Vice Provost, Dean, and Professor at Northeastern University
What We Learned from Studying the News Consumption Habits of College Students
Over the last year, I was fortunate to help guide a study of the news consumption habits of college students, and coordinate Northeastern University Library’s services for the study, including great work by our data visualization specialist Steven Braun and necessary infrastructure from our digital team, including Sarah Sweeney and Hillary Corbett. “How Students Engage with News,” out today as both a long article and accompanying datasets and media, provides a full snapshot of how college students navigate our complex and high-velocity media environment.
This is a topic that should be of urgent interest to everyone since the themes of the report, although heightened due to the more active digital practices of young people, capture how we all find and digest news today, and also points to where such consumption is heading. On a personal level, I was thrilled to be a part of this study as a librarian who wants students to develop good habits of truth-seeking, and as an intellectual historian, who has studied changing approaches to truth-seeking over time.
You should first read the entire report, or at least the executive summary, now available on a special site at Project Information Literacy, with data hosted at Northeastern University Library’s Digital Repository System (where the study will also have its long-term, preserved form). It’s been great to work with, and think along with, the lead study members, including Alison Head, John Wihbey, Pakis Metaxas, and Margy MacMillan.
“How Students Engage with News” details how college students are overwhelmed by the flood of information they see every day on multiple websites and in numerous apps, an outcome of their extraordinarily frequent attention to smartphones and social media. Students are interested in news, and want to know what’s going on, but given the sheer scale and sources of news, they find themselves somewhat paralyzed. As humans naturally do in such situations, students often satisfice in terms of news sources—accepting “good enough,” proximate (from friends or media) descriptions rather than seeking out multiple perspectives or going to “canonical” sources of news, like newspapers. Furthermore, much of what they consume is visual rather than textual—internet genres like memes, gifs, and short videos play an outsized role in their digestion of the day’s events. (Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past.) Of course, the entire population faces the same issues around our media ecology, but students are an extreme case.
And perhaps also a cautionary tale. I think this study’s analysis and large survey size (nearly 6,000 students from a wide variety of institutions) should be a wake-up call for those of us who care about the future of the news and the truth. What will happen to the careful ways we pursue an accurate understanding of what is happening in the world by weighing information sources and developing methods for verifying what one hears, sees, and reads? Librarians, for instance, used to be much more of a go-to source for students to find reliable sources of the truth, but the study shows that only 7% of students today have consulted their friendly local librarian.
It is incumbent upon us to change this. A purely technological approach—for instance, “improving” social media feeds through “better” algorithms—will not truly solve the major issues identified in the news consumption study, since students will still be overwhelmed by the volume, context, and heterogeneity of news sources. A more active stance by librarians, journalists, educators, and others who convey truth-seeking habits is essential. Along these lines, for example, we’ve greatly increased the number of workshops on digital research, information literacy, and related topics at Northeastern University Library, and students are eager attendees at these workshops. We will continue to find other ways to get out from behind our desks and connect more with students where they are.
Finally, I have used the word “habit” very consciously throughout this post, since inculcating and developing more healthy habits around news consumption will also be critical. Alan Jacobs’ notion of cultivating “temporal bandwidth” is similar to what I imagine will have to happen in this generation—habits and social norms that push against the constant now of social media, and stretch and temper our understanding of events beyond our unhealthily caffeinated present.
October 16, 2018 Add Comment
The Digital Public Library of America, Me, and You
Twenty years ago Roy Rosenzweig imagined a compelling mission for a new institution: “To use digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” I’ve been incredibly lucky to be a part of that mission for over twelve years, at what became the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, with last five and a half years as director.
Today I am announcing that I will be leaving the center, and my professorship at George Mason University, the home of RRCHNM, but I am not leaving Roy’s powerful vision behind. Instead, I will be extending his vision—one now shared by so many—on a new national initiative, the Digital Public Library of America. I will be the founding executive director of the DPLA.
The DPLA, which you will be hearing much more about in the coming months, will be connecting the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums so that the public can access all of those collections in one place; providing a platform, with an API, for others to build creative and transformative applications upon; and advocating strongly for a public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century. The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country, but instead will extend their commitment to the public sphere, and provide them with an extraordinary digital attic and the technical infrastructure and services to deliver local cultural heritage materials everywhere in the nation and the world. The DPLA has been in the planning stages for the last few years, but is about to spin out of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and move from vision to reality. It will officially launch, as an independent nonprofit, on April 18 at the Boston Public Library. I will move to Boston with my family this summer to lead the organization, which will be based there. It is such a great honor to have this opportunity.
Until then I will be transitioning from my role as director of RRCHNM, and my academic life at Mason. Everything at the center will be in great hands, of course; as anyone who visits the center immediately grasps, it is a highly collaborative and nonhierarchical place with an amazing staff and an especially experienced and innovative senior staff. They will continue to shape “the future the past,” as Roy liked to put it. I will miss my good friends at the center, but I still expect to work closely with them, since so many critical software initiatives, educational projects, and digital collections are based at RRCHNM. A search for a new director will begin shortly. I will also greatly miss my colleagues in Mason’s wonderful Department of History and Art History.
At the same time, I look forward to collaborating with new friends, both in the Boston office of the DPLA and across the United States. The DPLA is a unique, special idea—you don’t get to build a massive new library every day. It is apt that the DPLA will launch at the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building, with those potent words carved into stone above its entrance: “Free to all.” The architect Charles Follen McKim rightly called it “a palace for the people,” where anyone could enter to learn, create, and be entertained by the wonders of books and other forms of human expression.
We now have the chance to build something like this for the twenty-first century—a rare, joyous possibility in our too-often cynical age. I hope you will join me in this effort, with your ideas, your contributions, your energy, and your public spirit.
Let’s build the Digital Public Library of America together.
Just the Text
This post marks the third major redesign of my site and its fourth incarnation. The site began more than a decade ago as a place to put some basic information about myself online. Not much happening in 2003:
In 2005, I wrote some PHP scripts to add a simple homemade blog to the site:
In 2007, I switched to using WordPress behind the scenes, and in doing so moved from post excerpts on the home page to full posts. I also added my other online presences, such as Twitter and the Digital Campus podcast.
Five years and 400 posts later, I’ve made a more radical change for 2012 and beyond, as the title of this post suggests. But the thinking behind this redesign goes back to the beginning of this blog, when I struggled, in a series called “Creating a Blog from Scratch,” with how best to highlight the most important feature of the site: the writing. As I wrote in “Creating a Blog from Scratch, Part I: What is a Blog, Anyway?” I wanted to author my own blogging software so I could “emphasize, above all, the subject matter and the content of each post.” The existing blogging packages I had considered had other priorities apparent in their design, such as a prominent calendar showing how frequently you posted. I wanted to stress quality over quantity.
Recent favorable developments in online text and web design have had a similar stress. As I noted in “Reading is Believing,”
rather than focusing on a new technology or website in our year-end review on the Digital Campus podcast, I chose reading as the big story of 2011. Surely 2011 was the year that digital reading came of age, with iPad and Kindle sales skyrocketing, apps for reading flourishing, and sites for finding high-quality long-form writing proliferating. It was apropos that Alan Jacobs‘s wonderful book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction was published in 2011.
Now comes a forceful movement in web design to strip down sites to their essential text. Like many others, I appreciated Dustin Curtis’s great design of the Svbtle blog network this spring, and my site redesign obviously owes a significant debt to Dustin. (Indeed, this theme is a somewhat involved modification of Ricardo Rauch’s WordPress clone of Svbtle; I’ve made some important changes, such as adding comments—Svbtle and its clones eschew comments for thumbs-up “kudos.”)
One of the deans of web design, Jeffrey Zeldman, summarized much of this “just the text” thinking in his “Web Design Manifesto 2012” last week. Count me as part of that movement, which is part of an older movement to make the web not just hospitable toward writing and reading, but a medium that puts writing and reading first. Academics, among many others, should welcome this change.
Digital History Research Awards for New PhD Students at Mason
George Mason University and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are pleased to announce Digital History Research Awards for students entering the History and Art History doctoral program in fall 2012. Students receiving these awards will get five years of fully funded studies, as follows: $20,000 research stipends in years 1 and 2; research assistantships at RRCHNM in years 3, 4, and 5. Awards include fulltime tuition waivers and student health insurance. For more information, contact Professor Cynthia A. Kierner (Director of the Ph.D. Program) at ckierner@gmu.edu or Professor Dan Cohen (Director, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) at dcohen@gmu.edu. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2012.
December 19, 2011 Add Comment
Digital Humanities Now 2.0: Bigger and Better, with a New Review Process
After five months of retooling, we’re relaunching Digital Humanities Now today. As part of this relaunch it has been moved into the PressForward family of publications, as one of that project’s new models of how high-quality work can emerge from, and reach, scholarly communities.
The first iteration of DH Now, which we launched two years ago, relied almost entirely on an automated process to find what digital humanities scholars were talking about and linking to (namely, on Twitter). About a year ago, in an attempt to make the signal-to-noise ratio a bit better, I took my slightly tongue-in-cheek “Editor-in-Chief” role more seriously, vetting each potential item for inclusion and adding better titles and “abstracts.”
Today we take a much larger step forward, in an attempt to find and highlight the best work in digital humanities, and curate it in such a way as to be maximally useful to the scholarly community. The DH Now team, including Joan Fragaszy Troyano, Sasha Boni, and Jeri Wieringa, have corralled a large array of digital humanities content into the base for the publication. Building on a Digital Humanities Registry I set up in the summer, they have located and are now tracking the content streams of hundreds of scholars and institutions (what we’re calling the Compendium of Digital Humanities), from which we can select items for highlighting in the “news” and “Editors’ Choice” columns on the site. As before, social media (including Twitter) and other means for assessing the resonance of scholarly works will serve a role, but not an exclusive one, as we seek out new and important work wherever that work may be found.
The foundation of the editorial model, as I explained in this space on the launch of PressForward, is that instead of a traditional process of submission to a journal that leads to a binary acceptance/rejection decision many months later (and publication many more months or years later), we can begin to think of scholarly communication as a process that begins with open publication on the web and that leads to successive layers of review. Contrary to the concerns of critics, this is far from a stream of unvetted work.
Imagine a pyramid of scholarship. At the bottom is a broad base of scholarship on the open web (which understandably worries many scholars who object to new models of scholarly communication that do not rely on the decisive eye of a paid editor and the scarcity of journal pages). From that base, however, a minority of scholarly works seem worthy of additional attention, and after word of mouth and dissemination of those potentially important pieces, more scholars weigh in, making a work rise or fall. As we move up the pyramid—to more exclusive forms of “publication,” fewer and fewer works survive. Far from lacking peer review, the model we are proposing involves significant winnowing as a scholarly work passes through various levels of review.
For the new DH Now, these levels of publication are transparent on the site, and can be subscribed to individually depending on how unfiltered or filtered scholars would like their stream to be:
• Most people will likely want to subscribe to the main DHNow feed, which will include the Editors’ Choice articles as well as important news items such as jobs, resources, and conferences.
• Those who want full access to the wide base of the scholarly pyramid (or who don’t trust the editorial board’s decisions) can subscribe to the unfiltered Compendium of Digital Humanities, which includes feeds from hundreds of scholars.
• For those who felt that the original DH Now worked well for them, we have maintained a “top tweeted stories” feed.
• Finally, a major new addition is the launch of a quarterly review of the best of the best—the top of the pyramid of review, which will likely contain less than 1% of works that begin at the base. We will notify scholars about potential inclusion, and pass along comments and suggestions for improvement before publication. We hope and expect that inclusion in this journal form of DH Now will be worthy of inclusion on CVs, in promotion and tenure decisions, and other areas helpful to digital humanities scholars. DH Now will have an ISSN, an editorial board, and all of the other signifiers of quality and peer review that individuals and institutions expect.
You can read more about our process on DH Now‘s “How This Works” page.
We believe this new format has several critical benefits. First, it democratizes scholarly communication in a helpful way. Over the last two years, for instance, DH Now has highlighted up-and-coming work by promising graduate students simply because they chose to post their ideas to a new blog or institutional website. Second, it democratizes the editorial process while still taking into account the scarcity of attention and without sacrificing quality. Although we have a managing group of editors here at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, we are accounting for the views and criticisms of a much broader circle of scholars to make decisions about inclusion and exclusion, and those decisions themselves can be reviewed. Third, DH Now broadens the definition of what scholarship is, by highlighting forms beyond the traditional article. Finally, it encourages open access publishing, which we think has an ethical benefit as well as a reputational benefit to the scholars who post their work online.
Introducing PressForward
For some time here at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media we have been thinking about the state of scholarly publishing, and its increasing disconnect with how we have come to communicate online. Among our concerns:
• A variety of scholarly work is flourishing online, ranging from long-form writing on blogs, to “gray literature” such as conference papers, to well-curated corpora or data sets, to entirely novel formats enabled by the web
• This scholarship is decentralized, thriving on personal and institutional sites, as well as the open web, but could use some way to receive attention from scholarly communities so works can receive credit and influence others
• The existing scholarly publishing infrastructure has been slow-moving in accounting for this growing and multifaceted realm of online scholarship
• Too much academic publishing remains inert—publication-as-broadcast rather than taking advantage of the web’s peer-to-peer interactivity
• Too much scholarship remains gated when it could be open
Legacy formats like the journal of course have considerable merit, and they are rightly valued: they act as critical, if sometimes imperfect, arbiters of the good and important. At the same time, the web has found ways to filter the abundance of online work, ranging from the tech world (Techmeme) to long-form posts (The Browser), which act as screening agents for those interested in an area of thought or practice.
What if we could combine the best of the scholarly review process with the best of open-web filters? What if we had a scholarly communication system that was digital first?
Today we’re announcing a new initiative to do just that: PressForward, generously supported by a $862,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation‘s Digital Information Technology program.
PressForward will bring together the best scholarship from across the web, producing vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around. PressForward will:
Develop effective methods for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the best online scholarship, including scholarly blogs, digital projects, and other web genres that don’t fit into traditional articles or books, as well as conference papers, white papers, and reports
Encourage the proliferation of open access scholarship through active new forms of publication, concentrating the attention of scholarly communities around high-quality, digital-first scholarship
Create a new platform that will make it simple for any organization or community of scholars to launch similar publications and give guidance to institutions, scholarly societies, and academic publishers who wish to supplement their current journals with online outlets
We hope you’ll join us making this new form of scholarly communication a reality. You may be a researcher in a field that is underserved by traditional outlets, because it is new, interdisciplinary, or involves non-textual media. Perhaps you have a digital project that can only be “published” if you describe it in an article. You may be an editor of a journal who would like to supplement standard articles with digital content from across the web, or a scholarly society that wants to find and feature online work. As PressForward evolves, we hope to serve all of these constituencies, as well as a broad audience currently locked out of gated scholarship.
Learn more about PressForward on our new site, or by sending us an email. You can also follow us on Twitter or via RSS.
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
On April 15, 2011, the Center for History and New Media became the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. This was made possible by the incredible generosity of hundreds of donors, who gave over a million dollars to rename the center. I’m enormously grateful to those contributors, many of whom read this blog. Thank you. It was especially touching that in addition to the tremendous donations from Roy’s friends, there were scores of donations from people who had never met Roy, such as a $5 contribution from a student in rural India who learned from our websites and tools.
Here’s what I said at the beginning of the dedication ceremony:
On behalf of the entire staff of the center and also for the Department of History and Art History that the center is a part of, let me welcome you on this wonderful occasion to the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. We wouldn’t be here today without your extraordinary friendship and generosity, and so let me give the first of many thanks to everyone for making this day happen.
We have several speakers this afternoon that I have the privilege of introducing, who will each say a few words about Roy and the center. But I wanted to start off the proceedings by giving voice to something miraculous that is happening as we celebrate today.
Right now, silently in the background, literally thousands of people worldwide are connected to the center’s servers, studying and conversing and learning. I checked our server logs just before this celebration, and just today, tens of thousands of people have visited CHNM sites. And just in the last thirty days well over a million visitors took advantage of the center’s open access resources and open source tools. For this reason, I can’t imagine that any academic in history has affected more people than Roy has.
And from this day forward, all of these millions of visitors to the many sites of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will know who Roy is. They will see the new logo that is behind this curtain on our many websites, and know whom to thank for the incredible riches and generosity that Roy envisioned when he came up with the then-radical mission statement for the center: “to use digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” On a personal note, it’s truly a joy to be able to carry on the work of a good friend every day.
The endowment you have helped to raise will support the work of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for years to come. Thank you.
Digital Humanities on the Kojo Nnamdi Show
I really enjoyed being on the Kojo Nnamdi Show today talking about digital humanities for an hour with Kojo, the NEH‘s Brett Bobley, and UVA‘s Bill Ferster. Kojo’s show is produced at Washington’s NPR station, WAMU, and syndicated nationally. It’s also available as an audio stream and a podcast.
Having done podcasts for four years now, I’ve come to understand how difficult it is to do a radio show—to ask the right questions, to not um and er a lot, and to stimulate informative conversation. Kojo really makes it look easy, which is even more impressive given the wide variety of topics he covers. As I left the studio today he immediately prepped to do a show on Eisenhower and the military-industrial complex.
Brett, Bill, and I talked about how to define digital humanities, the use of text mining, visualization, and digital mapping, problems associated with the abundant digital record, collaboration in the digital humanities, and questions of publishing, open access, and tenure. We also took numerous questions from callers. I thought the show had a good vibe.
So, worth a listen: The Kojo Nnamdi Show: “History Meets High-Tech: Digital Humanities”
Today was also a moment to reflect on the fact that the last time I was on the Kojo Nnamdi Show was exactly five years ago, with Roy Rosenzweig. Our book Digital History had just come out. It was just before Roy got sick. Probably said a lot on the broadcast today that Roy would have said.
Special Campaign to name CHNM after Roy Rosenzweig
Many of those who follow the work of the Center for History and New Media know that we are in the middle of a special fundraising campaign in which the National Endowment for the Humanities will match donations to the CHNM endowment. Some of you have already given to this campaign, and we are tremendously grateful for your generosity. The endowment helps us to sustain dozens of educational, archival, and software projects, all of which have been and will be freely available to the millions of people who take advantage of them every year.
The NEH challenge grant is now entering the home stretch, and we have decided to do something very special with the remaining effort: raise enough funds to name the Center for History and New Media after Roy Rosenzweig, the founding director of CHNM, who tragically passed away in 2007.
Roy was—and remains—the animating spirit of CHNM. (Learn more about Roy.) We can’t tell you how important Roy is any better than Julie Meloni, who spent a week at the Center working on a new project:
The reason CHNM is uniquely positioned as instigator of and support system for this project…is the longstanding tradition of enthusiasm, creativity, collaboration, and support put in place by its founding director, Roy Rosenzweig. It is impossible to spend any time around CHNM without learning something about this man and the reasons the center exists and is a success.
Universities usually price naming opportunities in the millions of dollars, but George Mason University will allow us to name CHNM after Roy for $750,000 (plus the NEH match). An anonymous donor has already stepped forward to provide $100,000, and we need to raise the remaining $650,000 in the next two and a half years.
We welcome all donations, but believe that Roy, a true champion of democracy, would have loved the idea that small donors could have as much impact as those with deeper pockets.
So we are asking you join our Circle of Friends by pledging just $10 a month for the next 30 months. With this tax-deductible contribution, which will be matched by $100 from NEH, CHNM will officially become the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on its 20th anniversary.
Maybe you keep your precious research in Zotero or your treasured digital archive in Omeka, saving you from the expense of commercial programs. Maybe as a teacher or student you have learned more from CHNM’s free sites than from pricey textbooks. Or maybe you are grateful for our unique and powerful historical collections from George Washington through 9/11.
If so, we hope you’ll consider joining the Circle of Friends. These donors will be honored on a special page of our website and on the wall of CHNM.
Please join the Circle now, and thanks so much in advance for your support!
September 23, 2010 Add Comment
Zotero Everywhere
Here’s the big news today from our Zotero project, or you can hear me do my best to explain what’s next for Zotero on the recording of today’s broadcast of the Zotero announcement.
We’re delighted to announce Zotero Everywhere, a major new initiative generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Zotero Everywhere is aimed at dramatically increasing the accessibility of Zotero to the widest possible range of users today and in the future. Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries.
Zotero is the only research software that provides full and seamless access to a comprehensive range of open and gated resources. With a single click, Zotero users have long been able to add a complete journal article, book, or other resource to their personal libraries, including bibliographic metadata and attached files like PDFs. Until now, this powerful functionality has been tied exclusively to the Firefox browser, which not all researchers can or want to use. Today we are announcing support for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, which account for 98% of the web’s usage share. Plugins for these browsers will soon allow users to add anything they find on the web to their Zotero libraries with a single click, regardless of the their browser preferences. Rather than use the Zotero pane in Firefox, users will have the new option of accessing their libraries via a standalone desktop version of Zotero, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Zotero’s web API offers any application developer the ability to access individual and group libraries via a simple, human-readable programming interface. Until now, this API has been “read-only”—users could view their libraries but they could not change them via the web or via the API. Today we’re announcing the opening of Zotero’s write API to the public over the coming months. Because Zotero “eats its own dog food”—we already use the very same programming interface to serve pages at zotero.org—application developers can be confident that the public API will ultimately provide all the same functionality used internally at the Zotero project. With full read/write access to bibliographic data, attached files like PDFs, and the citation formatting engine, developers will be able to integrate a full range of Zotero features into their own web, mobile, and desktop applications, and users will be able to take advantage of this functionality at zotero.org.
Zotero Everywhere responds to the constantly changing needs of Zotero’s enormous research community. Downloaded millions of times since 2006 and used by hundreds of thousands of researchers daily, Zotero has grown to the world’s largest and most diverse online research community, with nearly 50 million library items presently synced to zotero.org. In addition to sharing their own individual libraries, Zotero users have formed over 25,000 collaborative research groups to pool references, share files, and coauthor manuscripts. By providing new ways of accessing and integrating this vast array of data, Zotero Everywhere will ensure that Zotero continues to be the catalyst for the next generation of research and scholarship.
© 2023 Dan Cohen


March 8 ~ This Day in Music History
Posted by MaryO on March 8, 2017
. 1714 ~ Carl Phillip Emanuel (C.P.E.) Bach, German composer
More information on C. P. E. Bach
. 1857 ~ Ruggero Leoncavallo, Italian composer
More information about Leoncavallo
. 1866 ~ “It is possible to be as much of a musician as Saint-Saëns; it is impossible to be more of one!” ~ Franz Liszt on meeting fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns in Paris.
. 1869 ~ Hector Berlioz died in Paris
. 1889 ~ John Thompson, Piano educator
. 1911 ~ Alan Hovhaness, American composer
More information about Hovhaness
. 1923 ~ Cyd Charisse, Dancer
. 1927 ~ Dick Hyman, Pianist and music director for Arthur Godfrey
. 1961 ~ Conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham died at the age of 81.
. 1962 ~ The Beatles performed for the first time on the BBC in Great Britain. John, Paul, George and … Pete Best sang Dream Baby on the show, “Teenager’s Turn” on ‘Auntie Beeb’ (as the BBC was known).
. 1993 ~ Billy Eckstine passed away
. 2001 ~ Ballet Legend Dame Ninette De Valois died at the age of 102. She was the founder of Britain’s Royal Ballet who launched dancer Margot Fonteyn on the road to stardom. De Valois, a strict and demanding disciplinarian with her pupils, was a gifted and theatrical choreographer who almost single-handedly put British ballet on the international stage. The doyenne of dance helped to nurture the talents of unknowns like Fonteyn and courted controversy in the 1960’s at the height of the Cold War when she invited Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev to appear with her company. De Valois always gave credit to Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev for teaching her all she knew. “Everything,” she once said of the Ballet Russe legend. “Diaghilev just managed the whole company. He knew all about the different teachers. He knew the types of teachers he wanted, he knew the type of ballet he wanted. He was a musician.” Born Edris Stannus in 1898 in the Irish county of Wicklow, she graduated from Irish jig to the ballet, worked with the writer W.B. Yeats at Dublin’s Abbey Theater and then, almost single-handedly, brought ballet to the fore in Britain. The famed diva, who adopted her professional name from an ancestor who had married into a French family, was first inspired at the age of 11 when she watched Anna Pavlova dancing The Dying Swan. In 1923, she joined Diaghilev’s troupe in Monte Carlo and began to lay the foundations of her own ballet empire. She gave up dancing herself after discovering that she had been suffering for years from polio. “It was no tragedy. I wasn’t that great,” she once said. In 1926, she opened her own ballet school in London. From the tiniest beginnings, she built up the Sadlers Wells Ballet in less than a decade. At the end of World War II, the company moved triumphantly into the Royal Opera House. A ballet dynasty was born. De Valois retired in 1963 but remained intimately involved in the ballet school, forever the sharp-tongued martinet who could strike terror in tomorrow’s ballet hopefuls.
. 2001 ~ Maude Rutherford, a singer and dancer in the glory days of black theater during the 1920s, died. She was believed to have been 104. Rutherford was billed as the Slim Princess when she worked with entertainers such as Fats Waller, Josephine Baker and Pearl Bailey. She was a featured performer and favorite at Harlem’s Cotton Club. Rutherford’s theater credits include: “Dixie to Broadway,” (1924), “Chocolate Sandals,” (1927), and “Keep Shufflin”‘ (1928). She retired from show business in 1950 and worked as a switchboard operator at an Atlantic City hotel.
. 2003 ~ Adam Faith, a square-jawed British singer who was briefly a Cockney challenger to Elvis Presley’s rock ‘n’ roll crown, died of a heart attack. He was 62. Born Terry Nelhams in west London in 1940, Faith was a handsome teenager who was playing with a skiffle music group – a mixture of jug band, acoustic, folk, blues and country and western styles – when he was spotted by producers of a British Broadcasting Corp. music program. Adopting the stage name Adam Faith, he became – alongside Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Billy Fury – a pop star of the pre-Beatles era. Developing a hiccuping delivery reminiscent of Buddy Holly, Faith had more than 20 British hits, including the chart-topping What Do You Want? and Poor Me. Faith also was a versatile actor, appearing in films like Beat Girl, Mix Me A Person and 1975’sStardust opposite David Essex. In the 1970s he played a Cockney ex-con in the TV series Budgie.
This entry was posted in Composers, musicians, Pianists, Today in Music History and tagged C.P.E. Bach, Camille Saint-Saëns, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, composer, dancer, Dick Hyman, Franz Liszt, pianist, quote, Today in Music History, video. Bookmark the permalink.


Review: Self-Ish: A Transgender Awakening, by Chloe Schwenke
Reviewed by Sarah Evans
At the beginning of her memoir, Chloe Schwenke is unemployed, desperate to find work after being fired unexpectedly from a leading human rights organization.
While her bosses didn’t state it outright, Schwenke is sure they let her go because she is a transgender woman.
It’s not the first, nor the last time Schwenke will wonder whether people are discriminating against her due to her status, as she reveals throughout her memoir, Self-Ish: A Transgender Awakening (Red Hen Press, May 2018).
It seems unbelievable at first that a woman with her job experience would find herself struggling to stay employed.
Schwenke worked for decades in senior positions in human rights activism and international development. She led major development and human rights organizations worldwide and became one of the first three transgender political appointees in U.S. history when President Obama named her a senior advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But her retelling of a professional meeting with one organization’s CEO during her job hunt starts to bring clarity to the barriers she faces. The two started their coffee meeting normally enough, conversation flowing easily as they talked about the work they had in common.
But as soon as Schwenke mentioned her “history,” the CEO — who was not aware of her transgender status until that point — immediately shifted the conversation to questions about her transition. After a long, awkward silence, he finally said his organization was “unlikely to have any work” for Schwenke.
Schwenke’s job troubles are nowhere near the only hurdle she has faced. She didn’t transition until middle age, when she already had a wife and two children. This brought many unanswerable questions. How does someone go from years of being a father to trying to be a mother? What if their child doesn’t want “another mother”? How does their spouse feel and what does the transition mean for their relationship?
These family-related questions often lead people to say that transgender men and women are “selfish” — that they are indulging in some internal wish without considering the impact of their change on their loved ones. Schwenke, instead, says she is “self-ish,” finally claiming and owning her authentic self after years of agonizing over her identity.
Schwenke’s writing, unfortunately, is not literary. She tells of her adventures working in Africa, of the fraught friendships she lost after her transition, and of her family’s struggles without ever bringing the reader fully into the moment. In other words, it’s all telling, no showing.
Still, in today’s political climate, where “bathroom bills” are commonplace and the presidential administration has been rolling back rights for transgender people, reading a story like Schwenke’s becomes essential.
Schwenke comes off as an intelligent, thoughtful, easy-going, middle-aged woman who works hard and sticks to her beliefs. A portrait of a transgender person as “normal” is more important now than ever.
Sarah Evans is an Oregon writer who has been published in Mom Egg Review and on River Teeth Journal’s Beautiful Things blog and Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Pacific University. Read more about her at www.sarahevanswriter.com.
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Home / Press & Media / Should I Send My Child Back To School Amid COVID? Experts Weigh In On Risks & Benefits
Written by Dr. Sunitha D Posina
Should I Send My Child Back To School Amid COVID? Experts Weigh In On Risks & Benefits
https://www.romper.com/p/should-i-send-my-child-back-to-school-amid-covidexperts-weigh-in-on-risks-benefits-29380644
As COVID-19 cases rise across the country and school districts release their plans for the fall, many parents are torn. On the one hand, kids are desperate for socialization and non-digital education. On the other, teacher unions are citing fears for their own and students’ health and safety. So how can parents weigh the risks or benefits of sending kids back to school in person this fall?
First of all, know that this decision might be out of your hands entirely. "Advice I give today may change next week," immunologist and infectious disease expert Purvi Parikh, M.D., tells Romper over the phone. Regulations and case numbers are changing on a day-to-day basis, making it difficult to plan with any certainty. Durga Sunitha Posina, M.D. , a board-certified physician in internal medicine, agrees, telling Romper in an email: “I think it’s too premature to make a generalized decision for the country, as we have to first work on multiple aspects of the issue, especially given that a huge part of our country is currently going through the peak of the coronavirus pandemic."
Even the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), whose initial guidance to re-open schools was often cited by the Trump administration, clarified its position in a joint statement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Education Association (NEA) and AASA, The School Superintendents Association:
“Returning to school is important for the healthy development and well-being of children, but we must pursue re-opening in a way that is safe for all students, teachers and staff. Science should drive decision-making on safely reopening schools. Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics. We should leave it to health experts to tell us when the time is best to open up school buildings, and listen to educators and administrators to shape how we do it."
Dr. Parikh urges parents to research exactly what their local schools are recommending instead of focusing on national news and guidelines. "We don't just want to see a flat curve, we want to see a downward trending curve," says Dr. Parikh. "I would also look at what measures schools are doing to follow CDC or NIH guidelines."
“We have to keep in mind that not all schools are the same, they have different numbers of students, challenges and requirements," Dr. Posina adds. "The approach needed for elementary schools will probably be different than middle or high schools in regard to how to keep them socially distanced, PPE. In addition, we also have to take into account the teachers and ancillary staffs comfort levels while making these decisions.”
Weighing what to do will really come down to taking a hard look at how your child’s particular school intends to address social distancing, classroom size, and school year expectations.
But while you’re thinking about all of that, Dr. Posina urges parents to remember that keeping kids home isn’t a perfect solution either.
“Keeping them home for such long durations is not ideal, but I think it is best we wait at this time as the pandemic further unfolds. Public safety overtakes in these circumstances given that it is a contagious disease and is currently of utmost importance to stop the spread,” she says.
Choosing to send children back to the classroom comes with added responsibility; not just for parents and teachers but for kids. Parents need to make sure kids truly understand the importance of social distancing, wearing face masks, washing their hands thoroughly, and not touching their face, says Dr. Posina. Not an easy thing to do with, say, a kindergartner. Plus, all children are different. "Two kids could be the same age but be night and day between level of understanding and maturity," she says. So it's important to account for your child's developmental understanding of what safety and health protocols mean and whether or not they can follow them.
And then there’s the tricky topic of whether or not to test your children for coronavirus antibodies before heading back to school. “Parents can always get their children the antibody test; however, being positive at this time does not give us as an immunity passport,” says Dr. Posina. “We don’t know how much immunity these antibodies offer or how long they protect one against the virus if they do at this time. In addition, it could be an overall false-positive given that the test can sometimes be falsely positive due to antibodies from other coronaviruses that cause the common cold, SARS and MERs.”
The harsh truth, says Dr. Purvikh, is that some children who return to school will get Covid-19. That's simply the statistical reality of this pandemic. While the general consensus at the beginning of the pandemic seemed to be that kids weren't likely to contract the virus, there have been more and more reports to the contrary in recent weeks: In one Texas county, more than 80 children under 2 years old, (most of them younger than 12 months) tested positive, NBC News reported on July 18; in Los Angeles, 15 children were diagnosed with MISC-C, the rare inflammatory syndrome linked to the virus, reported Yahoo! News on July 20. But even if kids have a mild case, parents need to consider how at risk other family members in the household might be.
“Children don’t necessarily get as sick from the virus at least from what we have so far. However, there is always a risk of the children catching the virus and spreading it to others such as family members," says Dr. Posina. "We certainly know the elderly population and people with certain medical conditions have higher risk than others, so that decision should be weighed in by families based on their comfort levels and individual situations. They can always discuss it with their primary care or family physician for further input.”
(Speaking of family physicians, Dr. Parikh reminds parents to keep on top of your children's yearly vaccines and booster shots, even if they don't physically go to school. She says we need those now more than ever, especially a flu vaccine to arm kids for the fall.)
There's no question that this is a trying time, especially for parents, and there are no good answers. But maybe there's reason to be hopeful. Dr. Parikh says she's encouraged by the efforts to produce a vaccine.
"I'm feeling pretty optimistic," she says. "Many companies have announced really good results and have moved into Phase 3 of large scale testing. What we're doing right now is months of innovation that usually takes years and there is promising data coming out of those studies. I think we could have a vaccine by the end of year or early 2021."
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Home News “I stood behind you for 32 years, but not now”, major blow...
“I stood behind you for 32 years, but not now”, major blow for RJD as Raghuvansh Prasad quits
In a blow to the RJD ahead of the Bihar polls, senior party leader and former Union minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a close friend of Lalu Prasad, quit the party on Thursday.
Singh, who was upset with the way the party affairs were being handled in Prasad’s absence, wrote a letter to the imprisoned RJD supremo from AIIMS in Delhi where he is admitted.
“Since the death of Jannayak Karpoori Thakur, I stood behind you for 32 years, but not now,” he wrote in his brief one-line resignation letter to Prasad, who is serving his term in jail in four fodder scam cases in Ranchi. He added,” I got the affection of party leaders and workers, besides common people. Please forgive me.”
Singh, admitted to AIIMS, New Delhi, because of post-COVID difficulties, had earlier announced his resignation in June but was moved by Prasad to stay back.
The senior party leader, a prominent Rajput face in the party who had piloted the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme, had been miffed over being sidelined in the party’s organisational set-up and being denied a Rajya Sabha seat for some time.
Bihar Election
Raghuvansh Prasad Singh


Where to Watch Cheer Up Episode 16, Release Date and Streaming Platforms
By Anshul Last updated Dec 15, 2022
The release date for Cheer Up episode 16 is coming up quickly. Fans of this new teen kdrama have always been excited about the show, and this time is no different. We’ll tell you when Cheer Up episode 16 will be out and how to stream it, but before we do that, we’ll tell you about the most recent episode for those of you who haven’t seen it yet.
Due to her near-death experience, Hae-Yi gets a few days off from all of her part-time jobs. She uses these days to ask Jung-woo out to the movies. She didn’t think that he would have already bought tickets to the show she wanted to see. Hae-Yi says the seats are great, even though he couldn’t pay for them. He purrs and strokes her hair as he asks her if she likes the gift.
Everyone can date openly, and man, are these students ready to have fun with it? Sunja and Jae start to get close after Sunja gives Min a makeover. Cho-boyfriend, hee’s Yong, tells her that she is too valuable to date any of the men who have hurt her. Cho-hee thinks about this for a long time and decides to put her love life on hold.
Where to Watch Cheer Up Episode 16?
For those who don’t know, let us remind you that the last episode of our favorite mystery show will be shown without subtitles in South Korea first.
Later, fans around the world will be able to watch the episode online with subtitles on the Viu app.
Cheer Up Episode 16 Release Date
If you want to know when the last episode of The Cheer Up will come out, we can tell you that it will be on Tuesday, December 13, 2022. The episode is called “Episode 16,” and it will be a mystery drama.
Let’s remind you that fans in Korea can watch the last episode of the drama all at once on SBS at around 10 p.m.
Before we talk about that, let’s look at what has already happened. In an earlier episode of the show, Hae-Yi came close to dying and took a few days off from her part-time job.
On her day off, she wanted to go out and have fun, so she asked Jung-woo to go to the movies with her. Even though she was eager to see that show, she didn’t expect him to have already bought tickets for it.
Cheer Up Season 1 Episode 16 In Binge Watching
The lockdown that has been in place since 2020 has made watching series the new trend among people who watch a lot of TV at once. They haven’t stuck to just one region or genre. It’s also become common for series to go in different directions. These people who watch Binge are now watching it in Korea, Spain, Germany, and many other places. Cheer Up is one of these shows that many of these binge-watchers have been meaning to watch.
Cheer Up, Episode 16 of Season 1 on OTT Platforms
Online platforms are becoming some of the best places to watch TV shows because they make it possible for shows and movies to be released all at once. There have been more people watching series because there are more ways to watch them online. These online platforms make it easy for people who like to binge-watch to do so with little effort. In fact, you can also watch Cheer Up Season 1 Episode 16 online.
A Quick Recap of Cheer Up 2022 Episodes
Now that he has no reason to hide it, Jung-woo makes it sweeter. Jung-woo isn’t sure what’s going on, but he doesn’t ask any questions. He’s lucky that he’s there with Ha-jin, his ex-girlfriend and the captain of the Hokyung cheer squad. When Yi asks what her goal is, Jin says, “To get rid of Woo.”
She then asks Sun and Yi about their relationship. Hae says, “Nope,” as she walks into her classroom, to dismiss it. Jung tells Yi that he still trusts her even though she can’t explain why she went with Ho. It’s possible that this won’t make Jung feel better. She says that she can’t say anything. Sun-ho calls Hae-Yi and asks to talk to her mother. He wants her to go with him to the clinic, so he wants to talk to her.
Hae-Yi decides to go with him for some reason and cancels the meeting with Jung-woo without giving a reason. Later, when Jung-woo goes to Hae’s house out of worry for her, he finds her there with Sun-ho. Hae’s mother has told the children to go back home while she and Jin-hee stay at the clinic.
Sun-ho is expected to stay the night, even though he doesn’t like being in that situation. Sun-ho stays at Jae-room Yi’s house while he and Hae-Yi both go to school in the afternoon. They run into Jung-woo, but they don’t tell him who they are. Eventually, after an awkward dinner at Hae-house with Sun-ho and Jung-woo, Yi’s two boys decide to make up.
Click if you want to know about Cheer Up Episode 15 Release Date and Streaming Platform: Who is the Main Lead in Cheer Up?
Sun-ho says he will give up on Hae-Yi because she seemed happy with Jung-woo. But now that this fight is over, the Yonhee and Hokyung cheerleading teams fight in front of the cameraman, making a new one. The teams will be shown on TV, and the show is trying to find a love story.
The TV crew pushes Jung-woo and Ha-jin close together for extreme close-ups, which makes Hae-Yi jealous. Then, Ha-jin and Hae-Yi compete against each other in sports competitions. Jung and Jin can hear Hae answer, yi’s, and Woo is so happy that he has to look at the ground to stop smiling.
Since she started dating Jung, Ha-jin has been shocked by how much he has changed. He and Yi were very happy, which is not like Woo. Jin-il fought a Sunbae, and the Sunbae nearly died from knife wounds. He seems to be awake right now, but he is in a coma.
BingeCheer UpmysteryOTTViu
Anshul 360 posts
Hi. This is your writer friend Anshul Kamboj, who always tries to let everyone know what's going on in the K-Drama world. Writing is my happy place. It helps me get all my thoughts out and makes me feel free.
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Home Popular Cities New York U.S. Supreme Court to weigh Cuomo-era New York corruption cases
U.S. Supreme Court to weigh Cuomo-era New York corruption cases
HBTVnews
Nov 27 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday will consider a pair of cases that could make it harder to pursue public corruption prosecutions – bids by an ex-aide to Democratic former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and a businessman to reverse bribery and fraud convictions.
The justices are set to hear arguments in the appeals by Joseph Percoco and Louis Ciminelli, who were charged in related cases in 2016 as part of a corruption crackdown by federal prosecutors in Manhattan centered on the halls of the state capital of Albany.
The eventual rulings by the justices, expected by the end of June, also will affect three co-defendants charged in corruption and fraud cases during Cuomo’s tenure as governor involving state contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Rulings favoring the defendants could curtail prosecutors from charging a variety cases as wire frauds and limit their ability to pursue certain classes of bribery cases, according to Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor now working at the Seward & Kissel law firm.
“Prosecutors could face a constriction of their ability to bring charges based on novel and expansive readings of the fraud statutes,” Nawaday said.
The Supreme Court in recent years has hemmed in prosecutors in political corruption cases including a 2020 decision to toss the convictions of two aides to Republican former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie relating to the “Bridgegate” political scandal. The court in 2016 also threw out Republican former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell’s bribery conviction in another ruling narrowing the types of conduct that can warrant prosecution as corrupt.
The charges against Percoco and Ciminelli were brought in 2016 by then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who also pursued corruption cases against top state lawmakers including former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
The case Bharara unveiled in 2016 cast a pall over Cuomo’s administration even though he was not charged. Cuomo resigned from office in 2021 in an unrelated sexual harassment scandal.
Percoco, a former Cuomo aide, was convicted in 2018 on bribery-related charges for seeking $315,000 in bribes in exchange for helping two corporate clients of an Albany lobbyist named Todd Howe pursuing state benefits and business.
Prosecutors said Percoco referred to the payments as “ziti,” a term for money used by characters in “The Sopranos” mobster TV series. Percoco was sentenced in 2018 to six years in prison.
Howe pleaded guilty and cooperated with investigators. Percoco was convicted alongside an executive at a real estate developer, Steven Aiello, who prosecutors said orchestrated bribes to Percoco.
At the time of the actions at issue, Percoco was no longer serving in government as the governor’s executive deputy secretary but managing Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign, a fact his lawyers said meant he could not be convicted of bribery.
His lawyers argue that Percoco’s status as a private citizen meant that his acceptance of money to convince the government to do something indicated he was not a crook but a lobbyist, and that upholding his conviction would expose the profession of lobbying more broadly to criminal charges.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 upheld his conviction, finding that Percoco had a guaranteed job in Cuomo’s administration post-election and in the interim exercised enough influence over government decision-making to owe a duty to the public.
Ciminelli’s case focused on Howe’s role as a consultant hired to help administer Cuomo’s $1 billion revitalization initiative for the Buffalo, New York, area – dubbed the “Buffalo Billion.”
Prosecutors said executives at two companies including Ciminelli, who owned a construction firm, conspired with Howe and Alain Kaloyeros, who oversaw the Buffalo Billion grant application process, to rig bids to ensure contracts went to their firms.
Ciminelli was convicted at trial alongside Kaloyeros, the former president of State University of New York’s Polytechnic Institute, and developers Joseph Gerardi and Aiello. They also have asked the Supreme Court to reverse their convictions.
Ciminelli was sentenced to two years and four months in prison, Gerardi to 2-1/2 years, Aiello to three years and Kaloyeros to 3-1/2 years. A judge in July allowed all four to be released from prison on bail after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Defense lawyers have said prosecutors overreached by trying to fit their actions within the framework of the wire fraud statute, which criminalizes schemes to fraudulently obtain money or property.
The prosecutors relied on a legal theory of wire fraud called “right to control” in which it was not money at issue but instead economically valuable information in which a victim had an interest. Prosecutors identified the victim as Fort Schuyler Management Corp, an arm of SUNY Polytechnic Institute that oversaw the contracting process and that the government said was deprived of the ability to make fully informed decisions.
Ciminelli’s lawyers said such intangible information could not qualify as a “property fraud” under Supreme Court’s precedents.
(This story has been refiled to add dropped word ‘make’ to lede)
Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Andrew Chung in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham
Nate Raymond
Nate Raymond reports on the federal judiciary and litigation. He can be reached at nate.raymond@thomsonreuters.com.
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PSEG Foundation Supports the Community FoodBank of NJ’s Efforts to Reduce Food Insecurity During COVID-19 Outbreak
PSEG Foundation provides $45,000 grant to address critical needs of children and families
Submitted by Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG)
The PSEG Foundation is supporting the Community FoodBank of New Jersey in its response to critical community needs throughout New Jersey as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. The Community FoodBank of New Jersey (CFBNJ) is New Jersey's largest anti-hunger organization that works with over 1,000 community organizations and partners in the state. The PSEG Foundation provided The Community FoodBank of New Jersey a grant of $45,000 to address rising food insecurity.
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak and statewide guidance to close schools and reduce community interaction, the CFBNJ has identified districts and communities in great need, including where children typically receive free and reduced-price lunch. In collaboration with schools, the Salvation Army and American Red Cross, this program aims to fill gaps for families created by the disruption to schools and work. (Volunteers are not needed at this time given the sensitivity of social distancing and food interaction.)
“The PSEG Foundation understands that COVID-19 presents a new and unique challenge to those who may already be struggling to meet the needs of their family,” said Rick Thigpen, PSEG’s senior vice president for Corporate Citizenship and chairman of the PSEG Foundation. “In our effort to support and build sustainable communities, the PSEG Foundation is honored to assist The Community FoodBank of New Jersey to reduce food insecurity and support of the most vulnerable among us in this time of crisis.”
"Our neighbors in need are already suffering from the economic impact of COVID-19, while others find themselves struggling for the first time," said Carlos Rodriguez, president and CEO of the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. "Low-income workers and those with hourly wages are among the hardest hit. CFBNJ is grateful to the PSEG Foundation for their support during this challenging time, helping us to keep New Jersey's most vulnerable individuals and communities fed."
In times of disaster, the Community FoodBank of New Jersey partners with the Department of Health & Human Services, NJ VOAD, the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
The PSEG Foundation is a 501c3, not-for-profit organization that aims to build sustainable and thriving communities by fostering equity, safety, and diversity and inclusion, as well as supporting the environment, education and workforce development in the communities we serve. The PSEG Foundation provides grants to groups in communities served by PSEG and its subsidiaries; Foundation giving is separate and distinct from PSEG’s operational budget.
For information about PSEG company response and operational changes associated with the COVID-19 outbreak, visit PSEG’s Coronavirus Update webpage.
If you are a PSE&G customer experiencing difficulties as a result of the outbreak and would like additional time to pay bills, visit pseg.com/help.
If you are looking for ways to stay connected with PSE&G to help manage your account, you can log into My Account, chat or email, register for MyAlerts for text and email updates, download the free PSE&G mobile app, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter
About the PSEG Foundation
The PSEG Foundation, 501(c)(3), the philanthropic arm of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PSEG) (NYSE:PEG), prioritizes investments in the environment, safety, STEM education & workforce development, diversity & inclusion, and the communities served by PSEG. Headquartered in Newark, N.J., PSEG is a diversified energy company with approximately 13,000 employees. In 2020, PSEG was named one of Forbes’ Best Employers For Diversity for the third year in a row. In addition, PSEG was named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index North America for the 12th consecutive year in 2019 and received a Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index 2018 rating of 100 percent. (https://corporate.pseg.com/).
Visit PSEG at:
www.pseg.com
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Marijke Shugrue
Marijke.Shugrue@pseg.com
Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG)
Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PSEG) (NYSE: PEG) is a publicly traded diversified energy company with approximately 13,000 employees. Headquartered in Newark, N.J., PSEG's principal operating subsidiaries are: Public Service Electric and Gas Co. (PSE&G), PSEG Power and PSEG Long Island. PSEG is a Fortune 500 company included in the S&P 500 Index and has been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for North America for 11 consecutive years (https://corporate.pseg.com/).
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Biblical AnalysisFeaturedFISM News
Study: acts of kindness are successful in fighting depression, anxiety
by Jacob Fuller January 13, 2023
Lauren Dempsey, MS in Biomedicine and Law, RN, FISM News
Kindness may be a cure for anxiety and depression according to a new study out of The Ohio State University (OSU).
David Cregg led the study as part of his Ph.D. dissertation in psychology at Ohio State along with Jennifer Cheavens, a professor of psychology at the university.
The study was published in December in The Journal of Positive Psychology and describes how social connection can impact anxiety and depression. The research involved 122 people in Ohio who had moderate to severe depression, anxiety, and stress.
The participants were separated into three groups after an introductory session. One group was assigned to plan social activities two days a week. The second group of participants was instructed to use a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) technique called cognitive reappraisal, which encourages patients to identify negative thought patterns and reframe their thinking to encourage positive thoughts and reduce depression and anxiety.
In the third group, participants were assigned to perform three acts of kindness a day for two days of the week. These acts were defined as “big or small acts that benefit others or make others happy, typically at some cost to you in terms of time or resources.”
Each group was encouraged to document their thoughts during the study and some examples of kindness that participants recorded were baking cookies for friends, offering a ride, and leaving notes with words of encouragement.
Participants followed instructions for their assignments for five weeks, after which they were re-evaluated. To determine if the interventions continued to be effective, the researchers checked with the participants after another five weeks.
KINDNESS IS THE BEST MEDICINE
While all three interventions yielded positive results, acts of kindness lead to improvements that were not seen in the other two groups, suggesting that acts of kindness and connecting with others directly impact mental health.
“These results are encouraging because they suggest that all three study interventions are effective at reducing distress and improving satisfaction,” Cregg said in a statement. “Acts of kindness still showed an advantage over both social activities and cognitive reappraisal by making people feel more connected to other people, which is an important part of well-being.”
Social connection is one of the ingredients of life most strongly associated with well-being. Performing acts of kindness seems to be one of the best ways to promote those connections.
OTHER STUDIES CONFIRM
Other studies support the idea that acts of kindness are beneficial to mental health. Research from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley indicates that kindness activates the pleasure center of the brain, releasing chemicals that can positively impact our mood and reduce levels of anxiety, stress, and depression.
However, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, resulting in impairments that can limit or alter a person’s ability to carry out major life activities. In 2020, an estimated 21 million adults in America had at least one major depressive episode with prevalence rates being highest in females and those aged 18-25.
Treatment of depression and anxiety usually includes a combination of therapy and medication. Psychotherapy can help to learn skills, modify problematic behaviors, cope with stress, and overcome fear.
The authors of this study are hopeful that this research will have benefits outside of traditional therapy. Cheavens explains that this “relatively simple, one-time training had real effects on reducing depression and anxiety symptoms,” and that “doing nice things for people and focusing on the needs of others may actually help people with depression and anxiety feel better about themselves.”
Editor’s Biblical Analysis
The Biblical lesson here is pretty obvious to anyone familiar with the teachings of Christ. When asked what the most important commandment was,
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” – Matthew 22:37-40
As Christ Jesus pointed out, love is the foundation of His Word. The Bible is full of commandments to kindness and love (Luke 6:35, Eph. 4:32, Col. 3:12, Gal. 6:10, 1 John 3:18, Phillipians 2:1-30). The Bible also teaches us that kindness and love benefit not only the recipient but also those who show kindness and love (Prov. 11:17, 14:21, 19:17, 1 Peter 3:9, Romans 11:22).
So, Believer, go forth and show kindness and love to those around you, knowing that in doing so you not only benefit those who receive your kindness, but you also please God and will reap the rewards of obedience to Him.
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Dec/10
MLB Trade Rumors: Identifying The Trade Needs For Every Single MLB Team
by Adam Rosen under MLB
I am not a general manager of any MLB team, but I am going to try and play one.
With the Winter Meetings in the rearview mirror, the MLB offseason winding down, before we know it, pitchers and catchers are going to be reporting to spring training in just a couple of months.
But until then, teams will be looking to improve their rosters. Whether its via free agency or trading for a player, each team has a need in which they need to fill before the season begins.
It might not be at the most important position, or in the clean-up spot in lineup, but this one move could be the difference between a World Series championship and a disappointing season.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion about what their favorite team needs to do before next season to become contenders, but this is mine.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy.
Let’s play ball.
Begin Slideshow
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MLB Free Agency: Jesus Montero and 10 Top Prospects Preventing Big Splashes
Looking ahead to 2011, many teams will look to improve their roster via free agency or by making a major trade during the off-season.
Teams like the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are looking to sign a major free agent, and have their fan bases excited for this upcoming season. However, the secret to a team’s success isn’t always found by signing the biggest free agent, or trading for a six-time all star.
The difference between a championship and missing the playoffs can be found in the minors. For some teams, the future of the franchise lay in the hands of the top-rated prospect. For others, general managers look to use their highly touted prospects as trade bait to reel in a big name to improve their roster, or in some cases, simply to boost ticket sales.
While everyone has their own opinion where Cliff Lee will end up, and have speculated which team Carl Crawford will sign with, these guys aren’t the only players making headlines during this offseason.
Let’s not forget about the Other Guys.
So from Triple-A last season to the Majors in 2011, here are some big name prospects who will not only be difference makers in 2011, but because of their talent and expectations they are bringing to the show, these top prospects are preventing general managers from making big splashes this offseason, at their respective position.
Sit back, relax, enjoy.
The winter meetings are set to begin.
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Nov/10
MLB Twitter: What A Few Of The Yankee Greats Are Saying About Derek Jeter Now?
No one on this list needs an introduction.
If you follow the Yankees, or simply, have been following baseball over it’s magnificent history, the names on this list speak for themselves.
Although most of these players on this list are Hall of Famers, and while some will fall short of reaching Cooperstown, there is no doubt, they are all Yankee legends.
AL East, Derek Jeter, New York Yankees, Rankings/List Leave a Comment more...
MLB Rumors: 10 Reasons Derek Jeter Won’t Win a Contract Standoff
Ready. Aim. Fire.
Contract negotiations between Derek Jeter and the Yankees are well underway with both sides standing pat.
The Yankees are not willing to offer Jeter a fourth year, and the Jeter camp is insulted with the Yankees initial offer of a three-year, $45 million deal.
We all know Jeter is going to be a Yankee next season, and for the next couple of years.
We all know he will be the starting shortstop when the season begins, and we all know Jeter will soon be nearing the end of the line in what will undoubtedly be a Hall of Fame career.
The battle lines have been drawn and the Yankees are not backing down.
Jeter enters this war after compiling career lows in a few offensive categories and, for the first time in his career, he does not have the upper hand.
As Jeter seeks the contract he desires, don’t expect the Yankees to change their stance.
At the end of the day, Jeter will be a Yankee, but unfortunately for Jeter, it’s going to be under the terms of the Yankees front office.
Derek Jeter, New York Yankees, Opinion, TimesUnion Leave a Comment more...
New York Yankees: Analyzing Their 10 Biggest Offseason Questions
While 2009 ended with a World Series championship, 2010 ended in disappointment.
While the Texas Rangers celebrated in front of their home crowd and were heading to their first World Series championship in franchise history, the 2010 offseason was beginning for the New York Yankees.
The Yankees and their 200 million dollar payroll, began their offseason earlier than expected. Now multiple uncertainties surround this team, with some of the greatest players in franchise history becoming free agents.
It’s sad to write, but even the almighty Yankees can’t be the best every year. Only most of the time.
As the Yankees get back to the drawing board, and look to re-tune for 2011, here are the 10 biggest offseason questions facing this team.
Sit back relax and enjoy.
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MLB Trade Rumors: BJ Upton and 10 Other Available Chips for 2011
Cliff Lee and Carl Crawford are the biggest names of a lackluster 2010 MLB free agent class.
In only a matter of weeks, Lee will be re-joined with former Cleveland Indians teammate CC Sabathia in New York, and Crawford will be heading to Hollywood to become a member of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
This will leave the headlines open for players like Jayson Werth, Adam Dunn and Paul Konerko, who will be vying for major contracts, and looking for a team to call home.
While a lot of the focus is on this year’s free agent class, I’m focusing on players who could possibly be dealt before the season begins.
That free agent class will be highlighted by a duo of first basemen, Prince Fielder and Adrian Gonzalez, and, if Albert Pujols and the Cardinals can’t work out an extension, he will be the precious prize of 2011.
Let’s look at BJ Upton and 10 other available chips for 2011.
Sep/10
MLB Trade Rumors: Power Ranking the 10 Best Second-Tier Players
This offseason, Cliff Lee and Carl Crawford will be headlining this year’s free-agent class. Both players will be demanding major contracts, and both players might end up in New York.
Well, Lee will be in the Bronx, but the verdict is still out on Crawford.
For teams that can ill-afford to get the “Big Fish,” they must look at other options—the second-tier players. Guys that can still contribute, but will be affordable to acquire.
With the start of the offseason just five days away for the teams that failed to qualify for the playoffs, here are the 10 best “Buy Low” Candidates for this offseason.
You will not agree with all of my selections. You will mention guys that I left off.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but this one is mine.
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AJ Burnett and MLB’s 10 Contending Pitchers Who Do Not Deserve a Playoff Start
Doesn’t the photograph of A.J. Burnett say it all?
I think it does (Yankee fans, including myself are used to it).
Therefore, sit back, relax and enjoy, as you read “AJ Burnett and MLB’s 10 Contending Pitchers Who Do Not Deserve a Playoff Start.”
The playoffs are around the corner.
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Mr. Clutch: CC Sabathia and the Top 10 Pennant-Race Performances Ever
“And down the stretch they come.”
Those words, made famous by horse racing announcer Dave Johnson, should be playing on loudspeakers in baseball parks all across the country.
With the regular season coming to an end, there are some divisions still up for grabs, and wild cards still to be determined.
While we wait to see which teams will be playing in this “second season,” let’s take a look back at the greatest pennant-race performances of all-time.
While some players buckle under the pressure, these players performed when the lights shined the brightest, and were the difference between a playoff berth, and missing out on a chance at a World Series championship.
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Thanks Pittsburgh: 10 Reasons MLB Is Facing a Labor Dispute
We all thought the Pirates and Marlins were in dire need of financial help.
We all were wrong.
A few weeks ago, documents were leaked pertaining to the Pirates and Marlins financial situations.
With the news, fans from Florida and Pittsburgh were outraged, and shock waves were felt around the MLB community.
What appeared to be two unprofitable teams simply trying to survive, are anything but. It is yet to be scene if the MLB is in trouble, as another strike is possibly looming.
As I present,10 reasons MLB is facing a labor dispute, we can only wonder what is next for baseball.
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Opinion: Why are Black women writing love letters to Black girls in Columbus?
Amelia Robinson
Dispatch Opinion Editor
fran frazier says that being a Black girl and experiencing trauma often go hand in hand.
That's part of the reason her soul felt it on April 20 when a police officer responding to a fight fired multiple shots into the body of a 16-year-old girl wielding a knife outside of her foster home in the 3100 block of Legion Lane.
►Loving our girls up: An open letter to Columbus' Black girls from Black women who love them
"When this killing of Ma'Khia Bryant happened, I was really broken-hearted," said frazier, who perfers her name lowercased. "I started thinking about all the girls in our community and what they must be feeling."
frazier, the founder Black Girl Rising — an advocacy and social change organization — wanted to do something to support and help central Ohio Black girls traumatized by the shooting, coronavirus, and other social issues.
►Opinion: 'Black girls matter and we are going to do our best to make sure they know that
As it turned out, so did a lot of other Black women.
frazier was blown away when 73 Black women showed up to the virtual meeting, she set up following Ma'Khia Bryant's death.
This summer, the women will offer a series of girl-focused workshops centered on conflict resolution, self-defense, yoga, mindfulness, and performing arts practices that address trauma.
The broad range 'village' of women — mothers, sisters, aunties, and daughters — penned the letter below to show support for Black girls.
More:Opinion: Public needs to know details of Ma'Khia Bryant's life and death while in our care
During the month of May, Mental Health Awareness Month, they will read love letters to girls on local radio stations. A sample of those love letters can be found on Dispatch.com.
They are encouraging other women to pen love letters to Black girls which will be gathered for a book to be distributed to girls in foster care and in juvenile detention facilities.
Columbus area service organizations and congregations are being asked to give greeting cards.
frazier said it is critical that girls know they are loved and valued.
"I am sure that people are going to deal with the other issues that came about as a result of this, but we need to figure out how to love our girls up," she said.


Contactless 101: How frequency guides RF technologies
category: Contactless, Library, RFID
In the late 1800s a German physicist named Heinrich Hertz created radio waves in the laboratory. A century later, we are still expanding upon Hertz’s discovery. Radio waves make possible all wireless communications–from mobile telephone conversations to wireless data transfer. They beam our television signals, bring music to our radios, and make it safe to fly by carrying air traffic information to radar systems. And, they make contactless cards contactless.
For his contribution to this field of science and engineering, Mr. Hertz’s name made the key unit of measurement in the field–the Hertz (Hz). Before we define the Hz however, we must first investigate the more basic concept of frequency.
For our readers working in the RF field (or those with stronger science backgrounds than the majority of us), this may seem rudimentary. However, for the thousands of Contactless News readers that work in corporate security offices, transit agencies, and the financial sector–our memories of high school physics have likely faded and a re-education will do us good. So here goes.
Like a wave in the ocean, a radio wave goes up and down over time. A single complete wave can be described as beginning at sea level, rising to its highest peak, descending past sea level to its lowest point, and then returning to sea level. The number of complete ocean wave ‘cycles’ that occur in a specific time interval could be described as the frequency.
A radio wave can be thought of in the same manner–going from a baseline to a peak, then to a low point, and back to the baseline. This is referred to as a cycle. Frequency is a measure of the number of cycles completed in a period of time. One cycle completed in one second equals one Hz. Thus, the unit of measurement called the Hz is actually the number of cycles per second.
Radio waves cycle extremely quickly and thus are seldom measured in Hz. Prefixes are added to Hz to make it large enough to describe frequencies in manageable terms. The prefix kilo (k) means 1000. A single kilohertz (kHz), therefore, is equal to 1000 Hz. The prefix mega (M) equals 1 million and, thus, a single megahertz (MHz) is equal to 1 million Hz.
In RFID systems, two common frequencies are 125 kHz and 13.56 MHz. Many read-only proximity cards used in access control arenas operate at frequencies on or around 125 kHz. That means that the radio waves are cycling at 125,000 waves per second. That is a staggering number, yet, the 13.56 MHz technology used in many contactless smart card systems relies on waves cycling at 13,560,000 waves per second!
While these frequencies seem astoundingly high, wireless networks and satellite systems operate at frequencies that are measured in gigahertz (GHz), or 1 billion cycles per second. Frequencies above 1 GHz are commonly referred to as operating in the microwave range rather than the radio frequency range–though this is not a delineation that is recognized universally.
So we see that it is the rate of the radio waves that determines frequency. And we see how this frequency is measured in Hz, kHz, MHz, and GHz. But what does this really mean? Why does a 900 MHz cordless telephone operate at 900 MHz while a 13.56 MHz fare collection card operates at 13.56 MHz?
In a RF system, there are two required components–a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter sends radio waves while the receiver catches them. In order for a transmitter and a receiver to communicate–to send and receive radio waves–they must both be ‘communicating’ at the same frequency.
To illustrate this point, think of the transmitter as a whistle and the receiver as an ear. When a normal whistle is blown, it creates noise at a frequency that the human ear can receive. But when a dog whistle is blown, the frequency of the resulting noise is above that which is audible to the human ear. A dog can hear it, but a human cannot.
In a similar manner, the frequency recognized by a transmitter and a receiver must be compatible. When a 13.56 MHz card is presented to a 13.56 MHz reader, signals are recognized. But when a 125 kHz card is presented to the 13.56 MHz reader, they cannot even begin a dialog.
So frequency measures the number of cycles per second, but the practical importance of this is that it determines whether transmitters and receivers can speak to each other. At any given moment, the air is filled with radio waves of many different frequencies. If the waves accepted by a particular receiver were not limited to certain frequencies or frequency ranges, it would be overwhelmed with incoming signals.
In the different regions of the world, governments or quasi-governmental bodies have allocated the spectrum of available frequencies to specific uses. Thus, television receivers are not likely to be bombarded by non-approved signals and RFID card systems are not likely to be jammed by unauthorized or unintended signals from other RF-generating systems.
Okay, that is enough about frequency. Next we will examine how the radio waves are used to carry meaningful data–such as card ID numbers–between transmitters and receivers. To give you a hint, it is called modulation and it is a concept that is just as important to wireless systems as the concept of frequency.
The all-important concept of freque... Radio frequency identification (RFI... Contactless 101: Modulation lets ra...
Tags: RFID and RTLS, Technology 101