Doris O'Brien is a retired college Speech teacher and banker. She has published two books of humor (Up or Down With Women's Liberation and Humor Me a Little) and for many years contributed light verse to the Pepper 'n Salt column of the Wall Street Journal. She is an avid writer of letters to the editors.
Doris celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary in the same year she welcomed her first grandchild. She now lives in Pasadena with a great view of the San Gabriel mountains — and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.
She can be reached by e-mail: witsendob at (@) gmail.com
The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux
She paints, sculpts, manipulates found photographs and objects — she’s likely to spin us via a vintage school-room globe into a polka dotted galaxy, or line up a troop of helmets on wheels like fledglings being patterned along an intractable trajectory. There is stagecraft, mime, and performance art sometimes at work. more »
MIT's Agnes Suit, An Instrumented Aware Car and the Miss Daisy Driving Simulator
These tools can be used to trigger driver feedback systems that are under development. Sensing systems include: six video cameras for operator monitoring, measures of vehicle velocity, lane position, radar; driver physiology issues includes heart rate, respiration rate and eye tracking more »
A Puzzlement
It’s hard enough, even with a determination to delve deeper, to detach the whole truth from what information is available to us about corporations, political candidates, about unfriendly nations, about allies, about governments, about our neighbors both near and far. A biographical article, for instance, may not contain a single direct lie. It also may leave out a score of relevant facts that can reverse the impression a reader gets. more »
Do Viewers Want to See Beautiful Politicians? Physical Attractiveness Has an Effect on TV Exposure
A study shows that physical attractiveness has an effect on television exposure: the better looking the politician, the more TV coverage he or she gains ... for every additional score on the ‘physical attractiveness index’, the politician’s television exposure rises by 11.6%. more »
