SCIWAY News, No. 32 – January 2001Free SCIWAY News Subscription
TIDELANDS BIRDING FESTIVAL - FEB 22-25
Next month's Tidelands Birding Festival offers a rare opportunity to enjoy guided bird watching trips with expert leaders. This event will be held at Huntington Beach State Park, Brookgreen Gardens, and nearby Georgetown County locations. The $30 registration fee includes trips to limited access protected areas, workshops, nightly guest lectures, Friday dinner, and a 7-day pass to Brookgreen Gardens. Registration is required. For more information, please call 1-888-887-2757 or visit http://www.ac.coastal.edu/~miles/tbf.html - page no longer exists.
In This Issue
1. African-Americans in South Carolina: A New SCIway ResourceMuch of what is special about South Carolina stems from the heritage and culture of black South Carolinians, so we're happy to announce the addition of a major new SCIway section that focuses on our state's African-Americans. You can find it at http://www.sciway.net/afam/. The heart of this new resource is a spellbinding section on the history of black South Carolinians. It includes links to more than 200 non SCIway Web pages, all of which are informative and many of which are too riveting to stop reading. This new black history section also presents lots of original material that we've developed in conjunction with the Chicora Foundation (http://www.chicora.org), a non-profit heritage preservation organization located in Columbia. These pages focus on the everyday lives of black South Carolinians during the 1700s and 1800s, and they're full of stories, quotes, pictures, facts, and graphs. We've also included information about notable black South Carolinians, historically black schools and colleges, black organizations, Gullah, and African-American festivals. Finally, we've tried to make it easier for everyone to use these materials by adding short descriptions to most of the links (an improvement we're making elsewhere in SCIway as well). During the next few weeks we will be adding more pages and images to SCIWAY's African-American section. If you know of some resources or links we should include, or if you would like to contribute a resource, please write us at service@sciway.net. We particularly need information, pictures, and documents from the 20th century. 2. New and Notable South Carolina Web Sites
3. Student Web Design Contest Expands, ChangesIn last month's issue of SCIWAY News, we announced our "Teach South Carolina" Web design contest for South Carolina K12 students. Since then we've received lots of comments and suggestions, and as a result we've decided to create a separate division for grades 1-5. The prizes for this new division will be the same as for grades 6-8 and 9-12: $500 for first place and $300 for second. Also in response to the feedback we've received, we have changed the contest rules considerably and clearly specified the criteria that will be used to evaluate Web sites. Finally, we've set up an online forum where you can ask questions about the contest. Just go to Ask SCIway. One thing that has not changed is the contest deadline: March 31, 2001. SCIway is sponsoring this contest to give South Carolina students an opportunity to show off their Web design skills as well as their research, writing, art, photography, and information organization abilities and talents. We hope you will encourage students you know to participate. 4. New SCIway Advertisers
5. Online Tax Resources GuideUnfortunately, paying income taxes is no easier than it's ever been. But now it's definitely easier to get the forms and instructions you need, thanks to Web sites provided by the South Carolina Department of Revenue (http://www.sctax.org) and the US Internal Revenue Service (http://www.irs.ustreas.gov). To save you even more time, SCIway has created a simple online tax resources guide that has direct links to state and federal tax forms, instructions, mailing addresses, email and telephone help services, and filing options. You can find it at http://www.sciway.net/gov/taxes.html. 6. Just how do you pronounce SCIway?I thought of the name "SCIway" in the fall of 1994. It's an acronym for South Carolina's Information Highway, and I liked it because it was unique and, to me at least, cheerful sounding. I knew from the beginning that lots of people would not know how to pronounce "SCIway" like I hoped they would, and was I ever right! Many people pronounce SCIway "sigh-way," as in science. Others say "esse-see-eye-way," as in S C I way. The former I expected. The latter has been a surprise. For what it's worth, I say "sky-way" ... and this is why you see blue sky and white clouds behind the red "SCIway" at the top of most sciway.net pages. However, as the old line says, we don't care what you call us, just call us! And on the Internet, that means come see us at http://www.sciway.net. 7. Upcoming Festivals and EventsFor the latest information on upcoming South Carolina events, please see http://www.sciway.net/calendar.html.
8. Four SC Maps: the Bush Vote, Income, Race, and a DilemmaAnother addition to SCIway this month is a set of four "data maps."
http://www.sciway.net/maps/data/medianincome-1997.html http://www.sciway.net/maps/data/percentwhite-1999.html http://www.sciway.net/maps/data/biwcomparison-2000.html The second map shows county income levels, while the third shows the percentage of non-Hispanic white people living in each county. The fourth page presents two smaller maps: one that shows the percentage of votes President Bush received ... and another that combines county income rankings and percent white rankings. These two maps are strikingly similar. They show that wealthier, whiter counties are much more likely to vote Republican. The only exception to this pattern is Richland County (Columbia). This is not news, but it does point to a major dilemma that faces South Carolina Republican legislators, who now control both houses of our General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction. Should they enact laws that provide immediate benefits to their party's higher income, white supporters ... or should they try to solve the problems that cause South Carolina to rank near the bottom on many important quality of life indicators? The simple truth is that we rank low on education, health, and crime measures largely because of conditions in our poorer, blacker counties ... the purple counties on our maps ... the ones where Republicans get fewer votes. Unless we are able to improve conditions in these counties, we're going to be at the bottom of state rankings forever ... and we're going to find it increasingly difficult to compete in an economy where jobs that require fewer skills are moving to other countries ... and a larger portion of American jobs require more advanced knowledge and skills. This puts Republican legislators in a genuinely tough situation. Do they make decisions that benefit their supporters now ... or do they try to solve our state's biggest problems by allocating more resources to counties where they receive fewer votes? It will be more than merely interesting to see how the Republican majorities in the South Carolina House and Senate deal with this dilemma. All of our futures will be affected by the path they choose. Next month we'll look at some maps that compare South Carolina school districts and the funding they receive.
Copyright © 2001 SCIway, LLC. SCIWAY News™ is written by Rod Welch and Robin Welch of James Island, South Carolina–with a lot of help from people throughout South Carolina. ISSN: 1527-3903. Direct circulation: 40,000+ To subscribe to SCIWAY News, send a one-word message that says "subscribe" to news@sciway.net. To unsubscribe, send an "unsubscribe" message to this same address. If your email address changes, please send your old and new addresses to news@sciway.net. The SCIWAY News mailing list is not loaned or sold to anyone. News, new Web site addresses, and comments and questions about this newsletter should also be sent to news@sciway.net. Back issues of SCIway news can be found at http://www.sciway.net/sn/.
SCIWAY, pronounced "sky-way," is an acronym for South Carolina Information Highway.
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