Links to Your World, Tuesday September 8

Regarding the plans to have the President address the nation’s school children today, Albert Mohler hits the nail on the head: Opposition was overblown, but fawning over Obama by the Dept of Education didn’t help matters. The moral of the story: “The White House should shut down the cult of personality, and the nation's conservatives should discipline themselves to discern the real issues from the conspiracy myths.”


ALL CAPS emails lead to woman's firing


“Austin parents believe they are a more influential source of information about sex for their teens than they actually are, a survey released Tuesday shows” (Statesman).


“Too much social media can be a bad thing. Two girls lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, Australia, updated their Facebook status instead of calling emergency services on Sunday night, in a situation authorities called ‘worrying’.” (Story)


Lots of people are commenting on this Atlantic piece: “I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.”


London’s Telegraph compiled 50 things that are in the process of being killed off by the web, from products and business models to life experiences and habits. See if you agree.


“Whether you believe you have some purpose to fulfill on earth or just have trips you plan to take and books you want to read, you have a survival edge over people with fewer goals. So say researchers at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago who interviewed more than 1,200 older adults” (RD).


Wired’s GeekDad asks which is better: The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. LOTR; hands down.


100 Most Educational iPhone Apps


“Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well. Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors. Would you wear that device?” (“Life Recorders May Be This Century’s Wrist Watch”)


“Christian couples staying faithful online” (AP story)