Archive - 2008
March 8th
Saturday afternoon random stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/08/2008 - 19:23It is a quiet, rainy day. Mairead and Miranda are with their mother. Fiona has been out with Kim at various activities; horse grooming in the morning, and rehearsal for the Palm Sunday Pageant in the afternoon. I have spent time, reading through emails that have piled up and listening to various shows on NPR.
As I get through the emails I’ve built up a list of websites that I’ve browsed and left open, something like 20 different tabs in my browser. Personal Paranoia is a website by Nick Carlton. He added me as a friend on BlogCatalog, I believe. I liked what I read and left the window open to come back to.
I’ve been checking in at Cool Justice a lot over the past few days as we continue to write about and try to make sense of the latest developments in the Avery Doninger case.
I had a meeting on Wednesday where it was suggested that I should check out Fielding Graduate University. “Our mission is to meet your educational and professional needs as an adult learner and a mid-career professional.” In the same discussion, the Carter Center was mentioned. They have The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships For Mental Health Journalism. Applications are due no later than April 28th.
Another tab had Introducing the Book open. It has a very funny tech support video.
Then, there are all kinds of tabs open for interesting events. Yesterday, South by Southwest started. Everyone is Twittering about it or jonesing to be there. The ”Big Gamble” symposium website is open, as is the Life 2.0 summit, where I still can’t find a schedule of who is speaking when. This overlaps with Take Back America 2008. I went to Take Back America last year, and I’m trying to figure out my schedule for this month.
Then, there are various job leads that have crossed my desk in one manner or another. The Center for Community Change is looking for a Web and New Media Manager. Virtual Thesaurus is looking for a Executive Producer to manage all editorial of its online magazine on language and the creative process. SLCN.TV is looking for a part time webmaster.
Two final websites; one is an article about Babak Zamanian, an Iranian blogger who has been sentenced to jail because of his writing. The other is 23andme, a personal Genome Service. For a thousand dollars, you can send them a sample of your saliva. They look at around 600,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, not the whole genome, but enough to get a very good view ones genetic ancestry and makeup. When I have a few thousand to spare, it would it looks like a great geek toy.
March 7th
Mixed Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/07/2008 - 17:50My queue of unread emails has expanded significantly again. There is so much to read. There is so much going on in Second Life. I have articles and emails to write. Yet it is also college break and the girls have been around. I drove Miranda to the train station this morning. She is spending some time with some friends before heading back to school. I asked my Mairead what some good father daughter time might be, and she suggested visiting a bookstore. It led to a good mixed media day.
The first store we stopped at is part of a large national chain, yet there is a foreign language section with ties to Yale and some great books. Mairead stopped there while I went and checked out some other books. I’ve been thinking of getting The Writer’s Market to see if I can find a publisher for my novel, and perhaps some other good writing gigs. Miranda is also interested in this, since she has written one novel and has some others in the works. However, I just couldn’t see spending $50 on the 2008 deluxe edition of The Writer’s Market.
When Mairead had selected her books, we headed off to another bookstore. This one was a small local bookstore. It was full of books from ancient literature to new media and from Marxist to anarcho-capitalist theories. As I looked at the new media books, I was struck by how old they seemed. I found it interesting to look at what they had to say, as I thought of what was piling up on my hard drive. At one point, Mairead asked me if I remembered who wrote Interview with the Vampire. We both remembered that the author’s first name was Anne, but we couldn’t think of the last name. If I were sitting at home, I could googled it and had the answer in a moment. As it was, the quickest way of finding out was to call Kim, who quickly reminded us that it was Anne Rice.
Cellphones and Google have changed the way we search for information. The Internet has changed our view of what is timely. This changes what you can find on the shelves of the large bookstore chains. However, there is still something very special about going to a small local bookstore, with a great collection of obscure books. Father and daughter, old media and new.
New England News Forum and Quinnipiac University co-sponsor symposium on Gambling
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/07/2008 - 13:12The New England News Forum together with Quinnipiac University will be co-sponsoring a symposium on gambling next Tuesday from 7 until 9 PM at the Mancheski Executive Seminar Room at the Lender School of Business Center at Quinnipiac. There will be two movies and two half hour long panels.
The first panel will be moderated by William "Liam" O'Brien, a media-production professor at Quinnipiac. It will include Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, Massachusetts secretary of economic development Dan O'Connell, as well as Barry J. Cregan, interim president of the Foxwoods casino and UMass Dept. of Public Health Adjunct Professor Rachel A. Volberg.
The second panel will “will cover the challenge of reporting on the news and effects of casinos in Connecticut.” It will include UMass journalism instructor Stephen J. Simurda, New York Times editorial writer Maura J. Casey, David Collins, editorial columnist at The Day, Marvin Steinberg , founder and director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling , and Indian Country Today staff reporter Gale Corey Toensing.
Earlier in the day, starting at 4:30, two short documentaries about gambling will be screened.
More information can be found on The New England News Forum website
March 6th
Mental Health and the Executive Branch
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/06/2008 - 14:20Some people may wonder what the two topics, Mental Health and the Executive Branch have to do with each other, especially these days, but they are two important issues that came up this morning on a conference call for bloggers and online journalists with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
The announced purpose of the conference call was to discuss the contempt charges that Congress will be filing as a civil lawsuit against Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers for their refusal to respond to subpoenas from Congress. At the center of this is the issue of executive privilege. How far does it extend? The same issue came up in the discussion about FISA. The positioning around the FISA bill seems to be all about attempts by the executive branch to usurp power from the legislative and judicial branches.
So where does mental health fit into all of this? The call started with Speaker Pelosi talking about congress passing the Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act on Wednesday. She described it as a tremendous, historic victory and spoke about the late Sen. Wellstone’s son, David Wellstone and Former First Lady working hard to help get this bill passed.
On Wednesday, I met with a past president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) to discuss how AGPA could better get its message out. Group Psychotherapy has played an important role in helping people deal with issues that disasters like 9/11 or Katrina have caused. Some of the early work in Group Psychotherapy was around treating soldiers traumatized by their experiences in World War Two, and it would seem like Group Psychotherapy could be very useful in helping veterans returning from the Iraq War.
We spoke about how AGPA can better interface with the media, including bloggers, about its efforts on Capitol Hill and its work with Roslyn Carter to promote awareness of group psychotherapy.
This brings us back to the Presidential Branch. Roslyn Carter has done great work in help our country address issues of mental health. Both Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have spoken about the importance of mental health parity in their health care platforms. Let us hope that our current President sees the importance of addressing issues of mental health.
Attorney Jon Schoenhorn's Arguments in the Doninger Case at the Second Circuit
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/06/2008 - 10:48Over time, the Avery Doninger case has evolved from a draconian overreaction by narcissistically injured petty school bureaucrats to a discussion of the school district making poor use of taxpayers’ money by missing important teachable moments and wasting money on a lawsuit they should have avoided. On Tuesday, the important underlying issues of Free Speech, especially as it relates to the Internet took center stage as the case was heard before the Second Circuit of Appeals.
As a quick summary, last April, Avery Doninger, who was then Class Secretary of the Junior Class wrote a post on LiveJournal one evening at home where she used a derogatory phrase to describe members of the school administration based on their handling of a concern she and others were organizing at her school. The school administration responded by saying she could not run for re-election as Class Secretary and by refusing to honor the results of the election where she won as a write-in candidate. Avery and her mother have sued the school for violating her freedom of speech.
