Interesting article on the trouble with too much email:

The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.

Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.

Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

Intel and other companies are already experimenting with solutions. Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.

A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

Cut off from email for 15 minutes? Ridiculous.

I’m going to send my underwear to Burma. You should send yours.

The debate over anonymous sources is getting nice coverage in the NY Times right now. First, the public editor wrote on the findings of a study on their use in the paper. Now, the managing editor is answering questions about the practice. Here’s the first one:

Q. It seems to me that 40 years ago The Times did pretty well without anonymous sources. Or is my aging memory failing me? I think the reason we got ourselves to where we are today is because too many scribes became lazy and/or too accommodating and they feel that is the only way journalism will work today. It will take courage, I realize, but if papers got together and declared they would no longer use anonymous sources, it would not be long before we would be back to normal. Y’all should try one part of the picture, i.e., Congress, and not spew their P.R. any more without a source.
— Alice Barnes

A. The Times and other major news organizations have relied for centuries on anonymous sources, including, in the most famous case of all, the Pentagon Papers, almost exactly 40 years ago (the Columbia Journalism School study, alas, does not have a decade-by-decade comparison). And the suggestions in your question, that if we banned anonymous sources we would get back to ‘normal,’ and that anonymous sources have made reporters lazy, are ones with which I disagree.

Looks like my dissertation topic — a 40-year study of the NY Times’ use of anonymous sources — will be eagerly received.

(Hattip: Andrew Nelson)

Free speech vs. hate speech

Interesting article in the International Herald about a free speech vs. hate speech case in Canada:

Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean’s magazine, the nation’s leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions in Vancouver last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up animosity toward Muslims.

The article points out that in this country, the debate has been settled.

Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions – even false, provocative or hateful things – without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone.” The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”

“But in the United States,” Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”

Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Last week, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined €15,000, or $23,000, in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.

By contrast, U.S. courts would not stop the American Nazi Party from marching in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, though the march was deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

The worrisome thing about limiting speech for its hateful nature is figuring out who gets decide whether speech is a “vicious attack.” That’s why I feel more comfortable simply allowing all speech — then we don’t have to worry about where to draw the line.

An update on my progress on the boat. I should re-shoot this bit as well — deadpanned the final act a little too well.

Interesting photo from Instapundit. Check out the others — great photos of Knoxville.

Here’s Weezer’s video featuring a host of Internet celebrities. I don’t recognize them all … probably a good sign.

Uplifting column in the AJC this morning from a young woman who overcame her environment:

I was supposed to be an emotional ‘crack baby,’ a problem child, a troublemaker, a statistic.

By some accounts, the 1980s was a decade of pop culture and good times. Across many communities, however, an epidemic of drug use was taking place. I was born in 1983, conceived by two parents who both used drugs at the time.

When I was born in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, my mother was asked to participate in a scientific study that would monitor my cognitive reception, intelligence, personality, habits and overall attitude for the next 24 years. The study was designed to monitor the progression of those born under the predilection that at some point in their life, they would be strongly affected by drug use.

Last summer, I participated in one of the final portions of the study. I impressed the testers in every test I took by my college degree, field of study and the fact that I have no kids out of wedlock. I was employed in a good internship in Midtown and I had no emotional disorders, no prior arrests and no drug dependence.

You should read the rest — her story is incredible. She took advantage of all the programs available for disadvantaged youth, a powerful indicator that such programs really are effective.

She specifically mentioned the Kim King Foundation which “exists to provide educational opportunities for underprivileged children in the West End area of Atlanta.” Luckily, the foundation accepts PayPal donations, a convenience that prevented me from putting off (and later forgetting) to make a contribution. Here’s the link.

Lie vs. Lay

As promised — lie vs. lay. I may reshoot this one since my right hand keeps getting cut off.

Video Grammar Tips

I made a blog to showcase my grammar tip videos. I also embedded advertisements in the video using an Amazon widget — took about 3 minutes. Check it out and buy that book.