Guns may not kill people, but they sure make it easier for people to kill other people. After watching this video it's also painfully obvious that guns make it awfully easy for people to shoot themselves, even if they're really smart.
Last week I sent my mom a link to the registration page for TEDxWakeForestU (she's a Wake Forest alumnus) and she and I were discussing it during a visit this past weekend. Others in our group asked what TEDx was, so I tried to describe the TED concept and the TEDx extension of it, but really failed quite miserably. That's one reason I was ecstatic to stumble across this video from TEDxBeaconStreet; it provides a great example of the TEDx format that I can send my mom so she can share it. The other reason is that the presentation is about the intersection of technology and education – something my mom's passionate about and thus I'm guaranteed she'll find the presentation fascinating.
Hopefully you will too:
If you've been drinking beer long enough you've encountered skunked beer at some point. So how does a beer get skunked? First thing you need to know is that the professionals don't call it skunked, they call it lightstruck.That's important to know because it ends up that the popular wisdom that letting a beer get hot will cause it to get skunked, er, lightstruck is incorrect:
What those researchers found is that there are two distinct pathways to getting skunky-smelling compounds in your beer. The two main actors is this tale of woe: hop alpha acids and light. Not heat. Not oxygen. Light…
All beers that have been bittered with hops can suffer skunking: As an experiment, get a draft beer poured into a clear glass and then let it sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so. Compare that beer to one fresh from the tap. You should definitely detect some skunk in the lightstruck beer. With clear, green or blue bottles, the glass doesn't filter out the ultraviolet and blue wavelengths that start the skunking reaction. Brown bottles are much better at keeping those wavelengths out of your beer…
In the end, if you want to avoid the skunk entirely, just buy a beer that has been packaged in a keg, cask or can. Those beers can (and do) develop bad flavors, but you'll never get one that has been skunked.
Duly noted.
Here's an interesting tidbit from JimRomenesko.com about a reporter who had built a following on her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and what happened when the new owner of her station put in place a social media policy:
At this juncture, I am retaining ownership of my existingFacebook and Twitter pages. Therefore, the company has started new social media accounts in my name for me to use during work hours when I am covering stories. The company has administrative control over these accounts.
It would be easy to think this kind of thing only applies to businesses with "talents" like news organizations, theaters, etc., but that would be wrong. As social media in its varying forms becomes ingrained in the way we do business, the question of who "owns" friends/followers will be as fundamental as who "owns" a salesperson's contact list. Many companies avoid this problem by having only one official company Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn page, etc. so there's no question about who "owns" those followers, but for those companies that decide to allow their employees to develop distinct social media presences as company representatives this is a vital consideration.
You might wonder why any company would allow an employee to develop a distinct social media presence. After all, you'd think that would distract from the company's core social media property. That's a valid concern, but when you stop to consider what you pay people to do in the "real world" – attend industry conferences, develop sales channels, develop relationships with the trade media, etc. – why wouldn't you want them to do the same things via social media? If you're willing to embrace the messiness and chaos that this brings to your social media portfolio then you're likely to generate plenty of business through these efforts, but you also better be ready to protect your business by making it clear who "owns" those channels and the related followers/fans/friends.
The Triangle Business Journal has a nice slideshow that highlights how much each school in the NC university system spends per degree conferred in 2011-12. Here's a handy-dandy list, by school, of the amount spent per degree and the number of degrees conferred:
FYI, the system average was $66,540 per degree and the number of degrees conferred system-wide was 49,447.
Seven years before Coke aired its iconic peace-and-harmony I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke TV ad, the company's CEO staked out a controversial position in Atlanta, GA, the home of the company's headquarters. From Now I Know:
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. On October 14, 1964, he became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. And his home town of Atlanta wanted to throw him a party: an inter-racial banquet, with official invitations going to the city’s leaders and titans of industry. The invites were signed by the city’s mayor, religious leaders from across faiths, a university president, and the publisher of the major area newspaper.
Unfortunately, Atlanta was still racially segregated, and while King had many fans, he also had many enemies. Many whites were upset that King had been honored by the Nobel committee… Invitations to the highly exclusive event came back with many more declinations than one would expect…
Mayor Allen and J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, called together a meeting of the Atlanta’s business leaders, and Austin threw down the gauntlet. According to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, Austin told those assembled that “it is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.”
They decided. Within two hours, all of the tickets were sold…
For your viewing pleasure today we have two videos – the Coke ad mentioned above and Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech. Enjoy.
The National Rifle Association's political clout has long been feared by politicians in the US, but that fear may be misplaced. From an interesting piece at The Atlantic Wire:
Much of the decline in the clout of the NRA is traceable to what has changed in American politics generally and the Republican Party in particular. The NRA is often cited as the reason the Democrats suffered massive losses in the 1994 midterm elections, by both reporters and even Bill Clinton. But a lot has changed since 1994. Democrats may have lost most of the South in those midterms and those southern Republican states are still where the NRA is strongest. As The New Republic's Nate Cohn explained, "pro-gun voters are lost to Republicans, and probably for good." Put simply: no one thinks NRA members would vote for a gun-toting Democrat. The NRA's political fortunes are tied up with the Republican Party's and the NRA's campaign donations reflect this: it supports vastly more Republicans than Democrats. (A comment from an October 2012 Hot Air post: "I’m still PISSED because the NRA endorsed Harry Reid. There’s ‘stupid’, and then there is ‘absolutely stupid’." The endorsement, in that case, does not appear to have delivered a vote.) And yet since the NRA's asendancy, Democrats have still managed to win national elections and congressional majorities. When Obama won Ohio and Virginia, it was by focusing on the cities and suburbs, not rural voters. "To win nationally, Republicans will need to reclaim the socially moderate suburbs around Denver, Washington, and Philadelphia where gun control is at least a neutral issue, if not a real asset to Democrats," Cohn writes.
In other words if you're a Democrat the NRA can't help you and they can only minimally juice the numbers of the voting block you've already lost anyway. In the larger national picture the NRA holds sway in places that are already heavily Republican so why should the Democratic Party worry about it at all since the group has minimal influence in areas that sway elections these days – those being the suburbs in large metro areas?
Here's a thought: the NRA is more afraid that it's losing its clout than it's afraid of a ban on assault weapons. That might help explain the craziness emanating from NRA HQ these days.
If you haven't seen the NRA's ad questioning the President's stance on armed guards in schools you need to check it out. Even if you think armed guards in all schools are a good idea you have to wonder which genius at the NRA decided it was a good idea to take this tack.
Update 1/18/13: So it ends up that the NRA's assertion is false on factual grounds too. Sidwell Friends, where the Presidents daughters go to school, doesn't employ any armed security guards. From the Atlantic Wire:
An erroneous report on Breitbart.com, the conservative activist news website, led NRA officials to believe that Sidwell Friends employs armed guards. (Breitbart seems to have misread a job posting for a security officer.) The NRA even appropriated Breitbart's argument: that the existence of such guards at an elite private school reveals Obama as an out-of-touch elitist, unaware of his own hypocrisy.
End update.
It would be fun to break down exactly how stupid the ad is, but it's even more fun to watch Jon Stewart do it:
Watching the documentary Reportero it's hard to compare the folks at Zeta with just about any media outlet in the US and not come away believing that the US media outlets are filled with vapid wusses who take for granted their First Amendment protection and that they ply their trade in a place where doing their job rarely leads to physical harm. To be fair it would be hard not to look like a wuss in comparison to the Zeta folks, but many of our outlets give the impression they'd be out of their league in a junior high journalism competition.
For those of you without the patience to watch the video here's the description from the documentary's webpage: Reportero follows a veteran reporter and his colleagues at Zeta, a Tijuana-based independent newsweekly, as they stubbornly ply their trade in one of the deadliest places in the world for members of the media. In Mexico, more than 50 journalists have been slain or have vanished since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to power and launched a government offensive against the country's powerful drug cartels and organized crime. As the drug war intensifies and the risks to journalists become greater, will the free press be silenced?
Too bad we can't trade Fox, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo etc. for them. We'd come out way ahead.
Watch Reportero on PBS. See more from POV.
Last month I wrote a post titled The Miracles and Limitations of Modern Healthcare that was prompted by my family's experience at Brenner Children's Hospital where our son had a procedure called a cardiac ablation to take care of a heart condition he'd been dealing with for a couple of years. I wrote the post the day after my wife and I had our son safely home following a successful procedure. As you can imagine we were thrilled with the outcome, but that thrill was tempered by some of our experiences in the waiting room. Here's part of what I wrote:
Unfortunately modern medicine also has its limitations. While we were in the waiting room during our son's surgery a doctor came out and met with a mother and grandmother waiting near us. It was very early in the morning and most of the folks in the waiting area were asleep, thus it was pretty quiet. We tried our best not to eavesdrop, but it was impossible not to hear pieces of what the doctor was telling the mother – that her child did indeed have some rare, malignant cancer. It was also impossible not to hear the mother's crying and her mother trying to console her. And quite frankly it was impossible not to break down ourselves once they left – I haven't cried in public since I was a child, and I'm not ashamed to say that I just couldn't hold it together. I can't imagine going through what that family is going through right now.
Right now our country is dealing with a lot of change in our health care system thanks in large part to theAffordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. There's (rightfully) a lot of discussion about how our health care system and the related health insurance industry work. The debate often focuses on cost and on whether or not we're moving towards a system of "socialized" medicine similar to Canada's or the UK's, and if we are, whether that will lead to a stall in medical advances that have led to every day "miracles" like what our family experienced.
Those are all worthy discussion points, but after yesterday all I could think was this: when it's your child in the operating room you really don't care how expensive the procedure is, you just want him to have whatever it takes to make him well. I would gladly live in a cardboard box in order not to have to hear what that poor mother next to us heard. Whatever we do I hope we continue to work towards making sure that fewer and fewer parents have to hear that their child doesn't have a miracle available to them at any price.
Today we learned that a 15 year old student at our son's high school, a boy named Ryan Wood, died today of cancer. His classmates had started a #prayforryan campaign on Twitter, which brought his and his family's ordeal to the attention of the media, celebrities like West Forsyth alumnus Chris Paul, and the community at large. When he passed away today a lot of us in the community heard about it, and that's what is prompting this post.
Ryan was treated at the same hospital – Brenner Children's Hospital – as our son, which means he had access to some of the best treatment available anywhere. When I heard his story I couldn't help but think back to the experience in the waiting room, and I couldn't help but wonder about how Ryan's family can possibly deal with this loss. And I can't help but hope and pray that the capabilities, the miracles, of modern medicine keep expanding at an ever faster rate so that fewer and fewer families have to discover the absolute devastation that they are feeling with the loss of their son today.
If you are a religious person please keep the Wood family and all families dealing with tragic loss in your prayers. If you aren't religious please send kind thoughts and reflections their way.
Befuddled 