The Freakonomics blog points to some research done on sexual abuse and highlights some very frightening numbers:
1) 25 percent of victims are 10-14 years old; 23 percent are nine or younger.
2) 22.5 percent of the offenders are family members. Only 8 percent are strangers.
Basically half of the victims are children 14 and younger, and if 22.5 percent are family and 8 percent are strangers then 70% are acquaintances of the victims. That’s bad enough, but then they write this:
3) 25 percent of sex offenses reported to the police lead to an arrest.
And these are only the offenses reported to the police. Stranger sex
offenses must be much more likely to be reported to the police than
family abuse.Using this data, I estimate that six out of every 1,000 10- to
14-year-old girls are victims of sex offenses which are reported to the
police each year. The actual victimization rate is surely much higher.
Here’s the link to the research piece they are referencing.
NPR taped its show Wait Wait….Don’t Tell Me at, uh, Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University last week and it features a guest appearance by Lewisville native and former West Forsyth H.S. and Wake Forest basketball star, and current NBA standout Chris Paul. Apparently Paul was the first pro athlete to ever appear on the show and he did a great job. Listen to it here.
The week before last I went to Evening with 8 Plus Smitty at the Piedmont Club in the BB&T tower in Winston-Salem. The speaker was Michael Miller, publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and there were about 30 people in attendance.
Mr. Miller gave a nice presentation and did a nice job answering questions and reacting to criticism of the newspaper, in particular the recent decisions to fold the daily business section into the local section and merge the Sunday Arts and Living sections. I was lucky enough to sit at his table but to be honest I didn’t get a chance to speak to him because the other prominent person at the table was Phil Hanes, the former CEO of Hanes Corporation. Let’s just say that Mr. Hanes ain’t shy.
Our table of eight was regaled with stories about Mr. Hanes’ efforts to build the Winston-Salem arts community, his involvement with the re-development of downtown Winston, and even some stories from his childhood growing up in the Hanes family. The man is refreshingly blunt and earlier in the evening he hadn’t been shy in his criticism of the Journal’s op-ed page. Essentially he called all of the Journal’s columnists nice people who live in the sticks and don’t ever write about what’s going on in the city. Mr. Miller couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.
Well, I Googled Mr. Hanes and found that he’d written a book called How to Get Anyone to Do Anything and if you look at the reviews you’ll see that the first is from none other than Harper Lee who calls him an "old friend." Now if we were playing the Kevin Bacon game, otherwise known as six degrees of separation, that would put me only one step away from the notoriously reclusive author of one of my all-time favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird. How cool is that!
I met a lot of other interesting people that evening, but I’ve been so busy lately it’s kind of a blur in my memory now. The one notable I can mention is Smitty himself. He’s the publisher of Smitty’s Notes, THE resource for happenings in Winston-Salem and he also does a fine job of putting together some interesting presenters for Evening with 8. If you’re in the Winston area you should definitely try and attend one (the schedule is here), and I’d join you but unfortunately the rest of the sessions this fall are on Thursday nights and I’m committed to my daughter’s soccer team those evenings. Maybe I’ll make more in the next session.
I came across the ad you see to the left on BuzzMachine. To me this is further evidence that I should have gone into advertising. Also, I’m wondering if there’s an endorsement opportunity here for The Turd Man of Alcatraz?
AT&T is getting some pretty bad press from some pretty serious bloggers. First there’s Ed Cone’s billing fiasco that was prompted by AT&T sending him a DSL package that he never asked for, billing him for it and then cutting off his service when he didn’t pay the DSL bill he didn’t even know about. They promised to fix it and then shut his service off again a month later. Then I read about prominent tech blogger Fred Wilson’s scrum with AT&T over his iPhone. You have to read this to believe it:
Last night I tried to activate the iPhone that I recieved as a gift
with a pre-paid plan. A plan that I am sure tens of thousands of people
have on their iPhones. The iTunes system would not allow me to
activate. I got a message that said:Additional information required to activate your iPhone
Please call AT&T at 877-800-3701 to complete your activation.
Refer to your Activation ID when calling
It
was late when I got to that point, so I called AT&T this morning. I
talked to a very nice customer service rep who told me that I could not
get an iPhone without giving them my social security number. I told her
that I was a tech blogger and just wanted to test the iPhone, review
it, and then give it as a gift and I had no need or desire to sign a 2
year contract. She told me there was nothing she could do. So I asked
for a manager.After about five minutes, the manager got on the line. I repeated my
case, asked him to authorize a prepaid plan for my phone. He said he
could not do so. That it was AT&T policy to only issue pre-paid
plans to people with valid social security numbers who fail a credit
check.So there it is. You cannot get a prepaid plan from AT&T unless
you are a deadbeat. That’s discrimination in my book. And I suspect its
illegal at some level.I will never, ever, use an AT&T service again.
Both of these guys are widely read bloggers who exert a great deal of influence in their respective readership communities. I hope that someone over in AT&T’s PR department is paying attention, but I seriously doubt it.
CBS has announced that they will be replacing CSI: New York with CSI: Winston-Salem, focusing on the struggles of running an effective crime lab utilizing the latest technology confiscated from meth labs in Appalachia…
Gotcha! Actually CSI: Winston-Salem refers to a program running all September at Atkins High School (sessions for October and November are already full) that was open to all Winston-Salem/Forsyth County middle school students. Celeste signed Justin, our youngest, up for the program and he attended his second session earlier this week. The program is being used to promote the biotech program at Atkins in hopes that they can entice middle schoolers from all over Forsyth County to enroll in the Atkins magnet program when the time comes for them to choose their high schools.
Celeste informs me that Atkins is an impressive school and Justin informs me that the CSI program is way cool. This week they did fingerprints and Justin got his "official" CSI badge. I’m not sure what next week will entail, but I do know that Justin’s really looking forward to it.
If you have a middle schooler who’s interested in attending the CSI program they have another session scheduled for January 19 & 26. The information page is here, the registration page is here, or you can call 703-6754, ext. 70503.
The program is being funded by a $3,500 grant from the NC Biotech Center.
Befuddled 