Can Cockatoos Really Dance?

Snowball the Cockatoo stomps and shakes his feathers to a song by the Back Street Boys in a video on YouTube. He has done it more than one million times since the clip went up last month. But is Snowball responding to the music, or to its owner? In the blog for the PBS show “Wired Science,” ornithologist John Pepper writes that cockatoos “are intensely social and interactive birds. They are especially interactive with a person they know well. But even as a stranger you can easily elicit this kind of behavior. If you walk into a pet store and interact with any parrot, make eye contact, and talk to it, and then start bobbing your head, chances are good that it will start bobbing its head along with you. Try it! I suspect that in most cases, while the video is being shot, but outside the picture, the bird’s owner is dancing along with the bird and encouraging it.”

Dave Fulker Honored By AMS
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has given its Cleveland Abbe Award for Distinguished Service to Atmospheric Sciences to David Fulker, the first Executive Director of NSDL. The Award is given to those who “have contributed to the progress of atmospheric sciences or to the application of atmospheric sciences to general, social, economic, or humanitarian welfare.” Fulker is cited for “almost a half century of pioneering work in the development of statistical applications providing service within the atmospheric sciences.” Before he joined NSDL, Fulker spent 18 years directing the Unidata Program Center at the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Among Fullker’s many accomplishments there was to help create channels that provide real-time weather data through the Internet. Fulker will receive the honor at the AMS’s 88th Annual Meeting in New Orleans in January 2008.

CNLP To Put State Standards On Thinkfinity
Thinkfinity, a digital learning platform supported by the Verizon Foundation, has awarded a grant to the Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) at Syracuse University in order to assign state standards to their online content. Some of Thinkfinity’s online collections are already connected to national education standards, but teachers often have difficulty comparing federal standards to requirements in their own state. The CNLP plans to hire 20 cataloguers to review and revise standards assignments that will be automatically generated by its software. Their tools were developed with NSF–NSDL funding and are available to other NSDL projects. For more information, contact Anne Diekema at diekemar AT syr.edu.