Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Charity of Our Children

On Yahoo!, one of todays featured items was a story about Colton Roe of Chantilly, Virginia, and his "Pennies for Passing" campaign to fight hunger. Colton is a 13-year-old quarterback who collects pledges against how well he performs on the football field. His thought in creating the program was, just as funding could be raised based on miles walked in a walkathon, he would ask for pennies to be pledged for each yard he threw for on the football field. Roe's efforts over the past three seasons (he started at age 11), have been based on the principle that every little bit helps "move the chains" and have raised over $6500 for the nonprofit Food for Others. Next year, he and his dad aim to spread the program throughout his Northern Virginia league.

In a quick search for more information, I stumbled across a "Penny War" as another novel fundraising effort by youth. Connie Hein reported, in her article for the Windsor Beacon about this Christmas fundraiser at Colorado's Windsor Charter Academy. Each class had a bucket where students brought their pennies to donate. The war part of the fundraiser came when students from other classes could bring nickels, dimes, quarters or dollars to put in other classes' buckets to cancel out an equal amount of donated pennies. The classes competed a for a pizza party prize. The money raised went to Candy Canes and Caring, an organization that purchases and distributes food clothes and gifts to needy local families during the Christmas holiday season.

Efforts like this, where children directly participate in and sometimes even become passionate about and/or very successful in helping their community truly warm my heart. Myself included, we are often too quick to notice and point out what is wrong in our world. The fact that even young children are actively participating in these unselfish efforts to help others offers is certainly reason for much hope and pride.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

The NFL's Day In Court

An article in this weeks "Parade" magazine reports that the Supreme Court will consider the question of whether the National Football League is a single entity or a collection of 32 teams. This all came about because Reebok signed a deal with the NFL for exclusive rights to use team logos on their sports apparel and American Needle, a competitor, sued the NFL under anti-trust laws. The league countered with the position that anti-trust rules should not be applied to the NFL, a single organization competing with other forms of entertainment for fans/viewers. In opposition is the opinion that teams compete with each other on things like ticket prices and player salaries and that declaring them a single entity would simply put more money in their pockets. Reebok is claiming that agreements like the one they made with the NFL makes quality products less expensive for fans. Now I'm just a Blind Bambi, but I don't think that in either case the fans will win. This decision may affect how money is split between owners, players, media companies covering the league, and companies marketing NFL merchandise. I can't really envision a scenario, however, where this decision would put more money in the pockets of fans.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

A Linguistic Fingerprint?

I stumbled across a BBC article about research into a method to linguistically fingerprint an author. This work has found that a "curve" based on the number of words an author uses only once and the length of the work seems to be a reliable method for unique identification of the writer. So, I find this concept very interesting. Apparently a great deal of analysis and testing has be performed by applying it to the writing of great authors like Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. I can't help but wonder, however, if it breaks down for a hillbilly like me. I don't think my vocabulary is big enough to house "unique words." Just a thought from this Blind Bambi.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Gaydar - Is it Genuine?

I was flipping through the 27 November 2009 issue of "Science" magazine, when a blurb entitled "How's Your Gaydar?" caught my eye. Psychologist Nicholas Rule, of Tufts University, performed an experiment where he showed 21 college students 192 photos of various straight and gay women. These images were taken from dating web sites and then cropped so that only the face itself (no hair or ears)was visible. It turns out that the students were right 64% of the time, guessing better than expected from simple random chance. This result held up even when the students were only shown the women's eyes. Further, in 2008, similar results were obtained with an experiment testing the classification of male faces. Other analysis has shown that homosexuals tend to adopt facial expressions more typical of the opposite sex. As the students in this study were more accurate when forced to make a snap decision, then, Rule believes that people unconsciously pick up on subtle differences in facial muscle tendencies. Human gaydar, then, is based on automatic processing of snippets of information that provide some basis for making a judgement. A 64% accuracy rate, however seems a far cry from a finely tuned gay versus straight sensor. I will admit, however, that this study relied only on visual clues discernible in the photograph of facial features. In person, our full range of senses may utilize additional contextual clues. I am far from convinced, however, that "gaydar" is an innate, reliable human skill. I'm just a Blind Bambi, though, with "no-eyed deer" about much of anything.