Wil Wheaton on how to respond to being called a nerd

I was fortunate to attend a school, growing up, where not only were “nerd” qualities valued and nurtured but so were humanistic values.

I feel for any child who is bullied at school for shining brightly. To be honest, I’m not much of a Wil Wheaton fangirl but his response to a little girl, who asked how to handle being treated poorly, is laudable.

Tragic Tally: More Than 200 Reported Child Drownings In Pools and Spas This Summer

EHS Safety News America

From Memorial Day through Labor Day 2013, at least 202 children between the ages of 1 and 14 drowned in a swimming pool or spa in the United States, according to media reports compiled by the USA Swimming Foundation. Of those, 143 of the victims were children younger than age 5.

The latest media-reported figures are consistent with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s (CPSC) annual Submersion Report, and show that young children and toddlers are especially vulnerable to drowning. Drowning is the leading cause of unintentional death among children 1 to 4 years of age and it is the second leading cause of death for children from 5 to 14 years old.

“The time is now to turn the tide on child drownings,” said CPSC Chairman Inez Tenenbaum. “In warm weather states and indoor swim parks, pools are still open. Let’s work together to…

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Stuff in the news 7/20/2013 – Technology

• Pew Internet have released a study that determined specific pros and cons of using digital technology in a classroom environment. According to the survey, the majority of middle school and high school educators believe that digital tools increase student collaboration with applications such as Google Docs, and help them share their work through social media platforms…. Read more
• I’m picturing Radar O’Reilly as a cyborg here…  The Cognitive Desktop: From Siri’s Creators, A Predictive Digital Personal Assistant
• Just in case you want to really mitigate your Sharknado risk: SAMS wetsuits make surfers look less tasty
• National Geographic has a fascinating piece up now about how forensic linguistics led to revealing J.K. Rowling as the actual author of The Cuckoo’s Calling. OK, so it’s not TIME magazine publishing about natural language processing but still great to see it being discussed mainstream. read about it here
• Drones – use them only for good.
• Did you sign a petition to stop phone record surveillance? Oh, well. Secret court renews controversial NSA phone data harvest program (Denver Post). John Perry wrote today in IEET that he likens this practice to piracy: “…there’s a way the NSA debate is like the piracy debate. The problem with a file sharer isn’t that he or she copied, but that the copy was done without permission. The NSA can be characterized as doing the same thing: copying data without permission. In both cases, a fundamental quality of digital technology — frictionless, nonrivalrous copying — enables the behavior. In both cases, the authority to grant permission is the key issue.”
• And, to close out today’s SITN for Tech, two interesting things on mapping. The first is a project in London, ON, to map social good endeavors. The mapathon (next Thursday, the 25th) is open to the public.
• The second is a new Coursera online class that actually started on the 17th (for 5 weeks), so you’ll have to play a bit of catch up for credit, I think:  Maps and the Geospatial Revolution The short description reads, “Learn how advances in geospatial technology and analytical methods have changed how we do everything, and discover how to make maps and analyze geographic patterns using the latest tools.” Hat tip Robert Dunne for the course link.

Stuff in the news 7/20/2013 – Social Good

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

• I haven’t yet followed the orgs in this list but the StayClassy philanthropy blog has put together a nice list of accounts for organizations that support persons with disabilities
• In a similar vein, there’s another reference I found that has Apps (and Maps) to End Sexual Violence
• I’ve just put the book being reviewed here on my Amazon wishlist:  Social Change Anytime Everywhere – Book Review. It looks like it will be really useful for non-profit communications work.
• If you’re working in the social good arena, you may be doing good works, but are you protecting yourself by having policies in place for yourself, as well as for your clients? Just Googling “social media policy” can yield some great stuff but I just ran across this today, so you might want to check it out: immediate future Launches a Step by Step Guide to Creating a Social Media Policy to Protect Company Reputations
• Most of us in the SMEM and social good world know this but Twitter does far more good than bad
• Well, this is interesting… while kids are fleeing Facebook in droves, this Study Finds Joining Your Teens On Facebook, Twitter Improves Relationship
• Mashable’s Social Good Summit is going international with meetups!  Social Good Summit Meetups Planned in 20+ Countries

Stuff in the news 6/30/2013 – Wildfires

• In Oregon… Bringing back good old days of logging difficult

“…the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is working on a kinder and gentler approach. Though some people are calling it “Whopper Junior,” the BLM pointedly is not. In a preliminary planning document released this month, the BLM’s state director, Jerome E. Perez, said the new approach will be based on what the public wants, science, the law and on the goals of healthy forests, not board feet of timber.”

• In Colorado…  Oil and gas companies, safety officials discuss presence of active wells in fire danger red zones. More on the South Fork area here:  Burn-ready: Parched Western Slope is combustible and here: Red Cross Disaster Update: Colorado Wildfire Response
• And it looks like it won’t be getting better in the West for a while: “National Weather Service meteorologist John Dumas said cooling Pacific Ocean winds haven’t been pushing far enough inland to offer many Southern Californians overnight relief.” Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-blistering-sears-western.html#jCp
• Across the US, the US Forest Service is awarding grants for wood fuel reduction initiatives. The intent of the Woody Biomass Utilization Grant program is to reduce woody biomass, while improving the economy at the same time.  Forest Service grants help design biofuel energy projects

• Outside the US, in Singapore, the country known for pretty much clean everything, is suffering e new image problem, due to smog from recent wildfires: Singapore’s clean image sullied by Indonesian smog

Stuff in the news 6/21/2013 – Wildfires

• I’ve heard this weather referred to as a new dustbowl many times. I don’t think it’s quite that yet but it surely is a drought and something about which we should be concerned. Cross-posted from today’s New Mexico news. 8 Images to Understand the Drought in the Southwest
• As if a fire weren’t scary enough on its own…  At Chernobyl, Radioactive Danger Lurks in the Trees: For 26 years, forests around Chernobyl have been absorbing radioactive elements but a fire would send them skyward again – a concern as summers grow longer, hotter and drier
• And elsewhere on the international front, Wildfire training for African locals
• According to Mammoth Times, Eastern Sierra and other areas of California are really in for it this year (as if it’s been a cakewalk so far)…  Fire season could be ‘worst in 100 years’
• 
  ESRI has a current wildfire activity map up. It says that it’s US but it also shows some activity in Canada and in Central America. I believe it is a worldwide tool.
• Staci Matlock has a good piece in today’s New Mexican about the Jaroso fire and how the IMT is managing it. It was good to see the inclusion of Luke Sheehy’s passing at the beginning of the piece.
• In Colorado, a Fireworks Company Says They Can Still Shoot Off Displays Safely
  • ““I hate to go there, but I think that a lot of times, these decisions are made and they aren’t thought out, it’s just ‘Hey, we’ve got fire, we’ve got smoke and this is a good story,’ ” Diaz said.”
    • Yeah, given the fire situation in Colorado, probably you don’t want to go there….

• This blog post was actually written in response to the Alberta floods but helping children develop resilience in the face of tragedy is important, whether it’ a flood, a fire, or a human-caused event. Taking an Opportunity to Build Resilience- Helping Children Grow After a Natural Disaster

Stuff in the news 6/24/2013 – New Mexico

Ghost Ranch, Abiqui, NM – Image by M. Reddy-Hjelmfelt http://theredelm.com/

• New Mexico now ranks 50th in child well-being, nationwide. Given that, I feel a need to clarify that there are 50 states and New Mexico is last.  New Mexico Drops to 50 in Nation for Child Well-being
• Reminder – the Santa Fe National Forest is closed, as of today, due to wildfire danger. KOB has a good list of what’s open and what’s closed across New Mexico. Be aware and be safe!
• Waking Times has an interesting article about the resurgence of Native foods, with a good portion of it focused on New Mexico pueblos’ efforts. Included is a reference to Declaration of Seed Sovereignty, which came out of Tesuque Pueblo’s Sustainable Food and Seed Sovereignty Symposium. Reference:  Putting the Culture Back in Agriculture: Reviving Native Food and Farming Traditions
• Check out the KASA video from New Mexico Magazine. You might want to pop out to the newsstand and pick up the July issue. Sounds yummy!

  Patriotic Pig Roast

• The Legal Tender in Lamy is re-opening this week. To start out, they will only be open for dinner, Thursday through Saturday. Happy hour goes from 3-5pm and dinner goes from 6-9pm. Here’s the info:
  

  HOURS & RESERVATIONS

  Thursday, Friday, Saturday
  3:00 PM to 9:00 PMHappy Hour Served: 3:00 P – 5:00 P
  Dinner Served: 5:00 P to 8:00 P
  Reservations RequestedCall: 505.466.1650
  email: info@TheLegalTender.com
• I’ve heard this weather referred to as a new dustbowl many times. I don’t think it’s quite that yet but it surely is a drought and something about which we should be concerned. So, I will probably cross-post these sorts of things here and in the Wildfire entries, as necessary. 8 Images to Understand the Drought in the Southwest
• Check out historical photos of places around New Mexico – or even upload some of your own – at WhatWasThere.com. This idea came from Ann Arbor, MI and you can look virtually travel to places around the globe. Lots of fun.

Stuff in the news 6/21/2013 – Wildfires

• ESRI has developed an online GIS tool for those responding and those affected by the current Colorado fires to monitor the situation on the ground.
• The US is not the only place experiencing wildfires. Sumatra’s fires are producing haze, extending into Malaysia and Singapore. When haze attacks three countries, cooperation needed
• Today’s policy editorial from the Durango Herald:  Forests, fires and budgets – Tight times mean no easy answer preventing, fighting forest fires
• I’ve made a number of friends in the US Forest Service but not one of them has introduced me to a Smurf. We’ll have to work on that…  The Smurfs™ Encourage Children to Get Outside and Discover the Forest
• The Colorado Rural Electric Association has established a Black Forest Fire Electric Co-op Relief Fund to help the more than 500 members of Mountain View Electric Association, who have lost their homes and businesses during the last two weeks.  Co-ops Battle Persistent Wildfires
• Every community in the West should be this forward:  No warnings: Boulder police to ticket, arrest anyone with fireworks this summer
• Bill Gabbert is pretty upset in his piece in Wildfire Today, InciWeb is failing. While I agree it’s a shame how slow it gets when fire season really kicks into gear, I would have liked to see a little credit given for the social media strides they’re making this year. Doce Fire had its Facebook page set up on the 18th and it already has more than 6,000 followers. They are posting prolifically and are answering comments.  It’s a move in the right direction, while we wait for a better Inciweb implementation.

• For all the time we spend discussing fires in the West, this is a perspective that I think we often miss. Before fire hits, artist aims to capture nature’s beauty

Stuff in the news 6/20/2013 – Communication

Image courtesy of Daniel St. Pierre / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

• How MomsRising and charity: water have used Storify & Quora for success
• This piece is a good companion to my previous blog post, To Post or Not to Post. Things you should pay attention to when considering posting in the aftermath of a tragedy… Social Media Moments of Silence – 5 Areas to Monitor During Tragedies
• Social-media tools allow anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account to play a role in determining how many readers a story reaches. And online communities such as the heavily trafficked Reddit enable readers to submit links to their favorite content, and vote up or down the content submitted by others, thereby changing a given item’s prominence on the site. The result is that the mainstream-media oligopoly is now just one force deciding what “the news” is and how important a story or image might be.“Over the last 100 years, you go from a point when a newspaper would be able to set the tone and the five top stories of the day, to what Walter Cronkite and his cohort would say on the evening news, and then to the explosion of cable news, and now the Internet,” says Gabriel Snyder, 36, the editor of The Atlantic Wire and former editor in chief of Gawker. “We’ve gone from having just a few handfuls of places that might set the agenda to this proliferation that is reaching a near infinite number of people who can define what the top story is today.” — Source: Streams of consciousness: Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
• From NPR: “On July 3, the 1977 movie Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope will premiere dubbed in Navajo. The Navajo Nation and Lucasfilm have teamed up to translate the original Star Wars movie into Navajo, the first time a major motion picture has been translated into a Native American language.”
• Do you really want to know what your cat thinks? Will Translation Devices Soon Allow Us To Talk With Animals? 
• Use it only for good….  NSA-Style Intelligence Comes To Financial Services Communications

• “Monitoring electronic conversations just got a lot more powerful with the alliance of Digital Reasoning and OP3Nvoice, announced at SIFMA today.

  Digital Reasoning, with roots in defense and intelligence, can search and understand structured and unstructured data and use it to build a view of underlying entities, facts, relationships and discover geospatial and temporal patterns. OP3Nvoice can monitor audio, video and text conversations across channels including fixed lines, mobile and Skype and search and locate conversations very fast.”

• Facebook is revamping their Insights again. I don’t know how this is going to affect analytics, comparatively, but you should be aware of the changes: Facebook Studio :: Blog | Updating Page Insights
• Just one more reason to refrain from using “baby talk” to your infant –  “The little sounds and puffs of air that toddlers often inject into their baby babble may actually be subtle stand-ins for grammatical words, new research suggests.”
• The [UK] government has published its communications plan for 2013 to 2014, prioritising professional development and innovative partnerships.

Understanding dyslexia

via inside.akronchildrens.org