Paper Towels!!

Come to think of it, Paper Towels are pretty cool.

GopherLink! Inside a Netflix sorting facility. The Long Tail in action! Read more here.

APA "repudiates" gay-to-straight therapy

The coverage of the new APA report on homosexuality is interesting in that it was well covered almost everywhere I looked. I've included some highlights of this coverage.

Here's the top three graphs of Associated Press:

The American Psychological Association declared Wednesday that mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments.

In a resolution adopted by the APA's governing council, and in an accompanying report, the association issued its most comprehensive repudiation of "reparative therapy" — a concept espoused by a small but persistent group of therapists, often allied with religious conservatives, who maintain gays can change.

No solid evidence exists that such change is likely, says the resolution, adopted by a 125-4 vote. The APA said some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.

The piece goes on to give fair coverage to thoughts of both liberals and conservatives on the subject. I think "repudiates" may have been too strong a word, but maybe that was in expectation that conservatives would be more frustrated with the report than they actually were. Some conservative therapists were actually pleased with the report. Take a look at The Wall Street Journal:

The men who seek help from evangelical counselor Warren Throckmorton often are deeply distressed. They have prayed, read Scripture, even married, but they haven't been able to shake sexual attractions to other men -- impulses they believe to be immoral.

Dr. Throckmorton is a psychology professor at a Christian college in Pennsylvania and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association. He specializes in working with clients conflicted about their sexual identity.

The first thing he tells them is this: Your attractions aren't a sign of mental illness or a punishment for insufficient faith. He tells them that he cannot turn them straight.

But he also tells them they don't have to be gay.
...
"We're not trying to encourage people to become 'ex-gay,'" said Judith Glassgold, who chaired the APA's task force on the issue. "But we have to acknowledge that, for some people, religious identity is such an important part of their lives, it may transcend everything else."

Even Baptist Press had an interesting take.

TORONTO (BP)--In a report that has resulted in widely differing interpretations, a 130-page paper from an American Psychological Association task force Wednesday concluded there is little evidence that "gay-to-straight" therapies work, but -- in a nod to Christian conservatives -- said religious individuals who desire to leave homosexuality should be assisted in doing so.

H/T Mollie Hemingway.

100 Confessions: Upstaging

(64) Apparently I have a way of making people feel inadequate. This is ironic since I'm usually plagued by my own inadequacies. But this came to my attention during the road trip my wife and I were on last week. In the course of our couch hoping, we ended up staying with a college friend on the Eastern seaboard and got a chance to meet her boyfriend. I really liked the guy. In my mind, my conversation with him sounded like this:

Dude: "Yeah, I'm really into creative writing."
Greg: "Really? Me too!"

Dude: "I've never published anything. I'd really like to develop my creative writing by going to graduate school at the local state university."
Greg: "Neat, I'm in graduate school myself."

Dude: "I think I might like to teach high school at some point."
Greg: "Cool, I'm in teaching as well."

My wife, upon later reflection, said the conversation went a little more like this:

Dude: "Yeah, I'm really into creative writing."
Greg: "Really? I just finished editing my fourth novel. I'm really proud of this one and think it will sell. I've got about four or five short fiction publications right now..."

Dude: "I've never published anything. I'd really like to develop my creative writing by going to graduate school at the local community university."
Greg: Oh community school huh? I'm at Georgetown right now. One year left on the Masters!

Dude: "I think I might like to teach high school at somepoint."
Greg: "Like 'em young eh? Yeah, I teach college students."

In my defense I can't help being awesome. Joking. And the above is a dramatic exaggeration.

Superhero, Barack Obama

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Review: Twilight

Okay, just to be clear here: I'm reviewing the book, not the movie. I haven't seen the movie, but I use the pictures because it brings more hits. True story.

Now, I approached this book with a bit of trepidation. After all, what would I tell people if I actually liked it? Twilight has earned the rap of being a girl's book and more specifically a tween girl's book. However, as a writer in the fantasy genre and some one who's been fascinated with vampire books for a long time (recent evidence), I thought it was worth a read.

So here are my thoughts:

(1) This book does for chicks, what a sword and sorcery book does for dudes. If you read any typical sword and sorcery book, it has some very typical elements: the young orphan raised in isolation; he discovers he is "special" and is sole person who can save the world; and in the process he will save damsels in distress, fight alongside buxom but ferocious female warriors and become unbelievably powerful (the late Robert Jordan is perhaps the epitome of this in his endless Wheel of Time series).

Now Twilight has some similar elements: a girl from a place things are boring and normal; she has an emotionally sensitive relationship with her parents that isolates her; she comes to a place where she is "special" and every boy at school wants to go out with her (including the boy genetically geared to destroy her); she will bravely, for love, put herself in dangerous situations where people fight for her because she is so special.

(2) Once again, we have secular vampires. The religious elements of vampirism have been taken out (the fear of the cross, holy water, etc) which leaves them as a sort of social group. In the book, they are balanced by a native Indian tribe who have been there for centuries (and who, I suspect, are werewolves). Thus the vampires become a marginalized part of society, largely through the actions of some bad apple vampires who hunt and kill people.

(3) The vampire elements are a backdrop for a romance story. Stephanie Meyer claimed that her inspiration for Twilight came from reading Pride and Prejudice. You can see the elements there: the forbidden love, the social danger, the major subplot of family relationships, and even the comedic elements (Bella can't play sports to save her life, and for someone who likes to hang out with bloodthirsty vampires, she tends to hurt herself a lot).

So to answer the broader question: "Did you like the story?" I liked parts of it, but then again, I wasn't the audience for this book. This isn't a book for people who like vampire/fantasy stories, it's for people who like romance stories. My favorite plot line was not the love relationship between Bella and Edward (which was the main plot), but the subplot of Bella's relationship with her father, Charlie. Neither Bella nor Charlie are good at expressing emotion yet throughout the story you see Charlie attempting to show his love for her in his own way (putting chains on her tires while she was asleep, etc.)

Ann Arbor loses the News

On July 24, the Chicago Tribune printed a mournful column, lamenting the death of the Ann Arbor News. Unlike many other cities, the death of the Ann Arbor News is the death of the only major news source in the area.

The News was not just a hometown paper for the 114,000 residents of this university town about 45 miles west of Detroit, it was the hometown paper. Ann Arbor has become the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily.

But perhaps understandably (less so for the many journalists sitting in the seats), they are starting from the ground up. The editors are trying a business model that has been semi-successful for other digital news outlets: small staff, small circulation, niche advertising (see AnnArbor.com--oh and the top story this morning is dead swans).

While this maybe the first "city" to lose it's full-time daily, there's certainly been documentation about what happens when a community loses it's daily. Want to make your palms sweat? See what happens to volunteerism, civic involvement and political participation when a local newspaper closes.

It's impossible for me personally to have a clear thought on the matter of a newspaper closing. On one hand, I've sat in the newsroom. I know what the loss of a colleague is like and I know the good that a skilled journalist can do. But I'm unfortunate enough to see where the market is headed. Will news survive? Of course. Will newspapers survive? Yes, in some capacity. But it means a new model with new strengths and a lot of new weaknesses. With that in mind, it's easy to understand how the columnist feels when he writes:

This radical reinvention looks ominously like a smoke screen for radical cost-cutting and wholesale firings, one that will be replicated in city after city where lone, moribund daily newspapers are so many dominoes waiting to fall now that this first one has toppled.

As I mourn the passing of the Ann Arbor News, I’m haunted by the fear that AnnArbor.com will succeed. Even more, I’m haunted by the fear that it will fail.

Is there a way to save these newspapers, that still attract millions online but don't charge for it? Some people think so. The LA Times on "Free Riding" and it's affect on newspapers:

Practically anyone can start a website and get software that snags fresh online
news from those who originate it. Website owners pluck the freshest, most interesting reports and quickly post condensed rewrites. That costs them little, and they then surround the rewrites with cut-rate ads.

When readers get to work in the morning, they can read fresh news on the newspaper's site or equally fresh rewrites on competitors' sites. The free-riders may link to the newspaper's report, but why click on the link to read the same story twice?

Take Newser.com, an "aggregator" of others' news reports. It boasts on its site: "We choose the most important stories from hundreds of U.S. and international sources and reduce them to a headline, picture and two paragraphs. And we do it 24/7 -- you can come back morning, noon, night (and in between) for something new that matters."

Competing with each other and newspapers for advertising, free-riders enter the market undercutting each others' ad rates until many of them can still profit, but newspapers, which bear the hefty labor costs of gathering the news, can't.

But on the other side, some journalists have, despite the obstacles, managed to make it in the digital world. But they're reporting on a beat, not on a city. Individual journalists can survive, but the industry?