The new standard for meetings and conferences

Seth's Blog: The new standard for meetings and conferences: "I think the standard for a great meeting or a terrific conference has changed.

In other words, 'I flew all the way here for this?' is going to be far more common than it used to be.

If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you're wrong. Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don't provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you're wrong as well.

Here's what someone expects if they come to see you on an in-person sales call: that you'll be prepared, focused, enthusiastic and willing to engage honestly about the next steps. If you can't do that, don't have the meeting.

Here's what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.

And here's what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement."

Autism in Wired

The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. "I remember in '99," she says, "seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were and wished there was something like that for autism. Now there is." The message: We're here. We're weird. Get used to it.

This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn't be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.

A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. "If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago," says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, "I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong."

The Mind Body Problem

The REAL brain drain: Modern technology - including violent video games - is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist | the Daily Mail

Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School.

There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups.

The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano - but had nothing to do with the instrument at all.

And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises.

The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.

But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons.

"The power of imagination" is not a metaphor, it seems; it's real, and has a physical basis in your brain.

Alas, no neuroscientist can explain how the sort of changes that the Harvard experimenters reported at the micro-cellular level translate into changes in character, personality or behaviour.

But we don't need to know that to realise that changes in brain structure and our higher thoughts and feelings are incontrovertibly linked.

One Reason Why I Go To Church

The REAL brain drain: Modern technology - including violent video games - is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist | the Daily Mail

I'm a neuroscientist and my day-to-day research at Oxford University strives for an ever greater understanding - and therefore maybe, one day, a cure - for Alzheimer's disease.

But one vital fact I have learnt is that the brain is not the unchanging organ that we might imagine.

It not only goes on developing, changing and, in some tragic cases, eventually deteriorating with age, it is also substantially shaped by what we do to it and by the experience of daily life.

When I say "shaped", I'm not talking figuratively or metaphorically; I'm talking literally.

At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.

The brain, in other words, is malleable - not just in early childhood but right up to early adulthood, and, in certain instances, beyond.

The surrounding environment has a huge impact both on the way our brains develop and how that brain is transformed into a unique human mind.

Randy Elrod on Manifestos and their shortcomings (via Hugh Hewitt)

Randy Elrod:

Viral loops, not manifestos, provide the opportunity for unparalleled influence. This is a world in which documents handed down by well-meaning alpha males result in a stifled yawn. However, this same world moves to the edge of their seat upon realizing that the responsibility to change the world need not be their legacy or burden. On the contrary, the creation of culture is the calling from which history speaks.

For example, Compassion International recently asked me to help form a group of influential bloggers for a historic trip to Uganda. A trip in which we visited slums, HIV/Aids hospitals and projects each morning. We then blogged, created video, and recounted stories raw with reality and emotion each afternoon. Thousands of people around the world followed our eight day journey real-time and over 400 children were sponsored and rescued from poverty. The viral loop that was created spawned hundreds of additional posts and offered the opportunity for thousands of additional people to experience the trip in an automagical way.

This “automagic” tested the corporate structure of Compassion. The trip was completely out of their control. The blog posts were not softened or censored and the videos and art spawned were not pre-approved by the marketing department. The servant leaders of this large organization flexed and collaborated to create culture.

Servant leaders have the ability to provide a new type of leadership. A collaborative mentoring and releasing of people with varied and mystical gifts in order to create culture. Alpha leaders value control, servant leaders value collaboration. Alpha leaders value individualism, servant leaders value community. Alpha leaders value affluence, servant leaders value influence.

Today, it is through viral loops that movements really snowball. In their latest issue, Fast Company says, “A destination such as Facebook grows via invitations, with each "friend" reaching out to her own set of contacts, which in turn do the same. More than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard joined within a month of Facebook's 2004 launch; four years later, it has 67 million active users. And at its current 3% weekly expansion rate, it will have 200 million users by the end of the year, equal to the population of the fifth-largest nation on earth.”

A Response

Townhall.com::Hugh Hewitt

"Evangelical Manifestos" of the future will not have to be read, but will be evidenced by the changes they have brought about. They will not have to be announced, merely recognized.

A Manifesto

Between Two Worlds: An Evangelical Manifesto: A Summary

This morning a document was released at the National Press Club entitled An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment, spearheaded by Os Guinness and signed by over 80 evangelical leaders. (You can read a brief interview I conducted this week with Dr. Guinness about the document.)

Where is they Sting?

Charity Navigator, a watchdog organization in Mahwah, N.J., that rates charities’ performance, has given bad marks to the musician Sting’s charity, which has raised money to preserve rain forests, reports the New York Post.

Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is planning its next fund-raising concert at Carnegie Hall for Thursday and expects such high-profile participants as Billy Joel and James Taylor, the paper reports.

After reviewing the charity’s tax filings, the Post found that just 41 percent, or about $887,000, of the more than $2-million raised at the organization’s 2006 concert ended up in the hands of charities working to save the rain forests.

“This one would fall to the bottom of the bucket,” Sandra Miniutti, a spokeswoman for Charity Navigator, tells the newspaper.

Charity Navigator has given the Rainforest Foundation a mark of zero for the last four years, the newspaper reports.

Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, who founded the organization in 1989, did not comment in the article.

But Ms. Styler, responding to the story in the Post, tells People magazine: “The Rainforest Foundation is celebrating its 20th year. We wouldn’t still be in business or have given out millions of dollars over the years if we’d spent everything we made immediately after it came in.”

Lawyers On Heparin

Townhall.com::On Heparin: A Few, Kind Words For Plaintiffs’ Lawyers::By Hugh Hewitt: "When I began covering the heparin story in February, I was astonished at how little attention it was receiving in the MSM. Perhaps because my father had used heparin for many years before he died (long before the heparin poisoning occurred), or perhaps because I have some very close, very successful friends in the plaintiffs’ bar and we regularly debate mass tort actions and their impact on the economy, I was fascinated by the story. As the number of deaths rocketed up to 81, and the long-term health effects on those who did not die but were sickened by the adulterated batches of the drug began to be debated, my curiosity increased. I am now hoping that the victims find the best plaintiffs’ lawyers in America because we need those litigators not just to get compensation for the families, but to force reform on China."

Switchfuels

Instapundit.com -

But, actually, as some critics are trying to tar all biofuels as if they are made from corn, this is a point worth stressing. Crop-based biofuels are just votebuying from farmers, but others are worth pursuing.

Cooling climate claims enrage Australian scientists

PM - Cooling climate claims enrage Australian scientists: "The idea that it's the sun's activity, not carbon, that regulates earth's temperature, has never entirely gone away. It figured heavily in the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, debated on ABC TV last year.

Now an Australian-born former NASA astronaut is claiming that the recent lack of sunspot activity could actually portend a new ice age. Dr Phil Chapman - a geophysicist who lives in California - makes the prediction in an opinion piece in today's Australian newspaper.

But climate experts here are incensed. They say the evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming is irrefutable.

Emily Bourke reports.

EMILY BOURKE: It might be an unpopular view but Dr Phil Chapman is sticking to it. The geophysicist and former NASA astronaut says figures from four separate agencies show the global temperature dropped noticeably during 2007 and that the globe could now be returning to an ice age.

PHIL CHAPMAN: All the people who monitor the world's global temperature say that the temperature fell by something like 0.7 degrees Centigrade. We're talking about a very large drop that cancels out all the increase since 1930.

If this continues, then global warming will have to be, we'll have to admit that it's over.

EMILY BOURKE: He says the sun and sunspot changes have a bigger influence on the climate compared to carbon dioxide.

PHIL CHAPMAN: The variations in the number of sunspots and the time when they occur, how rapidly they build up, has a close correlation with previous changes in climate, in particularly back in the, around 1700 and again around 1790 when the sunspot cycle was delayed and those were two times it was extremely cold."

I credit my use of public transportation. I don't care what anybody says.

Rick Warren | The Colbert Interview

Interview - Rick Warren | The Colbert Report | Comedy Central:

A Taxonomy of Energy Alternatives

Instapundit.com -

Coal is better than oil from dictators who hate us. Nuclear is better than coal. Nano-solar is better than either, of course, once it's feasible.

Time for Fighting

Time Fights Carbon Emissions; Military Fights Evil::By Dennis Prager: "It is much easier to fight global warming than to fight human evil. You will be celebrated at Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the BBC and throughout the media world, no one will threaten your life, there are huge grants available to scientists and others who fight real or exaggerated environmental problems, and you may even receive an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. Individuals who fight Islamists get fatwas."

...or called stupid.

Culture of Life

I guess the PA State police have been influenced by the anti-choice crowd by referring to the "unborn baby". I learned in school that its not a baby until it's born!

THE STATE

HOLLIDAYSBURG — State police are helping Williamsburg, Blair County, authorities find whomever spiked a pregnant teenage girl’s drink with a drug used to abort pregnancies in cows, a drug they think was stolen from a Williamsburg farm, according to a release.

The pregnant girl’s beverage was tainted with Prostamate sometime between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. March 31 at Williamsburg High School, police said. Troopers are considering the act an aggravated assault upon the girl and her unborn baby, police said.

State police think whoever was responsible was trying to abort the girl’s unborn child, the release indicates.

Violent Femmes

Suspects in video beating could get life in prison - CNN.com: "Eight Florida teenagers -- six of them girls -- will be tried as adults and could be sentenced to life in prison for their alleged roles in the videotaped beating of another teen, the state attorney's office said Thursday."

This case is horrific. It illustrates that you don't need violent video games to have violence. I'll bet money that these girls have never played an hour of violent video games.

One other thing: Many people I talk to on college campuses say that "an eye for an eye" is a barbaric doctrine. This case illustrates that barbarism is the natural bent of humanity. Escalation is the fruit of barbarism: eye for a bruise, life for an eye, etc. This cycle of violence dates back to Lamech in Genesis chapter 4.

An Eye for an Eye is a progressive moral development in history. It ends the cycle of violence by ending escalation and demanding justice. A rich mans eye is worth the same as a poor mans eye. The eye of a nobleman is worth as much as a commoner.

One wonders what motivated these girls to beat their friend unrecognizable. Whatever it was, it was not a gang beating.

Global Warming (Boston Edition)

Boston.com

Until today, it had been 165 consecutive days since the temperature last hit 70 degrees in Boston.

New and Improved

Google Docs:
"Offline access: You can now edit your documents and view your presentations and spreadsheets without an internet connection. Changes are saved to your browser while you are offline and automatically saved when Google Docs detects an internet connection. Learn more."

You talk about your campus crusades...

Pajamas Media:

This “Residence Life,” so-called “citizenship” program would have remained under wraps except for whistle-blowing by indignant students and their parents, as well as groundbreaking efforts by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to investigate and expose the character of what the university, in its own Orwellian materials, called “the treatment.”

The program’s stated intent was for the approximately 7,000 students in U.D.’s residence halls to espouse, in FIRE’s words, “highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.”

Program materials for this ideological reeducation, which have been removed from the U.D. Website, included race/gender/class/sexual orientation “trainer” Shakti Butler’s definition of a racist as “all white people living in the United States” and her edict that “people of color cannot be racists.” An intrusive rating instrument, “Discovery Wheel,” was used to prompt students to admit to their putative racism, and they were instructed that the U.S. is as “an oppressive society” whose “structures of oppression” it is their “duty” to eliminate.

“The treatment” was also mandatory and punitive. Students were required to attend training sessions, group floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Advisers (RAs), who, having been coached in interrogating vulnerable freshmen, plied them with invasive questions.

Good thing they don't have religion on campus. ;-)

Closing the Campus

Greg Lukianoff: 'What Can The Virginia Tech Tragedy Do For Me?' - Politics on The Huffington Post

the simple fact is that some administrators have been using the campus shootings of the past two years as an excuse to justify cracking down on speech they don't like.

The most dramatic recent example of college administrators using the specter of campus shootings to silence speech occurred last month at Colorado College, where students have been found guilty of "violence" for publishing a satirical flyer.

Will I be able to still watch Oprah?

Coming soon: superfast internet - Times Online

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

A Bird in my front yard...

And a nest in the backyard.

The more things change...

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Global warming 'dips this year' The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

...prompting others to question some who don't question climate change theory.

Anti-Aging Medication

Instapundit.com -

First rate coffee, red wine, Guinness -- you won't live forever, but you may live longer. And more enjoyably!

Maybe God is trying to tell us something.

This is where I work...

Summer is coming...

Ethical Standards Erode at Nonprofit Groups, Study Finds - Philanthropy.com

Ethical Standards Erode at Nonprofit Groups, Study Finds - Philanthropy.com: "Nonprofit organizations have long held a reputation for having significantly higher ethical standards than businesses and government.

But a report released today by the Ethics Resource Center, in Washington, shows that gap is closing quickly — as standards at charities are declining at what the study’s authors say is a disturbing rate.

Rates of observed misconduct at nonprofit organizations are at the highest level since the Ethics Resource Center began measuring in 2000. In 2007, more than half — 55 percent — of nonprofit employees observed one or more acts of misconduct in the previous year.

Twenty-four percent of nonprofit employees observed their co-workers putting their own interests above those of the organization. Twenty-one percent observed managers or executives lying to employees. Nearly one in five employees — 19 percent — reported that they had seen abusive behavior or that they had seen co-workers misreporting the number of hours they had worked.

The frequency of these behaviors mirrors the frequency reported in the for-profit and government arenas, the study found.

“One would think that freed from the pressure to generate and distribute profits to shareholders, nonprofit organizations would rise high above the myriad ethics and compliance issues that have plagued..."

As it turns out, economics doesn't determine behavior contra Marx. As C.S. Lewis observed in Men Without Chests, "We laugh at honor, and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst." Why be good? Why believe anything at all that can't be proven in a laboratory? Such is the plight of pure secularism.

The Greatest

Red Sox beat Dodgers 7-4 before 115,300 fans at Los Angeles Coliseum - MLB - Yahoo! Sports

Longtime announcer Vin Scully, who moved with the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, was honored before the game. He referred to himself as “an ordinary man who was given an extraordinary opportunity.”

After being given a long ovation, Scully told the fans: “Aw c’mon. It’s only me.”

A fitting monument to Reading, MA

Groovy

News - - Gainesville.com

The Grooveshark system works on the basis of a peer-to-peer music sharing system, Greenberg said. Users can upload their personal music library to the Web site.

To legalize the process, the user must buy a song if they want to add it to their collection, he said. Part of the profit is then deposited into the account of the person who uploaded the song to Grooveshark.

In this way, the sharing of an illegal music system is paired with the legalized purchase with the added benefit of compensation, Greenberg said.

And the Oscar goes to...

Instapundit.com -

I EAGERLY AWAIT THE HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER BASED ON THIS REPORT: EU Soldiers Accused of Torturing Civilians in Congo.

Bad News for Drivers

Mobile phones 'more dangerous than smoking' - Health News, Health & Wellbeing - The Independent

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation.

Good Business

Monks Run Multimillion-Dollar Company to Benefit Charity

A group of monks who pray, work, and live at Our Lady of Spring Bank Abbey, in Wisconsin, began an online ink and toner business in 2002 as a way to stem dwindling income for the abbey. Today, the monks run a multimillion-dollar operation, with all profits after operating costs going to charity, reports The San Francisco Chronicle.

Bernard McCoy, a Cistercian monk and the company's founder, receives no compensation for his role as chief executive officer. He created LaserMonks.com to sell discounted (including off-brand and remanufactured) inkjet products.

The business model has been deemed "commerce with compassion" in a recent book by Sarah Caniglia and Cindy Griffith, who now live at Our Lady of Spring Bank and manage operations for both LaserMonks.com and its two offshoots. The two women, who once ran their own marketing company, explain in their book how the monks' model changed their views on the corporate experience.

Ms. Caniglia estimates that LaserMonks sales in 2007 totaled $4.5-million; Father Bernard estimates the group's annual operating costs are $200,000. Beneficiaries of LaserMonks.com profits, according to the women's book, have included "formal charities like Faith in Action, as well as not-so-formal efforts, like sending a nurse from Wisconsin to Louisiana to treat victims of Hurricane Katrina."

As for skepticism about monks running a business, Father Bernard responds, "Enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit have always been a part of who we are."

I just heard about it the other day...

Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal - New York Times

Readers discover stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, like it and forward links to their friends, who forward them to lots more friends. Newspaper columnists mention it, stealing — er, quoting — some of the better jokes. By the end of February, the NPR program “Talk of the Nation” runs a report on it, debating whether the site is racist or satire.

And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.

Historic Prosperity

Thank God you live now. Read the whole thing.

Instapundit.com -

As Robert Fogel has noted, we take for granted today conditions that are a huge departure from basically all of human history.

Good thing we have blogs to fact check the newspapers.

Big Phat Liar - March 26, 2008

MARCH 26--Last week's bombshell Los Angeles Times report claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs's trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion "Suge" Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

Courage

Monk protest scuppers controlled media tour of Tibet - Times Online

Tibetan monks staged a daring protest against Chinese rule, disrupted an official government tour for foreign journalists with screams that the Dalai Lama was not to blame for violence and demands for religious freedom.

The astonishing outburst by about 30 monks came as the first group of journalists to visit Lhasa since the violent March 14 riot was being shown around the Jokhang temple, the holiest shrine in the Tibetan canon.

An Associated Press reporter, Charles Hutzler, described one young Buddhist monk who yelled “Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!” and then burst into tears.

He described how the monks had rushed over to stop the reporters from being taken into an inner sanctum of the temple, saying they were upset that a government administrator was telling the journalists that Tibet had been part of China for centuries.

It is better to give than to receive…

Charity Donors Are Happier Than Stingy People, New Research Finds

People who give away money are happier than those who do not, according to new research published today in the journal Science.

Elizabeth W. Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, started her experiment by trying to prove the ways in which accumulating money led to more happiness. She and two colleagues surveyed 632 Americans, asking about their level of happiness, personal spending habits, and how much they donate to charity, reports Forbes.

Ms. Dunn found that while people tend to think that spending money on themselves rather than giving it away will make them happier, the opposite turns out to be true. The researchers used a variety of settings and tactics to test the hypothesis that giving away money leads to more happiness, and the results held — whether on a college campus and in a corporate setting.

 

So giving makes people happy. Dennis Prager would say the opposite is also true: Happy people give more.

Jesus would say: Where your treasure is, your heart will be also. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul.

World's Tallest Man Struggles to Fit In

In 2006, Stadnik was officially measured at 8 feet 5 inches tall, surpassing a 7-foot-9-inch Chinese man to claim the title of the world's tallest person.

His growth spurt began at age 14 after a brain operation that apparently stimulated the overproduction of growth hormone. Doctors say he has been growing ever since.

While his size is intimidating, Stadnik charms visitors with a broad grin and childlike laugh. He seems at times like a lonely boy trapped in a giant's body, even keeping stuffed toys on his pillow.

Instapundit.com -

VICTIM KILLED BY BURGLAR while on the phone to 911. She'd have been better off with a gun.

The Greatest Innovation of our Time

hulu: About

Watch your favorites. Anytime. For free.

Preview of Government Health Care

ABC News: Passport Security Breach on McCain, Clinton & Obama

An embarrassed State Department admitted today that the passport files of all three presidential candidates -- Sens. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- have been breached by its employees.

The bombshell announcement came within hours of the admission that Obama's personal file was improperly accessed several times earlier this year and no one was notified of the breach.

"Christian Morality"

From The Corner: Whenever Ronald Reagan would mention his suspicion that Mikhail Gorbachev was a secret believer, everyone on the White House staff would scoff, thinking the president naive. When I had the opportunity to speak to Gorbachev a couple of years ago, however, I found myself concluding that Reagan had been onto something after all. Why, I asked, had Gorbachev refrained from putting down the revolution of 1989, just as Khrushchev had put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Brezhnev had put down the Prague Spring of 1968? "Because of something I shared with Ronald Reagan," Gorbachev replied. "Christian morality."

You talk about your binary traps...

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat : NPR

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Screening Process

Teens Spending Too Much Screen Time - Forbes.com

WEDNESDAY, March 12 (HealthDay News) -- A new survey reports that teenagers spend far too many hours a week in front of TVs and computers, and those in poor neighborhoods have even more "screen time."

From The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Harvard Law Waives Tuition for Public-Service Pledge

Harvard Law School today plans to announce it will offer the third year of education free to students who pledge to spend at least five years working at a nonprofit organization or for the government, reports The New York Times.

The plan is designed to increase the number of Harvard law students — roughly 10 percent over the past several years — who choose public-service careers.

“We know that debt is a big issue,” said Elena Kagan, dean of the law school, with regard to the new effort, which would save students more than $40,000 in tuition.

Many students are now graduating from law school with upwards of $100,000 in student-loan debt, which prevents them from taking the lower salaries typically offered at government or nonprofit organizations.

Joshua Marquis, district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, said, “I have had a lot of applicants who’ve said, ‘I’d like to take the job, but I really can’t afford it.’ ”