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Jackie Tiro, who has been studying business administration at Norwalk Community College since last year, knows that her education is a good investment.

According to a new report on the college, Fairfield County is seeing the benefit, too.

The report, prepared by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. of Moscow, Idaho, for the state community college system, found that NCC adds more money to the economy than it takes out, and provides taxpayers a return on their investment.

A study included all 12 community colleges in Connecticut.

"It reassures the taxpayers and the General Assembly that they're making a good investment," said Mary Anne Cox, assistant chancellor of the community college system.

The report found that having former NCC students employed in the region increases income by $511.8 million, stimulating the regional economy.

State taxpayers also benefit, earning a 10.4 percent rate of return on their investment in NCC. About 93 percent of NCC students remain in the state, and each student who enters the work force expands the tax base by generating higher earnings and reducing the dependency on public funds, according to the report.

NCC students add $25.6 million in income annually to the state economy, the report states.

Several NCC students said they plan to stay in Connecticut when they finish their degrees.

State Rep. Toni Boucher, R-Wilton, who is on the General Assembly's Education and Higher Education committees, said she

wasn't surprised to hear the results.
Boucher said NCC boosts the region when living costs and gas prices are rising.

"I think that is one place where we actually do receive a benefit or return," Boucher said. "It is one of our last remaining competitive advantages."

The report wasn't a response to looming budget cuts, Cox said. It is good to show the financial benefits of the community college system, Cox said.

NCC President David Levinson said the nursing program is a good example of the report's findings. After two years, graduates enter a competitive job market, earning $65,000 a year or more and provide a crucial service.

"You can't go to Norwalk, Stamford or Greenwich hospitals without coming into contact with one of our nursing students," Levinson said.

The report found that the lifetime earnings of an NCC student will increase $8.10 for every $1 invested in their education, and they can recover all their costs in seven years.

"I can see that, because when you come here you save more money than going to a bigger college or university, but get the same amount of education," said Tiro, 18. "It's good to have a school like this close to home that costs less money."

Disgraced US basketball referee Tim Donaghy, who admitted to betting on games he officiated and passing on inside information to bookies, was sentenced on Wednesday to 15 months in prison.

Donaghy, 41, a National Basketball Association official for 13 seasons, pleaded guilty last August to wire fraud conspiracy to defraud the NBA and to transmitting gambling information across state lines in a scandal that sparked league reforms.

"I'm very sorry, I brought shame on myself, my family, and to the profession that I love," Donaghy told US District Judge Carol Amon at Brooklyn Federal Court.

Donaghy had admitted taking cash payoffs from gamblers in exchange for inside information, such as the physical condition of certain players and which referees would officiate games.

Amon, who also ordered Donaghy to undergo mental health counseling, said of the referee's compulsive gambling disorder that "although it contributed to his criminal conduct, it does not excuse it.

"Many people relied on him to faithfully perform that job," she told the court.

Prosecutors said Donaghy received up to $5,000 for each prediction that turned out to be correct and that he had accepted money at least three times.

Donaghy resigned from the league last summer during an FBI investigation into his gambling activities.

"We're thrilled with the outcome today in court," John Lauro, Donaghy's lawyer, told reporters outside the court, describing the sentence as "fair and reasonable and a victory for the truth."

Lauro said that Donaghy, who was ordered to turn himself in by Sept. 23 to begin serving his sentence, will be likely be liable to pay the NBA about $200,000 in restitution.

Last week, two co-defendants, both high school friends of Donaghy, were sentenced respectively to 15 months and one year and one day in prison for their roles in the scheme.

Lauro told the court that half of all NBA referees were "engaged in gambling," saying,

"There's no question in my mind that the NBA has to be looked at from top to bottom."

"The NBA has done nothing except criticize the messenger," he said.

The NBA this month named retired US Army Major General Ronald Johnson to a newly created position to oversee referees in a move that separates the functions of the referees from the basketball operations.

As Senior President Vice for Referee Operations, Johnson will supervise all aspects of the NBA's referee program, including recruiting, training, and work rules enforcement.

State Rep. Brian Palmer's advice to whoever succeeds him as the elected speaker for the 36th District in Lansing: be bold.

"We need people who will take bold steps to turn things in the state around," the outgoing state legislator said. "We don't want more of the same. We need people to be bold and take a chance."

Palmer, R-Romeo, is term-limited at three two-year terms.

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On Aug. 5, voters in the 36th District will choose a Republican and a Democrat to face off Nov. 4.

The district, which is viewed as Republican territory based on its voting history, includes the northern Macomb County communities of Bruce Township, Shelby Township, the village of Romeo and Washington Township.

Those who vote in the Democratic primary will have three candidates from which to choose; those who cast votes in the GOP primary will have two.

Jeff Grundy, 62, and Greg Moore, 55, both of Washington Township, and Robert Murphy, 51, of Romeo are running as Democrats.

Their rivals from the Republican Party are Matthew Hedge, 39, and Pete Lund, 44, both of Shelby Township.

All five say the top issues facing the district -- as well as Metro Detroit and the rest of the state -- are Michigan's stagnant economy, its growing unemployment and rising energy costs.

Grundy believes lawmakers must step up efforts to retain businesses in Michigan and lure new ones to the state to improve the state's health. He also thinks his background as a business development manager equips him the best for that task.

"We've had lots of lawyers and bean counters, but we haven't had enough real business people in Lansing," he said.

Meanwhile, Moore's plan for helping the district's residents focuses on promoting education -- especially for children.

"I'm also pledging to donate $10,000 of my salary to my district to help its citizens, if I'm elected," said Moore, who boasts more than 20 years experience in the health care industry. The base salary for a state representative is $79,650.

And Murphy, a mediation specialist, believes his skill as a negotiator makes him the best-suited candidate.

"My training and experience has been invaluable in resolving problems," Murphy said. "I'm going to work closer with our U.S. congressional delegation to get funding for my district and the state from Washington."

If elected, Hedge, who has more than a decade of experience in corporate finance management, plans to introduce legislation to lower taxes and cut government spending.

"We have to lower taxes across the board and everything will follow from that," he said. "That'll attract capital into the Michigan marketplace and allow us to compete with other states."

Pete Lund is arguably the most well known of the candidates because he's served as a Macomb county commissioner for the last 10 years.

He is also the owner of a direct mailing company and an adjunct professor of finance and economics at Walsh College.

"I understand how to work with others, put coalitions together and get things done," Lund said. He said his top priority will be to push for the repeal of the Michigan Business Tax to attract businesses to the state.

Palmer's other of piece of advice for his successor: "You're going to have to do those things, which are the right things to do but they don't get you re-elected," he said. "You have to make your own way."

San Francisco - Intel is readying a second release of the Moblin open-source platform for mobile computing, with plans set for an alpha-level version in a few weeks, an Intel official said at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. on Wednesday.

Moblin is a project for mobile Linux that is centered on a range of devices, with Intel eyeing Moblin for its Atom processor for mobile systems. "Our focus as a company right now is on the Atom platform, but I'm sure other people in the community will drive it [in] other directions," said Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel.

Intel is putting together the software stack for Moblin 2, featuring a forking off of Fedora and the Gnome mobile stack. "We're going to open this up to the public," Hohndel said. "I want to see the community that really takes this project and runs with it and makes it their project."

Hohndel stressed that Intel was firmly in the open-source camp. "Open source is something that we believe really helps change the game," Hohndel said.

Also at the conference Wednesday, O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly brought up two MySQL dignitaries from Sun Microsystems to quiz them on how things were going since Sun acquired the open-source database company earlier this year. The two MySQL officials, Michael Widenius and Brian Aker, waxed positive about the merger.

"It's actually been really rewarding," Aker said.

"Sun has given use more free hands to do what we want to do," said Widenius.

Commenting on Sun's switch from a proprietary to open-source software company, Aker did note that there are inevitable tensions when engineers have to go public with their code.

Aker also called Microsoft "irrelevant." Additionally, he said he wanted a new iPhone but hoped that Google gets its Android systems out fast enough that it works well enough that he could use it.

An audience member asked why the open-source world can not do anything as "insanely great" as iPhone. O'Reilly cited potential developments in that direction, such as Android and Openmoko.

In the late nineteenth century, a German biochemist found the nucleic acids, long-chain polymers of nucleotides, were made up of sugar, phosphoric acid, and several nitrogen-containing bases. Later it was found that the sugar in nucleic acid can be ribose or deoxyribose, giving two forms: RNA and DNA. In 1943, American Oswald Avery proved that DNA carries genetic information. He even suggested DNA might actually be the gene. Most people at the time thought the gene would be protein, not nucleic acid, but by the late 1940s, DNA was largely accepted as the genetic molecule. Scientists still needed to figure out this molecule's structure to be sure, and to understand how it worked.

In 1948, Linus Pauling discovered that many proteins take the shape of an alpha helix, spiraled like a spring coil. In 1950, biochemist Erwin Chargaff found that the arrangement of nitrogen bases in DNA varied widely, but the amount of certain bases always occurred in a one-to-one ratio. These discoveries were an important foundation for the later description of DNA.

In the early 1950s, the race to discover DNA was on. At Cambridge University, graduate student Francis Crick and research fellow James Watson (b. 1928) had become interested, impressed especially by Pauling's work. Meanwhile at King's College in London, Maurice Wilkins (b. 1916) and Rosalind Franklin were also studying DNA. The Cambridge team's approach was to make physical models to narrow down the possibilities and eventually create an accurate picture of the molecule. The King's team took an experimental approach, looking particularly at x-ray diffraction images of DNA.

In 1951, Watson attended a lecture by Franklin on her work to date. She had found that DNA can exist in two forms, depending on the relative humidity in the surrounding air. This had helped her deduce that the phosphate part of the molecule was on the outside. Watson returned to Cambridge with a rather muddy recollection of the facts Franklin had presented, though clearly critical of her lecture style and personal appearance. Based on this information, Watson and Crick made a failed model. It caused the head of their unit to tell them to stop DNA research. But the subject just kept coming up.

Franklin, working mostly alone, found that her x-ray diffractions showed that the "wet" form of DNA (in the higher humidity) had all the characteristics of a helix. She suspected that all DNA was helical but did not want to announce this finding until she had sufficient evidence on the other form as well. Wilkins was frustrated. In January, 1953, he showed Franklin's results to Watson, apparently without her knowledge or consent. Crick later admitted, "I'm afraid we always used to adopt -- let's say, a patronizing attitude towards her."

Watson and Crick took a crucial conceptual step, suggesting the molecule was made of two chains of nucleotides, each in a helix as Franklin had found, but one going up and the other going down. Crick had just learned of Chargaff's findings about base pairs in the summer of 1952. He added that to the model, so that matching base pairs interlocked in the middle of the double helix to keep the distance between the chains constant.

Watson and Crick showed that each strand of the DNA molecule was a template for the other. During cell division the two strands separate and on each strand a new "other half" is built, just like the one before. This way DNA can reproduce itself without changing its structure -- except for occasional errors, or mutations.

The structure so perfectly fit the experimental data that it was almost immediately accepted. DNA's discovery has been called the most important biological work of the last 100 years, and the field it opened may be the scientific frontier for the next 100. By 1962, when Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine, Franklin had died. The Nobel Prize only goes to living recipients, and can only be shared among three winners. Were she alive, would she have been included in the prize?