Restorative justice

Posted on 30. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in cool websites, politics, religion

When I wrong someone, or when someone wrongs me, I believe the best way to heal the wound is to sincerely apologize directly to the victim. It allows both the victim and the perpetrator to experience forgiveness and move on to (hopefully) better lives.

This is at the core of a movement called “restorative justice.” According to restorativejustice.org,

Restorative justice is a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behaviour. It is best accomplished through cooperative processes that include all stakeholders.

Here are steps that website says should be taken to accomplish this:

1. Encounter:  Create opportunities for victims, offenders and community members who want to do so to meet to discuss the crime and its aftermath
2. Amends:  Expect offenders to take steps to repair the harm they have caused
3. Reintegration:  Seek to restore victims and offenders  to whole, contributing members of society
4. Inclusion:  Provide opportunities for parties with a stake in a specific crime to participate in its resolution

I heard about this on an NPR program this evening. The guest on the program was a victim of a violent crime, and talked about how important it was to her to face the person who hurt her. What fascinated me the most was her observation that it was most difficult for her daughter who hadn’t witnessed the crime to heal. It was as if she took the anger on as her burden, and couldn’t let go. I can easily see that, in many situations. Sometimes a child’s pain is tougher on a parent, for example, especially when they’re powerless to help.

I wish our courts would use more restorative justice techniques. It sounds like they’re being used more frequently in other parts of the world. I think forgiveness is essential to healing. And frankly, our penal system does such a poor job at reforming criminals that it wouldn’t hurt to try something new.

(This all reminds me of The Forgiveness Project, which I blogged about a few months ago.)

I’m a lover of quotes, but I have to admit, I’ve never quoted the Koran. Here’s an applicable one:

He who forgiveth, and is reconciled unto his enemy, shall receive his reward from God; for he loveth not the unjust doers.
- The Koran

Title IX violations

Posted on 29. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in education, politics, sports, startling statistics, things that bug me

According to the April, 2007 issue of O Magazine, 80% of federally funded colleges and universities are believed to be in violation of Title IX. Of those, none have ever lost federal funding as a result of their violations. If you’re going to have a law, you should enforce it!

I’m a big supporter of Title IX. I think girls have benefitted tremendously from being able to participate in the same numbers that boys do. Here are some more statistics:

• In 1972 one in 27 high school girls played sports. Today one in 2.5 does.
• Currently 41 percent of high school athletes are girls, and there are approximately 755 more women’s college sports teams than men’s.

The last point is one of the most controversial results of Title IX. Some boys teams (e.g., football) are so large that they “use up” the boys athletic slots that other, smaller teams could use. So some schools have eliminated smaller, less popular sports.

I played Little League back in NJ in 1974, the first year girls were allowed to do so. My daughter and my son have played organized sports since they were preschoolers. But times have changed…my daughter’s coaching tee ball, and there’s not a single girl on the team. Hopefully she’ll be a role model for all the little sisters!

That’s not me in the picture: it’s Maria Pepe, who brought the lawsuit that led to girls being allowed to play Little League. However, my uniform was just like that, made of heavy wool. Our sponsor was Dairy Queen, but unfortunately it didn’t lead to free ice cream. Darn!

Pushing Google maps to the limit

Posted on 28. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in cool websites, international

Go to , then Find Directions. Try getting from New York to London. Check out Step 24. Note that the trip will take you 29 days and 10 minutes! This works from U.S. locations to European locations, but doesn’t work to other continents. In case you’re wondering, you can’t get directions from South Korea to North Korea either! (Thanks, Holly!)

While you’re at that page, click on the “My Maps” tab next to Search Results. It has featured maps, such as “,” which pinpoints highlights along this historic route. The “My Maps” feature isn’t as easy to use as Platial is, but since it’s Google, I’m sure it’ll get better.

How bad are California’s public schools?

Posted on 27. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, education, politics

Stanford’s Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice recently published what appears to be an evenhanded report on what ails California’s troubled K-12 public schools. The report, titled “Getting Down to Facts: School Finance and Governance in California,” is the result of an 18-month effort that included 22 studies by more than 30 researchers from various universities and institutions. Not surprisingly, the problems are both systemic and monetary:

According to Loeb, a number of areas have been identified that could help to improve the system in a relatively short amount of time, although the solutions may be politically difficult. Such changes include reducing restrictions placed on district and school administrators as they try to make improvements, Loeb said. Personnel policies must be designed to help attract, retain and support school teachers and administrators, she said. The report also identified ways to improve what Loeb described as the state’s “irrational and complex” school finance system. In addition, the system needs better information about what works and what does not so that good policy choices can be made in the future, she said.

“Even if we do put more money into the system—it probably will take more money to make the changes that we want—they’ll only be effective if we use the resources well,” Loeb said.

The difficulty administrators face in firing poor teachers came up time and again in the research. “The one thing that they wanted more than anything else was more flexibility to dismiss teachers who weren’t effective,” Loeb said. “This came up so much that it was really difficult to ignore.”

Unlike earlier studies of California’s school finance system, “Facts” was not the result of a court case. “Because of that, [those studies] tend to be responsive to one side or other,” Loeb said. “We don’t have that. Our goal was to provide information to Californians so that we could get a common understanding in which to move forward and create better policy.”

None of this surprises me. After many years of PTA and Educational Foundation leadership in our community, I agree that not only do local administrators need more power to shape the school community as they see fit, but that without money there will continue to be overcrowded classrooms and unfit facilities. Hopefully this report will be a wake-up call to both the public and to government officials.

Today’s Los Angeles Times has a cover story titled “Teachers dropping out too” about how difficult working conditions have become for teachers, and many are quitting the profession.

In California, teachers are departing the profession in alarming numbers — 22% in four years or fewer — but simply offering them more money won’t solve the problem, according to a report released Thursday.

The real issue is working conditions, which are the flip side of a student’s learning conditions, said Ken Futernick, who directs K-12 studies at the Center for Teacher Quality at Cal State Sacramento.

There’s lots of work to be done on all sides. In the meantime, today’s students lose. You’re only young once…

A lesson taught with humor…

Posted on 27. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in podcasts, quotes

“A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained.”

- Ruth Westheimer, in NPR interview

More deaths than in all American wars combined…

Posted on 26. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, politics, things that bug me

From Bob Herbert’s NYTimes column today, “Hooked on Violence“:

I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American history.

“We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence,” she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

What kind of “civilization” are we???

It’s a small world

Posted on 26. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, politics

My son and I were so excited to see a third car with an Obama sticker today, until we realized it was the same car we saw a few weeks ago. Oh well! I’d better keep my car clean so that people can see my sticker, since apparently it makes up 50% of the Obama-stickered cars in the San Gabriel Valley!

Gotta love a candidate who knows his philosophers. Here’s an excerpt from David Brooks’ editorial, “Obama, Gospel and Verse“:

Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking about effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when they’re afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.

Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”

Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”

So I asked, What do you take away from him?

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

I like his balanced viewpoint. He’s not naive, but he’s not bitter and cynical either. Here’s how Brooks sums it up:

On the one hand, Obama hates, as Niebuhr certainly would have, the grand Bushian rhetoric about ridding the world of evil and tyranny and transforming the Middle East. But he also dislikes liberal muddle-headedness on power politics. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he says liberal objectives like withdrawing from Iraq, stopping AIDS and working more closely with our allies may be laudable, “but they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy.”

Hopefully he’ll get a chance to put this into action…

Global warming cartoon of the day

Posted on 25. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in art, cool websites, politics

From Slate.com:

The addictive Google Image Labeler

Posted on 25. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in cool websites

Want to test your typing and mindreading skills? Then check out the . You’ll be paired with another cyberspace visitor and asked to label random Google Image pictures. If you both name the same word, you’ll move on to the next picture. You have 90 seconds total. You’ll get 100 points for each correct picture, and each day there’s a tally of the top scorers. Google will use your word to better label its pictures.

It’s like a video game, and is slightly addictive. Unfortunately, it’s not always the best way to label a picture. The pictures are small, so you can’t always see what they are. Also, sometimes you just can’t tell what something is. There was one I needed to label that was a portrait of a military figure. I had no idea who it was. The word matched? “Man.” Whoopee. Not very helpful.

Anyway, it’s a nice break from the daily routine.

Babies who never have a chance

Posted on 24. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in parenting, politics, startling statistics

I didn’t want to mar yesterday’s feel-good post with the statistic that Gail Williamson cited at each class: 88% of all California pregnancies where the mother is told she’s having a Down Syndrome baby are terminated. In other words, only 12% of the women who believe they’re having a Down Syndrome baby choose to keep it. If they could have seen Blair yesterday, I believe that percentage would be much higher.

(If you’re interested in reading further, check out “The Abortion Debate No One Wants to Have: Prenatal testing is making your right to abort a disabled child more like “your duty” to abort a disabled child” in the Washington Post. The author, Patricia Bauer, talks about her family’s experience with Down Syndrome, and about how few Down Syndrome children there are in West Los Angeles, where she lives.)

Gail also said that DSALA recently received a large donation from a woman who had been told she was going to have a Down Syndrome child, but her daughter was born without Down Syndrome. So, the tests aren’t always accurate.

“Babies who don’t make it” was a recurrent theme for me yesterday. On my way to the school, I heard an NPR report about the Guangxi Province in China, where women are being forced to have abortions as late as nine months (!!) into their pregnancies.

During the past week, dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy, according to evidence uncovered by NPR.

China’s strict family planning laws permit urban married couples to have only one child each, but in some of the recent cases — in Guangxi Province — women say they were forced to abort what would have been their first child because they were unmarried. The forced abortions are all the more shocking because family planning laws have generally been relaxed in China, with many families having two children.

I agree with China’s desire for population control, but they should use incentives, not murder.

Down Syndrome speakers at junior high

Posted on 23. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in education, health, my life, parenting, work

Science has changed so much that even 7th graders now study genetics! Part of that curriculum at our  includes a discussion of Down Syndrome. When I heard that last year, I asked one of the teachers, Barbara Leach, if she’d like for me to arrange for representatives from one of my website clients, the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles (DSALA) to come speak. She liked the idea, and Gail Williamson, the executive director, and her actor son, Blair came to speak.

Today we did it again! Gail and Blair spent the whole day at the school, and spoke to five classes. They were very honest about Blair’s limitations and capabilities, and Gail carefully explained what Down Syndrome meant for different people. The kids paid rapt attention, asked intelligent questions, and were very respectful. Best of all, they laughed at all the right times at Blair’s impeccable comic timing, and really appreciated learning something new.

Blair’s an amazing guy. At 27, he’s an accomplished actor, with a string of commercials, tv shows, movies and even a music video on his resume. Of course, Gail is an amazing woman, too. She was the 1999 California Mother of the Year, and went on to become the U.S. Mother of the Year. Both are very humble, and have very good hearts.

It was a privilege to help facilitate this, and even though both my kids will be in high school next year, I hope to do this many more years! I hope that what Blair and Gail said today will stick with the kids, and they’ll remember it someday when they’re deciding whether to keep a pregnancy, defend someone against bullying, or even make a hiring decision. The seeds have been sown, and I’ll never know where they grow…but I’m confident that they’re good seeds!

Of course, I couldn’t let an opportunity to take a Flat Louise picture pass me by! Here’s a picture of Gail Williamson, Blair Williamson, and Barbara Leach with Flat Louise:

Blair even signed his headshot for Louise! Very cool!! 

Pasadena Showcase House of Design at Descanso Gardens

Posted on 22. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in shopping, tv

My mom, my daughter and I visited the Pasadena Showcase House of Design at Descanso Gardens today. It’s a particularly meaningful spot for our family since my stepbrother got married there several years ago.

I lost track of how many flat screen tv’s there were at the house. The strangest was the one built into the vanity that cost $12,000. It was particularly jarring after this morning’s sermon about the homeless. Hmm. Anyway, we liked the pink/gray color scheme in the teen girl’s room, wondered why the teen boy got all the technology, and thought the Calder knock-off sculpture on the weed-filled lawn didn’t fit in. But, the patio was stained nicely (see the picture), the tree-trunk playhouse was cool, and we admittedly wouldn’t mind an upstairs washer/dryer in addition to the downstairs one.

If only everyone could live this way… 

Babel or Blades?

Posted on 21. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in movies

My daughter saw Blades of Glory tonight. I wish I’d seen that instead of Babel, which we watched on pay-per-view.

I understand why Babel won a Golden Globe: it’s very artsy, complicated, international, etc. But I think the screenwriters sat in a room and said, “How can things get even worse?” as they cooked up the story. I also think that one of the stories is completely irrelevant to the plot, but that it was a story they really wanted to tell so they concocted a way to tie it in.

Very depressing. The Americans win, once again, but it’s a hollow victory.

Hollywood-China-Darfur connection

Posted on 20. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, movies, politics

In case you missed “DIPLOMATIC MEMO; Darfur Collides With Olympics, And China Yields” by Helene Cooper in the April 13th NY Times, it appears that Mia Farrow influenced Stephen Spielberg to influence China to take action re: Darfur:

Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the ”Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could ”go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.

Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region ”to bring an end to the human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy.

China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.

Perhaps Mia Farrow is “Supergirl” after all…

# of high school seniors to peak in 2011

Posted on 19. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, education, parenting, startling statistics

I’ve got one child that graduates from high school in 2010, and one that graduates in 2011. So the following is depressing:

The U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports that the number of high school seniors will peak at 3.3 million in 2011 and will decline only slightly to 3.2 million by 2016. Most educators predict that the percentage of those students going on to higher education—now about 67 percent—will increase and make the application process even more stressful.

I should have waited to have my babies!! (Not really.)

The absurdities of life

Posted on 19. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, parenting

Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.
- Luigi Pirandello

Sometimes what seems real is parody, and what seems unreal is reality. The internet serves to magnify this effect.

Today’s example starts with articles I’ve forwarded from The Onion. Even when I say “from the parody site, The Onion”, some people still believe what the article says. My favorite Onion stories are those which ring most true, such as “Majority Of Parents Abuse Children, Children Report“:

Encouraged to speak freely and confidentially about their home lives, subjects shocked even seasoned child welfare advocates with tales of systematic deprival and gratuitous cruelty. One Illinois boy told of being forced to linger with his mother in fabric stores and later leaving a Toys “R” Us empty-handed, even though the store sold a water gun he really wanted. An Arkansas 9-year-old said he spent all of third grade carrying a boring brown backpack instead of a super-cool Spider-Man one like a friend, whose parents love him, had. And a 6-year-old girl from Wisconsin was forced to sit at a dining room table for nearly two hours until she finished her canned green beans, a food widely considered by poll respondents to be disgusting and suitable only for adults.

I was chuckling over my stepsister’s response to that (she realized it was parody) when I saw I had another email, from the Free Burma Rangers. In contrast to stories about poor little American children, this one was full of all-too-real abuse:

The Burma Army captured and tortured a 19-year-old school boy, Saw Bwe Kyaw Htoo, to death, and shot to death 24-year-old Saw Dar La Lu. Burma Army Light Infantry Battalions (LIB) 371 and 372 combined forces and entered Saw Wah Der area at 12:00 p.m. on 15 April, 2007; the Burma Army killed these two villagers in Yaw Taw Bur at 1:00 p.m. Relief teams are in the area.

How can we laugh at Onion articles, but still process horrific events happening on the other side of the globe? I’m not sure how we manage, but I’m afraid that I sometimes cope by filing reality away in a dark corner file of my brain. Otherwise, I’d get too depressed.

Where women can’t vote

Posted on 18. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in feminism, international, politics

There are only two locations where law prohibits women from voting. Here’s an excerpt from today’s WiseGeek newsletter:

In Saudi Arabia and Vatican City, women are not allowed to vote by law. The only elections held in Vatican City are papal conclaves, which traditionally include a body of all-male Cardinals. If the Catholic Church ever allows women to be Cardinals, presumably they will participate in these conclaves as well, creating the possibility of a female Pope. In Saudi Arabia, women’s rights are severely restricted. Elections were held in Saudi Arabia in 2005 for the first time in 60 years, but women were not included in the proceedings.

There are other places where education, tradition, and lack of electoral system prevents women and others from voting. Thankfully, pressure from the United Nations and other international organizations is helping to shrink this list each year.

Too bad those who can vote don’t always appreciate it!

Happiness is a non-existent gun

Posted on 17. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, politics, things that bug me

How can we call ourselves a civilized society when a disturbed young man can legally purchase multiple handguns? The guns used in the tragic Virginia Tech shootings were never intended to hunt animals: they were intended to hunt people.

I’ve long believed that guns in the home are more likely to injure or kill the occupants of the home than to hurt an intruder, but I wanted to see if I could find statistics that addressed that.

It’s easy to find gun statistics on the internet, but before I posted anything I wanted to make sure the source was legitimate. Here’s an excerpt from a press release from the Harvard School of Public Health titled “Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths, Suicide, and Homicide among 5–14 Year Olds.”

In the United States, only motor vehicle crashes and cancer claim more lives among children 5–14 years old than do firearms. Between 1988 and 1997, the last 10 years for which complete U.S. data are available, 6,817 children 5–14 years of age died from firearms.

In contrast, children in other industrialized nations are not dying from guns. Compared with children 5–14 years old in other industrialized nations, the firearm-related homicide rate in the United States is 17 times higher, the firearm-related suicide rate 10 times higher, and the unintentional firearm-related death rate 9 times higher. Overall, before a child in the United States reaches 15 years of age, he or she is 5 times more likely than a child in the rest of the industrialized world to be murdered, 2 times as likely to commit suicide and 12 times more likely to die a firearm-related death.

Within the United States, case-control studies have found that the purchase of a handgun and the presence of a handgun in the home are strongly associated with an increased risk of homicide and suicide among adults and an increased risk of suicide among adolescents. Cohort, cross-sectional, and interrupted time series studies suggest a strong link between the availability of guns and rates of homicide and suicide among adults and with the rate of unintentional firearm death among all age groups.

Hopefully yesterday’s tragedy will bring about some positive changes in our nation’s gun laws, but I’m not optimistic.

Sorry, but we have a terrier

Posted on 17. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in my life, parenting

That’s our excuse for not having rodents as pets. However, I can see the value in having a hamster, mouse or guinea pig: it would allow my children to name something. Otherwise, I’ll wind up with grandchildren named Bosley, Fespucia and Tikitikitonzo.

Not that those are bad names, of course…they just don’t go with most last names.

Who is that street musician?

Posted on 16. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in music

Have you ever heard a street musician you thought was actually pretty good? Hopefully that happened recently to the throngs of people who passed by acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell, who was playing his Stradivari violin to rush hour crowds at Washington, D.C.’s L’Enfant Plaza metro station. According to the Washington Post:

By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

But did people stop to listen?

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

Only one person recognized him. A few others understood that this was a great musician, but that’s it.

Next time I hear a street musician, I’ll make sure to appreciate them. But, I think I do anyway.

How to make palacinky

Posted on 15. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in food, international, my life

My cousin Beth, her husband Milos, and their three wonderful children visited us from NJ this week. We had a great time at Disneyland and a fun day hanging out at our pool.

Milos was kind enough to teach my son and I how to make palacinky. Milos grew up in Czechoslovakia, and learned how to make some yummy Czech specialties from his grandmother. Milos says palacinky are Czech pancakes; they remind me more of crepes. They’re not too hard to make, and they’re definitely worth the effort. I think my son will be a sought-after roommate someday if he treats his friends to these!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg (another recipe I found says 2 eggs)
• dash salt
• butter
• sugar, fruit, jelly, cottage cheese (all optional)

Directions:

1. Mix flour, milk, egg, salt. Add more milk if it isn’t liquidy enough.
2. Melt enough butter to cover a non-stick frying pan. Milos held the stick of butter and rubbed it on the pan.
3. Pour ladleful of liquid onto pan, and spread around.
4. When it starts to bubble at the edge, lift up the edge and see if it’s hardening. If so, swish the pan around to make sure the pancake doesn’t stick.
5. Holding the pan away from the stove, tilt the pan so that the pancake moves to the edge of the pan. Then, by moving the pan sharply, flip the pancake. (This REALLY makes you look like a pro. My 13-year-old son mastered it after one flip.)
6. Repeat step 5 until the pancake is lightly browned on both sides.
7. Serve with fruit, cottage cheese, sugar, jam, or whatever else you prefer.

If I master this, I’ll try French crepes. Milos also taught us how to make fudge from scratch, and whipped cream. Maybe I’ll include that recipe soon…

Shirt or skirt?

Posted on 14. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in shopping, things that bug me

Disturbing observations at the Glendale Galleria this evening:

• Abercrombie & Fitch wouldn’t let me into the dressing room with my daughter. Only one person’s allowed at a time. The sales associate wouldn’t / couldn’t explain why. Maybe I’d rather not know anyway.
• Of the 68 people pictured in A&F, 66 were White. Two were African-American. No other minorities were represented. Of course, all appeared to be between 16 – 28 years old. I counted while I waited outside the dressing room. Clearly, I’m not their target audience.
• Why are there so many babydoll shirts in the stores this season? No one looks good in them.
• I’m getting too old. I keep thinking long tube shirts are skirts.

“24″ should be re-named “17″

Posted on 12. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in podcasts, tv

I love plot twists, but the detour in Monday’s episode of “24” takes the show to a whole new season. Only 17 hours have passed, but this season’s storyline wrapped up quite nicely in this episode. I should have frozen the Tivo and left it at that.

But nooooo….I had to hear who was on the phone call that Jack took…and I’m hooked for more!

To hear some great “24″ commentary, check out the “Slate Spoiler” each week. It offers an insightful discussion of each episode from some diehard “24″ fans. You can either listen online or download it onto iTunes.

Flat Louise visits Camarillo & Ojai, winds up in museum

Posted on 11. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in art, cool websites, my life, technical

We FINALLY took Flat Louise on a trip more special than sitting on our couch! She accompanied us to Ojai, and had fun stopping in Camarillo for dinner on the way.

Here she is preparing to accompany Don Adolfo Camarillo on his nightly survey of the strawberry fields. For some reason, his horse refused to move. However, we captured the moment on film, and loaded it to Museumr so that it could be memorialized on a museum wall. (I just found out about Museumr from Photojojo, a cool site that has tips on what to do with digital photographs. I particularly love their party ideas!)

Here’s the museum-ified picture of Flat Louise with the cool truck with all the faded fast food toys attached to it that we found at the edge of Ojai:

It’s not too late to participate in the Flat Louise Project! Find out more. Thanks galore to everyone who’s already participated!!!

Grammar Girl to the rescue

Posted on 10. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in cool websites, education, tv

My teenage daughter saw “Grammar Girl” on Oprah, and told me I’d love her. She was right, and I’ve added the Grammar Girl website to my Recommended Websites list to the right.

“Grammar Girl” is actually a technical writer named Mignon Fogarty. Here’s how she describes her mission:

Grammar Girl believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Her arch enemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.

She does indeed make grammar far more interesting than any of my teachers ever did. Here are some examples of grammar rules Grammar Girl has clarified for me:

The rule is that you use a before words that start with a consonant sound and an before words that start with a vowel sound (1).

Thank goodness! It’s always bugged me when people say “an historic event.”

And here’s a very important rule about dashes: never, never, never use a hyphen in place of a dash. A hyphen is not a junior dash; it has its own completely separate use that I’ll talk about at some point in the future, but I can’t talk about dashes without telling you not to use hyphens when you should use dashes. If for some reason you can’t insert the dash symbol, use two hyphens right next to each other: hyphen hyphen [—]. You’ll save an editor or typesetter from having a mild fit. I feel bad because I’ve lost track of the name, but one listener wrote in to say that he or she actually feels a little ill when confronted with a hyphen used as a dash.

Oooh! I use dashes all the time. I’ll have to make sure they’re long – assuming I can figure out how to do that with my blog typesetting!

And now for the last example. I’ve always struggled with whether to use “he” or “she” when the gender of the person is unknown.

So here’s the bottom line: Rewrite your sentences to avoid the problem. If that’s not possible, check to see if the people you are writing for have a style guide. If not, use he or she if you want to play it safe, or use they if you feel bold and are prepared to defend yourself.

This all reminds me of my old buddies in the editorial dept. at eToys, especially Christine! I think Grammar Girl should become a teacher, though in her own way she already is!

To thine own self be true, and just deal with it.

Posted on 08. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in life lessons, quotes

Today’s quotes:

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, rather than a second-rate version of somebody else.

- Judy Garland

Also:

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.

- Maya Angelou

Sounds like the Serenity Prayer.

How to win over the enemy

Posted on 07. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, politics, religion

Who said each of the following nearly opposite statements: George W. Bush or Jesus?

• “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
• “You’re either with us or against us.”

As you probably guessed, Jesus (Mark 9:38-42) said the first one, and Bush said the second one. Ironic, isn’t it, that a president that claims to have a religious mandate would say nearly the opposite to what’s in the Bible?

In today’s NYTimes editorial “An Easter Sermon,” Robert Wright argues that if Bush had modelled his foreign policy after Jesus’ teachings, we’d have a better chance of winning over our enemies.

Of course, Mr. Bush is more in the shoes of the Roman emperor than of Paul. America isn’t a small but growing religious movement. It’s a great power threatened by a small but growing religious movement — radical Islam. But the logic can work both ways. Great powers, by mindlessly indulging retributive impulses, can give fuel to small but growing religious movements. If you want to deprive jihadists of ammunition, make it hard for them to persuade others to hate us.

Right after Paul espouses kindness to enemies, he adds: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Sounds like naïve moralizing until you look at those Abu Ghraib photos that have become Al Qaeda recruiting posters.

The key distinction is between man and meme. Yes, a great power can always kill and torment enemies, and, yes, there will always be times when that makes sense. Still, when you’re dealing with terrorists, it’s their memes — their ideas, their attitudes — that are Public Enemy No. 1. Jihadists are hosts for the virus of hatred, and the object of the game is to keep the virus from finding new hosts.

A recent BBC survey of 28,000 people worldwide found that only Israel and Iran had a more negative rating than the United States. Of course, our purpose on the world stage isn’t to be popular, but when 28,000 people surveyed generally find something wrong with you, there’s probably something there. Perhaps if we tried to respect other nations and care more about their concerns, we’d accomplish more on the world stage.

Happy Easter.

Does Bush really want to revoke the 22nd amendment?

Posted on 06. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, life lessons, parenting, politics

Besides “You learn something new every day,” my father often says, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Today he proved what’s probably a corollary of that theory: “If it sounds too strange to be true, it probably is.”

He had enough healthy skepticism to ask me to use my NYTimes online subscription to research the veracity of what he’d heard on a talk radio program:

The New York Times published an article in which Dick Cheney gave a speech saying that President Bush is looking into a way to suspend the 22nd amendment to the Constitition, which limits a President to two terms. His reasoning would be that because we are in a worldwide terrorism crisis, he should be allowed to seek a third term.

What a wise father I have! This is FALSE!! I searched the NYTimes website high and low, and found no reference to this supposed article. However, I easily found it by searching Google. It’s a very sophisticated April Fool’s joke. You can see the article at http://www.newyourketimes.com/content/article76649.html. Once you click there, note the following:

• The article was “published” on April 1, 2007.
• The url isn’t nytimes.com: it’s newyourketimes.com.
• The links on the site actually do link to the real nytimes.com site.

I made sure to show this to my kids, and pointed out how careful they should be when they do research on the internet.

Too bad the talk radio commentator wasn’t as careful! There are probably lots of scared Democrats out there right now!! (And probably some scared Republicans, too!!)

 

Should CPR require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

Posted on 05. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, cool websites, health, startling statistics, videos

I’ve never had to perform CPR on anyone, and hope I never do. But if I do, I’ve always been afraid I’d forget the ratio of breaths to chest compressions.

Studies are showing that perhaps the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation step isn’t as necessary as previously thought. Tuesday’s NYTimes said that,

Last month, a study of more than 4,000 cases of cardiac arrest, the largest on the subject to date, found that patients were more likely to recover without brain damage if their rescuers had focused on chest compressions alone. Published in The Lancet, the study found that 22 percent of people who received chest compressions alone survived with good neurological function, compared with 10 percent who received combination CPR.

Those findings echoed those of a study in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2000. The reason is that in most cases of cardiac arrest, the victim’s body has enough oxygen to keep organs functioning for several minutes. Mouth-to-mouth simply delivers more oxygen, while chest compressions perform the more vital task of pumping blood.

Makes sense to me, but I’m no expert. Again, hopefully I’ll never have to test this theory.

If you haven’t taken a CPR class in awhile, you might want to check out this great from the American Heart Association. They recommend 2 breaths to 15 compressions, but apparently new guidelines recommend 2 breaths for every 30 compressions. However, the April 6, 2006 issue of The Week said that 30 compressions have been called for for nearly a century, and that “because oxygen levels in the blood can stay fairly stable for about six minutes during a heart attack, getting the heart muscle pumping is far more important than administering breaths.” It also says that

Experts still recommend that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation be performed in cases of near-drowning, choking, or drug overdoses.

Citizendium: Improving on Wikipedia

Posted on 04. Apr, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, cool websites, education

One of the most helpful research tools on the internet is also the one tool that schools won’t allow students to cite in their papers. The hero/culprit? Wikipedia. It’s an amazing first stop for researching just about any topic, but it can’t be counted on to be 100% accurate. After all, not only can experts update the site, but so can vandals or people who don’t have accurate information.

One of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, is launching a new site, Citizendium, which he hopes will address Wikipedia’s weaknesses. According to the Ventura County Star,

Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium’s volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.

Sanger was inspired to make this new site by an incident of vandalism:

A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia’s anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.

When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork.

A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its “copyleft” license that lets anyone use its content as long as he or she is equally generous with his or her output.

In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.

I think it’s great that Wikipedia allows a “copyleft” license, and I can’t wait to try Citizendium.