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Welcome To Communities In Schools – Aurora, IL
Welcome to Communities In Schools of Aurora. We hope you take the time to browse and read about all the great partnerships within the community that fosters one of our greatest resources, our children. Summer camp documents can be found under the Documents Tab.
CIS brings services and agencies into the schools. Through the combined efforts of both public and private partnerships, CIS leverages existing resources and repositions service providers into the schools, to serve alongside teachers, parents, and volunteers as a coordinated "family" team to help kids stay in school and prepare for life.
For more information contact Susan Larson at: firstname.lastname@example.com or 630-692-9524.
Donate to Communities In Schools of Aurora, Illinois
Communities In Schools of Aurora, Illinois is able to make available Day Time and Afterschool Services to provide dropout prevention services to at-risk students in our community.
You can help us fulfill our mission and make a difference in the life of a child! All donations are tax deductible up to the limits provided by the IRS
A donation to Communities In Schools of Aurora can be given in the form of cash, a gift of stock, proceeds from a 401-K, or in the form of a future estate gift. A gift from your estate proceeds can be transferred to CIS after you have enjoyed what you have worked for. Please feel free to contact Theresa Shoemaker, Executive Director at (630) 692-9524, or email Theresa at email@example.com to talk confidentially about your intent.


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Facebook Profit Surges as Ad Sales Grow
Social Network Gains Ground on Mobile Devices; Revenue Jumps 63%
Facebook Inc. isn't adding users the way it once was. But its business is accelerating.
The world's largest social network showed Wednesday that it can generate more money out of each user, as it posted a 63% increase in revenue and an eightfold increase in profit for the fourth quarter.
The results far exceeded investor expectations, sending...

subset: commoncrawl


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Some Aspects of a 1970-Model Planning, Control, and Information System
by GORDON L. MURRAY Partner, Executive Office
Presented at Executive Management Seminar of North American Aviation, Inc., Los Angeles—April 1967
IN REVIEWING North American Aviation's annual report I noted that the Chairman's letter in discussing market development effort stated that "... the company is studying the use of information systems to handle the masses of data needed in government and in a number of professions
" At another point it was reported that "the company is
studying development of a large-scale, very low-cost electronic data file capable of storing two billion bits of information, which could find widespread
use for rapid data retrieval in the financial, medical, legal, and educational professions." I am also not unaware that a segment of the company is called the Space and Information Systems Division (emphasis added).
That I would choose a subject concerning information systems to discuss before a group in the information business may seem presumptuous—
and perhaps it is. I must say that I got no comfort from seeing references to your commitment to information technology in the annual report. Where I did get some small comfort, though, was from another passage in the report, which said: "The company continued to institute advanced management controls and new techniques in program administration
and to streamline operations and organization." Why would advanced management controls continue to be instituted? There must be some degree of dissatisfaction with what exists and a recognition that improvements can be made. Perhaps, I thought, here is a situation a little bit like the barber's son who needs shearing and the shoemaker's son who needs shoeing—there just might be some opportunity for improvement, after all.
In any event, I chose "A 1970-Model Planning, Control, and Information
System" as my subject. This is a nice "loose" title, don't you think? The sort of title you get from someone who is asked for his subject before he has prepared his material and determines what it is he is actually going to say. Another thing you might expect from someone asked to provide a synopsis of his subject before he really has a subject is an ambitious statement of what he expects to do. My reply to your


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First off,
Mel I wanted to publicly honor you with an open heart for the work you have been doing reporting with James Fox and making it available to the general public.
I have always enjoyed your work and style though I have been an strong opponent of the pay for content/truth model.
While you charge for the Disclosure content and interviews, it appears to me that your heart is in the right place and recognize the immediate importance and relevance of the Gulf reporting to everybody.
There is more I could say to this but i will leave it at a heartfelt and profound thank you.
My family and I are truly grateful.
Bill, you said that to call this a Volcano is uninformed.
I would like to hear why you believe this to be the case.
Granted, It does sound a bit far fetched to me, and I doubt we will see a new volcano explode at the bottom of the Gulf, but it does explain the "authorities" response, intense pressure, volatile gasses, mass media blackout, threats of arrest, the no fly zone, ridiculous use of COREXIT ( to disperse volcanic gasses?), etc.
I cant see need for all of the hubbub for an out of control oil leak. I CAN however see that the people in charge and working on the situation are AFRAID. In their own estimation this is bigger than they can handle.
All their activities display that to be the case.
If the Webbot project is legit, and Clif is not an operative in some diabolical mass social experiment conducted by less than scrupulous individuals, then the implications of his findings lend credence in support of the volcano postulation in so far as it is the type of thing that could be so large in magnitude to cause such a significant diaspora.
To think that the powers that were could somehow use an uncontrolled oil gusher as an excuse to forcibly remove 20+ million people from the lower 40* was a thought that had crossed my mind. And, I have heard of the foreign troops in miami, lousiana, and alabama. I also looked into the vehicle build up in Jacksonville. However, i do not believe the powers that were have the skill, power, or ability to pull off such a grand operation. Look at how bad they messed up 9/11, the N Korean frame up of the sinking of the S Korean ship, and Georgia and South Ossetia. They are literally falling over each other after each screwed up operation. I do not give them the power.
I have come to a position where i feel and reason that they have bitten off more than they can chew....and they know it. you can sense and see dissension among the ranks, and the truth shall reveal them to be the ineffective, fearful, cowards that they are.
It is clear that the blow out is indeed a very highly pressurized pocket of oil and gas. More so than our current (public technology) can handle.
In light of the build up of volcanic activity, increase in earthquakes, and general earth changes of this period (cycle) of time i would not so quickly rule out the potential for new volcanoes to emerge, new fault lines to appear, and the topography of the globe to alter dramatically.
As an anecdotal thought, every map i have seen of the "future" includes a significant waterway running from what "were" the great lakes down to the Gulf. If there is any credence whatsoever, beyond far fetched data points to these maps, then it might warrant a thought or two about the effects a new vent would have on the geology and fault lines.
At the very least, what we have is a gusher that contains toxic gasses and oil that will run unabated for quite a while causing much damage to the worlds ecosystems and us. This would fit in with your ex-girlfriends mysterious declaration that the beauty of this world will not always be so.
At the other end of the spectrum the hole is being pressurized due to magma, and the solar system squeeze as we transition through the galactic equator, It IS a volcano, and it starts as a little leak in the proverbial dam and expands to let the rest of the highly pressurized "earthblood" out.
perhaps my imagination is running a bit wild....
perhaps it is just a highly pressurized oil pocket and will just wreak a slow creeping environmental havoc on the world.
or perhaps we are seeing global transformation.
Granted i may be slanted a bit towards the volcano thing because i would rather it be the globe that smacks us down a bit than have it be a diabolical plot by some of my own species to "cull the herd."
I am not holding onto any position to firmly. i am seeking the truth and i am open to learning. I want to know.
This is why i ask for your perspective on why it is uninformed to think it is a sub strata magma deposit is causing the pressure.
thanks for your time and efforts.


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Latest News
Sen. Burr and UNC chief back in-state tuition for vets
University of North Carolina President Thomas Ross said Thursday that extending in-state tuition to many student veterans would be a winning strategy for the state.
"It's to our benefit because it allows us to keep them in North Carolina, and many of them end up staying and becoming part of the workforce," Ross said in a meeting with Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., in the Capitol. "There are no better employees."
Ross said he hoped the state legislature would approve of Gov. Pat McCrory's proposal, announced earlier this week, to give in-state tuition to veterans who live in the state. The plan would apply to veterans who hadn't lived in the state long enough to meet the one-year residency requirement for in-state tuition.
It would be limited to those who were within two years of leaving the service; had served at least four years, part of it in North Carolina; and were honorably discharged. Those students would receive a one-year scholarship of at least $7,500, intended to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at the state's public colleges and universities.
McCrory last month made a related proposal, asking the legislature to provide North Carolina-based veterans with in-state tuition at the state's 58 community colleges for their first year out of the service. Burr said the governor's bill was a good step but didn't address all the different circumstances facing veterans.
Burr and Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, introduced a bill in December that would provide in-state tuition to many student veterans using GI Bill benefits at public colleges and universities nationwide, regardless of their state of residence. The students would be required to enroll within three years of leaving active duty and live in the state while attending school.
"We've got about 800,000 veterans in North Carolina and growing at a rate faster than any state in the country," Burr said.
With so many veterans in the state, "it shouldn't be a shock" that younger veterans also choose it as where they want to live and go to school, he said.
About 8,000 student veterans are enrolled at one of UNC's campuses, an increase from about 6,000 three years ago, according to university data. Other states have reached capacity in their university systems, and building new universities is expensive. But North Carolina has room for more students, Burr said.
"We want that talent in North Carolina," the senator said. "It's future talent that drives capital investment in this country today."
Added Ross: "We owe (veterans) a great deal, and we want to provide them quality educational opportunities."
Attracting veterans is also part of the university system's plan for raising the educational level of the state's population, he said.
"We're in the middle of the pack right now," Ross said of the state educational level. "If we want to be economically competitive five or 10 years from now, we need to be better."
While the state should keep aiming to graduate more high school students who are prepared for college, Ross said the high school population is flat, so UNC needs to "find students who come to us in a different pathway."
Ross was in the Capitol to testify Thursday at a House Veterans' Affairs Economic Opportunity Subcommittee hearing about student veterans. He told lawmakers in his written testimony that UNC was "working aggressively" with members of the General Assembly to enact state legislation in the upcoming short session that would allow many veterans to pay in-state tuition.
"North Carolina is a big military state," Ross told the panel. "We are home to 800,000 veterans. Our state has six major military installations with the third-largest active military force in the country, comprising 120,000 personnel, 12,000 members of the National Guard, and their nearly 145,000 spouses and children."
He also told lawmakers that faculty members say they like having veterans in their classes because "as a group, student veterans attend classes regularly, take their assignments seriously, are attentive and provide a unique perspective in class discussions."


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Wild Arms XF
Euro PSN update, August 20 – WET and DiRT 2 demos
The Euro PSN update today has some nice demos for you. WET, DiRT 2, Mini Ninjas, and IL2 Sturmovik: Birds Of Prey. Add-ons consist of Andy Dick for the game Pain, a Street Fighter II themed table for Zen Pinball and the usual Rock Band and Guitar Hero stuff. PSP users can get Wild Arms […]
Wild Arms XF headlines
Wild Arms XF latest


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Product Description
Add eye-catching luxury to the look of your bedroom with our 300 tc Duvet Cover Set. This stripes duvet cover set is made of 300-thread count, 100-percent cotton for long-wearing durability. The button enclosure avoids snags and makes it easy to wrap this quality cover around your favorite comforter At the end of a long day, when you climb into your bed, comfort is all that matters. And with this luxurious set of 100%cotton duvets from royal tradition you can ease into a good night's slumber. You can get the feel and comfort of a luxurious set of this duvet without the large price tag. These duvet sets have a wonderful feel and a simple look that will enhance any bed.


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Recent News
December 10, 2013
Washington Firm Recalls Chicken Noodle Soup
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services received information regarding a recall of chicken noodle soup due to misbranding and an undeclared allergen. The Classic Chicken Noodle Soup product is formulated with wheat, a known allergen. However, the product was released with a Loaded Baked Potato Style Soup side label, which does not declare this allergen.
The following product is subject to recall: [Label]
- 24-oz. plastic tub of Wholesome@Home "Classic Chicken Noodle Soup." The establishment number "P-18235" is located on the label on the lid.
The products were produced on October 25 and 26, 2013, with a use-by date of February 17 and 18, 2014. The product was shipped to distribution centers in the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Indiana, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington. The product was sold at retail only.
The full recall can be found at http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/recalls-and-public-health-alerts/recall-case-archive/archive/2013/recall-072-2013-release.


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- Description
Transmission fluid temperature is the single biggest contributing factor to the lifespan of your automatic transmission. Having an accurate, realtime measurement allows you to know when to downshift or when to take your foot out of it. Whether you're towing or simply trying to harness the power of a built or boosted motor, AutoMeter's Mechanical Trans Temp Gauge will give you the most accurate possible measurement for the exact temp of your trans fluid. An 8' Capillary Tube with a 1/2" NPT mounting nut is included to be installed in your transmission pan. An optional trans cooler line manifold is available for another easy installation option.
Feature Points
- Traditional incandescent lighting illuminates around the perimeter of the dial
- AutoMeter's race proven mechanical instruments provide trusted accuracy while being simple to install
- No electrical system required for gauge operation - compatible with every street or race vehicle
- Mechanical movements provide accuracy and durability even in the harshest environments
- Gauge kit includes 1/2" NPT adapter, bulb and socket assembly, red and green bulb covers, mounting hardware, and detailed instructions for installation
- 1/2" NPT adapter/fitting.
- 8 ft. Capillary Tube
Bulb & Socket
- 3220
Light Covers
- Red 3214 & Green 3215
Mounting Hardware
- 2230
- Reviews
- Questions
With this gauge can I purchase a mounting cup for it? 2 1/16 face, I'm looking to mount this on my steering column with the same series tach.Thank you for your question. Yes, you can use this with our 2-1/16" mounting cups such as the 2204.Date published: 2019-08-19
California Prop 65 Warning


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Congratulations to Kim Blades and Robbie Cheadle for their collaborative poetry anthology – Open a New Door
About the collection
Open a New Door is a poetic peep into the lives of the poets, Kim Blades and Robbie Cheadle, both of whom live in South Africa.
The book is divided into four categories: God bless Africa, God bless my family and friends, God bless me and God bless corporates and work. Each part is sub-divided into the good, the bad and the ugly of the two poets' experiences, presented in rhyming verse, free-style, haiku and tanka, in each of these categories and include colourful depictions of their thoughts and emotions.
The purpose of this book of poetry is encapsulated in the following tanka and haiku poems:
What drives me to write?
To share my innermost thoughts
The answer is clear
It's my personal attempt
To make some sense of this world.
Inspiration blossoms
Like the unfurling petals
Of the Desert Rose
Head over and buy the collection: https://www.amazon.com/Open-new-door-collection-poems-ebook/dp/B07K4RRC4W
And on Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-new-door-collection-poems-ebook/dp/B07K4RRC4W
About Kim Blades
Kim Blades has lived in Durban, South Africa, since she was three years old. Kim was born in England. She is married, with two sons aged 18 and 20. The family have five dogs and two cats.
Since early childhood she has loved to read and write – poems and stories. English and History were her favourite subjects at school and she was encouraged to take up Journalism as a career by my high school teachers and parents.
Her favourite poets are the Romantics, especially those who wrote about the beauty of Nature like William Wordsworth in his poems: To A Butterfly, I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud, and many others.
Kim likes to write poems about the natural world and am inspired by simple everyday things that we all take for granted, like sunsets, flowers, birds and bugs.
You can connect to Kim at these links:
Blog and Website: https://kim153.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.blades.16
Twitter: http://twitter.com/kimtracyblades
About Robbie Cheadle
Robbie Cheadle was born in London in the United Kingdom. Her father died when she was three months old and her mother immigrated to South Africa with her tiny baby girl. Robbie has lived in Johannesburg, George and Cape Town in South Africa and attended fourteen different schools. This gave her lots of opportunities to meet new people and learn lots of social skills as she was frequently "the new girl".
Robbie is a qualified Chartered Accountant and specialises in corporate finance with a specific interest in listed entities and stock markets. Robbie has written a number of publications on listing equities and debt instruments in Africa and foreign direct investment into Africa.
Robbie is married to Terence Cheadle and they have two lovely boys, Gregory and Michael. Michael (aged 11) is the co-author of the Sir Chocolate series of books and attends school in Johannesburg. Gregory (aged 14) is an avid reader and assists Robbie and Michael with filming and editing their YouTube videos and editing their books.
A selection of other books by Robbie Cheadle
One of the recent reviews for While the Bombs Fell on Goodreads
A lovely memoir written by a mother and daughter team about a young girl living in the UK during WWII. Elsie is very little during the war but can't help feel the fear and anxiety of her parents, siblings and neighbours. What I found interesting is that in spite of the threat of invasion, bombs falling on homes, air raid shelters, and food shortages, everyday life carried on. The cows were still milked, children attended school, went swimming and to the movies, neighbours met for tea, Christmas cake was made and Christmas was still celebrated. Never having lived under these circumstances, it was a good insight into another time and place. An added bonus is the wartime recipes at the end of the book. Well done Elsie Hancy Eaton and Robbie Cheadle!
And on Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Robbie-Cheadle/e/B01N9J62GQ
Read more reviews and follow Robbie on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15584446.Robbie_Cheadle
Connect to Robbie Cheadle
Blog: https://robbiesinspiration.wordpress.com/
Website: https://bakeandwrite.co.za/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SirChocolateBooks/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bakeandwrite


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As the train wound through the San Gabriel Mountains in the fading light, Hollywood was still far off, a winking gem. From the train window, my father, Lyle Talbot—a sweet-tempered Nebraskan who had left his small town for the carnival, then the vaudeville tent, then theatres across the South and the Midwest—gazed out at miles of pine, sagebrush, and yucca. For two days, he had been travelling from Dallas, where he'd been the leading man in a theatre company that had gone bankrupt, thanks to the Depression and the rise of the talkies. It was February, 1932, and Lyle, thirty years old, had lived on the road since he was seventeen, exuding charm in light comedies about sparring newlyweds and the gin-splashed fast set. Critics had not proclaimed him a master thespian, but they had noticed something that, in the new era of mass entertainment, was perhaps more important: he was easy to watch. He was a "pleasant" man "whose good looks are not wasted on the feminine portion of the audience." Five feet eleven and slim, he had a "virile and buoyant personality" and a "collegiate" air. His baritone voice was as toffee-smooth as his smile. Just before the theatre in Dallas shut down, a talent scout for the movies saw him onstage. Lyle soon received a telegram inviting him out to Hollywood for a screen test.
The train passed through the outskirts of Los Angeles. As the journalist Carey McWilliams described the scene, "The roadside signs tell the story of the city's improvised economy: canary farms, artificial pools for trout fishing, rabbit fryers, dogs at stud, grass-shack eating huts, psychic mediums, real-estate offices, filling stations, vacant-lot circuses." Lyle noticed—how could anybody from Nebraska not?—that the sky in early February was a bright, enamelled blue, and that even the empty lots were vibrant with poppies, red bottlebrush, and wild mustard.
When he arrived at La Grande station, his new agent, Arthur Landau, met him there. Like a character in a movie, Lyle had shown up in town with only a five-dollar bill in his pocket. He confessed to Landau that he couldn't afford a hotel.
Landau told Lyle that he'd stake him a place to stay, and sent him over to the Ravenswood Apartments, an Art Deco monolith in Hollywood, where you could rent by the week. (Later that year, another new arrival to Hollywood, Mae West, moved in; she stayed there until she died, in 1980.) After a day or so, the agency would send Lyle to Warner Bros. Studios for the screen test. Until then, he could have a look around.
Hollywood's movie business was still in its youth. The town had been settled in the eighteen-eighties by Harvey and Daeida Wilcox, a wealthy couple from Topeka. The Wilcoxes had purchased a hundred and sixty acres of land, where they tended fig and apricot orchards and attracted a community of God-fearing teetotallers like themselves. In 1903, when Hollywood officially became a city, it was a dusty, pious burg that prohibited both alcohol and factories. One industry that its city fathers could not keep out—and could hardly have anticipated—was the movies. In 1907, the Selig Polyscope Company, of Chicago, started producing movies in nearby Edendale (now Silver Lake). Two years later, D. W. Griffith began travelling from New York to L.A. every winter with his company. The new arrivals filmed scenes on open-air wooden platforms, and when interior shots were needed they draped canvas over the platforms, as if they were covered wagons, to block natural light. In 1911, the first studio opened in Hollywood, and three years later Cecil B. De Mille, who had set himself up in an old livery stable on Vine Street, filmed a feature, "The Squaw Man."
Southern California offered the obvious attractions of year-round sunshine and a rich variety of outdoor settings: mountains, deserts, trolley-filled streets, beaches. Unions had little presence in L.A., so labor was cheap. Moreover, the independent studios—including those of De Mille, Griffith, and Samuel Goldwyn—were eager to put a continent between themselves and Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company. Back East, hired toughs were known to shoot holes in cameras and hijack cars from filmmakers who resisted the Edison Trust's monopoly.
The new arrivals to Hollywood banded together like colonists, and struck the natives as peculiar and threatening. Locals were sometimes amused when "picture people" took over a street for a Keystone Kops chase, or a romantic rescue on horseback, but they didn't want anything to do with the wastrels. In Hollywood, signs for rooms to rent sometimes specified that actors and animals were not welcome.
By the time my father got there, the movies had become a global phenomenon. Yet, as Lyle later recalled, his first impression was that Hollywood had a "small-town atmosphere," and felt like a "separate world." There were no buildings more than four stories high, and the streets were dotted with stucco bungalows painted in the pastel shades of candy hearts. Hollywood Boulevard functioned as a kind of Main Street for picture people. There was the Pickwick Bookshop, owned by a Russian immigrant who admired Dickens; the ice-cream parlor C. C. Brown's, which served hot-fudge sundaes in chilled tin bowls; and the old Hollywood Hotel, where actors congregated on the wide front porch.
The movie business, and the people it attracted, made Hollywood a uniquely fanciful, sensual place. In 1931, Lillian Symes, a writer for Harper's Monthly, joked that there was "a fresh supply of pulchritude arriving on every train." Another visiting writer noted that, if you drove on Sunset Boulevard near Gower, where the so-called Poverty Row studios turned out B movies, you'd often spot people, in costume, talking shop—"cowboys in chaps and sombreros and extra girls in the traditional slacks and dark glasses, bright kerchiefs protecting their freshly waved hair." My father instantly loved the place: the bougainvillea, the shaggy date palms, the ersatz-Moorish mansions. He had been on the road for more than a decade, a pack-your-trunk-in-ten-minutes, sleep-sitting-up-on-the-train trouper. But here he could stay—if they'd let him.
Three years into the Depression, a job was no easy thing to get, especially in the movies. Books offering practical advice on making it were laden with cautionary tales. One such guide, "What Chance Have I in Hollywood?," advised aspirants to be prepared for a hundred rejections from casting directors before securing a job, and offered dire, titillating stories of girls who had lost their way. Typical was "Mamie Swamp," who left "Cottage Grove, Kansas," seeking stardom in L.A. but ended up as a prostitute in Baja. In the twenties, mail leaving Hollywood was affixed with a sticker: "Tell your friends. Don't try to break into the movies in Hollywood until you have obtained full, frank, and dependable information from the Hollywood chamber of commerce."
The story of dashed celluloid dreams became a journalistic genre—the flip side of the overnight-discovery tale, and, in its way, an equal testament to the power of Hollywood. The ultimate such story was that of Peg Entwistle, a New York stage actress who had relocated to California in 1931. A pretty, stage-trained blonde, Entwistle acted in a play with Humphrey Bogart, receiving respectful notices. But by 1932 she had landed only one bit movie role, in "Thirteen Women," a lurid ensemble piece about a murderess out to kill a group of sorority sisters who had snubbed her. She was dropped by R.K.O., the studio that had signed her. One day that September, Entwistle climbed the scrub-covered Hollywood Hills to the base of the sign that then read "HOLLYWOODLAND." The fifty-foot-high letters, erected in 1923 to advertise a housing development, was coming to symbolize moviedom. Climbing a ladder used by workmen, she leaped from the top of the "H." A few days later, a hiker found her body.
Lyle wasn't naïve about his chances. He knew that a screen test was a colossal gamble. M-G-M reportedly auditioned five thousand people a year; one per cent of them took screen tests, and only a few got contracts.
Though Lyle was a Midwestern optimist, he was so anxious about his audition that he greeted his agent at the station in tones barely above a whisper. As he later recalled, "Here I was on my way to talking pictures, on borrowed money from a man I'd never seen, and I lost my voice!" Landau, the agent, was kind, but this was ridiculous: An actor who can't talk? In the talkies? Still, as Landau dropped Lyle off at the Ravenswood, he drew on an instinctive courtliness, assuring his new client that he just had "a train cold," or "nerves." His voice would quickly come back.
Lyle wandered through the streets near the Ravenswood the next day, subsisting on black coffee and liverwurst sandwiches from a lunch counter down the street. He smiled and pointed when he wanted something, so as not to strain his vocal cords. He hummed experimentally to himself. The air was clear and dry, and sprinklers tossed their rainbow-beaded garlands of water over the lawns of stucco apartment courts. The grass was springy beneath his feet. Gradually, his voice returned. He started singing the song that he'd been humming: "If I never had a cent, / I'd be rich as Rockefeller, / gold dust at my feet / on the sunny side of the street." He felt buoyant again, like a Ping-Pong ball on a column of air.
The next afternoon, he was standing on a Warner Bros. soundstage.
Lyle arrived at the studio looking his best, his dark hair shimmering with brilliantine, his two-tone wingtips just as shiny. In his years as a travelling theatre actor, my father had cultivated habits that helped carry him through life. He didn't have the steadiest of moral compasses, or much in the way of self-knowledge, and he would later be undone, more than once, by his love of a strong drink or the wrong woman. (By the time he arrived in Hollywood, he'd already ended a two-year marriage, to a stage actress, and had four more marriages ahead of him. My three siblings and I were the products of the fifth.) But he always maintained his habits of professionalism, and of small attentions to himself—the sort of routines that can hold a person together when little else does. Lyle always showed up on time, and he always knew his lines. He never left the house unless he was well turned out, anointed with Lilac Vegetal, a clean white handkerchief in his pocket.
One thing Lyle felt certain of: the material he had chosen for his test was perfect. It was a scene from "Louder, Please," a play he'd done in Dallas. He had played Herbert White, a brash and charming publicity man for a movie studio who runs afoul of the studio's obnoxious head of production. Both men are crazy about the same actress, and she is keen on the publicity man and forever fending off the production head. The dialogue was quippy, and the pace was modern and frenetic, with a lot of ringing phones and shouting. In Dallas, Lyle's performance had earned him some of the strongest reviews of his career; one newspaper called it "a striking individual triumph for this deft young player who wooed, lied, ranted, raved, cajoled, implored, threatened, and almost never left the stage during the evening." The same review noted that the play's author, Norman Krasna, who had himself worked in Hollywood, "must have been fired, for nothing short of a dischargee's grudge could have inspired the healthy, boisterous, infectious malice of his composition. He writes directly for your anti-cinema bloodlust, tearing limb from limb the entire system of screen publicity and exposing to your sadistic delight the incredibly genuine processes of synthetic fame."
Did it cross Lyle's mind that somebody in Hollywood might take offense at such an acid portrait of Hollywood? It did not. After all, the studio in the play, Criterion Pictures, was fictional: who could possibly mind? Lyle really didn't know much about Hollywood in those days.
After Lyle had delivered all his lines, crisp and fast, the director walked over and said, "Talbot, that scene you did—was that from a play called 'Louder, Please'?"
"Yes, yes," Lyle said, pleasantly surprised.
The director spoke slowly, as though Lyle himself might be slow: "You don't know the story of that play?"
"No," Lyle said, feeling a tomtom of alarm in his chest. "I don't know anything about it."
"Well, that play is kind of taboo on the lot here," the director said. "The man you referred to as King in there, the one you're having a conflict with, is the head of this studio."
Krasna, it turned out, had been employed in the publicity department at Warner Bros. before turning to playwriting. Herbert White was a thinly veiled version of Hubert Voight, a legendary movie P.R. man. And Kendall King—described in the dramatis personae as "no good," "foppish," and "rattish"—was a satirical portrait of Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at Warner Bros.
Zanuck, like Lyle, was a small-town Nebraska boy. He was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, in 1902, which made him the same age as my father, and, like him, Zanuck had scant formal education. In the twenties, he'd started out by writing stories for "Rin-Tin-Tin." Now he was becoming one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. (A year later, in 1933, Zanuck left Warner Bros. to found Twentieth Century Pictures.) Though brilliant at his job, he could be domineering and crude.
The director told Lyle, "I don't think, uh, this test is something you'd want Mr. Zanuck to see."
Lyle swallowed. "Can't we do it over?"
But the director was already looking down at his clipboard, scanning the names of other hopefuls. He was done with this yokel. "No," he told Lyle. "I have no authority to do it over."
"My God, I was then in the depths," my father told American Classic Screen, years later.
Lyle got on the phone and called Lew Schrieber, an assistant in Arthur Landau's office. Schrieber was fiercely ambitious, and he was determined to parlay his position into a job working for Darryl Zanuck. He was Lyle's minder that day.
"How was the test?" Schrieber asked, rat-a-tat-tat.
"Well, gee, Mr. Schrieber. I don't know. I may have made a big boo-boo here." That was how Lyle talked. Although Schrieber was a young guy, he was still "Mr." to Lyle. And Lyle was not given to coarse language, other than an occasional "hell" or "damn." A couple was "having a love affair," even if he was clearly referring to a one-time sex act, as in "I opened the door, and there they were, having a love affair right there on the floor."
On the other end of the line, Schrieber's voice hardened. "What happened?"
"Well, the scene I did was from that play—Norman Krasna's play."
"What did you do that for?"
"You said to take a scene from a comedy and—"
"Well, you didn't say you were going to do that comedy!"
Lyle stammered something about how he had been focussing not on the content of the play but on the rhythm of the scene—its pace, its wit.
"What the hell?" Schrieber boomed. With ominous calm, he informed Lyle that he'd just screwed them both. He hung up.
"I was terribly upset," my father recalled. "So I went to the office, on the corner of Vine and Sunset. Mr. Landau was in, and I went to him and I was really low. I told him the story. He was such a sweet man. He said, 'Lyle, don't worry. Tomorrow, I'll take you to Paramount.' "
Meanwhile, Zanuck went in to see the day's screen tests. He had recently taken up polo, and strode in wearing riding britches and swinging a mallet. He seemed to be in an unusually good mood. When Lyle's test came on, Zanuck watched it all the way through. And he didn't say a word about Krasna's play. He just laughed.
As my father put it, "Maybe he thought, Here was this actor who was naïve enough, or stupid enough, or something enough to do that kind of scene for his screen test, for gosh sakes! And, for whatever reason, that particular day, that struck him as funny."
Lyle had another piece of good luck. Directors and producers on the lot often stopped by when screen tests were being shown, to check out the latest prospects, and that day Zanuck was joined by the director William Wellman. In 1927, Wellman had made "Wings," the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture; he went on to direct "A Star Is Born" and "Beau Geste." In the early thirties, he became a master of the taut, socially conscious drama for which Warner Bros. was famous. He also despised authority—his cussedness had earned him the nickname Wild Bill. When the First World War broke out, Wellman had volunteered for the Lafayette Flying Corps, a group of Americans who flew missions for France. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft fire, and ended up with a limp and a metal plate in his head. After the war, while working as a flight instructor in San Diego, he decided to try the film business. According to his biographer, Frank Thompson, Wellman put on his uniform and his medals, flew his plane to L.A., and landed on the polo field outside Pickfair, the home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. The stunt worked: Fairbanks was so impressed by Wellman's nerve that he got him a job in the movies.
Wellman, for all his bluster, was intensely loyal to the people he worked with. Once, the studio installed a coffee machine on the set of one of his movies, obliging the crew to pay for coffee that had formerly been free. Wellman rolled the machine off the soundstage and into the men's room. He told a studio official who came down to investigate that he'd throw him in there next, and after that Jack Warner—the studio's president. The crew got their free coffee back.
That day in the screening room, as Wild Bill watched my father charge through the lines from "Louder, Please," he turned to Zanuck and said, "Hey, if you sign this guy, I want him for my next picture."
"We're gonna sign him," Zanuck replied. "If you want him, you got him."
The film that Wellman had in mind was called "Love Is a Racket"—a cynical little tale about the intersecting lives of New York columnists, gangsters, and theatre people. Lyle began working on it within weeks, playing a suave gangster, opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In the film, Lyle directs a languorous, appraising gaze at a young woman he's just met, and deftly delivers the best line in the picture: "If I felt half as good as you look, I'd go out and kill myself while it lasted."
About a week into the shooting, Wellman ambled over to Lyle and clapped him on the back. "You know, Talbot?" he said. "You're really something. You're terrific."
"Thanks, Mr. Wellman," Lyle said. "I'm enjoying working with you, too."
"Oh," Wellman said, with another bearish swat. "You're O.K. in the part. But you're really something. You guys from the theatre—you know what I mean." He went on in this vein, as Lyle nodded politely, ever more puzzled. "That test of yours . . ."
Oh, Lyle thought. That.
"You really gave it to Zanuck! Good for you." Wellman loved the idea that Lyle was of the same breed. The fact that Lyle was not was no discouragement.
One day, after Lyle felt more comfortable with Wellman, he tried to level with him about the screen test: "Bill, look, you don't think I would be stupid enough to do that, do you? I was broke, I didn't have a sou. I could have been blackballed in Hollywood the rest of my life."
"Sure, Lyle," Wellman said, smiling. "Have it your way."
My father immediately established himself as a fixture at Warner Bros.; in 1932 and 1933, he made sixteen movies for the studio. Meanwhile, his nightlife became a gossip factory: among the women he was linked to were the platinum-blond torch singer Alice Faye, the beautiful rising star Loretta Young, and the formidable silent-era actress Estelle Taylor—Jack Dempsey's ex. "Lyle seems to be getting over in the City of Shadows That Talk," one squib noted. "This lad's affections should be filed under: Subject to Change Without Notice," another said. An Indianapolis newspaper described him as "smooth and nonchalant—the perfect movie man-about-town." The columnist Jimmy Starr called Lyle a "sensational newcomer whose rapid rise to the cinematic front rivals that of Clark Gable and George Brent."
It was fitting that Lyle's first job for Warner Bros. was playing a gangster. The studio was known for its crime movies and prison pictures. In 1932, Zanuck wrote an article for The Hollywood Reporter in which he described the Warners specialty as the " 'headline' type of screen story. . . . Somewhere in its makeup, it must have the punch and smash that would entitle it to be a headline on the front page of any successful metropolitan daily."
A screenwriter at the studio named Jerry Wald remembered being called in by his bosses and given instructions: "We could not compete with Metro"—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—"and their tremendous stable of stars, so we had to go after the stories. Topical ones, not typical ones. The stories became the stars."
With this mandate, Warner Bros. became the studio that most often depicted working people and underdogs, and which dealt most forthrightly with the pain of the Depression. It was a vision that depended on directors like the Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz, who adopted a shadowy, menacing aesthetic that anticipated film noir. It depended, too, on actors like James Cagney and John Garfield, who effortlessly embodied tough, city-boy characters. The year before my father signed with Warners, the studio made a star of the pug-faced, wound-up Cagney with "The Public Enemy," the bleak and unforgettable gangster film in which Cagney, after he is fatally shot, mutters the now iconic line "I ain't so tough."
Although Lyle was more of a lover than a fighter, and considered himself unsuited to the gangster roles that abounded at Warners, he was also a news junkie who relished the tabloid energy of its films. He was thrilled to discover that the studio had stashed Robert Burns, a fugitive from a Georgia chain gang, somewhere on the lot during the production of a film about his life. (The title was typically blunt: "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.") Lyle kept hoping to run into Burns in the commissary, but he never did.
He also got a kick out of the contract writers the studio kept on the lot, many of whom were raffish types who'd kicked around the streets of Chicago or New York. The most colorful storyteller was Wilson Mizner, who'd done a bit of everything—very little of it reputable—on his way to a gig at Warners. With his brother, Addison, Mizner had swindled miners during the Klondike gold rush, bilked wealthy investors during the Florida land boom, and sold overpriced Guatemalan relics. At Warners, Mizner was celebrated for his zingers: "Be nice to people on your way up, because you'll meet 'em on your way down"; "Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore." His best, however, was his assessment of his job: "Working for Warner Brothers is like fucking a porcupine: it's a hundred pricks against one."
The studio was proud of its cheap-and-fast identity. Harry Warner, one of the founding brothers, was known to comb the lot, turning off the lights in the bathrooms. Writers, as Cagney recalled, were "doing the best they could under perpetual rush-rush conditions . . . to crank out their stuff by the yard."
For many years, this reputation for thrift seemed to undermine appreciation of the films themselves. Even Jack Warner wondered, in a 1934 memo, whether "we are cutting our pictures too fast and making them too snappy." But in recent decades those snappy pictures—most of which were trimmed to seventy minutes or less—have been rediscovered and admired. In 1998, the critic Andrew Sarris wrote, "Warners was the most reliable source of entertainment through the thirties and forties, even though it was clearly the most budget-conscious," adding that, from today's perspective, the studio's "razor-sharp cutting and frantic pacing look inspired to the point of absurdism."
The shooting schedule at Warner Bros. was just as rapid-fire. Lyle, like all the contract players, worked six days a week, often for twelve hours at a stretch. He'd ride his bicycle between soundstages, carrying two or three scripts in the front basket—for pictures he was acting in—and two or three in the rear basket, for pictures he was signed up to make.
Warner Bros., Lyle recalled, was a "kingdom unto itself." He explained, "You practically lived at the studio—it was like your home. You had your own dressing room and your own chairs with your name on them. If there were any personal things to take care of—like when you got a traffic ticket, and probably up to murder—the studio would take care of it."
The nightlife that Lyle enjoyed was sometimes studio-sanctioned—squiring gorgeous starlets to the Trocadero or the Cocoanut Grove, where Warners photographers just happened to turn up—and sometimes got out of hand. After a Gay Nineties costume party at the Vendôme restaurant, which Lyle had attended with his girlfriend at the time, the Countess Dorothy di Frasso, he crashed his car. Soon afterward, the studio had him photographed in bed, a bandage looped rakishly around his forehead, reading his fan mail. In a statement for the press, Lyle credited the derby hat he'd been wearing with saving him from worse injury. It had served him, he said, "like an iron lid."
Lyle eventually became a devoted family man—his marriage to my mother, who was twenty-six years younger than he, lasted forty-one years. But as a young actor he was most convincing when playing sexy but weak men who projected a hollow sensuality. In several pictures, he was a playboy doctor with a drinking problem—a common type in movies of the era. Screenwriters clearly found the feckless medical man a good stand-in for all the authority figures, from bank presidents to the President, who had lately let Americans down.
My favorite of my father's Warner Bros. movies is "Three on a Match," in which he appeared with Warren William, Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, and a twenty-four-year-old Bette Davis. Though Davis later dismissed it as a "dull B picture," "dull" is hardly the word. The film historian Mark Vieira calls the movie "the quintessential Warner Bros. film of 1932, cramming headlines, history, sociology, sex, alcohol, drugs, adultery, kidnapping, blackmail and suicide into sixty-three busy minutes." And "Three on a Match" is remarkable for its frankness about drug addiction, and for its sympathetic treatment of the libidinal desires of an unhappy wife.
The performances in "Three on a Match"—particularly those of Ann Dvorak, as the straying wife, and Lyle, as the handsome low-rent chiseller she strays with—provide a psychological shading that you don't often get in the quickie Warners movies of the era. One scene, a model of potent, emotional brevity, informs the audience that Vivian—the Ann Dvorak character, who has left her wealthy straight-arrow husband for Mike, my father's character—is now having satisfying sex, probably for the first time. The scene cuts from a shot of the abandoned husband—played by Warren William, his large white hands twisting in distress as he talks about his missing wife and young son—to Lyle's hands, wrapped around a cocktail shaker. The camera pulls back to show a hotel room in which Vivian is lying on a sofa, wearing a filmy peignoir, a dreamy, postcoital smile on her face. When her little boy toddles over and says, "Mommy, I'm hungry," Vivian's erotic bliss clouds her response. She coos ineffectually at him and gestures to a decimated tray of hors d'oeuvres.
"Can't I have bread and milk?" the boy whimpers.
A small spasm of conscience passes over Lyle's face. He does something subtle with his expression that is not quite a wince, not quite an admission of shame—something shifty-eyed. We see in an instant that, as weak and hedonistic as Lyle's character is, he isn't heartless. It is a very nice bit of acting.
For a while, Warner Bros. tried to make my father a star. The publicity department crafted a persona for Lyle—a collection of alluring biographical details tailored for public consumption. Newly signed performers were asked to fill out a questionnaire about where they'd been raised and what they did for fun, about their fathers and mothers, their first jobs, their phobias, and—in a nod to the Depression—their "pet economies" (cheap socks, bologna sandwiches). The studio then wrote up a biography based, often loosely, on the answers.
As a fledgling entertainer in Nebraska, Lyle had been a magician's assistant, and the P.R. guys loved telling the story of his first act: rocks were broken on his chest while he was supposedly in a profound, induced slumber. In the talkie era, stage experience had a newfound cachet, and one of the studio bios boasted, "Talbot is a product of the stage. . . . He has never known anything else." The studio's literature freely combined the true with the ought-to-be-true: Lyle had grown up in a Nebraska town that was almost entirely Bohemian (that was true) and spoke fluent Czech (that wasn't). He was bright and liked to read (that was true) and had attended the University of Nebraska for two years (that wasn't). He cared so deeply about animals that once, when he was playing golf in South Dakota, and his ball conked a sheep on the head, he drove the sheep seventeen miles to the nearest vet, delaying the start of a play he was appearing in that night. (That was true-ish; he had gone to the aid of the sheep, but once he saw it back on its feet he headed for the theatre. He would never have been late for a curtain.)
The studio did not try to turn Lyle into a man's man or a rugged outdoors type—not seriously, at least. (One unfortunate batch of publicity stills shows him fly-fishing, standing in a stream in waders and grinning madly.) Clark Gable, by contrast, had not grown up as an outdoorsman, but when the studio biographies made him over in that mold he took to it, and started actually hunting and fishing. As the film historian Jeanine Basinger notes, Gable was "a bio success—life imitating art."
With Lyle, the bios took a different tack. "Really, he's nothing at all like any of the roles he's played," one said. "He's tall and well set up, with straight brown hair and well-cut features—good looking enough to play with anyone from Garbo down. He's not a tough—I've already said he's no Gable. His interest is in the stage and books, and he's a collector of the latter. He's modest, lives simply, and works hard." The studio presented him as a playfully sophisticated indoorsman. He was a collector of first editions, which he liked to have specially bound; an enthusiast for parlor games, like charades and concentration; a "devotee" of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. (That was a stretch—he had a lot of books, but preferred newspapers and magazines to serious literature.) He was fond of ballroom dancing, cocker spaniels, fillet of sole, silk pajamas.
Yet Gable was the defining male star of the era, and, behind the scenes, Warner Bros. kept wishing that Lyle could be a bit more like him. In 1934, after Jack Warner watched Gable in Columbia Pictures' "It Happened One Night," he sent a memo to Hal B. Wallis saying that Lyle "should grow a mustache just like his"—Gable's. "It gives him a sort of flash and good looks." Lyle dutifully grew one, but it didn't endow him with Gable's manly sexiness, and the mustache soon disappeared. Lyle, no matter how he was groomed, had a foppish, even juvenile, aspect, with a trace of the feminine that sometimes played as inadvertently goofy. He seemed like an urban type, but he did not project power, like Garfield or Cagney. He also lacked the paradoxical quality that often makes a star: the muscular brute with a tender smile, the all-American hero with a vicious streak. Nor did he have an adorable imperfection—jug ears, a crooked smile—that can attract fans. He did not have an outsized personality that he could carry from role to role.
It didn't help that Lyle was not at all picky about parts. "I was an actor who very seldom turned down anything, because I wanted to work," he later recalled. "So consequently I worked in all kinds of pictures—good, bad, and indifferent." Unlike many successful actors, he possessed neither soaring artistic ambition nor a bottomless desire to be admired. Joan Crawford, for example, could declare that she remembered "every one of my important roles the way I remember a part of my life, because at the time I did them, I was the role and it was my life for fourteen hours a day." Lyle spoke of his career with genuine modesty: "I thought I was lucky to have a job. It was the Depression and people were broke."
In 1935, Lyle was cast in "The Petrified Forest," a film adaptation of a Broadway play. He was to play Duke Mantee, a fleeing gangster who takes hostages at a diner in the Arizona desert. "Several weeks later, the casting director says, 'No, Lyle, you're not going to play it after all,' " he recalled, adding, "I wasn't upset—I'd still be working, still getting paid, just in something else." Lyle was told that Leslie Howard, who'd played the lead in the New York stage production of "The Petrified Forest," had insisted on bringing his co-star to Hollywood with him. The co-star was Humphrey Bogart, and the movie made him famous.
In retrospect, my father felt, he might have fared better at a studio other than Warner Bros.—Paramount, perhaps, or Columbia, which released a lot of light romances. In 1932, on loan to Columbia, he'd starred in "No More Orchids," wittily wooing Carole Lombard. It was the sort of role that he felt he had a flair for, and the genre in which he'd made the best impression onstage. But the truth is, though Lyle is capable in the role, he's also a little stiff, affecting the not-quite-British accent that American actors sometimes have in thirties movies. The early Warner Bros. pictures—with their fidgety pacing and crowded casts of stock players in small, vivid roles—showed Lyle at his best. He had created a singular roster of weak-willed malefactors: the dissolute actor who hangs himself after accidentally killing his party-girl date, in "Big City Blues"; the oleaginous freeloader turned reluctant thug, in "Three on a Match"; the preening, skirt-chasing football player, in "College Coach." All three movies are tight exercises in cynicism and urban verve, as bright and sharp as polished knives.
In 1936, after Lyle had completed his thirty-fourth film for Warner Bros., the studio cancelled his contract. Although he had worked with everyone from Barbara Stanwyck to Spencer Tracy, he would not be rising with them into the Hollywood firmament. Lyle kept working, however, never slackening the brisk pace he had picked up at Warner Bros.—and taking pride in never having to supplement his actor's income with, say, selling real estate. By the time he died, in 1996, he had amassed hundreds of Hollywood credits, including a recurring role on the TV series "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" and a few parts in the epically misbegotten films of Ed Wood. He was never bitter about his career: all his life, he felt lucky to have been plucked from obscurity, lucky to be an entertainer. Yet he never forgot the heady days when he seemed destined for greatness. In 1933, a spread in Motion Picture anointed two silvery stars of tomorrow. The woman was Katharine Hepburn. The man was Lyle Talbot. ♦


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So today we are celebrating. Today we reached/exceeded our PeopleFund.it target of £20,000 http://www.peoplefund.it/young-rewired-state/.
I had promised myself that I would save up the blog post I wanted so much to write about crowd-sourced funding until after we had actually achieved it. So within minutes of the target being reached – here I am.
Firstly, thank you so much to everyone who either donated or promoted our call for funds. Part of the reason I was so excited when I happened to catch a tweet about the launch of http://www.peoplefund.it (PFI) was that we had found a way to involve the people who have been such a huge part of Young Rewired State (YRS) over the years and have really wanted to contribute, even if it was only a fiver, and I hated having to just go for corporate sponsorship – which is its own special nightmare.
It's the crowd, man
I know that Kickstarter exists and is excellent, but have always been confused as to whether UK organisations could apply – and still am – so PFI appeared at exactly the right time: just as we were cranking up the calls for participation for YRS2012 we had a way of including the community that champions what we do.
It is so important to me and to what we are doing with Young Rewired State, that this is something that can be truly community-based, and community-funded*, and I really do feel that the people who have chosen to pledge money to YRS are as much a part of this as we are. I will work hard to ensure this happens as we race towards August, and to celebrate this at the festival of code itself.
But the pledgers were not only individuals, some were start-ups, some start-ups founded by YRS alumni, others were small businesses who really know how important this peer-to-peer interaction and learning is, and have benefitted directly or indirectly from it.
I will come back to this point in a mo…
It was hard work
Believe you me, this was not a case of submit the information, set a target and sit back and let PFI/twitter do the work. Sure we had an early high with those who were already bursting to be involved in some way pledging their cash, then a lull during which time Stephen Fry tweeted about it, as did Martha Lane-Fox and other luminaries – this rarely translated into money donations, but it did certainly raise the profile and we won in a different way by more kids signing up to come along – which is just as brilliant. I asked PFI to send a timeline of donations, it's here if you are interested! (Thanks Jake!)
It took a *lot* of hard work and time. I became horribly mercenary, everyone who wanted me to do something or talk somewhere would be hit by a request from me to donate! My poor, poor social networks were reminded pretty much daily that they could contribute, through a variety of thinly veiled pointers to the donation site. My family did not escape, in fact my poor Mum – who had worked out how to pledge through GoCardless, then cancelled the pledge when she later looked at her online banking and did not recognise the direct debit – is still insisting on sending a cheque. Rewired State events were hijacked by pleas for donations to YRS and friends with rich friends mercilessly 'reminded'.
But £20,000 is a LOT of money. Maybe not in bubble world, but in the real world, it is a huge sum. And ten weeks is not a long time to raise it. No matter how good the cause or idea, it needs to be relevant and there has to be value for money.
So this is a massive and resounding success, and I am just so pleased that it worked out.
Peer to peer funding
So as much as peer-to-peer learning is key right now, so it seems is peer-to-peer funding. But there is a missing element to this.
When Young Rewired State first started in 2009, we were sponsored £23,000, mainly from government if I remember correctly. Once the weekend was over, we had £5,000 left and so we looked for somewhere to donate that money. We gave it to Jonty Wareing and Hackspace, they had not found premises and needed a small lump to help them.
It was a perfect transaction, we had it spare, they needed it and they were providing something that would help the YRSers of the future.
This year the Real Time Club got in touch with us, after being pointed in our direction by the fabulous Simon Peyton-Jones and the Computing at Schools network (yes I blasted them too!), they had a similar situation with some excess money at the end of their year that they wanted to put towards a good cause. I went to meet them and explained about YRS, they talked to me about it and agreed to donate some money. Not only this, but one of the people I was introduced to there took me to the school for which they are a governor: Anson Primary, a remarkable school, doing wonderful things and now a YRS centre. Win!
It would be nice to think that as this crowd-sourced funding jag becomes more popular, so the circle continues. It would be nice if as the community funds projects, so the projects, once they become successful or if they end up with excess, helps the funding community. What a way to encourage individual enterpreneurism? What if a reward for pledging money to a community project or any project for that matter, came with a promise to assist anyone who was thinking of starting something themselves.
Just as YRS is a real example of P2P learning, so we can learn from the actions of the alumni, who all come back, year on year, to help support and assist the newbies coming through. It would be good to see this fostered in P2P funding and next year when I do this again (oh yes I sill, sorry gang) I will find a way to do just that.
Finally a HUGE thank you to the people at People Fund It, they have been hugely helpful and supportive and of course, those YRS alumni and mentors I have stumbled across working at GoCardless!
*Post Script
The PFI £20k is not the total sum we are having to raise for YRS, we are having to raise further funds through traditional sponsorship. This is to cover the costs of the event itself on the Friday and Saturday. The money raised using community funding is for the kids, hardship funds for travel, believe you me this will be hammered this year!, and anything else they might need during the week – it is a very specific amount and a very specific purpose that feels right to be funded by the community. Other costs such as toilets, marquees and AV can be funded by the corporate sponsorship we raise. If you want to know the total amount we need to raise for YRS this year, it is £50,000 (including the PFI £20k) – and if we don't use it all, we will be donating it back to other social projects, naturally.


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A splint may be a good short-term treatment for any painful
injury. Using a splint helps keep an injury from moving. This may help prevent
further injury until you can see your doctor.
Position the splint
so the injured limb cannot bend. A good general rule to follow is to splint
from a joint above the injury to a joint below it. For example, splint an
injured forearm from above the elbow to below the wrist.
are two ways to splint an injury:
When splinting an injury, make sure that you do not tie the
splint too tight. Your splint may be too tight if you have:
These splinting methods are short-term
first aid measures until a doctor can check the injury.
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June 27, 2012
Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:
William H. Blahd, Jr., MD, FACEP - Emergency Medicine & H. Michael O'Connor, MD - Emergency Medicine
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This week I'm exploring another peaceful celebrity hideaway in the Indian Ocean, the beautiful fantasy-land that is Mauritius. Famous faces seen on the island include royalty – Prince Harry and Princess Caroline, celebrities – Kylie Minogue, Russell Brand, Ewan McGregor, Joseph Fiennes and Catherine Deneuve, and sports personalities Rafael Nadal, Michael Schumacher and Zinedine Zidane to name just a few. It's not difficult to see why the A-list adore this island with its other-worldly beauty, spellbinding sense of spirituality and stunning five-star hotels – it certainly didn't take me long to fall head-over-heels in love with the place. Here's a snapshot of my time at the wonderful Shanti Maurice.
The Lowdown
The first thing that struck me on my arrival at Shanti Maurice was what a special place it was. Sitting in a plum position on the South coast with a travel brochure beautiful beach surrounded by 35 acres of colourful tropical gardens, it was impossible not to be immediately won over. The hotel originally started life as an Ayurvedic spa retreat and has evolved over the years to become a tres chic luxury boutique where the spa experience now comes with a delicious side order of sunshine and champagne. The 61 oceanfront villas and suites are dotted around the resort and are kitted out in cool, comfortable shades of cream with local hardwood furnishings and cavernous spa bathrooms. The 17 villas also come with their own private pools affording celebrity guests like Thandi Newton and Liz Hurley the utmost privacy.
Then there's the rest of the hotel, which I have to say, had me swooning at every turn. At its centre is a shimmering slate infinity pool (where I found myself spending every spare moment swimming like a contented Koi carp around its pretty fish fountains and floating gardens). Fanning out from this focal point are a series of handsome thatched pavilions which house the reception and lounge area and two wonderful restaurants; Stars and Pebbles. There's also a cracking kid's club on site (although it's tucked away so you never hear a peep) and,of course, the star of the show, the Nira Spa.
The Highlights
My experience of the Nira Spa went well beyond the usual holiday massage and without veering into dodgy "Eat, Pray, Love" territory, I really did find it to be a truly inspirational experience. The Nira Spa is the biggest (and arguably the best) spa in the Indian Ocean and takes the holistic approach to health and well-being to a whole new level. I eased myself in with my first ever Qi Gong class where we performed a series of gentle movements in the spa gardens while the sun set over swaying fields of sugarcane and magical mountain vistas. Sheer bliss.
After such a lovely start, I dedicated the next day to the full Shanti experience with a morning yoga class, steam, sauna and swim (there's another beautiful serene pool within the spa grounds) followed by a healthy lunch. Physical needs attended to, it was now time to see to my spiritual side with a consultation with the the resident Ayurvedic doctor.
I didn't know much Ayurvedic philosophies beforehand and wasn't entirely sure what to expect – and I certainly didn't anticipate bursting into tears halfway through the appointment! Cringe. Thankfully though this it turned out to be a perfectly normal and fairly common reaction. Ayurveda is all about treating the mind, body and soul and although my Glaswegian sensibilities initially rallied against it, after getting over my intense sense of embarrassment, it actually felt pretty amazing to get it all out and reflect on my seriously-neglected spiritual side. I left my consultation feeling intensely uplifted and by the time I had finished my sixty-minute Africology massage I had reached a Zen-like state of tranquillity. For a few days at least, life felt a little bit less complicated.
The wonderful thing about Shanti Maurice though is that you can dip in and out of the whole wellness thing as and when you like. Another not-to-be-missed, and slightly naughtier, option is the the twice-weekly Fish and Rhum Shack, where a remote stretch of beach is transformed with tiki torches and driftwood furniture into a hedonistic sea-side hangout. On the menu is a selection of ridiculously large lobster, giant prawns and juicy organic meats, all of which can be washed down with a rum punch while the wild Indian Ocean crashes in the background and a squillion million stars shimmer above.
There are plenty of hotels around the world that have fabulous facilities, stunning views and sublime service but it's a pretty rare thing to find one that has character to match, a hotel where you just can't imagine being anywhere else. Luckily for me this was one of them.
Star Style
Long-haul flights, air-conditioning, blazing sunshine and ice-cold air-conditioning all conspire to reek havoc on my skin so to prevent dry patches, I like to use a super-moisturiser on top of my regular skincare products. Always in my in-flight bag (and Emma Watson's apparently) is Comfort Zone's Hydramemory 24h Cream Gel.
£30 50ml
Go There
Shanti Maurice, Mauritius:Tel: +230 603 7200; www.shantimaurice.com; Junior Suites start from €555, including breakfast and 15% VAT, per room per night. Air Mauritius flies non-stop from Heathrow to Mauritius 5 times per week. Call 0207-434-4375 for more information or visit www.airmauritius.com. HolidayExtras.com offers Meet and Greet car parking at London Heathrow from just £66.20 for 8 days. To book visit to www.holidayextras.com or call 0800 1313 777.


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The Polyamorous Polyglot
It's true; polyamory is enjoying an efflorescence in popular culture these days. But this mirrors the spike in interest swinging had a couple of decades ago. This suggests to me that there is a fissure at the foundation of the dominant relationship model of the monogamous heterosexual, reproductive pair. All the sociological underpinnings of why our culture promotes this paradigm aside, I think it is undeniable that there is a level of dissatisfaction on the part of many who initially bought into this model as the only way to live, love and raise small herds of children. But is it?
People may feel trapped in the traditional expression of a committed relationship. But while they may be second-guessing the party line, they are equally wary of throwing open the doors in a haphazard way, and rightfully so.
The Model
For starters, the viability of an open relationship depends on the maturity level of the people who are considering opening up their sexually exclusive relationship. And how much they're willing to work at communicating with one another through all the little details that such a decision entails. One thing for sure, I am willing to go on record to say that the devil, in this case, really is in the details.
That being said, there are a few things us sex researchers know for sure. In most cultures, people claim to practice sexual exclusivity, which is commonly referred to as monogamy. Although I think that's a misnomer. Monogamy literally means having one union, which as we all know tells us nothing about the sexual expression either or both partners are supposedly sharing in.
Lifetime sexual exclusivity (being sexually involved with only one person for one's entire life) is rare. Serial sexual exclusivity (having a series of exclusive relationships over one's life) is much more common. And despite knowing that we humans do not mate for life, we continue to presume that sexual exclusivity, or monogamy is the only legitimate form of coupling.
This, unfortunately, leads to our culture's obsession with cheating—that is, having sex with someone outside of a monogamous relationship. And frankly, what I know about humans, human relationships and human sexuality; I can say for certain that fidelity is not necessarily a genital issue. One can indeed be faithful to someone else and still have the freedom to express him/herself sexually with others. It happens all the time. In these cases, fidelity is to the relationship and the agreements, parameters and boundaries mutually agreed upon by the partners. Which gets me back to my opening comment about the need for communication. Of course, it's much easier to presume that everyone in a relationship is working under the same rubric, but that kind of presumption is a fool's paradise.
Another shortcoming of setting up sexual exclusivity or monogamy as the only legitimate type of coupling is that it diminishes all the other types of relationships that flourish, albeit in a more covert sort of way. And here I'm talking about an array of open relationship models—and polyamory. The fact that we're only now hearing about these non-traditional relationships shouldn't suggest to you, or anyone, that they don't exist; or that they aren't practical alternatives to the traditional monogamous model, or that they aren't practiced by a lot of people. They do and they are! It just means that most people in non-traditional relationships know not to go public in a society that would denigrate them for their lifestyle choices. That's how things are here in the good old US of A; and I'll wager it's also true for the rest of the world. Am I right, or am I right?
Open relationships and polyamorous relationships work because the people in them adhere to some basic tenets about how to conduct themselves.
First among them is the notion that these alternative relationships must be chosen; they can't be mandated. If one or another of the persons considering an open or poly relationship is being pressured to go along with the flow, or is fearful that he/she will be alone if he/she doesn't comply with the will of the other(s). That kind of emotional duress will not work.
Each person in the relationship needs to take responsibility for the choices he/she is making. If you're not up for the task, or if this kind of arrangement is not compatible with your personality type, don't attempt to override that. You will only jeopardize the relationship for the other(s) involved. However, if the idea appeals to you, give it your best shot. I can guarantee that it will be a learning experience. Just remember, exploring something and having it carved in stone are two very different things.
Second, communication is key. The more complex the relationship structure, the greater the need for open lines of communication. Know your boundaries and express them clearly. Ask questions; never assume you know something when you don't.
Third, know yourself! You must be able to deal with your emotions, particularly jealousy, in an up-front, adult way. This is often much easier said than done. If you need to be the center of attention just so you can feel good about yourself, or you have serious territorial issues—this is mine, this is mine, and THIS is mine!—then alternative relationship models are probably not for you.
Know what keeps you even keel in terms of what you need and what you are able to give. There has got to be a healthy tension between these two things. If you're the kind who gives too much and resents not being rewarded for your gifts, stay away from alternative relationships. Or if you are so needy that you can't stand it when someone else is enjoying his/her time in the sun; open or poly relationships are decidedly not for you.
You should also know that alternative relationships, of whatever stripe, are, for the most part, on the fringes of what society will accept. And some are outright taboo. This doesn't mean you will have to slug it out on your own in a vacuum of support. On the contrary, you will, no doubt, find that the people who are living contrary to the expectations of the popular culture are often a whole lot more generous with their support and compassion then those following all the rules.
You will find that your support system will shift from more traditional sources like family, church and community to alternative sources like clubs and social groupings of other like-minded individuals as yourself. A common mistake made by those in non-traditional relationships is to take their problems and issues to their traditional support systems. This rarely works because the traditional support system will inevitably blame the non-traditional relationship setup for the problem. This is not true, of course, but how would those in traditional relationships know otherwise.
I always suggest that those in non-traditional relationships bring their issues to a non-traditional support system. Here you are less likely to encounter judgments about your life choices and more help with overcoming the problems at hand.
In the end, it's your call. Are the potential rewards as well as challenges associated with an open relationship worth taking more than the voyeuristic peek behind the curtain that the mainstream magazines provide you?
Good luck!


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New EPA Carbon Rules Pinch States Unevenly
Kentucky Appears to Have It Easier Than Washington State, but It Doesn't
Kentucky appears to have it easy under the Obama administration's new climate rules unveiled Monday, with an 18.3% cut in carbon-dioxide emissions required by 2030. Washington state, by contrast, must cut its emissions by 72%.
But Kentucky's goal will be anything but easy, said John Lyons, the state's assistant secretary for climate policy. Burning coal produces more carbon dioxide than oil and natural gas, and Kentucky gets 93% of its power from coal—well above the national average of 40%. So reducing it by almost one-fifth...


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Question Session
What kind of patients make better decisions about their health and well being? Informed.
What are synthetic structures that are placed in the area of the tooth normally occupied by the root?
What are the thin pieces of porcelain or plastic cemented over the front of your teeth to change their color or shape?
What procedures have effectively restored the smile of people with stained, dull, or discolored teeth?


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Is the GOP Ready for Erika Harold?
She's a young, black, Harvard-educated Miss America. So why don't the Republicans want her to run?
There she was, Erika Harold, in the basement meeting room of a library on a bitterly cold night in Edwardsville, hoping to convince a few more voters in this St. Louis suburb to support her insurgent campaign in the Republican primary for a congressional seat, even as her own party seems to be trying everything it can to keep her from the race.
There was the ugly email from a GOP county chairman calling Harold "a streetwalker." The bizarre snub at the state fair. The adamant rejection when she asked to use Republican voter data. And the frequent suggestion she would be better off running for something—anything—else.
Story Continued Below
"One thing after another," lamented Doug Ibendahl, a Chicago attorney and former state GOP general counsel who considers Harold a "top notch" candidate. "There are people in the Republican Party who are actively working against her who shouldn't be."
It does seem odd. Harold would appear to be exactly the kind of candidate the GOP needs: Miss America 2003. A speaker at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Harvard Law School grad. A practicing attorney interested in the Constitution. She is just 33 years old, close enough to count as one of the coveted "millennial" voters herself. The product of a mixed-race marriage—her father is white, her mother is African-American—Harold has a background that recalls that of another Illinois politician, a guy who went on to hold a pretty lofty office himself.
"Just look at me," Harold told the crowd of about 30 in the library basement, most of them older and white as she made her pitch for why they should unseat a freshman Republican congressman in this year's March primary in favor of her. "I am definitely not the stereotypical Republican."
Harold's appeal is built on "the optics, the experience, the resume." That's according to her dad—who is also her campaign manager. "The party knows it has to broaden its base," Bob Harold said, "and who better to do that?"
The Republican Party has talked plenty about the need to shed its image as the grand party of old white men—especially after its 2012 presidential defeat, as party elders took notice of a demographic curve that appears to be running away from them. The Republican National Committee knows it, too, writing in a report last March that, "Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country."
And here comes Harold. The GOP has never had a black woman in Congress, and in fact its best shot at making history this election cycle might be not Harold but Mia Love, a Haitian American and former mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, who narrowly lost her congressional bid in 2012 and is running again
But the story of how Harold so far has gotten more national attention than local traction is instructive. She's certainly gotten the media's attention, perhaps not surprising given her Miss America credentials and compelling personal story—she recently appeared on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News show, and a poster board at her meeting with voters touted praise from The Daily Beast, Newsmax Magazine and The Weekly Standard ("A Glimmer of Hope for the Illinois GOP").
Harold doesn't fit neatly into the taxonomy of today's Republican factions: She is not a middle-of-the-road Republican. Nor is she a neocon, a Tea Partier or a strict libertarian cribbing Ayn Rand quotes. She calls herself a constitutional conservative. She is anti-abortion rights, pro-gun, believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. She does not support marijuana legalization. She wants to repeal Obamacare. She also is against the death penalty, because, she says, the sentences are too dependent on the varying quality of the accused's attorneys.
Conservative politics were part of her tour as Miss America. The official platform that year was supposed to be reducing youth violence, but Harold pushed pageant organizers into letting her also promote abstinence before marriage. In 2004, she toured the country with then-party chief Ed Gillespie as part of a GOP outreach group. She served as an Illinois delegate to that year's Republican National Convention, where she gave a speech about faith-based initiatives. Even then, people were touting her potential as a fresh new face for the party.
Then she retreated from the limelight, finishing law school and working as an attorney in Chicago.
In April 2012, her shot at Congress popped up unexpectedly when longtime incumbent U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson, shortly after winning the Republican primary, suddenly announced that he planned to retire, citing family concerns and the partisan atmosphere in Washington. The 13th congressional district is a truly competitive one at a time when such districts are in ever shorter supply: It covers a central Illinois swath that includes Champaign-Urbana, home to the University of Illinois, and the state capital in Springfield, running south through farm fields and small towns before ending in the suburbs outside St. Louis. And while Republicans have held the seat for decades, President Obama won the district in 2008 and split it 49-49 percent with Romney in 2012.


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This year, overall biomedical research funding is sadly flat, and university growth has reached a plateau. State budgets are in crisis, and university endowments are still recovering from deep losses suffered during the economic downturn. Given the current circumstances, it would be impossible for all of our current Ph.D. students to move on to academic positions. In this respect, what might be viewed as good news is the fact that a large proportion of our graduate students apparently don't want to pursue academic positions (1). But current circumstances have led some to suggest that we are training too many Ph.D. graduate students (2). Are we?
By definition, a Ph.D. is awarded to a scholar who has demonstrated expert command of his or her chosen field and contributed original and publishable research findings in that area. Graduate students are important contributors to the discoveries made in most of our laboratories, and they are invaluable participants in the current research enterprise worldwide. Moreover, having mastered graduate-level courses and passing qualifying examinations, Ph.D. biochemists and molecular biologists have acquired a broad range of expertise. Graduates also learn how to write papers, how to present their work orally, how to work as part of a team and, most importantly, how to use data to solve problems analytically. There is a continuing need to train a scientifically educated cadre that can contribute to our society at the highest level, as teachers, writers, policy analysts, consultants, lawyers and, of course, research scientists.
Given that most of our graduates will not pursue academic careers, why don't our training programs acknowledge that fact adequately and inform students about career options at the outset of graduate training? Are we doing enough to give students teaching experience or asking our colleagues in biotech what we should add to our curricula to better train their future employees? Are our annual job fairs sufficient, or should our programs add more alumni visits and panel discussions? And, if a student wants to become a teacher or patent lawyer, why should a Ph.D. require longer than four years? A Ph.D. metric of two first-author papers is not unusual at many institutions but harder than ever to achieve. Publishing papers seems to have become a lot more difficult in recent years, in part because we can do so much more, more readily, and referees can ask for more as well. But separate from the challenges of publication, the time to degree issue is not being addressed adequately. (I will return to this topic in a future column.)
My colleague Paul Berg notes, "We convey the message that Ph.D. students should aim high in their ambitions and, for the right students, that's a wonderful challenge. But, if you now admit students whose ambitions lean toward nonacademic careers, the goals of a major research contribution and two first-author papers in a high-impact journal are totally unrealistic. One thought is to encourage students to craft a first proposal that explores a problem related to possible career choice: analyze a Business School case study of an interesting biotech company or a study of some particular education experiment or even examine the basis for a prominent patent infringement case and follow the legal outcome and ramifications." Sounds to me like a wonderful idea for an elective course to offer year one or year two Ph.D. students.
2010 ASBMB President's Address
Click HERE to watch a videocast in which ASBMB President Suzanne Pfeffer talks about the society and its activities and journals.
Another challenge to offering broader graduate student training experiences relates to the mechanisms by which we fund graduate study. Today, most graduate students are supported by research grants to individual investigators and by federally funded training grants. National Institutes of Health training grants were designed "to prepare qualified individuals for careers that have a significant impact on the health-related research needs of the Nation." Optimally, it would be great for students to include a year of teaching or public policy or biotech as part of a training experience. But that can't be justified with NIH grant support to a specific research project, or by most (but not all) predoctoral training programs. National Science Foundation graduate fellowships are more flexible, in that they permit recipients to acquire additional skills that will "more broadly prepare them for professional and scientific careers." Unfortunately, not enough of our students are funded by this mechanism. Indeed, fellowships to cover one-year (post-Ph.D.) science teacher training or public policy internships would go a long way to support our graduates in postdegree transitions.
In an important and eloquent recent letter to the Wall Street Journal (July 9, 2010), Dr. John Lechleiter, chairman, president and CEO of Eli Lilly and Company, highlighted America's growing innovation gap. "Unfortunately, America's economy is in danger of losing what has always been our greatest competitive advantage: our genius for innovation…" Lechleiter noted that the U.S. is sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in terms of innovative competitiveness, but 40th out of 40 in terms of the "rate of change in innovation capacity" over the past decade. We also ranked last in terms of what we as a nation are doing to combat this trend. "Human beings— with their talent and energy, creativity and insights— are a priceless resource, but one that is woefully underdeveloped in this country… With our kids falling further behind on international comparisons in education, we've got to get serious about broad improvement in science and math instruction in our grade schools and high schools," he wrote.
Similar conclusions were reached in 2007 by the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, in their report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future" (3). The committee was charged by Congress to address two questions: What are the top 10 actions that federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States successfully can compete, prosper and be secure in the global community of the 21st century; and, what implementation strategy could be used for each of those actions? The committee's highest priority recommendations include a proposal designed to increase America's talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education. They proposed to recruit 10,000 science and mathematics teachers annually by awarding four-year scholarships and, "thereby educating 10 million minds." We obviously need more qualified science teachers, and many of our Ph.D. graduates would be wonderful in these roles.
"Given that most of our graduates will not pursue academic careers, why don't our training programs acknowledge that fact adequately and inform students about career options at the outset of graduate training?"
Curriculum development also is important, and, earlier this year, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute awarded $70 million to 50 research universities to "develop creative, research-based courses and curricula; to give more students vital experience working in the lab and to improve science teaching from elementary school through college." Another approach, taken by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, supports science technology museums, notably "innovative programs and exhibits that will measurably increase scientific awareness and critical inquiry… including professional development for teachers." Even the professional golfer Phil Mickelson has teamed up with ExxonMobil to create a Teachers Academy whose mission is to enhance third through fifth grade math and science education.
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology members are active in K-12 educational activities and ASBMB's Education and Professional Development Committee's mission includes providing resources and direction for K-12 education. Perhaps we should be doing more to nurture the science teachers of the future. Should ASBMB be sponsoring enrichment programs for teachers to spend summers working in ASBMB member labs? Should our annual meeting include sessions on biochemistry and molecular biology curriculum development for teachers? It already has been suggested that ASBMB offer one-day registration to enable local teachers to attend at least part of our annual meeting, and we certainly can consider scholarships for local teacher participation. We aren't the "American Society for Science Teachers," but we do have an obligation to educate our youth, support K-12 teachers and maintain the pipeline for outstanding scientists for the decades ahead. Why aren't more biochemistry departments offering joint degrees that enable students to earn a master's degree in education (and teaching credential) co-terminal with a Ph.D.? We can help and encourage students to consider careers in teaching, where they can make a profound difference in educating scientists of the future and in developing an educated and sympathetic public. Lechleiter noted that innovation leadership requires "a society that understands and appreciates scientific inquiry." This can start with our K-12 teachers.
There always will be individuals with a burning desire to do research who are willing to chance the perils of academia. It is our obligation to provide these trainees with the opportunity and encouragement to reach their goals. Ph.D.-trained scientists can make invaluable contributions to our society beyond academia, and I feel strongly that the scientific community should not decrease the number of graduate students we are training right now. This approach comes with added responsibility: We must all do much more to prepare students for, and inform them about, the wide variety of positions that await them.
1. Alberts, B. (2008) Hybrid Vigor in Science. Science 320, 155.
2. Benderley, B .L. (June 14, 2010) The Real Science Gap. Miller-McCune.
3. National Academies of Science (2007) Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. National Academies Press.
More from the current issue


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Obama interview to air on NBA All-Star Game
TNT's coverage of the NBA All-Star Game will include an especially prominent basketball fan: President Obama.
Obama sat down Thursday with TNT broadcaster Charles Barkley -- a former NBA All-Star himself -- for an interview to air during coverage of the game to be played Sunday in New Orleans.
Among the topics, according to excerpts: Obama's suggestion that current superstar LeBron James could wind up as good a player as the legendary Michael Jordan.
"Now, I'm a Chicago guy and Mike will always be the guy, for me, just because that was a magical moment for the city, and he was a champion," Obama said. "Mike is now retired. LeBron, when you look at him, you think he might be able to play at a high level for another seven, eight, 10 years. He's 29 years old. In terms of every aspect of the game, LeBron has a chance to be as good as anybody."
Obama also said of James: "I've never seen somebody that size, that fast, who can jump that high, who is that strong, who has that much basketball savvy all in one package."
In addition to hoops, Obama and Barkley also discussed items ranging from health care to the administration's new "My Brother's Keeper" initiative for minority men, according to a release fron the NBA.
In a brief video clip, Obama plugs both the NBA All-Star Game and the network televising it.
"It's going to be a great weekend," Obama says. "And I'll be watching! On TNT!"


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