Former Indiana Mayor sentenced in Bribery conviction
Former Portage Mayor James Snyder, who was found guilty of taking a $13,000 bribe from a trucking company and illegal tax evasion, has been sentenced to 21 months in prison by a federal judge. Snyder was convicted in March of 2021 of seeking bribe in 2013 in return for directing over $1 million in city contracts to the Great Lakes Peterbilt trucking company. Snyder was removed from office in 2019 when he was first convicted on the charges, although that verdict was later thrown out for overly aggressive prosecutorial tactics. Snyder was retried and once again convicted, even though he has continuously maintained his innocence, testifying during his trial that the money was payment for consulting work which had been declared on his income tax returns. The judge has ordered Snyder to surrender for the start of his prison term by January 5, 2022.
Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed dashboard announced by State Board of Education
The Indiana State Board of Education (SBOE) approved a resolution affirming the state’s new Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (Indiana GPS) school performance dashboard characteristics. Following public engagement with stakeholders across the state, the SBOE determined a student’s ability to display these five characteristics, which best indicate a student’s preparation for success after high school, will comprise the framework for the Indiana GPS dashboard:
- Academic mastery;
- Career and postsecondary readiness: credentials and experiences;
- Communication and collaboration;
- Work ethic; and
- Civic, financial, and digital literacy.
This resolution follows the passage of House Enrolled Act 1514 during the 2021 legislative session, which directs the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) and the SBOE to develop a school performance dashboard that promotes transparency and multiple student measures, including longitudinal measures.
The board approved these five key characteristics, which will be reflected on the school performance dashboard, following public comment from and focus groups with families, students, teachers, school administrators and business leaders across the state. As next steps, IDOE will solicit public comment and stakeholder input on indicators to measure each Indiana GPS characteristic, which the SBOE will consider at its December meeting. These indicators will then inform the development of Indiana’s school performance dashboard.
City of Martinsville to host Town Hall style meeting
Martinsville will conduct a town hall meeting on Thursday, October 21st, starting at 6:30pm in the Community Room of the South Central Indiana REMC (300 Morton Avenue). Martinsville Mayor Costin stated, “I encourage anyone who has a question, concern, or whatever, to come to the meeting and share what is on their mind.” The town hall will be aired on the city’s Facebook page live; however, only questions presented by the in-person audience will be answered. Updates on current and future projects will be presented as part of the town hall.
IU physicists lead world’s most precise measurement of neutron lifetime
An international team of physicists led by researchers at Indiana University has announced the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime. The scientific purpose of the experiment, which IU has led for over a decade, is to measure how long, on average, a free neutron lives outside the confines of atomic nuclei. The results from the team, which encompasses scientists from over 10 national labs and universities in the United States and abroad, represent a more than two-fold improvement over previous measurements — with an uncertainty of less than one-tenth of a percent.
The neutrons used in the study are produced by the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Ultracold Neutron source at Los Alamos National Lab. The UCNtau experiment captures these neutrons, whose temperatures are lowered to nearly absolute zero, inside a “bathtub” lined with about 4,000 magnets. After waiting 30 to 90 minutes, researchers count the surviving neutrons in the tub as they’re levitated against gravity by the force of the magnets. The unique design of the UCNtau trap allows neutrons to remain stored for more than 11 days, a significantly longer time than earlier designs, minimizing the need for systematic corrections that could skew the results of the lifetime measurements. Over two years, the study’s researchers counted approximately 40 million neutrons captured using this method. These efforts were the thesis work of Gonzalez, who collected the data at Los Alamos as an IU graduate student from 2017 to 2019, and led the analysis of the published result.
This Week in Hoosier History
1971 – Rushville banker and attorney Philip H. Willkie spoke before the State Medical Association about the severe shortage of doctors in Indiana. He represented a coalition of church, farm, and civil rights groups which supported a new law proposing to erase the double standard applied to foreign doctors wishing to practice in Indiana. Willkie said he advocated reforms “in the way America selects, educates, and utilizes it physicians.”