"Librarians and other experts say the growing conflicts [between librarians and rowdy students] are the result of an increase in the number of latchkey children, a decrease in civility among young people and a dearth of 'third places' — neither home nor school — where kids can be kids."
--from an nyt article re: librarian's 'growing' frustration w/ rowdy middle-schoolers < link >
Dear NYT Trend Piece Department,
Give me metrics!
Are there more latchkey children in Maplewood, NJ in 2000 than in 1990? It sure seems to me like there's approximately the same number, if not fewer. (Incidentally, the 1990 census has 246 male-headed "families". There's no similar category listed in 2000, but a little subtraction gets me to 117, assuming I understand how the categories happened. Where'd the single dads w/ kids go?
Likewise, I don't really believe that civility among middle schoolers is any worse now than it was at any time in my lifetime.
I did notice that according to the census figures, the African-American population of Maplewood, NJ has tripled over that same ten-year period. Is it just too much time at Columbia that makes me wonder if race plays a role in this?
(community discussion here)
More on third places in a later entry; it's an idea that fascinates me, particularly in light of the nyt article on myspace and various video websites where (this same population of) kids does hang out.
Showing posts with label detective work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label detective work. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Monday, March 13, 2006
The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists
- The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
- All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
- Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
- No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
- No Chinaman must figure in the story.
- No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
- The detective must not himself commit the crime.
- The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
- The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
- Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
--Father Ronald Knox
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Second Thoughts: Motive
It's clear to me that the statistics on "wrap rage" (and possibly the name) do trace back to Cornhill Direct, and that they were purposely released. But why? My old hypothesis was that it was a PR firm, but what's the advantage. Are they just trying to frighten old people into buying health insurance? Possibly, but it seems awfullly indirect.
The other option is just that it was a funny statistic that got wings, because it matches up to a concern that's, well, growing more concerning for millions of Baby Boomers. In that interpretation, the content matches on to a convenient cultural concern, rather than being pushed by various media outlets because it's an easy story to write, etc. Obviously I'm overly schematicizing, and it's probably some of both.
I'm just trying to get a sense for the way certain ideas just seem to be in the air. Mark Twain has an article on telepathy that I can't read the tone of; he's not particularly funny or ridiculous, and it certainly sounds a little like he believes what he's writing, while he's also smart enough to put some distance between himself and the ideas. He remarks on the frequency of people thinking things at the same time and claims that one person is just reading the other's mind. (The challenge, of course, being figuring out which.) One of his pieces of evidence is the simultaneous discovery of various things all over the world.
I can't help but think that new ideas happen when the economic and intellectual circumstances are right. For example, Benz and Daimler building gasoline-powered cars simultaneously; Neipce and Drais inventing the bicycle within a year of each other; etc etc etc. Hence the particular curse of being "before one's time."
More particularly, inventors (and other thinkers) are emmeshed in similar social networks, have access to similar components, and often are part of societies facing similar problems. Of course analogous solutions are likely. This makes me want to write about English poetic forms in the 1590's, but I NEED an apartment.
Addendum:
I can't find the Twain essay, but here's an excerpt from a letter:
"To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
LONDON, Jan. 8, 1900. DEAR JOE,--Mental Telepathy has scored another. Mental Telegraphy will be greatly respected a century hence.
By the accident of writing my sister and describing to her the remarkable cures made by Kellgren with his hands and without drugs, I brought upon myself a quite stunning surprise; for she wrote to me that she had been taking this very treatment in Buffalo--and that it was an American invention.
Well, it does really turn out that Dr. Still, in the middle of Kansas, in a village, began to experiment in 1874, only five years after Kellgren began the same work obscurely in the village of Gotha, in Germany. Dr. Still seems to be an honest man; therefore I am persuaded that Kellgren moved him to his experiments by Mental Telegraphy across six hours of longitude, without need of a wire. By the time Still began to experiment, Kellgren had completed his development of the principles of his system and established himself in a good practice in London--1874 --and was in good shape to convey his discovery to Kansas, Mental Telegraphically.
"
the whole letter can be found at http://mark-twain.classic-literature.co.uk/mark-twains-letters-1886-1900/ebook-page-105.asp.
The other option is just that it was a funny statistic that got wings, because it matches up to a concern that's, well, growing more concerning for millions of Baby Boomers. In that interpretation, the content matches on to a convenient cultural concern, rather than being pushed by various media outlets because it's an easy story to write, etc. Obviously I'm overly schematicizing, and it's probably some of both.
I'm just trying to get a sense for the way certain ideas just seem to be in the air. Mark Twain has an article on telepathy that I can't read the tone of; he's not particularly funny or ridiculous, and it certainly sounds a little like he believes what he's writing, while he's also smart enough to put some distance between himself and the ideas. He remarks on the frequency of people thinking things at the same time and claims that one person is just reading the other's mind. (The challenge, of course, being figuring out which.) One of his pieces of evidence is the simultaneous discovery of various things all over the world.
I can't help but think that new ideas happen when the economic and intellectual circumstances are right. For example, Benz and Daimler building gasoline-powered cars simultaneously; Neipce and Drais inventing the bicycle within a year of each other; etc etc etc. Hence the particular curse of being "before one's time."
More particularly, inventors (and other thinkers) are emmeshed in similar social networks, have access to similar components, and often are part of societies facing similar problems. Of course analogous solutions are likely. This makes me want to write about English poetic forms in the 1590's, but I NEED an apartment.
Addendum:
I can't find the Twain essay, but here's an excerpt from a letter:
"To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
LONDON, Jan. 8, 1900. DEAR JOE,--Mental Telepathy has scored another. Mental Telegraphy will be greatly respected a century hence.
By the accident of writing my sister and describing to her the remarkable cures made by Kellgren with his hands and without drugs, I brought upon myself a quite stunning surprise; for she wrote to me that she had been taking this very treatment in Buffalo--and that it was an American invention.
Well, it does really turn out that Dr. Still, in the middle of Kansas, in a village, began to experiment in 1874, only five years after Kellgren began the same work obscurely in the village of Gotha, in Germany. Dr. Still seems to be an honest man; therefore I am persuaded that Kellgren moved him to his experiments by Mental Telegraphy across six hours of longitude, without need of a wire. By the time Still began to experiment, Kellgren had completed his development of the principles of his system and established himself in a good practice in London--1874 --and was in good shape to convey his discovery to Kansas, Mental Telegraphically.
"
the whole letter can be found at http://mark-twain.classic-literature.co.uk/mark-twains-letters-1886-1900/ebook-page-105.asp.
Matthew Googles
"Doyle has no solid statistics on injuries caused by our hassles with packaging, but they do exist in England. One study there shows that "wrap rage," as it is called by the Brits, has been the cause of more than 60,000 injuries. These often occur when consumers resort to knives and scissors to deal with stubborn packages, according to a 2003 report in the Daily Telegraph."
--Joyce Gemperlein, The Washington Post, But the Dang Thing Won't Open
A little Google work turned up this BBC Business link. 71% of the 2000 readers of Your Magazine (aimed at the over-50 set) surveyed reported having gotten injured by packaging: "In the survey, the most common injury from trying to open packets was a cut finger, followed by cut hand, sprained wrist, bruised hand and strained shoulder muscle."
What I found more interesting was that 99% thought that packaging had gotten harder to open in the past 10 years. This seems like a startling result, until you realize that for people my age, 99% of packaging has probably gotten easier to open over the past ten years. Remember how hard it was to open jars when you were 11? Makes me realize how much the world may change as the people my parents' age keep getting older.
To return to my original point: the original statistic seemed questionable, so I kept digging. this CBS News article claims that 67,000 people suffered from injuries related to packaging in a single year. This seems to me to be suspiciously similar to the 60,000 WaPo statistic, but it's still unsourced. (In 2003, the population of Britain was 59.6 million, so this number suggests that (very roughly) 1 in 1000 Britains has been injured from trying to open a package. It just sounds like a made-up number.)
On a Lexis search, I found a Melbourne Herald-Sun story (can't figure out how to link to Lexis) that cites the BBC News article and the Your magazine article in February of 2004. Before that, there's a Daily Telegraph story from November of 2003 that finally identifies the source of the statistic. A quote:
"CORNHILL Direct has identified "wrap rage" as the latest irritant in modern life to drive Britain's more unstable citizens crazy.
Spokesman Allan Truman says every year more than 60,000 people need hospital treatment for injuries caused by grappling with food packaging. 'About 2,000 accidents happen while people are trying to separate items of frozen food, usually with a knife.'"
Cornhill Direct, it turns out, according to this market research report, is one of the leading advertisers in the over-60 insurance segment. Which leads me to suspect that they're a major advertiser for the aforementioned Your Magazine.
So an insurance company releases a number and then a magazine does a survey. (Obviously, the people who return survey cards about packaging injuries are more likely than the average person to have packaging injuries.) This information is then picked up by the BBC as business news, gets turned into a 'study' by CBS, and is reported by the Washington Post.
Someone has a good PR firm.
(This great Paul Graham essay turned me on to the way PR firms propagate and validate statistics. Thanks Krischelle for linking to "Hiring is Obsolete" on the same site. Most of his articles are addicting. One of my favorites, which I read a long time ago off AL Daily, is this , on essay-writing, why it's associated with literature, the history of writing, how to write, and several other things.)
--Joyce Gemperlein, The Washington Post, But the Dang Thing Won't Open
A little Google work turned up this BBC Business link. 71% of the 2000 readers of Your Magazine (aimed at the over-50 set) surveyed reported having gotten injured by packaging: "In the survey, the most common injury from trying to open packets was a cut finger, followed by cut hand, sprained wrist, bruised hand and strained shoulder muscle."
What I found more interesting was that 99% thought that packaging had gotten harder to open in the past 10 years. This seems like a startling result, until you realize that for people my age, 99% of packaging has probably gotten easier to open over the past ten years. Remember how hard it was to open jars when you were 11? Makes me realize how much the world may change as the people my parents' age keep getting older.
To return to my original point: the original statistic seemed questionable, so I kept digging. this CBS News article claims that 67,000 people suffered from injuries related to packaging in a single year. This seems to me to be suspiciously similar to the 60,000 WaPo statistic, but it's still unsourced. (In 2003, the population of Britain was 59.6 million, so this number suggests that (very roughly) 1 in 1000 Britains has been injured from trying to open a package. It just sounds like a made-up number.)
On a Lexis search, I found a Melbourne Herald-Sun story (can't figure out how to link to Lexis) that cites the BBC News article and the Your magazine article in February of 2004. Before that, there's a Daily Telegraph story from November of 2003 that finally identifies the source of the statistic. A quote:
"CORNHILL Direct has identified "wrap rage" as the latest irritant in modern life to drive Britain's more unstable citizens crazy.
Spokesman Allan Truman says every year more than 60,000 people need hospital treatment for injuries caused by grappling with food packaging. 'About 2,000 accidents happen while people are trying to separate items of frozen food, usually with a knife.'"
Cornhill Direct, it turns out, according to this market research report, is one of the leading advertisers in the over-60 insurance segment. Which leads me to suspect that they're a major advertiser for the aforementioned Your Magazine.
So an insurance company releases a number and then a magazine does a survey. (Obviously, the people who return survey cards about packaging injuries are more likely than the average person to have packaging injuries.) This information is then picked up by the BBC as business news, gets turned into a 'study' by CBS, and is reported by the Washington Post.
Someone has a good PR firm.
(This great Paul Graham essay turned me on to the way PR firms propagate and validate statistics. Thanks Krischelle for linking to "Hiring is Obsolete" on the same site. Most of his articles are addicting. One of my favorites, which I read a long time ago off AL Daily, is this , on essay-writing, why it's associated with literature, the history of writing, how to write, and several other things.)
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