Research & Rescue

Shatner's Rocket Man

This is for my friend, Joe, who posted a clip of William Shatner singing Keep it Gay on the Dick Cavett show back in the 60s. Sorry, Joe, this rendition beats that hands down. The sad thing is, to this day, I can't hear Rocket Man on the radio without recalling this haunting (as in night terrors) performance.

I write like Chuck Palahniuk

Every once in awhile, you have to indulge in these cutesy little web tools. This one takes a passage you've written (a blog entry or paper is suggested over tweets - unless you want to be E.E. Cummings) and compares your writing to prominent authors, based on a textual analysis of your writing style.

Hat tip Bookworks of Albuquerque

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like Chuck Palahniuk. Proof: http://iwl.me/s/2b568272

Action Alert: It's Crunch Time for Paycheck Fairness

Time is running out.  Congress' August recess is almost upon us, and the elections will dominate much of their time in the fall.  It's been a year and a half since the House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act, but the Senate has yet to act on this critical piece of legislation.  The hard truth is that the time remaining to get this bill passed in this Congress is running short -- but we're not giving up!  As a cosponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, your senator needs to push Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring this bill to the Senate floor now, and he or she needs to hear from you to make this happen. 

Visit the AAUW Capwiz page to make your voice heard: www.capwiz.com

The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

This piece is rather lengthy but Henry Giroux really hits the nail on the head. Thanks to Barb Wold of Democracy for New Mexico for sharing it on Facebook

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society.

Read the rest at www.truth-out.org

Gender appropriate foods?

I guess I suspected that men liked bar food more than women did, in general but gender-appropriate food? Who knew?

Boys learn at an early age that certain foods (red meat, beer) are associated with masculinity, while others (fish, vegetables, yogurt) are considered feminine. Eating gender-appropriate grub becomes a way of affirming one’s manliness. As they grow into men, those choices gradually become habitual.

Read the whole things at www.miller-mccune.com

Child Poverty in the US worse than other developed nations

David Frum posted a blog entry about an Urban Institute report that said that...

American children experience poverty than we might suppose – and... their odds of escape over time are much lower than we might hope.

• More than 1 out of 3 American children will be poor at some point in their childhood.
• You might imagine this experience as a brief or temporary one: the child on food stamps as his mother seeks work after a divorce for example. In fact, even children who experience poverty only temporarily tend to experience it recurringly: they cycle in and out of poverty, bad years following good.
• Children born into poverty are much more likely to remain poor in adulthood than children who are not born into poverty.
• Race predicts poverty: black children are 2.5x more likely to experience poverty than white, 7x more likely to be persistently poor.

Such sad statements about a nation as wealthy as ours...

via www.frumforum.com

Obama's abstraction

Interesting piece at PBS Need to Know, regarding Obama's use of abstraction in speech and how it presents problems in the public connecting with the points of his addresses. What do you think? Are most people in need of concrete examples in speeches and should they be able to handle abstraction? I seem to recall a Stephen Colbert piece on Obama's speeches and how they are written at a 10th grade level, with the implication by the press that this was too much to ask of most people.

We are not arguing that Obama always speaks in abstractions, or that he does so more than other politicians or leaders. But we think these recent statements illustrate an aspect of his public speech that can cause problems for him. The reason lies in how our minds and brains process information. Concrete and abstract words activate different parts of the cerebral cortex. Concrete words like hammer, hit and hard are processed more by areas at the back of the brain that handle visual and spatial information. Abstract words like justice, fairly and render activate the frontal lobes, which process information independent of any particular sense (vision, hearing, touch).The frontal lobes typically are involved when a cognitive process requires effort and attention, which implies that we have an easier time interpreting the meaning of concrete words than interpreting abstract ones. We also have an easier time remembering concrete words because they can be stored in memory using two separate codes: a verbal code (the sounds or characters of the word) and a pictorial code. Abstract words don’t call a specific, universal image to mind. And, concrete words evoke stronger emotional responses, further strengthening our memory for them.

Listeners balk at hearing BP and 9/11 in the same sentence both because they bear little concrete resemblance and because the oil spill seems, at least on the surface, so much more like Hurricane Katrina. When people must compare two concepts, events or problems, they consistently pay attention to the superficial similarities and don’t see through to the deeper, more abstract commonalities. In a famous study, subjects had trouble drawing an analogy between an army attacking a fortress from all sides at once and a doctor treating a tumor by bombarding it with radiation from several different directions — because a fortress doesn’t seem like a tumor, and an army doesn’t resemble radiation beams.

Read the rest at www.pbs.org

Crises of Capitalism

Truly disconnecting

You who know me know that I am far from having the fortitude to pull off SocMe entirely but I try to take block out to just pick up a book and read or set down the blasted iPhone when visiting with friends (not a master, still a grasshopper). What William Powers says here is too true. While I don't want "bad internet days", I also don't want to disconnect from the deeper conversations that let us really see each other and know each other. In Twitter's defense, being a telecommuter a lot of the water cooler aspect of work out of my day and I've been very fortunate to have Twitter at night to meet people in NM and have developed some wonderful friendships here because of it. But those in person interactions, when they come along are so much better than conversations that are limited to 140 character responses.

Powers' book, Hamlet's Blackberry, is on the stack and I hope it will help me break free of some acquired bad habits I've developed living mostly online.

On one level, it makes perfect sense that we never go anywhere without our gadgets. They perform all kinds of useful tasks for us and enrich our lives in countless ways.

But they also keep us connected to everything we’re trying to escape. Having a screen along for the ride changes the nature of the ride. A quiet afternoon of fishing isn’t the same when your inbox is buzzing every five minutes. Getting lost in a wonderful book is impossible if you’re simultaneously fielding tweets and Facebook updates.

By staying connected all the time, we ensure that we never truly go “away.” And the resulting losses are massive. Our souls crave the release summer once offered. We need to cut loose now and then, sit quietly, take naps, dance in the moonlight. Those moments are exceedingly rare now, yet this is barely discussed, like a dirty secret nobody wants to mention.

William Powers is the author of the new book “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.”

Read the rest of Powers' piece at www.pbs.org

The Skinny on the Global Poverty Gap (Clue: It's Not Skinny)

In all the ruckus about the protesters at the G-20, the mainstream media has lost the real message. Watch this video recorded speech by Maude Barlow from Democracy Now. It's sad that the mainstream media concentrates so much on conflict and rhetoric instead of covering the real tragedy at hand. Glitz sells, I guess.

Maude Barlow: "The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History"