Web Tips
|
||||||
| NewWork News Web Tips |
||||||
| Home | ||||||
|
|
||||||
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Faces of the Fallen (Thursday, 6/1/06)
The Bush administration's policy is to do all it can to prevent the press from photographing caskets containing war dead, and high government officials, including the President, do not attend military funerals. Under these conditions, it may be easier to forget that each of the 2,416 American deaths in Iraq and the 292 American deaths in Afghanistan, as of May 31, 2006, represent a real person, most with grieving families who aren't likely to get over these deaths during their lifetimes.
Sometimes war is necessary--few Americans would claim that it was a mistake to bring down Germany's Nazi regime through the use of military force--but war is always a messy and very costly business that certainly shouldn't be forgotten. The Washington Post, in its online Faces of the Fallen section, enables readers to learn at least a little about each of the the persons whose lives have been sacrificed in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to see most of their photographs.
On the other hand, it's useful to put America's current wars into historical context. For instance, it's been approximately 39 months since the U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, with more than 2,400 American deaths. By comparison, it was approximately 45 months from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor until Japan's surrender ended World War II in early September, 1945. During World War II, there were more than 400,000 American deaths. At the same time, during that great mid-20th century war, more than 450,000 people died in the United Kingdom, while more than 23,000,000 (sic) persons died in the Soviet Union.
Some of the numbers are likely to be disputed for years, just as Americans are likely to be arguing about the current War in Iraq a century from now. Clearly, there have been far more unknown soldiers than those buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but nobody is sure how many.
In this case, we're relying, in large part, on data from George Mason University's History News Network. In fact, for further perspective, here are the approximate numbers of American war dead so far, according to George Mason University historians:
Incidentally, while more Americans died as a consequence of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 than at Pearl Harbor, several times as many Americans died in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.American Revolution: 25,324
War of 1812: 2,260
Mexican War: 13,283
Civil War: 863,153
Spanish-American War: 2,446
World War I: 116,516
World War II: 405,399
Korean War: 54,246
Vietnam War: 56,244
Panama Invasion: 23
Gulf War (1991): 148
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Hospital Compare (Friday, 6/2/06)
How do the hospitals in your community stack up? The United States Department of Health and Human Services offers an opportunity to find out with Hospital Compare.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary (Saturday, 6/3/06)
In his autobiography, which puts his personal spin on his life's story only up to about age 50 or so, Benjamin Franklin tells about a very early trip to England where he got a glimpse across the room in a London coffee shop of a very old Isaac Newton, but didn't have sufficient nerve to go over and talk to him. Franklin doesn't say whether it was simply a matter of being "star struck," or if the great physicist's reputation for tearing people's heads off and handing them to them was behind Franklin's youthful reticence.
At any rate, among many other things, Benjamin Franklin often is identified as America's first entrepreneur. He was rich enough by the time he wrote his autobiography that he was free to concentrate full time on being remembered as a great physicist himself, and, of course, on the reasons that most Americans remember him three centuries after his birth: his key diplomatic activities as an old man which enlisted French assistance in winning a war against the strongest military power on earth. Here's an excellent site to help you celebrate Franklin's 300th birthday this year: The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Coin & Conscience (Sunday, 6/4/06)
Coin & Conscience: Popular Views of Money, Credit and Speculation is an extension of a 1986 exhibition at Harvard Business School's Baker Library.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Maxed out in America (Monday, 6/5/06)
More Americans seem to be drowning in debt. Maxed out in America comes from American Radio Works and examines personal bankruptcy in the U.S. as well as the credit reporting industry.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Happiness Formula (Tuesday, 6/6/06)
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert is a major researcher on "happiness," as well as author of the book, Stumbling on Happiness. He was interviewed recently on "The Charlie Rose Show" by Nobel Laureate and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Harold Varmus, who questioned Dr. Gilbert about "physics envy" among psychologists who try to measure subjective states such as "happiness." This and related issues are dealt with on The Happiness Formula from the BBC.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: UsingEnglish (Wednesday, 6/7/06)
America might be better prepared for the future if the majority of native English-speaking American could also function handle Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin, , but, since Americans have an international reputation as the world's worst linguists, we may have to wait a long time before most Americans even recognize that there is a world beyond their immediate communities. In the meantime, many people in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world are scrambling to learn English, and UsingEnglish.com can be of assistance.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Using Biodiversity to Improve Human Well-Being (Thursday, 6/8/06)
The quality of life on Earth, including human life, depends on biodiversity. One of the principal reasons there is so much concern among experts about the loss of the rain forests is that a major proportion of the planet's species are found in those regions. The Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is made up of over 800 botanical institutions and gardens throughout the world. Here is a recent report from the BGCI: Botanic Gardens: Using Biodiversity to improve human well-being.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Writers at Work (Friday, 6/9/06)
The famed Paris Review, founded by George Plimpton, Harold Humes, and Peter Matthiessen in 1953, has no more than about 15,000 subscribers, compared to TV Guide, say, which has circulation of more than 9 million. Like most important cultural institutions, it operates at a loss with the kind assistance of interested benefactors.
The National Endowment for the Arts finances the public availability on the Internet of more than 300 interviews with the top writers of the past half-century or more. Here's the Paris Review's Writers at Work archive.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: UN Chronicle (Saturday, 6/10/06)
If you're interested in global policy issues, you'll probably be interested in reading the UN Chronicle, published by the United Nations.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Office of Vocational and Adult Education (Sunday, 6/11/06)
Why do professional researchers go to all that trouble and spend all that time on their projects? Because THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES, and if we don't do what it takes, we can't expect to be right about anything any more consistently than by flipping a coin. Of course, it's fairly easy to hold the same beliefs as most of the people who surround you, and, thus, be told you're right repeatedly, but that's not the same thing as being right.
The most fundamental purpose of educational institutions is to produce educated persons, not prepare people for jobs or careers. Education for living and education for citizenship are particularly important now that the tech and knowledge revolutions have resulted in a situation in which most people's beliefs about most things are, at least to some extent, simply wrong.
Still, people need to make a living in the revolutionary new world economy, and, the required skill sets for most jobs that pay well have been escalating significantly. Moreover, with the rapid rate of change in the economy, retraining seems necessary at an ever-increasing rate. Here's the U. S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Personal Finance Myths? (Monday, 6/12/06)
Hugh Chou is a postgraduate-trained computer specialist at Washington University in St. Louis. He's developed a number of financial calculators, which are available on his site, and he's also listed what he regards as several personal finance myths.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Apollo Alliance (Tuesday, 6/13/06)
During the hot old days of the Vietnam War, the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing a concert pianist in tails standing beside his grand piano saying, "Before we begin, I have a few remarks about American foreign policy."
Such bait-and-switch techniques have been used by many entertainers over the years who have the power to attract attention for reasons having nothing to do with their ideas or lack of them. A recent example may be the "Dixie Chicks," but there have been lots of others. Many people--not just entertainers--can easily come to "believe their own press releases," in a sense, and assume that, because they have been successful in a particular line of work, they necessarily know something about unrelated issues, or that "everybody has a right to their opinions," whether or not they ask for them, and whether or not they're told ahead of time that this is what they will get for the price of a ticket.
After all, publicity, self-promotion, and hype are the lifeblood of commercial entertainment. Without a lot of noise, nothing happens, and it has become an increasingly noisy environment in which the ability to stand out and get noticed has resulted in noisy escalations.
Of course, entertainers are citizens too, and they have a right to be politically active and a right to speak, but not a RIGHT to be heard. That is, they don't have a RIGHT to our time or a RIGHT to be taken seriously. Those things must be earned. It all has to do with WHAT IT TAKES to be right about anything, and many of the noisiest individuals who have the ability to attract public attention to their political or religious opinions typically don't have a clue.
However, those who do their homework may very well become expert so as to earn our time and attention. Becoming a successful artist doesn't preclude the possibility of excelling in other areas as well. For instance, Goethe was one of history's greatest writers and also one of its greatest scientists. The current Secretary of State is a very good pianist who once aspired to making her living on the concert stage. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once was a Julliard student and played in traveling orchestras.
Robert Redford has the ability to become the center of attention by simply walking into a room or in front of a camera, and he has used his celebrity to attract attention to various causes in which he has been active for many years. However, he doesn't live in Beverly Hills and has done his best to disconnect himself from the Hollywood culture in many ways. Even though he was born in Santa Monica, he hasn't lived in California for decades.
Redford is not simply a movie star, or even "simply" a noted actor, director, and film producer. He's also been a businessman and environmental activist, among other things. In the long-run, he may be most influential as an educator because of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival that he established, all of which may very well live on long after he's gone. Even though he has succeeded grandly in Hollywood's industry, he has great depth and sophistication, and he has given no indication of being self-obsessed or of having been romanced by his own publicity.
Recently, he's been calling a good deal of attention to the Apollo Alliance, an organization dedicated to reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy for both economic and national security reasons, as well as to the creation of the next generation of quality American jobs.
Along similar lines, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been pushing the need for a reorganization of the American economy based on clean, renewable sources of energy. His latest book, The World is Flat, has sold two-million copies in hardback, and he is featured in a new film called "Addicted to Oil," which will run on the Discovery Channel. At the same time, former Vice President Al Gore is featured in a new feature film called, An Inconvenient Truth. Even the Bush administration, which contains a number of major figures who seem to have close ties to the oil industry, now has a Secretary of the Treasury who is a committed environmentalist.
After many years of accumulating scientific evidence of climate change, something important finally may be happening in the political culture, which, typically follows and reflects changes in society at large. Former professional politician Al Gore is right in attempting to influence public attitudes, not simply attitudes among people on Capitol Hill or in the White House. It's a mistake to spend too much time agonizing over individuals, even the President of the United States. Attitudes held by millions of people WILL be represented in our political culture, if not by George W. Bush, then by somebody else.
Moreover, a change of public attitude and, thus, of public policy may not come a moment too soon. Gore indicates in his movie that climate changes may be occurring much more rapidly than previously believed. Yes, this does appear to be the case, and it's what Ray Kurzweil has been saying all along. Dr. Kurzweil has demonstrated that major changes often are perceived as linear when, with sufficient perspective, we can see that they are really geometric or "ogival."
An example is the number of humans on Earth, which remained fairly small for tens of thousands of years, increasing only very slightly over most of that period. Then, for the first time in human history, total world population reached one billion somewhere around 1840. Now, fewer than 170 years later, there are approximately 6 1/2 billion persons on the Earth.
In only 170 years, Earth has accumulated 5 1/2 times as many people as it took during all of Earth's history to accumulate up until about the time that the grandparents of some people still living were born. And, yes, it does appear that the same kinds of mathematical functions can be used to represent climate change.
Ray Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity is Near, should be bought and read by each of the two million persons who have purchased Tom Friedman's latest book. They make good companion reads, and both are among the most important books of the past half-century.
It all comes down to what philosophers for centuries have been referring to as "epistemology." WHAT we know depends entirely on HOW we know it. There has been a lot of magical thinking in the Bush administration on many topics by people who don't yet understand WHAT IT TAKES to be right about anything. Problem is, the majority of the Administration's noisiest and most outspoken critics don't either, and the interacting knowledge and tech revolutions are leaving whole societies and their institutions far behind.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Gerontologist (Wednesday, 6/14/06)
The Gerontologist is a journal published by the the Gerontological Society of America, a nonprofit organization with more than 5,000 member professionals.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Thursday, 6/15/06)
Bill Gates finally turned 50 last year, even though it seems as though he's been around forever. Actually, he WAS helping to change the world when he was still in his teens, and he's been the wealthiest person in the world since at least his thirties, maybe his twenties, which may give hope to college dropouts everywhere.
For a brief period several years ago before the bursting of the dot-com-all-ye-faithful bubble and before courts ordered the breakup of Microsoft Corporation into several "Baby Bills," Billionaire Bill's net worth was estimated at $100 billion, which, for readers in parts of the world that use the word "billion" differently, means one-hundred-thousand-million dollars. To put things into perspective, that number of $1 dollar bills, laid end-to-end, would extend about 380 times around the Earth, or, about 20 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon and back again.
The breakup of Microsoft never happened, but protracted court battles and attendant publicity helped to drive Microsoft stock values down. More recently, Forbes magazine estimates Mr. Gates' wealth at about $50 billion in 2006 dollars, which still puts him several billion ahead of Number 2, Omaha's Warren Buffet.
During the late 1990s, when Ted Turner announced that he would donate a billion dollars to the United Nations, criticism of Bill Gates arose because he hadn't given away much of his money yet, even though he had announced that he would eventually give away nearly all of it, because he doesn't believe in simply dumping it on his kids. As Senator Mark Dayton's father often told him when he was growing up, "There's nothing worse than a rich bum." However, Bill's response at the time was, "Look, I'm still only about 40 years old."
Nonetheless, Mr. Gates apparently was sufficiently embarrassed by all the publicity, that he quickly established a foundation in his wife's and his own name, which now gives away about as much money each year as fellow-billionaire Oprah Winfrey has altogether. At the beginning, Bill's father, William Gates, Sr., a noted and recently retired Seattle lawyer, was put in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with emphasis on the supporting of worldwide health and learning initiatives.
The richest individual in the world is now one of several co-chairs of Earth's largest foundation, which gives away enough money each year to make a really significant difference in the condition of peoples throughout the world. In fact, Bill Gates has announced that he is giving up his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft in order to concentrate his attentions on the foundation.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Celebrity 100 Power List (Friday, 6/16/06)
Forbes magazine is known for its lists, and the Celebrity 100 Power List is one of the more peculiar ones. At any rate, Tom Cruise tops the list, while Steven Spielberg made far more money last year. However, Tom's income itself might be the envy of a number of small countries.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Demystifying Student Loan Consolidation (Saturday, 6/17/06)
Many qualifying Americans will want to do this SOON, and, if you've been confused or "mystified," Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary can help with her column, Demystifying Student Loan Consolidation.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Center for Rural Studies (Sunday, 6/18/06)
The Center for Rural Studies is located at the University of Vermont and deals with the problems of rural people throughout the United States.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: United Nations Environment Programme: Maps and Graphics (Monday, 6/19/06)
If you're fearful that Earth rapidly may be turning into the type of planet never yet experienced by modern humans during the tens of thousands of years that they have been on the planet, you may have a particular interest in examining the Maps and Graphics from the UN's Environment Programme.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: NOAA Ocean Explorer (Tuesday, 6/20/06)
Climate change isn't simply affecting that thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth, but also the upper layers of the world's oceans. For instance, as the oceans get warmer, tropical storms become more numerous and more severe. For this reason and others, you may want to get into closer touch with your world's oceans, and the NOAA Ocean Explorer can help. Incidentally, NOAA is the government agency that is responsible for those weather radios that can alert you in the middle of the night if tornados or other deadly storms are brewing in your area.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The BoxTank (Wednesday, 6/21/06)
Are those big warehouse stores a good thing or a bad thing for America? The BoxTank can help you consider all sides of the question.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: FactCheck (Friday, 6/23/06)
It's almost that time again. Stand by to be inundated with political campaign commercials on television which will attempt to make all of the candidates look like the most despicable low-lifes imaginable. If you haven't totally given up on ever hoping to see factually accurate campaign commercials, and would like to get your own facts straight, FactCheck from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania can help.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: United Nations Population Fund (Friday, 6/23/06)
The UN's United Nations Population Fund is a development agency focusing on public health initiatives as well as other issues.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: HyperStat Online (Saturday, 6/24/06)
A good case can be made for making statistics a part of basic education at both secondary and post-secondary levels. In modern life, we're surrounded by things which are inherently statistical, and thinking or talking about these things without using statistical concepts is a little like trying to discuss pharmacy while leaving out "all that stuff about chemistry." HyperStat Online is an introductory statistics textbook which is available now, and it's free.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Maps In Our Lives (Sunday, 6/25/06)
For people who don't know where on Earth they are, Maps In Our Lives from the world's greatest treasure trove that is the Library of Congress can help. Also, in the online exhibit, and particularly in the James Madison Building in Washington itself, you'll also find a tremendous number of maps of historical significance.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Financial Access for Immigrants (Monday, 6/26/06)
This 100-page report from the Brookings Institution examines the financial practices of immigrants in order to make policy recommendations that would increase access to financial institutions, particularly in poor neighborhoods. Here's Financial Access for Immigrants: Lessons from Diverse Perspectives.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Center for Public Leadership (Tuesday, 6/27/06)
Judging from the recent failures of so many institutions in American life, there surely is need for more effective leadership in the public sphere, as the world reorganizes under rapidly altering conditions. Famed Harvard University has been serving leaders and aspiring leaders in government, corporations, and nonprofit sectors since 2000 with its Center for Public Leadership.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Virtual Skies (Wednesday, 6/28/06)
If you're of a generation that, even though you've flown regularly for years, can't really believe that those big planes can get off the ground, Virtual Skies, the aeronautics tutorial from NASA, can help.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: ConsumerLab (Thursday, 6/29/06)
ConsumerLab conducts independent laboratory tests in order to help consumers and healthcare professionals evaluate the claims made by the manufacturers of food supplements and other such products.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Law Enforcement Technology (Friday, 6/30/06)
Law Enforcement Technology is a monthly magazine with more than 30,000 readers and deals with the technologies that assist people in this line of work.
Copyright © 1995-2007 Gary Johnson Communications. All rights reserved. BraveNewWorkWorld, NewWork, NewWork News, Careers in the NewWork World, WITNE, and WITNE: Women in the New Economy are trademarks of Gary Johnson Communications.