The Texas Department of Public Safety - Narcotics Service requires a form to be filled out before one starts a chemistry lab at home (or anywhere else).

ftp://ftp.txdps.state.tx.us/forms/nar-120a.pdf

In about 1994 I was an Apple fan, and had the first version of the Power PC. At that time Apple allowed the operating system to be used by other manufacturers as Apple Clones. They also had the right to make modifications to the OS.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple and breached all the contracts with these clone makers, most of whom went out of business.

Since then I refuse to purchase any Apple product. This was the only way I could think of to object to their behavior as a consumer.

I attended MIT as a freshman in 1956. During orientation, we took a test which consisted of writing a paragraph about anything.

The results of the test were used to determine whether the student would be required to take Remedial English.

Guess what... 30% failed.

I am a Ph.D. Chemist with 28 years of industrial experience (Dow Chemical) as an analytical chemist. I have over 30 publications in the scientific literature (some of them ground-breaking), have presented talks at national and international scientific meetings, and in my narrow area of expertise, was world renowned for my work in ultra-trace determination of toxic substances (mostly dioxin) in the environment.

I agree with almost everything you said. I would add the resources of the American Chemical Society (http://www.acs.org).

Some of the skills a chemist (or any scientist) needs beyond a knowledge of chemistry are (in no particular order):

1- Documenting your work in a way that stands up to legal scrutiny. (Without documenting what you have done, it is as if you never did it because no one can benefit from it.)

2- Presenting your work orally. (scientific meetings, work-group meetings, job performance reviews, ...)

3- Knowledge of the scientific literature in your current area of endeavor. (Has what you plan to do been done before? Can you benefit from what has been done before?)

4- Planning projects. (How should you go about achieving a project's goals?)

You could help your students prepare for a degree in science by making them aware of the importance of these other skills.

Not only that, I found an ID card of my father's from World War II when he worked in the Bayonne, NJ shipyard putting cannons on ships. As far as I can discern, he wrote his last name identically to the way I do.

Lewis Shadoff, Ph.D.

"(a) In General- Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable-" [emphasis added]

Note the use of 'shall' and not 'must'. I believe this means that the section is not mandatory.
[At least this is the interpretation in government contracts, but correct me if I'm wrong.]

Also, the term 'practicable' is open to interpretation.