HMI is adjusted for seasonal factors, such as the typical slowdown due to cold-weather, sales activity is breached by ongoing weakness in the job market and the rising number of foreclosures. "The steady but low level of the HMI reflects the fact that builders and consumers have yet to see consistent signs that the economy is improving," added NAHB chief economist David Crowe. "The good news is that the index and its subcomponents remain above recent lows from the early fall." Two out of the three sectors of the HMI remained unchanged from November. The current sales condition index stayed at 16 and the six-month sales expectation index stayed at 25. The index measuring how builders view the traffic of prospective buyers fell one point to 11. Regionally, HMIs vary. Homebuilders were the most confident in the Northeast at an index of 24, followed by the South (17), the Midwest (13) and the West (11). Write to Christine Ricciardi.
Enterprise resource planning software has been around for about a decade as a tool to help both government and businesses streamline their business processes. If used wisely, it can help agencies meet their goals while squeezing more out of static or shrinking budgets.
ERP actually is a spin-off of the manufacturing industry, and since its early days has attempted to combine the needs of all departments and functions of a company into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database. Various departments, whether they are involved in finance, accounting, human resources, supply chain management, warehouse management or sales, can more easily share information and communicate with each other than if they were all working from standalone software or paper-based systems.
Government organizations aren't always interested in the full complement of functional modules'in some cases more than 50'that come with a comprehensive ERP suite. This is where separate but integrated modules of product suites come into play.
For example, your agency might have little interest in manufacturing but a huge interest in improving finance and HR services. Suite vendors have made it easy to cherry pick modules that meet your agency's requirements and integrate them as you see fit. Typical ERP modules used in government would cover such functions as finance, budget, accounting, procurement, HR, purchasing and payroll.
While some users might be satisfied with these classic back-office functions, vendors are now focusing on more comprehensive enterprise design features that incorporate front-office features such as customer relationship management. Many of the vendors listed in the accompanying chart have developed or are developing CRM and other front-office components to go with their ERP suites.
Other developers of full-scale ERP suites have developed specialized components, particularly for aerospace and defense contractors.
There is little doubt that the integrated approach of ERP has payback potential for organizations if the software is installed correctly and the entire organization has bought into changes ERP brings about.
But there are some pitfalls.
For example, ERP got bad grades from users at the end of the 1990s, when organizations worldwide rushed to complete their year 2000 software upgrades with the help of ERP consultants.
In the general haste to complete foolproof Y2K solutions in time, compromises were made in ERP programs for the sake of speed and on-time performance. If in-house administrators and executives didn't understand the implications of these short-term concessions on future system performance, they wound up frustrated that their long-term goals for ERP weren't being met.
Partly because, in the past, some vendors promised more than they could deliver, ERP is still a hard sell in some quarters. Even its most ardent supporters admit that, in the early stages, ERP planning takes a large degree of control from the organization and puts it in the hands of third-party ERP providers.
And, there's no question that by its very nature ERP forces significant changes in the ways organizations do business. It forces people and their departments to change how they do their jobs. Change of this magnitude doesn't always get a warm welcome.
ERP is by no means a quick-fix solution; it can take years to transform your enterprise into a smooth-functioning entity in which in all departments and personnel can glean productive information from other departments without a glitch.
Despite the caveats, ERP has made a strong comeback since 2000. International Data Corp., an industry market researcher in Framingham, Mass., predicts that spending for ERP software will jump by 6 percent this year and increase at a compounded rate of 13 percent to 14 percent through 2006, outpacing the expected growth rate of the overall software market.
If ERP systems are used to integrate and optimize an organization's internal financial, distribution and human resource functions, then the next-generation of ERP software, ERP II, addresses the integration processes that extend across an enterprise and its trading partners, according to Gartner Inc., a high-tech consulting company in Stamford, Conn.
Gartner, which coined the phrase ERP II, says it will form the basis of Internet-enabled e-business and collaborative commerce.
J.B. Miles of Pahoa, Hawaii, writes about communications and computers. E-mail him at jbmiles@hawaii.rr.com.
I am a bit confused: are scientists supposed to be the folk heroes of environmental activists or not? When the subject is climate change they certainly fulfil this role: the likes of Naomi Klein are forever pushing the conceit that some vast global capitalist conspiracy is engaged in the denial of scientific reason. But when the subject is the herbicide glyphosate? The great majority of scientists whose work has found it safe are dismissed as nothing more than dupes of agribusiness firm Monsanto.
Last week, Monsanto lost a court case against a school groundsman from California who claims his non-Hodgkins lymphona was caused by glyphosate in the Roundup herbicide he used as part of his job. The company, who was ordered to pay the groundsman £226m ($289m) in damages, says it will appeal. With due respect to the jury, its decision sits at odds with the bulk of scientific evidence. It is true that in 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’ – a category in which it also includes red meat, hot beverages and working in shift patterns. But other bodies, reviewing the same evidence, have come to a different conclusion – including a joint declaration by the World Health Organisation and Federal Agriculture Organisation. Among those disagreeing with the IARC is the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), a body not known for rashness. Indeed, the precautionary principle used by the EFSA and other EU regulators has led to an effective ban on growing GM Foods in Europe.
Yet the EFSA’s scientists have decided that glyphosate does not cause cancer in humans. As to why it disagrees with the IARC, it published a paper last year, which you can read here. It is well-reasoned, as you would expect, pointing out that the evidence which had been claimed to link glyphosate with non-Hodgkins lymphona was too limited to make a positive association. Nevertheless, in the minds of environmental activists the EFSA’s scientists can’t possibly be independent, objective scientists coming to a reasoned conclusion – they must have been either bought or brainwashed by Monsanto. For example, writing in the Guardian, US activist Carey Gillam, writes of Monsanto: “The company has employed a range of tactics – some drawn from the same playbook used by the tobacco industry in defending the safety of cigarettes – to suppress and manipulate scientific literature, harass journalists and scientists who did not parrot the company’s propaganda, and arm-twist and collude with regulators”.
It would be nice to have some evidence of how Monsanto is supposed to have bullied and manipulated the EFSA’s scientists. We certainly haven’t had any yet. The evidence presented in court claiming that Monsanto suppressed damning evidence about the safety of glyphosate may have convinced a jury, but others might be less convinced. You can judge for yourself. One of the pieces of evidence was an internal memo from 2003, advising staff how to respond to charges laid by environmental activists against glyphosate.
It was, in other words, a request for scientific precision – something sorely lacking from the environmental activists who have been trying to tell us that glyphosate is giving us cancer. It is GM Foods all over again, where environmental activists found it very easy to frighten the public about ‘Frankenstein Foods’. Indeed, the two issues are related. Monsanto was the bogeyman in the anti-GM campaign – while Roundup-resistant crops were one of the GM foods which were attacked.
As the Yosemite public beta rolls out tomorrow, CNET takes a deeper dive with individual features from the OS starting with Spotlight.
Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite is one step closer to your Mac desktop.
The public beta of Apple's next computer operating system will be released Thursday at 10 am PT. After checking it out for more than a week it's clear that it's more than just another incremental update.
First off, Yosemite's flatter look and sharper corners that are reminiscent of iOS 7 mark the biggest redesign to the Mac interface since Mac OS X was first released as a beta in 2000. And beyond the new look, Yosemite also adds several new features that should make common computing tasks easier, along with better communication between Macs and iOS devices.
In the weeks ahead of the launch this fall, I'm going to be taking a closer look at some of the major new features and how they stack up against previous versions of OS X as well as similar features on other platforms.
For this first post, I'm looking at Apple's changes and new features in Spotlight.
For many years, searching the Web has been Google's bread and butter. The company has dominated Web search so thoroughly that it's tough for some people to even name another search site that's comparable.
With Spotlight in Yosemite, though, Apple is trying to take a piece of that pie. Instead of just searching your hard drive like you did using Spotlight in Mavericks, in Yosemite the feature now searches the Web for relevant results, obviating the need to even open your Web browser and navigate to Google's homepage.
Sound useful? Sure, but remember that Apple wasn't the first to find a way around Google's search dominance. Windows 8, too, delivers Bing Web results straight from the operating system search tools since it came on the scene in 2012.
Now that Apple has announced that relevant Web results will accompany your hard drive searches, is it trying to break you of your habit of loading up Google by keeping you in Apple's OS? Probably to some extent, but I don't think that's the whole story. I think Apple probably saw what Microsoft was doing with search and thought it a useful feature, then reworked Spotlight to give you the best results possible, but all in one window.
Just as you clicked the magnifying glass in the upper right (or hit Command-spacebar) to search your hard drive in Mavericks, Spotlight in Yosemite uses the same controls to deliver both local results and relevant finds from the Web.
As an example, searching for "Burrito" in Mavericks returns results in the upper right part of the screen from my connected email account and any other files or apps with that name on my hard drive. At the bottom of the search box there are options to search the Web or Wikipedia for Burrito, which opens Safari to load the results. Obviously performing a spotlight search for a Burrito shop in Mavericks is not ideal because it only searches the hard drive, but it illustrates why Yosemite is so much more convenient.
I should also point out in the screenshot below that Spotlight is finding the word burrito in coupon emails where it appears alongside several different deals. Yes, even the one that says "2-Hour Fashion Consultation" has a coupon later in the email for deals on Mexican food.
In Yosemite, a search for burrito gives you location-based results in Maps (nearest burritos to you), any news stories about burritos, the associated Wikipedia entry, and any references to burrito in your connected email accounts. A similar search on Google will get you much of the same information, but I have to admit it's pretty easy to hit command-spacebar and type in the food I'm craving at the moment for a quick list of results.
Spotlight also searches Apple Maps for hits nearby. Clicking on a Maps result brings up a map with Yelp reviews for the burrito restaurant in your area along with the restaurant's website, address, and phone number. Buttons at the bottom let you get directions, and you can scroll further to read Yelp reviews.
Clicking on the phone number will let you place a call via Handoff features through your iPhone if its within the same Wi-Fi network. I was unable to test these features because they are tied to iOS 8, but Apple demonstrated at WWDC how you can make or receive calls directly from your Mac.
Like I said, Spotlight isn't the first with this added Web search functionality as part of the operating system. Windows 8 also includes Web results when you perform a search, giving you location results using Bing Maps, and actually displays quite a bit more Web results than Spotlight.
Likewise, Windows 8 will bring up Bing Maps to give you directions to the nearest burrito shop, and you can call the restaurant using Skype or if you have calling features set up in Chrome via Google Hangouts. But while you're getting the same features, the main difference here is that Yosemite displays all this information neatly in the same box you performed the search where Windows requires some scrolling through results to find the information you need.
It's not a big difference, but when you look at the smaller Spotlight screen with relevant results, Yosemite displays the information you need right now rather than an exhaustive list of results you need to search.
As a public beta, Apple is still working on smoothing out the rough edges in Yosemite, so treat this post about Spotlight as a preview rather than an evaluation of the finished product. Even at this early date, I like the changes that are coming to Spotlight to make performing both local and Web searches much easier than before. True, it's not as if opening a browser to search the Web is that painful, but having everything is more convenient for users. And on Apple's side, "Google It" isn't even entering your workflow.
It's true that both Windows 8 and Google search already have many similar features to what you get in Spotlight and that they turn up more results. But I think the way Apple returns the most relevant results on one screen is more convenient, letting you get to the information you need right away without having to scroll through several screens or search through a long list of Web results.
In the end, we'll have to wait and see what tweaks Apple makes before launch, but I think Spotlight is looking like a welcome upgrade over the Mavericks version.
That's it for my preview of Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, but check back every week as I talk about a new feature and compare it to similar features on other platforms.
The Office Lens app, which lets anyone turn their smartphone into a pocket scanner, is now available to Android and iPhone users, in addition to the Windows Phone users.
Microsoft's popular and free Office Lens app, which turns a smartphone into a pocket document scanner, is now being offered in Android and iOS versions.
The Office Lens app was initially unveiled in March 2014 for Windows Phone users alone, and it has become one of the most popular apps on the Windows Phone platform, according to the company. Now, Android and iOS users will also be able to use it once they download and install it, Microsoft announced in an April 2 post on its Office Blogs site.
"Office Lens is a handy capture app that turns your smartphone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote so you'll never lose a thing," the post states. "Use it to take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky notes—then let Office Lens crop, enhance and save to OneNote. Just like that—all the scanned images you capture from Office Lens are accessible on all your devices."
Apple iPhone users can download the new Office Lens for iPhone app for free from the Apple App Store, while Android users can download a preview version by signing up at in a special Office Lens Android Preview Google+ community that has been set up for the app's development. Android participants can click the "Join community" button in the upper right-hand corner of the site, and then click the "Become a Tester" link under the "about this community" link, according to the blog post.
"Bringing Office Lens to iPhone and Android is a significant step for extending OneNote capture capabilities to more devices and endpoints," Microsoft wrote. "Get it for your iPhone, Android phone or Windows Phone today—start scanning documents and whiteboards from the convenience of your phone, and let us know what you think in the comments below and at app store feedback."
For iPhone users, the new app recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image, according to Microsoft, while it can also identify printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so users can search by keyword for the image in OneNote or OneDrive. It also converts images of paper documents and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files for easy editing and reformatting and lets users capture business cards that can then generate contact details that can be added to their smartphone. The app also allows users to insert images into OneNote or OneDrive (as DOCX, PPTX, JPG or PDF format) and provides options to save, export and share the images.
The Android preview version of Office Lens Android will work with devices running Android Jelly Bean 4.1 and above, according to Microsoft. Once a user is enrolled as a tester in the Google+ community, they can download the Office Lens Preview from the Google Play Store.
As a tester, participants will receive test versions of Office Lens Preview through app updates, some of which "may be unstable and contain bugs," according to Microsoft. Testers can choose to leave the test at any time and return to the regular version of Office Lens Preview.
This is a question about myself and my parents and favoritism. When I was young I was my father's favorite but my mother always favored my sister. My father died a few years ago and my mother is in control of the estate. My Mom is basically giving most of the estate to my sister. This makes me both sad and deeply angry. How can I honor my father's memory and not give in to my anger towards my Mom and sister?
Favoritism is a cancer that runs in too many families like cancer. In fact it is as old as time. In the Bible, the lives of the patriarchs reveal generations of parents who allowed favoritism to bring disaster on their families. As a direct result, we see envy and bitterness that poisoned multiple generations (think of Joseph being sold into slavery by his own brothers as just one example of many). In a recently published book titled "The Sibling Effect" the author asserts that 70 percent of fathers and 65 percent of all moms evidence favoritism.
A parent who chooses to esteem and honor one child over the others sets in motion a long term train wreck. The child who is disfavored will either come to dislike the parents and/or feel badly about the child who was favored. The favored child also does not benefit in the long run. Jealousy is corrosive, a jealous sibling is a dangerous person to have in one's life. Don't be jealous of your sister — and don't be bitter with your mom. By giving in to your emotions you are prolonging your agony and giving them power of your life and emotions.
I myself came from a family that was rife with favoritism. In the end I had to witness a completely unfair distribution of my parent's estate that was orchestrated by a sibling who directly benefited himself. In the end I realized that his selfishness was utterly unimportant. What was important was to forgive (not trust — that is an entirely different matter) and to move on. We continue to work hard to establish in our own nuclear family a new pattern that breaks the generational curse of favoritism.
Dad Says: Harboring bitterness in our hearts is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die. That's why Jesus taught us to pray "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Forgiveness isn't just good for the person being forgiven … it is good for our soul.
With respect to your sister, there are things you can do to bring some reconciliation. First, please don't be anxious about the estate (after all, it is just stuff). We must always look to our Heavenly Father for our provision. Jesus taught us NOT to worry about stuff, but that like the birds of the air we must learn to trust our Heavenly Father to cloth and feed and provide for us as we put first His Kingdom and His glory. Trust me. If you do that, He will keep His end of the bargain. Secondly, let her know that you love her. The Bible tells us that "Love never fails." In the end love is the most powerful force in the universe. Use it for good.
And be sure not to give in to the curse of favoritism with your own children. If we do so, we are also depriving our children of the the most important relationships in the lives: the sustaining friendships of their siblings. There is no one like your bother or sister with whom to share memories, laugh about old stories, and yes, grieve over deaths in the family. Brothers and sisters should be best of friends. We thank God that is true in our family. But favoritism is a sure way to kill close sibling friendships. So be sure not to let favoritism be a curse in your own family. Use your experience to make sure your children don't go through the same negative pattern.
Your kids need to be like the Three Musketeers: all for one, and one for all. Raise your kids not to compete with each other — it is critical that they are not jealous of each other's success. In our family, our kids love spending time with each other and they like nothing better than family vacations. Given the big issues of parental favoritism in both of our extended families, this is miracle that we don't take for granted.
It is imperative to be honest about negative generational patterns in our family lines because with God's help we can be healed. Otherwise, you or your children could be doomed to repeat the sins of past generations. Take what is a difficult situation with your mom and sister and use it as a guide not to replicate what has come before. God came to free us from generational curses … but this only comes with honesty and discipline. Check yourself to see that you are not favoring one child over another. Work with your husband to be sure each child knows that they are loved and cherished equally.
We cannot change the past but we can learn from it. Let's all make sure that the curse of favoritism is not a curse in our own families.
A grease fire destroyed a home near DeLand on Tuesday, officials said.

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