Research and Ruminations on My Birthday

On the morning of Sunday, October 29, 1978, Janice and John Pershing welcomed their daughter, Catherine Leigh Pershing, into the world, bright and early at 1:13 AM, in Mesa, Arizona.  They agreed to call her Katie.  Their daughter was something of a wedding present; John and Jan had been married only about a week.  They would have married sooner, but had to wait for Jan's divorce to be final.  Katie's brothers and sisters (well, half siblings, anyway, they were all much older) had an ambivalent reaction to her arrival.  Her oldest brother, Joe, remembers it as "the best of times and the worst of times."  He stopped by to see his mother and new baby sister on his way out of town to report to Navy boot camp.  Her oldest sister, Irene, was likely spending the weekend with a friend, although she doesn't remember for sure; what she remembers most clearly was frustration with their mother for being pregnant in the first place.  The fifteen year old was uncommonly responsible for her age (a label which was never applied to Jan) and thought that, perhaps, some reckless decisions had been made.  Middle siblings Bill and Diane did report their activities on this day when questioned; however, in an attempt to protect the innocent and the unindicted, those activities will not be reported in this forum.  Happily, it all worked out in the end, or as Irene put it, "We decided to keep you," and they all lived happily ever after.  Actually, that last part is categorically untrue, but all of that is beyond the scope of this paper.

That Sunday was special for more reasons than Katie's birth.  Millions of Americans woke up happy to have an extra hour of sleep, due to the end of daylight savings time that morning;  in fact, Katie was born during the hour of the time change, causing some historians to question just how long, exactly, after midnight the birth occurred.  Later that morning, many Americans read Sunday papers with their coffee, many of which would have included this Garfield comic:

Like all fall Sundays in the United States, football was on the afternoon menu.  The box scores and some of the statistics from that day in football can be found here:

http://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/1978/week_9.htm

Perhaps more interesting, and more representative of typical American life at that time, is this string of commercials that played during the football game that day

Less interesting but pertinent to the assignment is the Billboard Chart's #1 song that week, which was Nick Gilder's Hot Child in the City.  If you are like me, you have never heard of this song.  If you are like me, you are glad you've lived your life this long without having to be exposed to this truly terrible song, and will not choose to listen to this YouTube of it:

If you foolishly listened to that, you have only yourself and the terrible musical taste of young people in the late Seventies to blame.

In more serious news, according to the front page of the Dallas Morning News, the President of the United States was struggling with a crisis in the Middle East, a local police officer and politician was caught up in a scandal, and voters were bitter and apathetic.  Wait, that was this week, in 2014.  Wait, no, it was 36 years ago, its just that pretty much nothing has changed:  

For more national and international news, I looked at the Washington Post.  This story:  http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/docview/146872025?accountid=7120

discussed the Pope meeting with East German leaders.  Other stories listed covered issues with the Soviet Union, including relations and allegations of spying in the United States.  Those stories, in particular, struck a note with me today, because those nations are gone with the Cold War wind, but it doesn't feel that long, to me, since they were around.  By the time my three year old daughter is old enough to care, the Soviet Union and all the Eastern Bloc countries will have been gone for over thirty years, long enough to feel like ancient history. 

Even though the events chronicled here are from the day I was born, obviously before I was aware, they are not that removed from my memory times gone by.  The hairstyles, the clothes, the newspapers and comics, all look very similar to what I remember as a little kid.  Even though I'd never heard of my birthday's number one song, many of the others on Billboard's chart for that year were radio frequent flyers when I was growing up (1978's Billboard charts to be found here: http://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1978/hot-100 .  If I'd been born a week later we could have had Anne Murray's awesomeness in this piece, but alas, I was born to into bad luck).  For the first time, I'm beginning to feel that I'm no longer part of the generation that's coming up; I'm part of the generation that's on its way out.  While I, hopefully, have more years ahead of than behind me, those years are passing with a lightning swiftness I couldn't have imagined when I was 18 or 20, and I'm suddenly very conscious of the fate that awaits me at the end of this journey. 

Wow. This has been a very uplifting assignment.

News Exploration: Google News Rocks the House

My exploration of the Google News and The Huffington Post internet news aggregators was an eye opening experience for me.  While I had been directed through links to stories on Huffington Post, I had never explored the actual website; and Google News was something I was familiar with only by reputation.  After exploring and playing with the features on both sites, my initial impression that Google News is a better news provider was confirmed.

Google News is laid out in clean lines, easy to read and navigate.  On my first ever visit, I immediately noticed the controls available to customize the news to my preferences, with toggle controls to control the subject of the displayed articles, controlling the frequency with which stories in the category are shown, between rarely and always.  Also, there is a keyword box were you can personalize your news display in any way you choose, and another set of toggles which control how frequently you see headlines from particular sources.  I fiddled with the controls, changing the sports from always to never, and was pleased to see the headlines changed immediately in response to my preferences.

Here is a screenshot showing the personalization tools on the right:

Additionally, as you can see within the above screenshot, the menu bar to the left of the screen allows you to navigate easily and simply through different categories of news, including local news, which somehow changes with my location, presumably through info from the wifi router.  Overall, I felt I was being offered a wide variety of news from various outlets on various topics with no overt political bias (which is to say, obviously there is political bias in there somewhere, as it is nearly everywhere; however, I didn't feel like the website was screaming at me that conservatives are EVIL!!!!! as I felt on other sites, say, for instance, The Huffington Post….)

I wanted to like The Huffington Post; over the years I have read several really good articles through their site on emotional, spiritual, and social issues.  Because of this, I expected a left leaning site, and that wouldn't necessarily have been bad.  However, several of the front page headlines every time I went were anti-Republican, anti-conservative, anti-law enforcement, or something else that would be considered more right wing, and they frankly weren't very kind about it or very objective in their presentation, I felt.  In the following screenshot of the front page, you can see the sarcasm directed at the Republican party front and center:

and surrounded by stories that appear to be anti-government, anti-white, and anti-police.  While I value an alternative viewpoint to my generally moderate conservatism, when it is presented in a manner that I perceive as hateful, I don't get much benefit from reading it; it just makes me mad.  I also didn't like that the featured blog posts on the left are laid out in a manner that looks like "news", but are actually just basically opinion pieces. 

In addition to the political bias, the manner in which The Huffington Post was laid out was more difficult for me to interact with than Google News.  The Huffington Post looks to me like a digitized version of a more traditional paper newspaper, but I don't think that translates well to a traditional computer (I realize, though, that it may translate VERY well to tablets, which I don't own and so couldn't try out. ) For me, the busier layout was more difficult to navigate and peruse.  

Many of the headlines on "HuffPo" (as it is known) also had wording which seemed to me more emotional than journalistic, such as "These Workouts Are More Effective Than Running."  While health and fitness are valid journalistic story lines, the above reads more like opinion than facts, leading me to think, "What do they mean by effective? Pretty sure nothing is more effective at improving running than actual running." I realize the line is designed to get people to click on it, and it probably works, but I think it appeals to the lower common denominators rather than encouraging people to think rationally, which is my major complaint about much of modern media, online and otherwise.

All in all, I found Google News to be a better news aggregator than The Huffington Post.  It was easy to read, navigate, and personalize.  While it worked great for my political and cultural point of view, it would also be easy for a person with very different opinions to take the site and personalize it to suit their needs, making it a better all-around site than The Huffington Post.

Assignment 2: I didn't like anything on Facebook for several days

Out of the available options for this assignment, I chose what I felt was the least possible of the evils and did not "like" anything on Facebook between Thursday and Tuesday.  The first thing that was apparent was that, much as I had imagined, it was very difficult not to "like" things, and in fact I had to "unlike" several things to not violate the rules of the assignment, because it is such an ingrained reaction.  Because I am such an active Facebook presence, I knew all of my friends would be alarmed if I suddenly stopped obsessively liking their posts, so I posted an alert to let everyone know what was going on.  While in truth I doubt anyone would have paid that much attention to my lack of "liking" things, I thought it was interesting how disgruntled and offended that some people were at the idea that "liking" could be proscribed.  This stuff is serious.

                Because of the way I often use social media, on the run for a few seconds or a minute here or there, I don't comment near as much as I "like", and when I was not allowed to "like," I found myself feeling uncomfortable and disengaged a lot.  I didn't have time to comment and I couldn't like anything; without the ability to interact, what was the point? So I actually ended up not being on Facebook nearly as much.  And the benefit of that, not at all surprisingly, was that I was much more engaged with my friends and family who were actually present.  And that, also not surprisingly, had the benefit of improving those relationships. 

                What I took away from this experiment, as a learning experience, is that while I believe social media does add a certain dimension of quality to my life and relationships, I also think to a much greater extent, it detracts significantly from my overall quality of life and the quality of parent/friend/sister/student that I can be.  While being relatively unengaged for a few days on Facebook didn't appear to damage those relationships, it did noticeably improve my "real life" relationships.  Ideally I would find a balance between those two, so that I could continue to interact on social media without detracting from everyday life.  However, if I'm not able to do that, I would consider finding a way to disengage from Facebook so that I can better focus my energies on my priorities. 

                I might have more to say about this, but I have to go take a Facebook quiz about which Frozen character I am…

Assignment 1 - Three Interesting Tweets

             There were a lot of Tweets that I found engaging and interesting, but I picked three to comment on.  One was from The Onion, and it was a photo meme of a prison guard that says, “Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones.” I found it amusing, and I like the way The Onion takes serious issues and puts them in a “dark humor” light.  This meme takes the question of guilt and innocence, and the suspicion of culpability of law enforcement in false guilt cases, and makes it something that it’s okay to laugh about, just for a moment, and uses humor as a way to bring these issues into the public consciousness.  I retweeted that one, so others could laugh and then maybe think seriously, as well.

                Another Tweet that I retweeted was from Men’s Health Magazine.  This one was a link to an article titled “15 Instant Ways to Make Yourself Happier.”  The tweet drew my attention because, like most people, I enjoy being happy, and anything I can do to improve that is interesting to me.  The article  was a list of practical, simple actions that can improve a person’s mood.  I appreciated that the suggestions were unique; there were several that made sense but with which I was not familiar.  Also, each suggestion included the scientific explanation behind it, which differentiates this article from many opinion pieces on self-improvement.

                The third Tweet that I found especially informative was from Reuters, and it was a link to an article about the Ebola outbreak, titled “U.N. says $600 million needed to tackle Ebola as deaths top 1,900.”  The Tweet drew my attention because it was about the Ebola outbreak, which I have been following on and off, and feel is a significant world issue right now that can get lost in all the war outbreaks that are occurring.  The article was well-written and informative, covering briefly the history of the outbreak, the steps being taken to combat it, and problems that are being experienced in that effort.