On Bill Moyers' Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. This video is well worth watching for many reasons. The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to Southern Baptist…
They want to know what to do about all the left-over turkey today. How do I know this? I check Google Trends. Google has many other new functions in the works. To explore what Google is in the process of developing, go to Google Labs. There is a lot to…
Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace. When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter. This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.
I never once thought it was her fault.
How could you? She’d been deceived. Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.
History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality. Especially among adolescents. We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain. The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development. It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely …
I needed to change the battery in one of our smoke detector tonight. This reminded me of an incident that occurred in 2001. It’s an illustration of the value of smoke detectors. The story also has a nice twist at the end. Afer the incident, I wrote the following email to friends and family.
…I’m writing today because I’m alive and able to do so because of an incredibly important and inexpensive gadget: a smoke detector.
Yesterday morning, at about 5:45 am, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the Battery-powered smoke detector located in the 2nd floor hallway, outside of the bedroom. It was only after being awakened that I smelled the smoke. I blasted out of bed and scrambled to find a fire in the upstairs hallway bathroom we are renovating. The bathroom is only 10 feet down the hall. I was home alone (JuJu and Anne have been out of town while the bathroom is being renovated).
I grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the fire (the fire was the size of a roaring campfire when I hit it the first time. The flames were the only thing I could see in the bathroom—all else was thick black smoke. I ran downstairs to call 911, then grabbed a second extinguisher, which turned the fire into a small glowing area. The fire department showed up a five minutes later and helped figure out (through lots of smoke) that an old permanently-installed bathroom space heater was the problem.
What it was like to practice law 25 years ago without the use of any computers It’s amazing to think that I’ve been a lawyer since 1981, which is more than 25 years ago. The years are certainly going by quickly, which is a bit disconcerting. I currently work with…