Important Note:
Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.
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Living with disaster
Posted at: Oct/27/2010 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Perspectives,
Seems like a strange subject, but please stay with me on this. I live in southern California, specifically in the San Diego area. A while back I was on the telephone conference with a business associate back east and the conversation got around to where we each lived. My associate upon learning where I lived was surprised anyone would want to live in southern California “with all the earthquak.....read more…
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A Nobel Prize for IVF
Posted at: Oct/14/2010 : Posted by: mel
This month (October 2010), professor emeritus Robert Edwards of the University of Cambridge and Dr. Patrick Steptoe (who died in 1988) won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a process where eggs removed from the female are fertilized by sperm outside the body, “in vitro.” IVF has proven to be a highly successful treatme.....read more…
When disasters aren’t really disasters!
Posted at: Aug/22/2010 : Posted by: mel
We hear a lot about disasters. In recent history we have had monsoonal flooding in Pakistan, an earthquake in Haiti, fires in Russia, another earthquake in Chili, and the environmental disaster of the Deepwater Horizon rig and oil spill. Despite all these real disasters we continue to go to the movies and watch disasters as entertainment; honestly it can be confusing and misleading. I.....read more…
Do we need to go to space?
Posted at: Aug/16/2010 : Posted by: mel
Space travel is cool stuff. I was born in the late 1950’s. This meant that during those young and impressionable years I was totally transfixed as I followed every detail of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. Other than a brief period during elementary school when I read Hardy Boy Mysteries, my genre of choice has always been science fiction. Of course the border between current s.....read more…
The Creativity Crisis
Posted at: Aug/08/2010 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Education, Perspectives,
How Creative Are You? For years America has bragged about its creativity. We have produced everything from the automatic coffee maker to the Ronco food chopper, and a million products in between. These products have created new industries, phenomenal wealth, and untold numbers of jobs. Along the way we have replaced radios with televisions and televisions with flat screen entertainment systems.....read more…
I did not need to hear those words
Posted at: Jul/28/2010 : Posted by: mel
Way back in 1972 (I’m old enough to remember), George Carlin released an album of stand-up comedy entitled “Class Clown”. The only really memorable routine on the album was titled "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". In this comedy monologue Carlin lists these seven words expressing amazement that the words on his list could not be used, regardless of context. You can look up the list f.....read more…
Are video games really a learning tool?
Posted at: Jul/19/2010 : Posted by: mel
Video games have a bad reputation. Many parents (including myself) have feared for years that their kids were spending too much time zoning out with the PlayStation, Xbox, Game Cube, etc. Having grown up without these same distractions I was sure for many years that my boys needed to be catching frogs like I did rather than playing “Frogger”. After watching my boys for a number of years I am begin.....read more…
Who writes this stuff?
Posted at: Feb/22/2010 : Posted by: mel
A couple of weeks ago having had a late night beer, cheeseburger and fries I came home and could not get right to sleep, heartburn seems to plague me much more now than 20 years ago. Popping some antacids I decided to take up the remote and watch a little TV to take my mind off my discomfort. After some channel surfing I settled for an hour of Star Trek. As is normally the case, the Captain .....read more…
Are we behind in Science & Math Education?
President Obama recently kicked off an “Educate to Innovate” campaign to help boost US students from middle-of-the-pack mediocrity internationally in science and math achievement to the head of the class over the next decade. The good news is that this initiative included $260 million in partnerships involving the federal government, companies, foundations, nonprofits, and science and engineering.....read more…
The Challenge of Public Education
Posted at: Oct/26/2009 : Posted by: mel
I have wanted to build an essay on this subject for quite a while, but I have struggled with what direction my theme would take. It has finally dawned on me that this is in itself metaphoric of the issues facing public education. There are so many different internal and external pressures being applied to education that there is no longer any possibility of a simple understanding or a simple solut.....read more…
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