Relationships & Going Places
Articles
Joan L. Cannon, Am I Wearing Out My Welcome? Remember that your newfound cyber-pal has a life too. Don’t treat a new correspondent as though they already understand a) your family background, b) your phobias, c) your pet peeves, d) your most cherished dreams
John Malone, Amha Goes to the Inauguration: Born in a remote Ethiopian village, Amha had been sold by his father to a traveling trader, survived in the mean streets of Addis Ababa and now stood with his adopted father witnessing a historic event on the Mall
John Malone, As I Look Back: Is this perhaps just a case of the criminal returning to scene of the crime? Or am I searching for answers about the real meaning of my life — the good, the bad and the ugly?
Ferida Wolff, A Christmas Blessing: The musicians begin playing and a sweet, haunting sound suddenly comes from the band. The song is suspended in the air, shining like the crystal ornaments on the Christmas tree. A hush settles on the residents
Online Report: Teens Online
Digital Learning: A MacArthur Foundation project has released " the most extensive US study on teens and their use of digital media show that America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online — often in ways adults do not understand or value." The five year project was launched "to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life."
“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online — that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”
- Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.
- Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
- Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
- The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.
- The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
- Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
- Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
- Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.
- “Geeked-out” learning opportunities are abundant — subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.
Two page summary (pdf);
White Paper - Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (pdf)
Articles
Joan L. Cannon, A Plea for Imagination: Surely, there is a real danger to what we like to call civilization when so many people appear to have lost the ability to imagine ... if only to learn how to fear something that may not yet be evident, if we are to prevent it
We recently had a letter from a reader praising Ruth Jobrack Abramowitz's article, The Clothesline. We're posting the link to that article once more for those who may have missed it in 2007.
Ferida Wolff, Mom's Jewelry: What I loved best of all was a bracelet with milky stones that my mother called moonstones. I will know that no matter how beautifully a jewel glows, it is the human spirit that truly shines
Kissing a Frog
We found this maths essay when trying to find something unique for Halloween ... we had purchased a witch doll kissing a frog, if you must know.
Kissing the frog: A mathematician's guide to mating by John Billingham, a Professor of Theoretical Mechanics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham:
After introducing the original fairytale, Professor Billingham posits another way to play the selection game. The paragraphs and link that follow are from +Plus Magazine:
How attractive is my frog? Kissed Too Soon?
I'm told that when men meet women, they sometimes rate each other on a scale of 1 to 10. Of course, mathematicians are far too intelligent and sophisticated do this. We rate people on a scale of 0 to 1. In our original mathematical model, all we could do was compare one possible frog with another. The numbers didn't mean anything in themselves; they just told the princess whether one frog was "better" than another. Let's change the fairytale slightly so that the 100 frogs are now labelled with numbers drawn randomly from those that lie between 0 and 1, with the handsome prince having the highest number. What's the princess's best strategy now?
Well, the princess now has much more information to use. There is a highest and a lowest number (0 and 1), and the frogs' numbers are uniformly, but randomly, distributed between the two. If the first frog to hop out is numbered, for example, 0.99, then she knows it's a top quality frog, and could well be worth a peck on the cheek. What if the first frog is numbered 0.8? Is that good enough to kiss? It turns out that the best strategy is, as anyone aged over 25 knows, to start with high standards, and then lower them as the frogs keep on coming. We're meant to be doing some maths here, so by "standards" I mean that for each frog there is a number, called a decision number, below which the princess shouldn't kiss it (here's how to calculate the decision number). If the frog is numbered above the appropriate decision number, and is the best frog so far, she should kiss it. This strategy nets her the handsome prince a whopping 58% of the time. In fact, if the first frog is numbered 0.99, she shouldn't kiss it, because the first decision number for 100 frogs is about 0.992. She's more likely to find Mr. Right by holding out for a more attractive frog.
The best-looking frog ... but he doesn't fancy me .. and I don't know why not!
There are lots of other things that we could add to our mathematical model to make it more realistic. For example, in real life, if you kiss the second best frog, you don't have to stay in the enchanted forest. Unless you're an incurable romantic who thinks that there's just one perfect person out there for you, you can be very happy with frog number 2. Maybe you're more interested in avoiding a very bad frog. What's more important, making sure you bag frog number 1 or avoiding frogs 51 to 100? The strategy you should choose depends upon what you're trying to achieve.
Read the rest of Prof. Billingham's math essay at the Plus Magazine site
Articles
Julia Sneden, On the Nose: Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low; an excellent thing in a woman — King Lear, Act V. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a rising pitch and increasing nasality in the speech of American women?
Jane Shortall, Madame's New Chapter: A visiting friend to the Ariège Pyrénées remarked that it made him feel as if he had stepped back to the 1950's: the slow pace of life, taking every day as it comes, enjoyment of small things and good food and wine
Margaret Cullison, Third Time's Charm: Even though we’d been together awhile, I’d been single for over 25 years, and I hadn’t forgotten how I’d yearned for another go at marriage. The time had come to stop being afraid to try again
Ferida Wolff, Shhh: Three decades have passed since I had full charge of a child. I hoped I remembered my mothering skills. How different could it be? I wondered
What Beach Did You Choose?
The Natural Defences Resource Council has issued their yearly guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches:
NRDC's annual survey of water quality and public notification at U.S. beaches finds that pollution caused the number of beach closings and advisories to hit their second-highest level in the 18-year history of the report. The number of 2007 closing and advisory days at ocean, bay, and Great Lakes beaches topped 20,000 for the third consecutive year, confirming that our nation's beaches continue to suffer from serious water pollution that puts swimmers at risk.
Beach water quality standards are more than 20 years old and rely on outdated science and monitoring methods that leave beachgoers vulnerable to a range of waterborne illnesses such as gastroenteritis, dysentery and hepatitis along with respiratory ailments and other serious health problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have concluded that the incidence of infections associated with recreational water use has steadily increased over the past several decades. With the population in US coastal areas growing, we can expect to see more Americans getting sick until the sources of beachwater contamination are addressed. Both the EPA and the federal government must strengthen protections for our nation's beaches.
Visit the Beachgoers Water Quality site. Here's the NRDC list of surveyed states:
Alabama | Alaska | California | Connecticut | Delaware | Florida | Georgia | Hawaii | Illinois | Indiana | Louisiana | Maine | Maryland | Massachusetts | Michigan | Minnesota | Mississippi | New Hampshire | New Jersey | New York | North Carolina | Ohio | Oregon | Pennsylvania | Rhode Island | South Carolina | Texas | Virginia | Washington | Wisconsin
Articles
Ferida Wolff, Sister Perceptions: Was it time to see each other through new eyes? It wouldn’t be easy. Our assessments were entrenched over decades of automatic thinking. We had to get out of the past and let go of our childhoods
Roberta McReynolds, Last of the Cat Tribe: Mike knew there wasn’t any point in discussing whether the kitten was staying or not. I offered Mike the naming rights. His inspiration was from the exploits of the last survivor of a Native American Nation known as the Yahi
Julia Sneden, Musings on the Grand Life: Multigenerational contact provides a depth or resonance to any child’s development... It’s not all sweetness and light, of course. There are bound to be what my grandmother called starchy times
Travel Articles
Before you go to China ....
Joan James Rapp, Part Two of Yin and Yang on the Yangtze; A Senior Adventure in the “People’s Republic of Steps:” China is a beautiful, fascinating country, a contradiction of ancient wonders and modern technology. Just because you missed seeing it in your salad days does not mean that you can’t have a memorable journey now
Joan James Rapp takes us on the road again, this time to China: Yin and Yang on the Yangtze; A Senior Adventure in the “People’s Republic of Steps,” Part One
Trends In Marital Stability
Excerpts from the study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers:
The much-cited claim that one-in-two first marriages will end in divorce will likely end up being realized for those who married in the 1970s. Thirty years after these marriages 48.9% of them had ended in divorce. However, the more recent data give us greater confidence in forecasting that subsequent marriages are less likely to end in divorce. Indeed, the divorce probabilities of the 1990s marriage cohort are now only a little above those who married in the 1960s, for a similar marriage duration. It is worth noting that these cohorts will likely live longer than previous cohorts, giving them a longer period of time to be “at risk” of divorcing. Thus, declining divorce probabilities at each year of marriage yield a reasonably clear forecast of longer and more stable marriages, although rising longevity complicates any assessment of the relative likelihood of marriage ending by divorce rather than death. If the divorce rates show declining divorce and earlier longitudinal data supported a story of decreasing divorce then why were so many analysts (including many leading family scholars quoted in the press) easily mislead to believe that divorce has been rising? One possible reconciliation is based upon stock-flow dynamics. While it is difficult to find data on the stock of ever-divorced people (most surveys only ask about current marital status), examining the currently-divorced population ... shows that the number of people currently divorced has continued to rise long after the divorce rate peaked; indeed the population of current divorcees appears to have leveled off only in recent years. Changes in the stock of people ever-divorced people reflect the rate at which people divorce and the rate at which those already divorced die. Analyses of the stock of those whose current marital status is divorced are further affected by the rate at which the divorced remarry. Only in recent years are those whose marriages dissolved during the period of highest divorce rates approaching the peak years of mortality. This explains why the stock of divorcees has continued to rise even decades after the flow of new divorces slowed.
Indeed ... the risk of divorce, at least as measured relative to the married population, peaked in 1979. And while the decline in marriage is also surely part of the reason for the fall in divorce, our analysis ... shows that those marriages that did occur were less likely to end in divorce. However... the proportion of the population who are divorced continued to rise through the 1980s and 1990s, and has only begun to level out in recent years. Thus, despite lower divorce rates and greater marital stability today, a larger proportion of our social networks are divorcees than at any point over the past century.
