Chronicle of Higher Ed: Will the Book Survive Generation Text?

”I don’t mean the already overwrought debate over the crisis of the book as codex — the daily New York Times announcement that electronic readers stand primed to eliminate paper books. [snip] The issue isn’t the decline in book sales, though it, too, remains an element of the big picture. I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors — intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague — that for too many of today’s undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.” This sadly makes me think of graphic design, where ‘negative space’ is as important as ‘positive space’.  And the risk of losing context.

Science Daily: Smoking can increase depressive symptoms in teens, study finds.

”The association between depression and smoking exists principally among teens that use cigarettes to feel better.” So, the ones who pick up the habit are *exactly* the ones who shouldn’t?

The Atlantic: This Is What the Student Debt Crisis Looks Like.

And we only demonize medical insurance. This is a terrible shame - education is our future.

Discover: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - and What We Can Do About It.

”Higher education should be open to every young person, and this is an option we can well afford.  We confess to being born-again Jeffersonians: we believe everyone has a mind, the capacity to use it, and is entitled to encouragement.” Congruent with my beliefs.

NY Times: Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas.

”Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions.” I wonder if college students couldn’t work in some international travel, with the cost saved. Go pick up the books themselves, in other words.

Slate: Are children today really going through puberty earlier?

Instead of uselessly blathering, look at old yearbooks. You can easily confirm the trend from photos - particularly over obesity rates.  Verifiable fact, not opinion, please.

Slate, Book Review Jack London’s many sides emerge in James L. Haley’s Wolf.

”At one point, London says socialism’s strength is that it ‘transcends race prejudice’ — but then that prejudice returns, just as vicious as before. When he visits Hawaii, he is in awe of its native culture, but then demands the United States conquer it just the same.” Color me shocked ... I didn’t realize this about the man.  The very first book I ever ‘got into’ as a child, the one that took me from passive reading to involved, connected reading was ”White Fang”.  Funnily enough, I never bothered to read “Call of the Wild”, the more popular of his books. Every time I cracked it, it never seemed as interesting as the former.

Beloit College Mindset List.

Does this strike you as written a little badly, itself?  I’m sure someone could up a blog post requesting contributions, webloggers could come up with four times the number of these, and written understandably.

New Scientist: Autism explosion half explained, half still a mystery.

“Researchers have long claimed that changes to the way the condition is diagnosed are the main cause. But now a series of a studies have shown that diagnostic changes alone cannot account for the increase. They suggest that other causes, perhaps environmental factors, are also contributing to the rise in cases.”

Eurekalert: Acetaminophen use in adolescents linked to doubled risk of asthma.

”There was a significant association between acetaminophen use and risk of asthma and eczema. For medium users the risk of asthma 43 percent higher than non-users; high users had 2.51 times the risk of non-users. Similarly, the risk of rhinoconjunctivitis (allergic nasal congestion) was 38 percent higher for medium users and 2.39 times as great for high users compared to non-users. For eczema, the relative risks were 31 percent and 99 percent respectively.” And yet it’s been the ‘preferred’ analgesic for kids among physicians, because of the risk of Reye’s Syndrome with aspirin. Geez.

CNN: ‘Terror babies:’ The new immigration scare tactic.

I will personally kick the ass of anyone victimizing newborns for their self-serving political agendas.

Kiplinger: 13 Careers for the Next Decade.

”Most people discover they love their career only after they’ve become a go-to guy or girl in that field or end up with a great boss and workplace.” Virtually noone (outside of law or medicine) I’ve met has been working in a field directly related to their BA.

Vimeo: Canon 7D vs. Barbie Video Girl.

Okay, we used to think the Playskool video stuff (recorded in B/W on audio cassettes) was pretty cool ... but I doubt we’ll see vintage-loving videographers swinging Barbies around on homemade Steadicam rigs.

Spiegel.DE: Logging Off: The Internet Generation Prefers the Real World.

“They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don’t even know how to google properly.”

Eurekalert: New research: Children’s vegetable intake linked to Popeye cartoons.

”Researchers at Mahidol University in Bangkok found the type and amount of vegetables children ate improved after they took part in a program using multimedia and role models to promote healthy food.” I fights to the finish, ‘cause I eats my spinach ... still remember that.  Still hate cooked spinach, esp. out of cans.

CNet: How to text without a cell phone.

”Entner pointed to recent Nielsen research showing that U.S. teenagers are using 3,146 messages a month, which translates to more than 10 messages every hour of the month that they are not sleeping or in school. Even tweens under 12, he added, are sending 1,146 messages per month, which is almost four text messages per waking hour that they are not at school.” Good lord.

Tufts University: Chew on This: Six Dental Myths Debunked.

Interesting, so I thought I’d post it. I recall pulling out a baby tooth with a huge cavity in it. Apparently that’s a no-go these days - it could damage the underlying permanent tooth.

Discover Magazine: Fatty, Sugary Western Diets Give Kids Inferior Gut Microbes.

“According to the team’s findings, the kids’ diet had a dramatic effect on what bacteria they harbored in their guts to help them with digestion. The Burkina Faso children, who grew up eating a lot of fiber, had gut bacteria that help to break down that tough material. Meanwhile the Italian children, who grew up on a Western diet, had guts dominated by a kind of bacteria that’s more common in obese people, and they had less bacterial diversity overall.” Related to that previous story about food allergies.

SF New Mexican: Three out of 30 Santa Fe Public Schools meet goals.

”Administrators say scores illustrate assessment’s shortcomings.” There’s a spin for you. The system sounds a bit arcane.

Washington Post: U.S. regulators lack data on health risks of most chemicals.

“The cereal recall hints at a larger issue: huge gaps in the government’s knowledge about chemicals in everyday consumer products, from furniture to clothing to children’s products. Under current laws, the government has little or no information about the health risks posed by most of the 80,000 chemicals on the U.S. market today.”

The Economist: Banning cluster munitions: Cluster duck.

“On August 1st the UN’s Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning the manufacture, use and stockpiling of cluster munitions came into force. [snip] But many producers and stockpilers of cluster bombs (including China, Russia and the United States) decided not to sign the convention.”

NY Times: Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age.

”At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.  At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.” Woof.

Flavorwire: Tattooed LEGOS.

Good lord that’s fine work.

AOL News: Want to Create a Nation of Savers? Start at Birth.

”Under their plan, every child born would get an initial deposit of $500, and children in families with lower incomes and fewer resources would have their contributions automatically matched. In addition, the plan would set up a financial education curriculum for schools.” This was talked about, then shut down, in the ‘80’s.  Let compound interest do the work for children born today.  In the 80’s, if you invested $2k upon a child’s birth, and never touched it, their retirement would be taken care of. Don’t know about today.

Rebecca’s Pocket: How to foster creativity in your children and yourself.

Practical application has always been the problem. I speak from my own history. Junior year of high school, for History II AP, they brought in some theoretical physicists from the local braintrusts (Institute for Advanced Study, FMC, etc.) for us to team up with.  These scientists had one goal ... to teach us to brainstorm effectly.  We broke into small groups, and were assigned challenges (such as the challenge in this article) to remedy. Creativity and imagination exploded. I’d weight that one afternoon/evening more highly than just about my entire high school experience. 

Our nation still stereotypes children as ‘helpless’ or ‘victims’.  Kids are self-motivating survivors, if you let them be themselves.  I see so many banging up against the hard edges of our modern consumer/videogame lifestyles, wanting more. Much more.