Too much information or not enough?

The Atlantic recently published a piece by Conor Friedersdorf lamenting the fall of local newspaper coverage. His piece was a response to Matt Yglesias’ piece on Slate glorifying the state of today’s news media.

Yglesias’ general premise is that because of the internet, mobile phones, and other technologies, we have access to more information than ever. Newspapers online don’t have space constraints and therefore can provide more stories and don’t have to cut words, limiting the information we get from what they do publish. Fair enough. He frames this around the bank bailout in Cyprus and sites many websites to get the story from every point of view and where to find interactive features that let you make decisions and see what (theoretically) will happen.

Friedersdorf’s counter argument is that while the information available on the Cyprus bailout is astonishing, it’s not exactly useful to the average American. Friedersdorf argues that we should be judging the new media on: “How well does it provide citizens the information they need to govern themselves? How effectively does it fulfill its role as a watchdog?” To meet those standards, newspapers need to provide better local coverage, something that Friedersdorf asserts has been decimated by the internet age (interestingly, less than a week after Ygelsias published his piece extolling the glories of journalism he published this piece about local news).

I’m inclined to agree with Friedersdorf. The coverage of the bank bailout on the other side of the world gives me, an unemployed 26 year old female in California, no useful information. How does that help me to understand what is plaguing the California job market? What information is there that could help me to determine what measures I should vote for in November to aid my local economy? What does that tell me about the state of my local schools, and should I be voting for a bond measure to increase funds for them? 

Another thing noted by Friedersorf is the news media’s role as the watchdog, not just informing citizens, but protecting them. A few years ago, a couple of local beat reporters for the LA Times uncovered fraud with a capital F in Bell, CA. Citizens were being screwed to the wall to fatten the wallets of city administrators and council members and no one did anything about it. According to former CA Attorney General and current CA Governor Jerry Brown, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System knew what these guys were earning and didn’t question it. Brown says that “CalPERS should have told someone, and the attorney general’s office would have been a good place to start.” Would the Economist or the BBC have done the investigative legwork required uncover that information? No, it took a couple of reporters that focused on local news.

While Yglesias is right, and we do have access to more information than we could have ever thought possible, having to access to relevant information is more important. And, unfortunately, this is what is declining. And it’s not all the internet’s fault. Newspapers have been padding their issues with wire stories and cutting local stuff for years.  It was in 2005 when Mitchum Huntzberger told the editor’s of the newly acquired Stamford Eagle-Gazette to stop relying on wires and start increasing local coverage on Gilmore Girls. I remember the first time I opened the local paper in Eugene, Oregon, probably in 2006, and there was very little written by staff reporters. Most of the paper was wire stories, without so much as a local bent on the story. I think that if a newspaper is going to run a wire story, it probably makes sense to figure out why I should care.

Don’t get me wrong, I support open access to information. I do think that Yglesias is right and new technologies have led to more in depth coverage and in many ways a more complete picture. The problem is that we see the benefits of this on really a small number of national stories. We need news outlets, whether they be papers, television or online, to dedicate more of this type of reporting to stories that will actually inform the public of the things that matter to them. 

"Let's Eat Some Veggies" Said No Teen, Ever

Maybe we should have a standardized diet. We can all eat the same things for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. They can come in little tin packages, labeled “Monday Breakfast” or “Friday Dinner.” I’m sure we can create a government office to handle this. And since citizens won’t have to go to the grocery store, we can fund this program with the households' grocery budgets. Although, now that I think about it, hosting a party would present a logistical nightmare…

Ok, I’m kidding. Some people probably think that’s a great idea and others probably hate it, if I can judge by the comments under any Los Angeles Times article that even hints that maybe schools should step in to teach healthy eating to students. Those comment boards are usually littered with people either blaming parents for not teaching this, or people proclaiming that no one should interfere with their right to teach their kids to eat garbage. It turns out, though, that what parents teach kids has very little influence on what teens actually eat.

Patricia Mawusi Amos, Freda Dfiza Intiful, and Laurene Boateng published a study on SAGE Open in December that found that teens’ peers have more influence on their eating habits than either the media or the teens’ parents. They conducted their study in high schools in Ghana, and found that adolescents eat what their friends eat, and that the more influence the friends had, the less healthy those habits were likely to be. And in another stinging blow to feminists, girls were found to have less healthy habits than boys.

I think, then, that we can assume we need to start warning kids in the second grade not to succumb to peer pressure to eat a cupcake. Peer pressure’s already in the curriculum, warning kids to ‘Just Say No’ to offers of alcohol or drugs. “Red Ribbon Week” takes place each October, where students are encouraged to wear red and sign pledges avowing they will remain drug-free. Let’s schedule “Green Ribbon Week” for November, where students will sign pledges to remain sugar-free and to eat more vegetables.

But more seriously, kids spend a lot of time with their friends, so is it any real surprise that these friends are so influential on diet? And so it seems that perhaps early intervention in schools would be a good thing. Overweight teens are a problem for the United States. Teens don’t eat right, and they do follow the lead of their friends. I knew that Cheez-Its and Dr. Pepper did not constitute a healthy lunch in high school, but that’s what I ate most days. That, or something even more disturbing like Flaming Hot Cheetos and Pepsi, was what my friends ate. Was that an act of rebellion? Probably. I can’t speak for my friends, but I know that my parents not have let me get away with eating like that if I had been at home.

The thing about diet is that a crappy one in high school can leave lasting physiological effects, even if the diet is later improved. UCLA researchers found that subjects who didn't have enough iron in their diets in their teen years had structural changes to their brain later that made them more vulnerable to neurodegeneration. These teens were otherwise healthy.

If friends are the biggest indicator of how well a teen is going to eat, then it makes the most sense to try to get all kids to understand how to eat well and then make that available to them. Going after companies and limiting advertisements during programming aimed at kids is fair, but not maybe not the most effective approach. If we want kids and teens to eat healthier, we have to teach them to want that first. Because I'll be honest, tin boxes packed by a government agency determining what we eat sounds terrible. If nothing else, that would take all the fun out of going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering dishes to share.

The Lost Solution for Polar Bears

Someone’s been watching too much “Lost.” Andrew Derocher, a polar bear researcher, has proposed that perhaps we should start airlifting kibble to supplement the polar bear’s diet and save them from certain extinction. After years of having the message “Don’t Feed the Bears” drilled into my head, this just sounds wrong.

While there is no word on whether the kibble would come packaged with the Dharma octagon, the kibble contains “a high level of fish and animal products designed specifically for polar bears” and “should not be fed to other species” (according to one manufacturer). Don’t tell Yogi, because I’m sure that once he hears about it, he’ll be coming over for dinner, assuming he can brave the cold.

Supplemental feeding programs, as they are called, are not that uncommon actually. In the United States, they tend to happen in the central states where hunting and trapping routinely depletes the available stock. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks has regulations on its website for homeowners to participate in feeding programs for the white-tailed deer. Wyoming has been feeding the elk for over a hundred years, a “program” that started when locals started feeding the few elks that were thisclose to extinction. The federal government took over that program in 1912, presumably so the locals could focus on pushing a button every 108 minutes.

One of the big problems with feeding programs is that the animals aren’t stupid and will congregate where the food is dropped. Disease runs rampant where populations are kept artificially high, which is why Texas cautions “Supplemental feeding of deer may be beneficial if the herd is harvested adequately each year and the range is in good condition” (Perkins).

Feeding polar bears presents another challenge that we don’t necessarily see in feeding deer: will the polar bears forget how to hunt? Deer and elk are foragers, and feeding programs run the gamut from putting out feed stands to planting fields of their natural diet. Kibble is much easier to hunt than seals or smoke monsters, so is there a way to produce a food that polar bears will eat, but won’t find as yummy as seal fat? The Washington Forest Protection Association faced a similar dilemma in the early 80s with the black bear. They wanted the bear to continue eating the berries but leave the sapwood tree trunks alone, so they developed pellets to supplement the diet. Again, though, we’re dealing with an opportunistic feeder and not a hunter.

Bear acclimation is a really big issue in National Parks. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who had their car broken into by a hungry black bear in Yosemite because the bear decided it was easier to steal a sandwich than to go find some berries (looking at you Yogi). Depending on how much Mr. Derocher was planning on feeding the bears, we might see that sort of behavior in the great white north.  The other thing to factor in is what that would cost. The Dharma Initiative had a seemingly unending supply of cash to airlift food in for 34 years. But since this project would cost an estimated $32,000 a day, it’s not very practical. Nobody is going to be clamoring to take on that cost.

Or we could just put the polar bears in a cage and teach the combination to get a fish biscuit. That worked for Sawyer.

Sources:
Impacts of the black bear supplemental feeding program on ecology in western Washingtonby GeorgJ. Ziegltrum

Don't feed the (polar) bears By John D.Sutter, CNN

Supplemental Feeding by J.R. Perkins

Debate Rages Over Elk Feeding by Kirk Johnson

Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks Supplemental Feeding Regulations

Can We Not Leave the Boys Behind?

Cory and Shawn slack off in the back of the classroom. Topanga’s right up front with her homework done and hand held high to answer the question. Mr. Feeny calls on the slackers, who inform him that they don’t know the answer. If only those boys would get their act together, then they could move to the head of the class.

But is it their fault they don’t have the motivation to keep up in school? A study to be released this week in the Journal of Human Resources asserts that boys are biased against in school starting at the elementary age because they can’t sit still as well as girls. The assertion, as described by Christina Hoff Sommers, is that all things equal, boys will get lower grades than girls by virtue of the fact that girls develop skills of attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently before boys do. Consequently, girls have better earlier experiences in school which is why they are going on to earn more college degrees than boys.

Interesting assertion. Anecdotally I can say that I had a much easier time in school than either of my two younger brothers. And neither of them had more trouble in elementary school than when they had a teacher I had first. And as we learn more about learning styles and even the value in recess we are starting to see more collaborative and interactive lesson plans. Sommers goes on to talk about Aviation High School in New York and some other school ideas that are being tried out. Even on Boy Meets World, we see that Mr. Feeny gets through to Shawn and Cory and Eric not so much in the classroom, but through one-on-one application in the Matthews’ backyard.

Okay, so if we assume the assertion that girls essentially get favorable treatment by teachers from the get-go, how do we change that? Is it simply a matter of giving boys a chance to be boys? I think the problem goes deeper than that. Of the six teachers I had in elementary school, exactly one of them was a man. My brothers had a few more male teachers than I, but their early education was still minimally influenced by y-chromosomes.

If boys had men as teachers, perhaps some of this female bias would evaporate. Men, after all, used to be boys and would probably understand how to reach them better. I know that in my elementary school career, there were female teachers with the reputation of not liking boys, and it sounds like this is true. So maybe we should spend some time recruiting men to the classroom to balance this. This is not to minimize the other suggestions that Sommers outlines. We absolutely should make allowances for all learning styles. And, for heaven’s sake, we need to make recess and playtime a priority (studies show that it’s important). But, at the same time, it seems that maybe we need some men in there helping to work on these solutions. 

Mr. Feeny helped Cory, Shawn, Eric and Topanga get into college and presumably their degrees. I know that was television, but would a Ms. Feeny have been as valuable a character? 

It's Wing Time!

Why is the buffalo wing the unofficial food of the Super Bowl? What is it about that messy little bugger that will have Americans eat an estimated 1.23 billion wings this weekend?

The generally accepted “inventor” of the chicken wing as we know is Teressa Bellissimo at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. Apparently she had a hungry son and his friends hanging around the bar late one night, so she dropped the wings in a fryer, then rolled them in hot sauce. This was in 1964, making hot wings only a few years older than the Super Bowl.

Word of the wings spread, and other bars and restaurants started serving the disjointed wings smothered in hot sauce. By 1975, the first wing chain, Wings N’ Curls, had opened in Florida. Buffalo Wild Wings opened its doors in 1982 and Hooters opened in 1983. Unlike the original Buffalo wings, these establishments offer mild, sweet, garlicky and all other varieties of wing sauce. True wing aficionados will tell you they’re not authentic, but we all know how protective New Yorkers are of their culinary traditions. Buffalo wings really hit the American radar in the early 1990s when Domino’s and McDonald’s both added wings to their menus.

So how did we come to associate the wing with the game, and vice versa? The solution is probably as simple as the fact that the Buffalo Bills got on a hot streak and went to four Super Bowls in the early 90s. If you’ve ever watched the pre-game shows, you know that the stations devote a lot of time to “getting to know” the cities the teams came from. Four years of media coverage of Buffalo and the producers were bound to come across this local specialty sooner or later. Domino’s probably also had something to do with it. You can figure that it was really easy to add an order of wings to the pizza football fans were already ordering.

I won’t be eating hot wings for this year’s Super Bowl, or any other one. My tastebuds can’t handle the heat. I really like BWW honey bbq or parmesan garlic sauce.

Recommendations from locals for the real stuff: Duff’s Wings in Amherst, NY

Make your own: Deep fry 2.5 lbs chicken wings for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with 1 tbs salt and 1 tsp pepper. Toss with 3/4 cups Frank’s REDHOT Buffalo Wings Sauce.

(from http://www.franksredhot.com/recipes/kickin-bbq-chicken-wings-RE1889)

Television's Adoption Problem

Last night on 30 Rock we saw newlywed Liz Lemon determine she was willing to adopt an older child instead of waiting for a baby (and curiously, we saw her discuss this with everyone except her husband). Earlier this season, we saw the forceful Julia Braverman and husband Joel come to the decision that they were willing to adopt an older boy after the newborn they invested in fell through last season. Are we seeing a trend that will call attention to older child adoption?

According to the 2007 National Study of Adoptive Parents, 94% of all adopted children were adopted before the child was 11 years old. That includes private and international adoptions. The number is still a staggering 90% for children adopted out of the foster system. And 70% of children adopted out of the foster system were 5 or younger. The Administration for Children and Families (AFCAR) estimates that there were 132,000 children in the foster system waiting to be adopted in 2007 and 52,000 adoptions. Granted, 70% percent of the children waiting to be adopted are 5 years or younger, but 20,000 teenagers still age out of the foster system each year.

There are numerous and valid reasons why someone would choose not to adopt an older child, and that is not something I want to dwell on. I watch Julia and Victor on Parenthood and think “Wow, that would be really hard. And why doesn’t overprotective, overreacting, overstressed Julia have that whole family meeting with some sort of counselor during the transition? Come on writers, know your characters better!” Growing up, at least in my experience on television, babies were adopted and older kids without parents caused trouble. I’d see young adults on my mother’s soap operas that find out they were adopted in some over the top crisis moment. I’d see the young couple on Judging Amy be in the delivery room for the birth of their child. But as for kids that could walk and talk, they were just sort of stuck in a group home (unless they could miraculously help Danny Glover’s Angels win the pennant). Sure, you’d see the storyline where someone stumbles upon a high school student living in a car, and some young adult takes him or her in, à la Brooke Davis on One Tree Hill. You’ll note though, that when it came time to actually adopt children for her family, she chose to go the newborn route.

Anyone that chooses to adopt a child and give that child a nurturing, loving home is a saint. Let me just say that. However, I am glad to see that Hollywood is turning to a less cliché adoption story and will maybe encourage people to think about adopting older children. I know that 30 Rock only has four episodes left, so whatever they do with that storyline will in no way resemble an actual adoption process, but I’m glad they’re going to tackle it. Maybe in a few years we’ll have television characters adopting special needs kids too.

Monopoly

I read on the Washington Post today that Hasbro is hosting an online vote to determine which classic token will be discontinued in the game and what lucky token will replace it. It looks like voters have to log-in to Facebook to actually vote. The campaign has taken over the Monopoly Facebook page, with propaganda and debates covering the timeline.

I don't think I like this marketing gimmick. Maybe I'm still burned out from the eternal 2012 election season and this is too reminiscent. Maybe I just don't have fond memories of playing Monopoly. It's true; I don't know if I've ever finished a game of Monopoly. I remember that we had Star Wars Monopoly, but like most old board games, my brothers and I had more fun creating imaginary worlds using the tokens. We could play the same sorts of games as with Barbie dolls, only without the stigma. In truth, I couldn't have told you what the Monopoly tokens were until today. Glancing over the Facebook page, however, I see that people are strongly attached to "their" token.

These irrational attachments have become a basis for countless marketing campaigns, mainly to direct traffic online. I've seen it in other areas too, such as the Capital One Mascot Challenge. These are advertising campaigns that seem more intent on driving online traffic than actually selling something. Anything that gets your name out there is good (in advertising), but I do wonder why they do them. Does Hasbro think that someone will become so distraught that the Iron is discontinued that they will go out and buy multiple games? Board games have the unusual disadvantage that the biggest fans will probably still only buy the game once. A family of five only needs one Monopoly in the house, unless they manage to lose all the pieces.  So I guess this campaign is a strike to keep Monopoly relevant.

And maybe that's what bothers me about this form of marketing campaign. It doesn't seem relevant. There is no room for nostalgia in this day and age, because nothing ever disappears. People that like Monopoly can always find Monopoly online. I guess it seems like Hasbro (not even Parker Brothers) is trying to force nostalgia.