DebateGate

It's not the first time Lee Baca, the sheriff who opened the jail door for Paris Hilton, has had his judgment questioned.

He's been criticized for using his authority to benefit friends and supporters, and since coming to office he's accepted thousands of dollars worth of freebie meals, sports tickets and trips.

Baca is facing accusations of favoritism after making the decision that allowed Hilton to leave jail Thursday and serve out her sentence at her West Hollywood home.

He dismissed that criticism, saying Friday that Hilton had been ordered to spend an unusually long time behind bars.

Under his department's early release program, Hilton would not have served any time in jail and would have been put on home electronic monitoring, Baca said.

"The special treatment, in a sense, appears to be because of her celebrity status," he said. "She got more time in jail."

After ordering Hilton back to her cell Friday, Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer said he "at no time condoned the actions of the sheriff."

The union representing deputy sheriffs demanded that Baca "put a stop to his special treatment for celebrity inmates." And county Supervisor Don Knabe said he was stunned to find out Baca released Hilton without consulting the court.

"I would have thought he would have better judgment than that," Knabe said.

The county Board of Supervisors will demand a report on Hilton's release and Baca's decision-making in the matter, Knabe said.

For Baca, 65, who has led the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department since 1998, the blowback is not extraordinary.

When Mel Gibson was arrested for drunken driving, the department withheld video and audio tapes of the arrest, asserting they were exempt from open-government laws.

There were questions about favorable treatment for the "Apocalypto" director after a sheriff's spokesman initially said the arrest occurred "without incident" and made no mention of Gibson's now-notorious anti-Semitic rant.

"When a celebrity is involved, that's when people pay attention," said Robert Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies, a research group. "The big question ... is why didn't the sheriff go to the judge" before Hilton was released.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported Baca put one of his closest friends on the payroll as a $105,000-a-year adviser.

The newspaper also said he had accepted more than $42,000 in gifts since taking office, including some from those who do business with his department.

In 2004, he took more gifts than California's other 57 sheriffs combined.

Baca oversees an 8,000-officer force that has been vexed by low morale, tight budgets, overcrowded jails and the persistence of gang crime.

Jonathan Wilcox, a Republican strategist who teaches a course on politics and celebrity at the University of Southern California, said Baca may be caught between public expectations and the reality of the criminal justice system.

"Sheriff Baca needs to be very concerned with at least the impression that the final frontier, the law, is now as affected by celebrity as almost every other aspect of our lives," Wilcox said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2007/06/08/state/n145756D44.DTL&type=printable

Retired TV station owner and broadcast engineer, John Kanzius, wasn’t looking for an answer to the energy crisis.  He was looking for a cure for cancer.

Four years ago, inspiration struck in the middle of the night. Kanzius decided to try using radio waves to kill the cancer cells. His wife Marianne heard the noise and found her husband inventing a radio frequency generator with her pie pans.

“I got up immediately, and thought he had lost it.”

Here are the basics of John’s idea:

Radio-waves will heat certain metals. Tiny bits of certain metal are injected into a cancer patient.

Those nano-particals are attracted to the abnormalities of the cancer cells and ignore the healthy cells.

The patient is then exposed to radio waves and only the bad cells heat up and die.

But John also came across yet another extrordinary breakthrough. His machine could actually make saltwater burn.

John Kanzius discovered that his radio frequency generator could release the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly intense flame.

“Just like that. If that was in a car cylinder you could see the amount of fire that would be in the cylinder.”

The APV Company Laboratory in Akron has checked out John’s amazing invention. They were amazed.

“That could be a steam engine, a steam turbine. That could be a car engine if you wanted it to be.”

Imagine the possibilities. Saltwater as the ultimate clean fuel. A happy byproduct of one man searching for the cure for cancer.
_______________________

See the video here - very cool! - http://www.wkyc.com/video/player.aspx?aid=35660&bw=

Story link: http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=68227

I wanted to share this with other parents of Gen Yers...it's an excellent study of the Gen Y population, the job market they face, and how the business world is responding to them.

Attracting the twentysomething worker
The baby-boomers' kids are marching into the workplace, and look out: This crop of twentysomethings really is different. Fortune's Nadira Hira presents a field guide to Generation Y.


(Fortune Magazine) -- Nearly every businessperson over 30 has done it: sat in his office after a staff meeting and - reflecting upon the 25-year-old colleague with two tattoos, a piercing, no watch and a shameless propensity for chatting up the boss - wondered, What is with that guy?!

We all know the type: He's a sartorial Ryan Seacrest, a developmental Ferris Bueller, a professional Carlton Banks. (Not up on twentysomethings' media icons? That's the "American Idol" host, the truant Matthew Broderick movie hero, and the overeager Will Smith sidekick in "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.")

At once a hipster and a climber, he is all nonchalance and expectation. He is new, he is annoying, and he and his female counterparts are invading corporate offices across America.

Generation Y: Its members are different in many respects, from their upbringing to their politics. But it might be their effect on the workplace that makes them truly noteworthy - more so than other generations of twentysomethings that writers have been collectively profiling since time immemorial.

They're ambitious, they're demanding and they question everything, so if there isn't a good reason for that long commute or late night, don't expect them to do it. When it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for are last on their list - behind their families, their friends, their communities, their co-workers and, of course, themselves.

But there are a whole lot of them. And as the baby-boomers begin to retire, triggering a ballyhooed worker shortage, businesses are realizing that they may have no choice but to accommodate these curious Gen Y creatures. Especially because if they don't, the creatures will simply go home to their parents, who in all likelihood will welcome them back.

Some 64 million skilled workers will be able to retire by the end of this decade, according to the Conference Board, and companies will need to go the extra mile to replace them, even if it means putting up with some outsized expectations. There is a precedent for this: In April 1969, Fortune wrote, "Because the demand for their services so greatly exceeds the supply, young graduates are in a strong position to dictate terms to their prospective employers. Young employees are demanding that they be given productive tasks to do from the first day of work, and that the people they work for notice and react to their performance."

Those were the early baby-boomers, and - with their '60s sensibility and navel-gazing - they left their mark on just about every institution they passed through. Now come their children, to confound them. The kids - self-absorbed, gregarious, multitasking, loud, optimistic, pierced - are exactly what the boomers raised them to be, and now they're being themselves all over the business world.

It's going to be great.

"This is the most high-maintenance workforce in the history of the world," says Bruce Tulgan, the founder of leading generational-research firm RainmakerThinking. "The good news is they're also going to be the most high-performing workforce in the history of the world. They walk in with more information in their heads, more information at their fingertips - and, sure, they have high expectations, but they have the highest expectations first and foremost for themselves."

So just who is this fair bird?
Plumage:  The creature in the wild: Joshua Butler, audit associate, KPMG

With his broad networker's smile, stiff white collar, and polished onyx cuff links, Joshua Butler has the accouterments of an accountant. Even so, he looks a little out of place in a KPMG conference room. At 22, he's 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, with a body made for gladiator movies. A native of suburban Washington, D.C., Butler chose accounting after graduating from Howard University because he wanted "transferable skills."

At KPMG he's getting them - and more: The firm has let him arrange his schedule to train for a bodybuilding competition, and he's on its tennis team. Even before that, KPMG got his attention when it agreed to move him to New York, his chosen city. "It made me say, 'You know what? This firm has shown a commitment to me. Let me in turn show some commitment to the firm.'" He pauses, a twinkle in his eye. "So this is a merger, if you will - Josh and KPMG."

Boomers, know this: You are outnumbered. There are 78.5 million of you, according to Census Bureau figures, and 79.8 million members of Gen Y (for our purposes, those born between 1977 and 1995). And the new generation shares more than just an age bracket.

While it may be crass to "define" such a group, any Times Square tourist could probably do so with one finger - pointed at the MTV Networks building. Gen Y sometimes seems to share one overstimulated brain, and it's often tuned to something featuring Lindsay Lohan. Add to that the speed with which Yers can find Lindsay Lohan - day or night, video or audio - in these technology-rich times, and it's suddenly not so strange that Gen Y has developed such a distinct profile.

And what a profile it is. As the rest of the nation agonizes over obesity, Gen Yers always seem to be at the gym. More than a third of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have a tattoo, and 30 percent have a piercing somewhere besides their earlobe. But those are considered stylish, not rebellious.

And speaking of fashion, this isn't a group you'll catch in flannel. They're all about quiet kitsch - a funky T-shirt under a blazer, artsy jewelry, silly socks - small statements that won't cause trouble. The most important decorations, though, are electronic - iPods, BlackBerrys, laptops - and they're like extra limbs. Nothing is more hilarious than catching a Gen Yer in public without one of those essentials. Let's just say most wouldn't have lasted long on Walden Pond.

When it comes to Gen Y's intangible characteristics, the lexicon is less than flattering. Try "needy," "entitled." Despite a consensus that they're not slackers, there is a suspicion that they've avoided that moniker only by creating enough commotion to distract from the fact that they're really not that into "work."

Never mind that they often need an entire team - and a couple of cheerleaders - to do anything. For some of them the concept "work ethic" needs rethinking. "I had a conversation with the CFO of a big company in New York," says Tamara Erickson, co-author of the 2006 book "Workforce Crisis," "and he said, 'I can't find anyone to hire who's willing to work 60 hours a week. Can you talk to them?' And I said, 'Why don't I start by talking to you? What they're really telling you is that they're sorry it takes you so long to get your work done.'"

That isn't the only rethinking Gen Yers have done. Their widespread consumption of uniform media has had some positive effects. Girls watch sports and play videogames, and no one thinks twice about it. And boys can admit to loving "The Real World" with impunity.

Race is even less of an issue for Gen Yers, not just because they're generally accustomed to diversity, but because on any given night they can watch successful mainstream shows featuring everyone from the Oscar-winning rap group Three 6 Mafia to wrestler Hulk Hogan. It all makes for a universe where anything - such as, say, being a bodybuilding accountant - seems possible.

Of course, Gen Yers have been told since they were toddlers that they can be anything they can imagine. It's an idea they clung to as they grew up and as their outlook was shaken by the Columbine shootings and 9/11. More than the nuclear threat of their parents' day, those attacks were immediate, potentially personal, and completely unpredictable. And each new clip of Al Gore spreading inconvenient truths or of polar bears drowning from lack of ice told Gen Yers they were not promised a healthy, happy tomorrow. So they're determined to live their best lives now.

Habitat:  The creature in the wild: Sheryl Walker, assurance associate, PricewaterhouseCoopers

Growing up, Sheryl Walker says, she could do no wrong. The youngest child of Jamaican immigrants in New Jersey, she majored in accounting because she knew it would make her parents happy: "They're big on saying their children are 'a doctor,' 'a lawyer' -'a something.'"

And now that the 24-year-old is "a something," she continues to make them happy. By living at home. "I don't have any plans to leave," she says, laughing. "My father told me if I did, he would be very upset. And I at least pay a bill, out of courtesy." The electric bill, that is. Considering the cost of living in the New York area, that's quite a bargain. "I think parents want to feel needed," she says, "and it's like, because I'm so independent, they get excited when I ask for a favor."

From the moment Gen Yers were born, long before technology or world events affected their lives, they were dealing with a phenomenon previously unknown to man: the baby-boomer parent. Raised by "traditionalists" after World War II, the boomers, once they had children of their own, did exactly the opposite of what their parents had done, cooing and coddling like crazy.

Couple all that affection with the affluence of the '80s and '90s, throw in working parents' guilt, and boomers' children not only got what they wanted but also became the center of their parents' lives. Self-esteem was in, spanking was out, and coaching - be it for a soccer team or a kindergarten interview - was everywhere.

Affirmation continued as they grew, and when they spoke up, their opinions were not only entertained but celebrated. Overscheduled grade-schoolers became overcommitted teens, with the emphasis on achieving. The goal was to get into a great college, which would lead to a great career and a great life.

But there was a hitch. Upon graduation, it turned out that a lot of Gen Yers hadn't learned much about struggle or sacrifice. As the first of them began to graduate from college in the late 1990s, the average educational debt soared to over $19,000 for new grads, and many Yers went to the only place they knew they'd be safe: home.

Lots haven't left. A survey of college graduates from 2000 to 2006 by Experience Inc. found that 58 percent of those polled had moved home after school and that 32 percent stayed more than a year. Even among those who've managed to stay away, Pew found that 73 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds have received financial assistance from their parents in the past year, and 64 percent have even gotten help with errands.

It's what Jeffrey Jensen Arnett calls "emerging adulthood" in his 2004 book of the same name. "People think very differently about their 20s now," the Clark University research professor says. "It's so volatile and so unfettered and so very unstructured. Nothing has ever existed like it before." For example, in 1960 the median age at marriage was 20 for women and 23 for men. Today it's 26 for women and 28 for men. In sociological terms that's a revolution.

And though Gen Yers will eventually have to grow up - like all of us, they'll lose their parents, face layoffs and suffer insane bosses - they are stretching the transition to adulthood well into their 20s. "If we don't like a job, we quit," says Jason Ryan Dorsey, the 28-year-old author of 2007's "My Reality Check Bounced!," "because the worst thing that can happen is that we move back home. There's no stigma, and many of us grew up with both parents working, so our moms would love nothing more than to cook our favorite meatloaf." It's a position borne out by the numbers; 73 percent of Pew's respondents said they see their parents at least once a week, and half do so daily, a fact that, however sweet, sort of makes you want to download "Rebel Without a Cause."

With this level of parental involvement, it's a miracle that Gen Yers can do anything on their own. "It's difficult to start making decisions when you haven't been making decisions your whole life," says Mitchell Marks, an organizational psychologist and president of consulting firm Joining Forces. He points to one of his recent projects at a software development company. His client, which had one health-care plan, was acquired by a bigger firm that offered five more.

"The twentysomething software developers were up in arms about having to choose," Marks says. "That was their No. 1 issue - not 'Will I lose my job?' or 'Will there be a culture clash?' but this -because they were just so put off that they were put in what they viewed as a very stressful situation." One can't help but wonder how stressed they'd be with no health insurance at all.

But even for the Gen Yers who try in earnest to succeed, Marks says, the way they've been raised can still be detrimental: "They've been made to feel so special, and that is totally counter to the whole concept of corporations."

Courtship:  The creature in the wild: Katie Connolly, associate attorney, Halleland Lewis Nilan & Johnson

Unlike most new attorneys, Katie Connolly took a pay cut for her second job. Why? The 28-year-old graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School liked that it wasn't the attorneys but the staff at Halleland, a 53-attorney firm in Minneapolis, who had windows (since they were more often at their desks) and that everyone dressed casually. Her decision paid off. At her old firm she spent all her time researching at her desk; at Halleland she has already tried her first case.

"Lots of firms say, 'Oh, we're 150 years old,'" she says, "and they do things like they did 150 years ago. That's not attractive to me. I want to do good work, not just slog through for years till I get my Persian rug and my 50-gallon fish tank."

What, then, is a Fortune 500 company to do?

Gen Yers still respond most of all to money. There's no fooling them about it; they're so connected that it's not unusual for them to know what every major company in a given field is offering. And they don't want to be given short shrift - hence the frightening tales of 22-year-olds making six-figure salary requests for their first jobs. One could chalk that up to their materialism and party-people mentality, but author Erickson has a different take. "They have to get some money flowing because they have a lot of debt to pay," she says.

To get noticed by Gen Yers, a company also has to have what they call a "vision." They aren't impressed by mission statements, but they are looking for attributes that indicate shared values: affinity groups, flat hierarchies, divestment from the more notorious dictatorial regimes.

At Halleland, which was founded in 1996 by defectors from a larger firm, offices are all the same size, new associates are encouraged to pass work up the chain and senior partners send out e-mails congratulating junior staffers on career milestones. In 11 years Halleland has lost just five associates to other outfits.

It hasn't hurt that the firm emphasizes work-life balance. While Gen Yers will work a 60-hour week if they have to - and might even do so happily if they're paid enough to make the most of their precious downtime - they don't want that to be a way of life.

Some firms where long hours are the norm have found ways to compensate. At Skadden Arps, new employees are reimbursed up to $3,000 for home-office equipment and $1,000 every year after. And the firm's gyms are a big hit with Gen Yers. "You'd be amazed, when people come by to interview or check out the firm, what a warm response the fitness center gets," says Wallace Schwartz, who leads the firm's New York office.

Watching public accounting firms scout for talent is especially instructive, since they have had to staff up after Sarbanes-Oxley. At Ernst & Young, recruiters hand out flash drives instead of brochures, send text messages to schedule meetings with candidates, and give interns videocameras to create vlogs for the firm's Web site. They also launched the first corporate-sponsored recruiting page on Facebook to meet Gen Yers on their own turf.

"That was a difficult sell," says Dan Black, who heads E&Y's college recruiting for the U.S. and Canada, "to be in a medium where you don't have control and people can post some not-so-nice things and you're going to leave it up there, which we do." It was so far ahead of its time that even the kids got thrown off. At one point Black wanted to quote some vivid comments a junior staffer had posted on the page. He left him a voicemail asking for a call back. The next thing Black knew, the posts had all vanished. "He thought he was in trouble!" Black says, howling. "So they're learning how to work with us too."

But as any worthy suitor knows, in the end the key to courtship lies at home - in wooing Mom and Dad. For Merrill Lynch (Charts, Fortune 500), getting young people to commit wasn't much trouble before. "In the past, if we gave you an offer, you accepted," says Liz Wamai, who heads diversity for Merrill's institutional business.

"It was Merrill Lynch. Now it's sell, sell, sell." The company holds a parents' day for interns' families to tour the trading floor. But it's involving parents in recruiting that's been a real shift. Subha Barry, global head of diversity, recalls running into a colleague having lunch with a potential summer recruit and someone she didn't know. It turned out to be the boy's mother.

"If somebody would have said to me, 'You're interviewing for a job somewhere, and you're going to bring your mother to the closing, decision-making lunch,' I would've said, 'You've got to be crazy,'" she says, wagging a finger. "But I tell you, his mother was sold. And that boy will end up at Merrill next summer. I can guarantee that."

Domestication:  The creature in the wild: Johnny Cooper, assistant designer, J.C. Penney

Johnny Cooper has always wanted to be a fashion designer. At first that usually means picking out pins by day and waiting tables by night. So when an offer of real work came from J.C. Penney in Plano, Texas, he took it in a heartbeat. "What 23-year-old can say that they affect a quarter-billion-dollar business on a daily basis?" he asks.

Yes, he actually has affected it, helping to revamp the company's line of men's swimwear. Cooper also organized a major fundraiser for the company after proposing it in an e-mail to the president. "He responded," Cooper says, chuckling. "It took him a week, and it was a one-liner. But it was the most exciting thing to me."

Succeeding quickly does have its challenges: "I sometimes feel like if I'm given so much responsibility and excelling, why can't I have more and more? I have to say, 'Slow down, Johnny. Sure, you want to be design director, but you've only been here two years.'"

No one joins a company hoping to do the same job forever. But these days even your neighborhood bartender or barista aspires to own the place someday. What's more, the ties that have bound members of this age group to jobs in the past - spouse, kids, mortgage - are today often little more than glimmers in their parents' eyes. So if getting Gen Yers to join a company is a challenge, getting them to stay is even harder.

The key is the same one their parents have used their whole lives - loving, encouraging and rewarding them. What that amounts to in corporate terms is a support network, work that challenges more than it bores, and feedback. "The loyalty of twentysomethings is really based on the relationships they have with those directly above them," says Dorsey, the "Reality Check" author. "There's a perception among management that those relationships shouldn't be too personal, but that's how we know they care about us."

Dorsey - who in true Gen Y style dropped out of college to write an earlier book, "Graduate to Your Perfect Job," without having either graduated or gotten a job - recommends starting small. Business cards are an easy way to make young employees feel valued. Letting them shadow older employees helps, as does inviting them to a management meeting now and then. And marking milestones is major, says Dorsey. No birthday should go uncelebrated, and the first day on the job should be unforgettable.

Dorsey recalls the time the president of an engineering firm called a new employee's mother and asked her to be there when her daughter started work Monday morning. "When her mom walked through the crowd, she was like, 'Oh, my God,' and her mom says to everyone, 'I took her to kindergarten, and now I'm here for her first day of work,'" Dorsey says. "The president took them on a tour of the company and explained to both of them why what new employees were doing was so important to the company. And the mom turns to her daughter and says, 'You are not allowed to quit this job. Real companies are not like this.'"

Skeptics would say Mom had a point. But the idea is simply to make big companies feel small, and even major corporations can do much of that work through mentoring. This no longer means creating a spreadsheet, matching people by gender, race or a shared love of baseball, and hoping for the best. At KPMG, says Jesal Asher, a director in the advisory practice, every junior staffer is expected to have a mentor, every manager a protégé, and those in the middle often have both. There's a Web site to facilitate the formal process, and social activities - happy hours, softball games, group lunches - are organized to encourage informal networking.

With the resources that companies like KPMG have, though, ice-cream socials are just the beginning. This summer KPMG will send 100 new hires to Madrid to train alongside new hires from other countries. The firm also gives employees time off to do community service. Steps like those have helped bring turnover down from 25 percent in 2002 to 18 percent last year, says KPMG's head of campus recruiting, Manny Fernandez.

"Gen Yers are able to do and learn so much more than I could at that stage," he says, "and they're not looking to have a career like I have, with just one company. So we've got to build tools that are not just about retention but about having people develop skills faster, so that they can take on larger opportunities."

While development is a long-term goal, it begins in the short term with harnessing Gen Yers' energy. "They're so vocal that you can almost take an associate to a meeting with the CEO," says Asher, "because something that comes out of her mouth is going to be actually outside the box, something that none of us have ever thought about."

And twentysomethings can thrive when given real responsibility. Mark Meussner, a former Ford manager, remembers one instance when, faced with a serious manufacturing problem and two young engineers begging for the chance to solve it, he took a chance on them. He gave them one more-experienced person as a counselor, and they made what he estimates was a $25 million impact by solving a problem that had proved intractable for a decade. The success spawned a slate of company-sponsored initiatives led by more-junior staffers. Says Meussner: "We need to use 100 percent of an employee - not just their backs and minds, but their innovation, enthusiasm, energy and fresh perspective."

It's 12:45 A.M., this story is due next week, and I'm hard at work. By that I mean I am sitting at a desk. In my house. Wearing yellow ducky slippers, track pants, and the royal-blue Tommy Hilfiger pullover that has been my thinking cap since I started writing papers in high school. Pondering my bookshelf - some Faulkner, Irving, Naipaul, Kerouac, Franzen and, of course, Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne - for inspiration.

With "The Cosby Show" playing in the background, Google chats going with two friends, and text messages coming from my boyfriend, who's on assignment in Africa. When things really get going, I'll put on "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," which has kept me company through every major story of my writing career. In short, I'm ridiculous.

I know this will be alarming to read, particularly for my mother, who cares so much about my image that she began blow-drying my hair when I was 4. But it had to be written, because I've come to realize that the most significant characteristic of the Gen Y bird is that we are unapologetic. From how we look, to how spoiled we are, to what we want - even demand - of work, we do think we are special. And what ultimately makes us different is our willingness to talk about it, without much shame and with the expectation that somebody - our parents, our friends, our managers - will help us figure it all out.

That's why, in retrospect, when I started at Fortune in 2004, I asked then-editorial director John Huey what he thought the magazine needed and how I might contribute to that end. "I don't think you need to worry about that," he said, fixing me with an ever-so-slightly amused gaze. It seemed like a perfectly valid question at the time, but with all the hindsight that three years can offer, thinking about it makes me giddy - with embarrassment, but also a fair amount of awe. Who did I think I was? At 23, I had already had three jobs - one at a startup magazine that folded, a contract gig at the prestigious MTV News and a stint recruiting for Time Inc., which is why I was sitting with Huey in the first place. And Huey was just an office away from becoming top editor of the world's largest publishing empire. Unwise of me, to say the least.

But that's the beauty of Gen Y. Despite the initial smirk, Huey did go on to talk to me about the magazine, his own career, and what he expected of and hoped for me. And that 20-minute conversation set a tone of learning, self-evaluation and growth that I'm glad of now, especially as I've struggled to turn years of Gen Y news, research and hearsay - ranging from the worshipful to the condescending - into some sort of cohesive narrative.

It speaks to a confidence that's been building since our parents clapped at our first steps, right through the moment when - as so many new college graduates are doing now - we walked across the stage at universities throughout the country, straight into America's finest corporate foyers. If that makes us a bit cocky at times, it's forgivable, because I'm willing to bet that in coming years, all that questioning will lead us to some important answers. And in the meantime - sorry, Mom - I'll be out getting a tattoo. 

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033934/index.htm

Kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children, according to a new study that is the first to look at the effects of religion on young child development.

The conflict that arises when parents regularly argue over their faith at home, however, has the opposite effect.

John Bartkowski, a Mississippi State University sociologist and his colleagues asked the parents and teachers of more than 16,000 kids, most of them first-graders, to rate how much self control they believed the kids had, how often they exhibited poor or unhappy behavior and how well they respected and worked with their peers.

The researchers compared these scores to how frequently the children’s parents said they attended worship services, talked about religion with their child and argued abut religion in the home.

The kids whose parents regularly attended religious services—especially when both parents did so frequently—and talked with their kids about religion were rated by both parents and teachers as having better self-control, social skills and approaches to learning than kids with non-religious parents.

But when parents argued frequently about religion, the children were more likely to have problems. “Religion can hurt if faith is a source of conflict or tension in the family,” Bartkowski noted.

Why so good?

Bartkowski thinks religion can be good for kids for three reasons. First, religious networks provide social support to parents, he said, and this can improve their parenting skills. Children who are brought into such networks and hear parental messages reinforced by other adults may also “take more to heart the messages that they get in the home,” he said.

Secondly, the types of values and norms that circulate in religious congregations tend to be self-sacrificing and pro-family, Bartkowski told LiveScience. These “could be very, very important in shaping how parents relate to their kids, and then how children develop in response,” he said.

Finally, religious organizations imbue parenting with sacred meaning and significance, he said.

University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who was not involved in the study, agrees. At least for the most religious parents, “getting their kids into heaven is more important than getting their kids into Harvard,” Wilcox said.

But as for why religious organizations might provide more of a boost to family life than secular organizations designed to do the same thing, that’s still somewhat of a mystery, said Annette Mahoney, a psychologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, also not involved in the research. Mahoney wondered: “Is there anything about religion and spirituality that sets it apart?”

Unanswered questions

Bartkowski points out that one limitation of his study, to be published in the journal Social Science Research, is that it did not compare how denominations differed with regards to their effects on kids.

“We really don’t know if conservative Protestant kids are behaving better than Catholic kids or behaving better than mainline Protestant kids or Jewish kids,” he said.

It’s also possible that the correlation between religion and child development is the other way around, he said. In other words, instead of religion having a positive effect on youth, maybe the parents of only the best behaved children feel comfortable in a religious congregation.

“There are certain expectations about children’s behavior within a religious context, particularly within religious worship services,” he said. These expectations might frustrate parents, he said, and make congregational worship “a less viable option if they feel their kids are really poorly behaved.”

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/070424_religion_kids.html

'Helicopter' parents hover when kids job hunt
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY

Employers are finding that parents are increasingly involved in their children's job choices, as "helicopter parenting" extends to the workplace.

As Generation Y enters the job force, parents of new hires are calling employers to negotiate salary and benefits, and some are even showing up at job fairs. It's a new dynamic that has some employers responding by training recruiters and managers how to handle "helicopter parents," who hover over their children's lives.

•At Hewlett-Packard, parents have gone as far as contacting the company after their child gets a job offer. They want to talk about their son's or daughter's salary, relocation packages and scholarship programs.

"Parents are contacting us directly," says Betty Smith, a university recruiting manager at HP. "This generation is not embarrassed by it. They're asking for parents' involvement."

She recalls one job fair in Texas "where the parent was there at our booth asking about benefits." The company has trained recruiters in how to handle parents.

•At Weber Shandwick, a global public relations firm, a father recently called the company to inquire about how his son could apply for its Atlanta internship program.

"I was very surprised. I answered my phone, and he said he had a son interested in internships," says Jennifer Seymour, who runs the intern program at the Atlanta office, where two full-time internships are offered every summer. They largely go to recent college graduates. She says helicopter parents create a negative view among hiring managers. "It hurts. Absolutely."

•At insurance provider Chubb, employees have helped their children get jobs at the company. Mary Troianello, 56, a senior administrative assistant, who has worked in human resources and other jobs for Chubb for about 16 years, helped her daughter Leah, 25, tweak her résumé, submitted it to the human resources department and helped her pick an interview suit and prepare for the interview. Leah got the job in accounts payable.

"I didn't feel the colleges were doing enough in that area," Mary says. "The (graduates) really don't have a clue. They're lost."

But too much parental involvement can backfire: Employers may shy away from job candidates because they don't want to deal with parents.

"Psychologically, it's somewhat eroding. When an employer is hiring someone, they're hiring an adult for an adult job, and then they have to deal with a parent," says Charles Wardell in New York, the managing director and head of the northeast region at Korn/Ferry. "There comes a time when you've prepared children, and you need to let go."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2007-04-23-helicopter-parents-usat_N.htm

This sounds like a good book - has anyone here read it?

Excerpt from Lileks:

Anything else today? Well, how about a book review?

My friend Hugh Hewitt has written a political biography of Mitt Romney, and I can recommend it for one solid reason: this marks the second time in my life I have looked for my name in the index, and found it. Aside from that, I can recommend it on several levels.

I should preface this by saying I’m not a Romney guy. It has nothing to do with his creed. I think his accomplishments are impressive, his public persona solid and direct. I think he is what he seems to be. You could say that’s the case with many other candidates, and I agree; inasmuch as all politicians show us a polished carapace, I think Guiliani and Obama are the Genuine Article as well -  in different ways, of course, but when they smile I don’t see the wires leading back to the Calculating Machine.  Romney has all the hallmarks of a polished robot whose public persona is a buffed and tailored suit, a shell that hides something raw and convoluted. But I never got that impression. There are happy confident rich guys with great family stories, you know.

I just never found him very fascinating on an immediate level. The difference between Rudy and Mitt’s personality, one suspects,  is the difference between wandering around the Louvre with two glasses of red wine under your belt, or being handed a shoebox full of high-res Louvre gift-shop postcards, arranged by artist and date. (Then there’s Fred Thompson, who would nod politely while you described your visit to the museum, then tell you about the picture he has in his study. It’s dogs, playing poker.)

So I was interested in Hugh’s book. What makes him interesting to the author? Romney and Hewitt are not, to say the least, members of the same church, yet Hewitt is emphatically sympathetic to Romney’s candidacy. Since I began the book, Romney’s campaign has continued its attempt to climb out of the slough of despond; the media likes the Rudy – McCain dynamic, the social conservative base that might flock to Mitt seems either indifferent to anyone who can win, or has made a private deal to support Rudy on the half-a-loaf theory. Much of Romney’s 02 has been absorbed by Fred Thompson, who has basic bona fides, a satisfyingly saturnine persona, and some other intangibles. Like, HE’S NOT A MORMON.

Well, it had to be said. But that’s not all of it; Romney’s religion isn’t the main reason his campaign isn’t out front by 10 points. There’s something else at work; could be the YouTube flip-flop problem. But I think I know what it might be. He’s in a hard position: he’s too good to be true, but he’s truly that good.

Let’s step back.

If you’re interested in the upcoming campaign, and wish to enter any political debates with a certain amount of preparation, this book is a brisk and clear rundown of Romney’s private and political life. I had a glancing knowledge of the Salt Lake City Olympics story, but the chapter about Romney’s experience in private industry was news, and suggested – which I’m sure was the point – that Romney is a meritocrat above all. (One of the oft-noted characteristics of the Bush family – loyalty first – is one of my least favorite attributes.)  His evaluations of Romney’s political positions are clear and fair; his analysis of the logistics of the election are typically canny, and the overview of Romney’s “Christmas card-perfect” family will annoy anyone who believes that any real life has be fraught with sixty-eight tons of complex parental issues. We learn about Romney’s experience with the Bainiacs – an interesting look into his private sector experience, but not, I suspect, something that will have much of a role in the Presidential campaign. Green eye-shade conservatives will view it as a comforting plus, social conservatives won’t care much at all, and economic nationalists will seem him as a pawn of Big Capital. In any case, it’s all prologue. What counts are the Mormon Chapters.

That’s the meat of the gist’s pith, after all. You can’t write a book about Romney without writing about his Mormonism, simply because he’d be the first Mormon president. It’s not the same as having a Catholic president; Protestant and Catholic beliefs branched out but attained parallelism over the course of centuries, whereas Mormonism seems to be a diagonal line that intersects with Christianity at a big crucial junction, then heads off in a different direction. The angle is low, but the line still diverges.

Hugh’s book isn’t a defense of Mormon theology. It’s a defense of the Mormons' right to have their beliefs respected in the public sphere.  Hewitt gives two reasons;  religious tolerance is the first, obviously. The second concerns a bright line not yet crossed in the mainstream political arena, and it’s a line I’m sure will be erased in years to come. It’s the line that surrounds an individual’s belief in what some call the divine or the miraculous, and others call Magical Thinking. In short, it’s about the right to believe in something that lies outside the realm of empiricism.

Oh, we can all respect that right. We can all make public proclamations about the sanctity of individual beliefs. And we’ll all qualify those remarks in private, among friends. (Note: nothing I’m saying here reflects personal conversations with Hugh about the matter. Just so we’re clear.) People who have friends of different creeds can josh about the differences, as long as each knows that the each respects the other’s beliefs. But some beliefs are, well, out there; doesn’t it say something about a person if they’re a Raelian, or subscribe to the Church of Joe-Bob Briggs (a splinter group of the Church of Subgenuius, formed in the great Bob Schism Wars of the early part of this century) or pray to a plaster bust of St. Leibowitz? Yes. It does. That’s the problem for many: it does matter.

Privately, anyway. The public realm has different standards, and it should.

Or so we’d like to hope.

It doesn’t matter much to me, because I’m more concerned about the policies the candidate advances, and how well I think they’ll advance them. If Fred Thompson gave a speech about Iran I loved, and I also knew he believed that humans were seeded on earth by lizard aliens who will return in 3030 AD to construct a Dyson-sphere terrarium, I’d still be more interested in how his Iranian policy stacked up against the other candidates. Not to suggest that Mormonism is akin to the space-lizard belief-system or Raelianism or whatever, of course. But you get my point.

The point is made with greater clarity in Hugh’s book, which cautions against putting Belief into the mainstream pundit’s meat-grinder. Because once Faith is a fair target, every aspect of faith will be put under the microscope. If you can dismiss a candidate for his belief in the golden tablets, then transubstantiation is next on the list. You want to snigger about Mormon undergarments? Fine; the next time a Sikh runs for public office, quiz him about the same issue. You want to probe a Mormon for the ways in which their Jesus narrative varies, you’d best do the same to a Muslim candidate. And if you can’t see yourself standing up in a press conference asking a Muslim candidate whether Christians will have a problem with him because he doesn’t think Christ died on the cross, you’d best throttle back your zeal for digging into a Mormon.

I’m not comfortable with all beliefs, but I am comfortable with believers. I am not sympathetic to the tenets of Mormonism. But. Just last week I got a knock on the door on a rainy night, and there they were: two Mormon missionaries. White shirts, black ties. They explained their mission and asked if I’d like to talk. Well, lads, I’m what you call a hard sell. I told them that I appreciated their concern, though, and wished them well.

“Do you know anyone around here who needs some help?” said the shorter, dark-haired one. (The other was tall, which gave them a Napoleon-Pedro vibe.) I said that I didn’t, and they thanked me for my time and they went on their way.

If at that moment I had some sort of domestic emergency that required me to leave the house but also required someone to stay at the house – I don’t know, to watch a scientific experiment or take a cake out the oven (a cake – for the Pope!) – I would have trusted both of them to hold down the fort until I returned, and I know I would have found both of them sitting in the living room when I returned, with nothing in the house out of place or moved to a pocket.

Surely how one lives one’s life is as important as the things the curious things they believe, no?

Anyway. I hadn’t thought much about these matters until I read Hugh’s book, and I expect it will have the same effect on those who have a passing interest in the matter – or for Democrats as well, since the Senate Majority Leader is a Mormon as well.  (If Romney’s fair game, so’s Harry Reid.) If nothing else, the book is a quiet refutation of all that “Christianist” nonsense; it’s a fair and respectful evaluation of a politician who happens to be Mormon from a commentator who happens to be an evangelical Christian, amply sourced, replete with other voices, and laid out with Hugh’s trademark clarity.

Plus, I’m on page 266.

http://www.lileks.com/bleats/index.html

I should have filled up day before yesterday - regular was $3.09 then and it's $3.15 today.  Damn.


San Francisco's surging gasoline prices stand poised to smash their old record of $3.36 for a gallon of regular, perhaps as early as today.

Some stations in the city already have passed that record, set last May.

Although San Francisco's average gasoline price reached $3.34 Thursday, individual stations were charging as much as $3.98.

And yes, that's $3.98 for regular. Want premium? At least one San Francisco station was charging $4.18 per gallon.

The national average for a gallon of regular stands at $2.62, up 48 cents since the end of January. California's average is $3.22, up 70 cents in the same period. No other state average tops $3 per gallon, although Hawaii might pass that mark this weekend.

Blame huge refinery profit margins, falling gasoline production, tensions with Iran and American drivers themselves, who are -- believe it or not -- buying more gas now than they did last year.

Just two weeks ago, it looked like San Francisco and the rest of the country would finally get a break at the pump. Prices for crude oil, gasoline's raw material, were falling. Refineries were almost done with their annual spring maintenance, which temporarily had cut the amount of gas they could produce. Market analysts predicted that the stunning late-winter run-up in prices would soon end. San Francisco's average even dropped for a few days.

Then escalating tensions with Iran forced crude oil prices sharply higher, almost 17 percent in 10 days. Mechanical problems kept hitting refineries throughout the country and in the Bay Area, shrinking the amount of gasoline on the market.

Throughout, refinery profit margins on the West Coast remained almost twice as high as they were last fall, adding to the price drivers pay at the pump. The difference between what West Coast refiners pay for crude and the price they charge for refined products has risen to $37 per barrel from about $20 last fall.

And all the while, drivers kept buying. The country now burns about 1.4 percent more gasoline than it did at the same time last year.

In other words, there's less gasoline available, but drivers are consuming more than before. The companies that sell it enjoy hefty profit margins, and they don't have any incentive to cut prices.

"If you can sell, relatively speaking, the same amount of your product at a higher price than at a lower price, you're probably going to sell at a higher price," said Sean Comey, spokesman for the AAA of Northern California Auto Club.

Consumer advocates charge that refiners are purposely restricting gas supplies as a way to drive up the price. They doubt that all the recent mechanical problems are real or require as much downtime as the companies say. And they note that no government agency polices refining companies to make sure their executives are telling the truth.

"They could well be making more money by not producing gas than they do when they produce gas, which is the scenario we saw in the electricity crisis," said Michael Shames, executive director of the watchdog Utility Consumers' Action Network in San Diego. "When you have a market that's so dysfunctional, you need to have more oversight."

Still, no one has been able to prove manipulation. And many experts say the huge margins for refiners simply represent the dynamics of the market, where supply is squeezed and demand keeps rising.

For all the times California officials have investigated gasoline prices, they have never been able to demonstrate that refiners are gaming the market. The state attorney general's office has one such investigation under way right now but has not reached any conclusions.

"A lot of people have invested a lot of time on this, and a lot of those people have subpoena power," said Tupper Hull, spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association. "And they haven't found anything wrong."

Yet, even some oil executives acknowledge that California's gasoline market is broken, or at least seriously warped.

The state uses its own unique, pollution-fighting blend of gasoline, made by a limited number of refineries. That limited supply makes the state prone to wild swings in price and is one of the main reasons Californians typically pay more at the pump than other Americans.

San Ramon's Chevron Corp. now controls about one-quarter of the state's refining capacity. CEO David O'Reilly said the country needs to cut the number of specialized gasoline blends in use, which would allow gasoline to flow across state borders much more easily. That, in turn, would minimize price spikes and give California access to more fuel. He has made that argument for years.

"I think it's unfair for people to assert that we're trying to take advantage of something when we've been pointing out, for years, that this is the wrong way to go," O'Reilly said.

But Chevron, like other local refiners, benefits from California's perpetually tight market. And when they talk with Wall Street, the company's executives sometimes boast about how profitable their West Coast operations have become, even though the vast majority of the company's profits come from selling crude oil.

"The Chevron brand continues to garner both increased market share and pricing power in the marketplace," Executive Vice President Mike Wirth told stock analysts at a conference earlier this month.

Chevron plans upgrades to its California refineries that could increase their gasoline production by 840,000 gallons per day. And O'Reilly continues to argue that the government can fix the problem by standardizing gas blends.

"We've advocated for change at a state level," he said. "But advocating and getting the regulations changed are two different things."

How long will the gasoline price increase last? Analysts say that will depend on refinery output and the international politics influencing the price of crude oil.

Refineries elsewhere in the nation are starting to increase the amount of gas they produce, according to the latest federal government figures, but California still lags. As for oil, any further saber-rattling between Iran and the West could easily shove up the price further.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/30/MNG50OUPG71.DTL&type=printable

The rival presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) traded accusations of nasty politics Wednesday over Hollywood donor David Geffen, who once backed Bill Clinton but now supports his wife's top rival.

The Clinton campaign demanded that Obama denounce comments made by the DreamWorks movie studio founder, who told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Wednesday's editions that while "everybody in politics lies," the former president and his wife "do it with such ease, it's troubling."

The Clinton camp also called on Obama to give back Geffen's $2,300 contribution.

Campaigning in Iowa, Obama refused.

"It's not clear to me why I'd be apologizing for someone else's remark," the Illinois senator said.

For her part, New York Sen. Clinton sidestepped questions, leaving the issue to her aides to discuss.

"I'm just going to stay focused on my campaign and I'm going to run a positive campaign about the issues that affect the people in our country," she told The Associated Press in an interview in Nevada. She was participating a candidate forum in Carson City.

The Clinton team seemed eager to continue the attack. With Obama in Iowa, aides arranged for former Iowa attorney general Bonnie Campbell to criticize him in a conference call with reporters.

In the newspaper interview, Geffen also said Bill Clinton is "a reckless guy" and he does not think Hillary Clinton can bring the country together during a time of war, no matter how smart or ambitious she is.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs added another criticism of Clinton.

"It is also ironic that Senator Clinton lavished praise on Monday and is fully willing to accept today the support of South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford, who said if Barack Obama were to win the nomination, he would drag down the rest of the Democratic Party because 'he's black,'" Gibbs' statement said.

Ford later apologized. The Clinton campaign said it disagreed with Ford, but the senator has embraced his support.

Another Democratic presidential candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said at the candidate forum that Obama should denounce Geffen's comments. "We Democrats should all sign a pledge that we all be positive," Richardson said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070222/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_obama_13