Also on today’s menu:
Task Force Recommends Higher Education Coordination
Figuring Out Coordinated Lunar Time
In August 2022, a lower-court judge granted James Covington’s request to change his first name to Jamauri. He told the court that he had “worked hard in my quest to correct my wrong doings” and was seeking a “fresh start” after having been sentenced to prison for 30 years to life for murdering his lover, Debra Dunce. The state filed a request to overturn the decision, arguing that he had not provided a compelling or necessary reason for the name change.
When a superior court judge invalidated the name change in October 2023, Covington submitted a new application to again change his first name to Jamauri, citing a fear of retaliation by a former prison guard who, he alleged, sexually abused him, and from nearly two dozen jail employees against whom he has filed civil lawsuits while incarcerated. The state filed a motion against the name change in January, arguing that allowing people under correctional supervision “to change their names whenever they desire would impact the agency’s ability to maintain adequate identification records and to accurately track the criminal history of inmates and parolees.”Covington is incarcerated at the state correctional facility in Berlin and is not eligible for parole until 2028.
Lancaster Probate Court Judge Sandra Cabrera issued a ruling on the request on March 29, agreeing that incarcerated people must prove that a name change is “necessary” and that Covington had not provided evidence that he was facing threats that would justify that change. Cabrera said Covington could pursue other legal avenues, including restraining orders, if he feared for his safety upon release.
Discussion: Lawyers for the state also argued that “victims and their families have a right to notice of a defendant’s potential name change” so they would be able to monitor his whereabouts should he be released. That alone is a good reason to deny a name change. During my career as a news editor, there have been numerous requests by those who committed crimes to have their records removed online so they would not face uncomfortable questions after having served their time, when applying for jobs, for instance. Such a request is granted only if they could show a court order to annul the criminal history record. Newspapers serve as a repository for historical information, including crimes, and amending that history is not something to do for convenience. Likewise, changing one’s name to avoid being associated with previous behavior also should not be easy.
Task Force Recommends Higher Education Coordination
The Public Higher Education Task Force has released a list of recommendations for the strategic alignment of education in New Hampshire, including initiatives to reduce financial barriers, increase accessibility, drive the state’s economy, and ensure a foundation for an active and engaged citizenry.
Short-term goals include aligning curriculum and transfer credit between the Community College System of New Hampshire and the University System of New Hampshire, while expanding credit opportunities for experiential work; beginning the implementation of accreditation for CCSNH by the New England Commission of Higher Education; streamlining the admissions process for CCSNH students with a predetermined GPA to USNH schools and notification of automatic acceptance to CCSNH for high school students; utilizing consistent admissions and financial aid processes for students of both systems; increased use of online access to workforce opportunities; recruiting employers to assist graduates with loan repayments when they begin working; and providing shared workspace for CCSNH and USNH system offices to streamline and coordinate administrative functions.
Long-term recommendations include looking into the feasibility of having one governing board and one chancellor overseeing the two systems; developing a rolling six-year plan, updated every two years; eliminating program duplication where duplicate programs are not needed; expanding online offerings and potentially consolidating to a single platform for both systems; looking into offering CCSNH courses and programs on USNH campuses and vice-versa; improving students’ ability to transfer from CCSNH to USNH; and analyzing ways to utilize space and share facilities between the two systems.
Discussion: Generating a report is only useful if it leads to implementation. Governor Chris Sununu will be reviewing the report with Higher Education Task Force members and will need to work with legislators to put agreed-upon recommendations into effect.
Figuring Out Coordinated Lunar Time
Both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency are looking at a new time system for outer space. The US government is proposing a new time zone for the moon — Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT) — because of the different gravitational field strength on the moon.
Kevin Coggins, NASA’s top communications and navigation official, said, “An atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth. It makes sense that, when you go to another body, like the moon or Mars, that each one gets its own heartbeat.”
Directing the upcoming mission of Artemis-3 — the first mission to the moon’s surface since Apollo 17 in 1972 — will require extreme precision, down to the nanosecond, because errors in navigation could risk sending spacecraft into the wrong orbits. Artemis-3 is set to land at the lunar south pole, believed to hold vast stores of water-ice in craters that never see sunlight.
Discussion: This is another aspect of space travel that remains unknown to those of us who remain on our planet’s surface. Hearing this, it makes the 1969 moon landing, which required pages of human calculations to figure out the flight path — since computers in those days were pretty primitive — all the more amazing.