Commenting without reading: An April Fools experiment by NPR
NPR played a clever April Fools trick this year. It posted a link on FB with the following headline: "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?."
NPR played a clever April Fools trick this year. It posted a link on FB with the following headline: "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?."
By now, I'm sure, many people know about the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. Only 9% of respondents apparently saw Ham as the winner. Of course that won't be the end of it.
From Public Citizen:
Seat belts are the single most effective traffic safety device for preventing death and injury, according to NHTSA. Wearing a seat belt can reduce the risk of crash injuries by 50 percent. Seat belts saved more than 75,000 lives from 2004 to 2008. Forty-two percent of passenger vehicle occupants killed in 2007 were unbelted. A 2009 NHTSA study estimates that more than 1,600 lives could be saved and 22,000 injuries prevented if seat belt use was 90 percent in every state.It amazes me that there have been a few people I ridden with who don't use a seat belt. I tell them I won't move my car until they put on their belt, and they always have, sometimes unhappy about it. I should just tell those people that it is an anti-terrorist device that will save 1,600 lives every year from Middle Eastern terrorists. Then they'd have federal checkpoints to make sure everyone is belted in.
Penn and Teller offer a response that takes less than 2 minutes. Not that any of this makes it any easier to see your baby subjected to multiple jabs of concoctions created by Big Pharma. That said, the statistics beg for us to make sure we vaccinate our children. And see here.
This is a worthy seven-point article from Forbes. The topic is 7 parenting behaviors that stunt their children's growth. Here are the titles to the sections: 1. We don’t let our children experience risk 2. We rescue too quickly 3. We rave too easily 4. We let guilt get in the way of leading well 5. We don’t share our past mistakes 6. We mistake intelligence, giftedness and influence for maturity 7. We don’t practice what we preach. Immediately after reading this Forbes article, I stumbled upon this parenting article from The Atlantic: "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy." Lots of common ground between the two articles.
[U]nderlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.