On Valentines Day 2008, I read about a mini-controversy involving peer counseling on a New jersey radio news Web site. The news coverage came out of one New jersey high school: Clearview Regional High school in Harrison Township Teqip in the southern part of the state. There, parents object to peer counselors, high school juniors and seniors, counseling freshmen on a variety of topics related to sex education. The counseling model comes from a program called Teen Pep. Designed by the Princeton Center for Leadership Training (not affiliated with Princeton University), Teen Pep has been implemented in over 50 Garden State high schools for the past eight years. Therefore, Teen Pep is not a new program and school districts have had time to investigate its merits-only now, one school has made the news.
Teen Pep trains not only students, but also faculty advisors, to work one-to-one, but also as a team in various counseling situations. Schools contracting for Teen Pep work with the Princeton Center for a minimum of two years and there are supervisory field visits by qualified professionals to help ensure the program is running smoothly. A school that engages in Teen Pep makes a considerable intellectual investment, as well as a financial investment, to make it work. Part of this investment is to explain this program to parents.
Perhaps the most widely recognized for BI content was TDWI. org. The data Warehousing Institute provides education, training, certification, news, and research for executives and it professionals across the world. Founded 15 years ago, TDWI is the premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing. Home to Wayne’s World Blog, written by Wayne W. Eckerson, the director of research and services, it provides readers with anything from online conferences, to whitepaper downloads, to industry reports.
Frequently cited by several LinkedIn members, Information Management was another popular resource people turned to for BI news. It claims to be “the educated reader’s choice for the latest news, commentary and feature content serving the information technology and business community”, and with its relaunch last year, it offers original reporting, online radio programming, informative Web seminar programming, white paper resources and online education to professionals in the field of IT. Providing daily informative newsletters on a variety of content, it is understandable why info-mgmt. com has carved a strong position in the BI domain.
The BeyeNETWORK provides global coverage of the BI ecosystem. It supplies industry coverage and resources on business intelligence, performance management, data warehousing, data integration and data quality. B-Eye-Network also includes BeyeUNIVERSITY, a comprehensive curriculum covering all areas of the business intelligence ecosystem. These certificate programs are taught by experts who are nationally and internationally recognized as leaders in their respective fields, and best of all, are completely free!
The name Ralph Kimball cropped up on more than one occasion, although perhaps not soley in reference to BI. He is known worldwide as an innovator, writer, educator, speaker and consultant in the field of data warehousing. He has maintained his long-term conviction that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His books on dimensional design techniques have become best sellers in data warehousing. To date Ralph has written more than 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers’ Choice Award five years in a row. Some of his books include “The Kimball Group Reader: Relentlessly Practical Tools for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence” and “The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering Data”.
Similarly to Ralph Kimball, Bill Inmon was another name that graced discussions quite regularly. Inmon, a world-renowned expert, speaker and author on data warehousing, is widely recognized as the “Father of Data Warehousing”. In addition to authoring more than 50 books and 650 articles, Bill has been a monthly columnist with the Business Intelligence Network, EIM Institute and Data Management Review. In 2007, Bill was named by Computerworld as one of the “Ten IT People who Mattered in the last 40 Years” of the computer profession.
News is essential to be in touch with the latest happenings in the world. Unfortunately news has become something unreliable as a result of biased information presented by broadcasting co-operations and news service providers but it is important to be aware about updates in the world we live in. It may seem overwhelming at times but being informed with the current events around the world would help you to be on top of things wherever you are.
News provide the latest information about current affairs that occur politically; technologically as well as in business and we must consider ourselves as privileged to be educated about them at present unlike the ancient days where global information was the least available. In general, people in all walks of life read news and everyone have their own desired category to read. Whatever your interest maybe, it is important to be educated about the current activities that happen around the globe and maybe beyond. As a younger reader, news feeds in Twitter, Facebook or Perez Hilton would find very interesting, but these do not provide the general knowledge which is part of education. Therefore you need to be informed about all extents; no matter you are young or old.
Think about the world leaders. How many of the names of the world’s presidents or prime ministers are you aware of? If you know it all, you are well updated but if you are not, it is time to read. Understanding about the society that you live in and the societies around the world are significant as we are living in a globalized village. Haven’t you felt clueless about your surroundings when you return home after a long holiday? Similarly you would feel ill-informed about the affairs around the world without making yourself educated about the news. Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds and would be the most uninteresting toil to sit at one place and read news but today the option of reading news online on desktop, laptop or even on mobile phone is available.