A collection of articles on whatever
Jul. 26th, 2007 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Pressure Builds to Ban Plastic Bags in Stores
Pressure Builds to Ban Plastic Bags in Stores
By IAN URBINA
ANNAPOLIS, Md., July 23 — Paper or plastic? It is a question that has long dogged grocery shoppers. But the debate may soon be settled for this maritime city, where a bill aimed at protecting marine life would ban plastic bags from all retail stores.
San Francisco enacted a ban in April, but it applies just to larger groceries and drugstores. Similar measures are being considered in Boston; Baltimore; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Santa Monica, Calif.; and Steamboat Springs, Colo.
Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau and director of EarthEcho, an environmental education group in Washington, said, “Banning plastic makes sense for the simple reason that it takes more than 1,000 years to biodegrade, which means that every single piece of plastic we’ve ever manufactured is still around, and much of it ends up in the oceans killing animals.”
Ms. Cousteau attended a public meeting here on Monday to support the measure. More than 70 people attended the meeting.
The bill aims to help protect Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, whose fish and birds often die after ingesting discarded plastic bags. Stores would be required to offer paper bags made from recycled material under the bill, which goes to a final City Council vote in October.
Critics say the ban would be expensive and counterproductive.
“It sounds good until you consider the cost,” said Barry F. Scher, a spokesman for Giant Food, the grocery chain based in Landover, Md.
Instead of taking away plastic bags, which cost 2 cents each compared with 5 cents for paper bags, Annapolis should enforce its litter laws, Mr. Scher said.
He added that Giant already offered a 3-cent credit for every plastic bag that customers return to the store and that 2,200 tons of bags a year were recycled and turned into backyard decks and park benches.
Paper bags are bulkier to transport than plastic bags, Mr. Scher added, and more trucks, fuel and pollution are involved in delivering them to stores.
“That may be true,” said Alderman Sam Shropshire, the sponsor of the bill here. “But what they don’t tell you is that to make 100 billion plastic checkout bags per year, which is how many we use in the U.S. each year, it takes 12 million barrels of oil. No oil is used to produce recycled paper checkout bags.”
Jeffrie Zellmer, legislative director of the Maryland Retailers Association, said it took far less energy to recycle plastic than to recycle paper. Mr. Zellmer added that 90 percent of retailers used plastic bags and that costs could increase threefold or sixfold, eventually reaching consumers.
The commercial recycling coordinator for the City and County of San Francisco, Jack Macy, said that nationally 1 percent of all plastic checkout bags were recycled. “That means the rest end up in landfill,” Mr. Macy said. “And so the argument about plastic recycling being energy efficient isn’t a strong one.”
“Look,” Mr. Shropshire said, “in the end, the best option is for people to bring their own reusable bags. But if they fail to do that, then they can use paper bags that biodegrade faster than plastic and yet do not require any trees to be cut down.”
At the hearing, a lobbyist for Safeway called the bill un-American, saying it would take choices away from consumers.
For now, Mayor Ellen O. Moyer of Annapolis, a Democrat, remains undecided on the measure.
A spokesman for Ms. Moyer, Ray Weaver, said the city planned to distribute reusable bags to residents by the fall. To accomplish that, Mr. Weaver said, the city is considering teaming with sail makers to use excess material that teenagers in a jobs program may sew into sacks.
“I think it’s a smart move,” said Jim Martin, owner of the Free State Press, a small printing and copy store several blocks from the State Capitol, as he ordered business cards for a City Council member to be delivered in a plastic bag.
Mr. Martin said he was more than willing to phase out the plastic bags because he was tired of the litter in the streets, trees and bay.
Brian Cahalan, owner of 49 West, a coffeehouse about two blocks from the Capitol, said that regardless of whether the measure passed, the debate had compelled him to act.
Though his store uses plastic bags, Mr. Cahalan said, he plans to encourage customers to use their own bags or none by adding a fee of 25 cents for each store bag used.
“That way,” he said, “we won’t have to figure out which of these two types of litter is worse.”
An article on isolating carriers of dangerous diseases in hospitals... I'm not phrasing this right, just read it.
Swabs in Hand, Hospital Cuts Deadly Infections
By KEVIN SACK
Correction Appended
PITTSBURGH — At a veterans’ hospital here, nurses swab the nasal passages of every arriving patient to test them for drug-resistant bacteria. Those found positive are housed in isolation rooms behind red painted lines that warn workers not to approach without wearing gowns and gloves.
Every room and corridor is equipped with dispensers of foamy hand sanitizer. Blood pressure cuffs are discarded after use, and each room is assigned its own stethoscope to prevent the transfer of microorganisms. Using these and other relatively inexpensive measures, the hospital has significantly reduced the number of patients who develop deadly drug-resistant infections, long an unaddressed problem in American hospitals.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected this year that one of every 22 patients would get an infection while hospitalized — 1.7 million cases a year — and that 99,000 would die, often from what began as a routine procedure. The cost of treating the infections amounts to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
But in the past two years, a few hospitals have demonstrated that simple screening and isolation of patients, along with a relentless focus on hygiene, can reduce the number of dangerous infections. By doing so, they have fueled a national debate about whether hospitals are doing all they can to protect patients from infections, which are now linked to more deaths than diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease.
At the Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh, officials say the number of infections with a virulent bacterium known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, dropped to 17 cases last year from an average of 60 before the program started. The 40-bed surgical unit that began the experiment in 2001 has cut its infection rate by 78 percent.
Such results are not unprecedented. Several European countries, including the Netherlands and Finland, have all but eliminated MRSA through similarly aggressive campaigns. But at many American hospitals, experts say, high infection rates have been accepted as a cost of doing business. Barely a quarter of American hospitals screen patients for bacterial colonies in any methodical way, a recent survey found.
“People don’t believe it’s in their institution, and, if it is, that it’s too big to do anything about, that you just have to accept it,” said Terri Gerigk Wolf, director of VA Pittsburgh Healthcare Systems. “But we have shown you can do something about it.”
Three state legislatures, including Pennsylvania’s, broke ground this year by passing bills to require that hospitals routinely test high-risk patients, like those in intensive care units. But some infection-control experts warn that such regulations may have unintended consequences, including lesser care for patients who linger in isolation. Studies have found that patients in isolation are seen by hospital staff members half as frequently and tend to suffer more from falls, bed sores and stress.
Dr. John A. Jernigan, a MRSA expert at the disease control agency, said there was “a legitimate scientific debate” about whether hospitals should devote precious resources to screening every patient.
“It is a daunting problem, and it has been a recalcitrant problem,” Dr. Jernigan said. “We’re starting to see encouraging results. But I think we’ve been so stuck in this argument about what works and what doesn’t that people have not put programs in place.”
The problem of infections in hospitals is growing. MRSA has been a particularly troublesome pathogen since its emergence in the United States in 1968. Resistant to a number of antibiotics, it can cause infections of surgical sites, the urinary tract, the bloodstream and the lungs, leading to extended hospital stays.
MRSA can be brought into hospitals by patients who show no symptoms, and it then thrives in settings where immune systems are weakened and where incisions provide inviting ports of entry. It now accounts for 63 percent of hospital staphylococcus infections, up from 22 percent in 1995.
Johanna Sullivan Daly, a 63-year-old Brooklyn woman, developed MRSA and other infections after surgery to repair a broken shoulder in 2004, said one of her daughters, Maureen J. Daly. Ms. Daly said that just before her mother’s discharge from a Manhattan hospital, she watched a doctor remove her dressings with bare, unwashed hands.
Five days later, her mother developed intense pain and they went to have her wound examined. “When the dressing came off,” Ms. Daly said, “I saw this — I can’t describe the smell, it was the foulest thing — just this greenish fluid coming out of her arm, oozing and oozing.”
Soon after, her mother developed a high fever and then lost the ability to move her limbs, Ms. Daly said. She spent several months on a ventilator before dying in a nursing home. The hospital bill came to $600,000 for what was to have been a $40,000 procedure.
“I have lost friends to breast cancer, to AIDS, to car accidents, to things we don’t have answers to,” she said. “That I lost my mother to someone not washing their hands or cleaning a hospital room properly is disgusting to me.”
The disease control agency projected seven years ago that the added annual cost of treating infected hospital patients was nearly $5 billion. Now officials there believe it may approach $20 billion, or 1 percent of the nation’s $2 trillion health care bill. Other experts put the number above $30 billion.
As at other hospitals experimenting with rigorous controls, the Pittsburgh veterans hospital has found that preventing infection is cost-effective.
Dr. Rajiv Jain, the hospital’s chief of staff, said its infection control program cost about $500,000 a year, including test kits, salaries for three workers and the $175-per-patient expense of gloves, gowns and hand sanitizer. But the hospital, which has a $431 million budget, realized a net savings of nearly $900,000 when the number of infected patients fell, Dr. Jain said.
The V.A. began phasing in the program at each of its 140 acute-care centers in March.
Dr. Richard P. Shannon, who championed a program to reduce catheter infections at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, was able to show administrators that the average infection cost the hospital $27,000. He demonstrated that reimbursement payments for weeks of extended treatment were not keeping pace with actual costs. “I think it was assumed that hospitals didn’t mind treating these infections because they were getting paid for it,” Dr. Shannon said.
A major emphasis at the Pittsburgh hospitals has been hand hygiene. Studies have consistently shown that busy hospital workers disregard basic standards more than half the time. At the veterans hospital, where nurses have taken to pushing elevator buttons with their knuckles, annual spending on hand cleaner has doubled.
State governments, which reimburse hospitals for infection-related costs through Medicaid and other insurance programs, have taken notice and are beginning to impose new mandates.
Eighteen states now require hospitals to publish their infection rates. Last month, legislatures in New Jersey and Illinois approved bills that would make those states the first to require hospitals to screen all intensive-care patients for MRSA.
Here in Pennsylvania, Gov. Edward G. Rendell recently signed a bill requiring MRSA screening of certain high-risk patients. Mr. Rendell did not, however, win legislative approval to end state reimbursements to hospitals for the treatment of infections and to test all hospital patients for drug-resistant bacteria.
It is the screening and isolation of patients that draws the most debate. Screening presents an upfront cost for hospitals, and administrators worry that keeping patients in isolation will further clog emergency rooms and reduce the quality of care. Some researchers believe that improving hygiene and surgical practices alone may be equally effective.
In guidelines released last year, the centers recommended that other precautions be taken first and that hospitals resort to screening high-risk patients if they cannot otherwise reduce their infection rates. The guidelines are endorsed by the American Hospital Association, which believes that hospitals must be able to tailor plans to varying needs.
Others do not see the issue that way. Betsy McCaughey, who became a hospital infection crusader after serving as the New York lieutenant governor, said it was paradoxical that the centers encourage hospital screening for H.I.V. but not for bacterial infections, which are associated with seven times as many deaths. Ms. McCaughey said the agency “is largely to blame” for the failure to contain drug-resistant organisms.
“Their lax guidelines,” she said, “have given hospitals an excuse to do too little.”
Correction: July 28, 2007
A chart yesterday about hospital-acquired infections at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh omitted a label describing the data. The chart showed a substantial decline in the infection rate in a 40-bed surgical unit at the hospital — not in the hospital as a whole.
On children's birthdays where presents are eschewed in favor of charity
Cake, but No Presents, Please
By TINA KELLEY
CRANFORD, N.J., July 22 — At Gavin Brown’s 4th birthday party, the usual detritus lined the edges of the backyard: sippy cups, sunscreen, water shoes, stuffed animals. There were 44 guests and as many buns on the grill, in addition to an elaborate ice cream cake adorned with a fire truck. For the adults, there was sangria and savory corn salsa.
But the only gift in sight was a little red Matchbox hook and ladder rig. All the bounty from Gavin’s birthday — $240 in checks and cash collected in a red box next to a plastic fire helmet — went to the Cranford Fire Department.
“Thanks, buddy,” Lt. Frank Genova said on Sunday when Gavin handed over the loot, after which he took a tour of the pumper truck and tried on a real captain’s helmet. With the party proceeds, the birthday boy suggested, the firefighters “can buy new fire trucks, new equipment, and more food.”
In part to teach philanthropy and altruism, and in part as a defense against swarms of random plastic objects destined to clutter every square foot of their living space, a number of families are experimenting with gift-free birthday parties, suggesting that guests donate money or specified items to the charity of the child’s choice instead.
Witness, perhaps, the first hyper-parenting trend that does not reek of wanton excess.
Grown-ups who have everything have long politely requested “presence” instead of presents for later-in-life birthdays and anniversaries, and some couples have recently shunned the wedding registry, instead directing loved ones to donate.
Now, the trickle-down effect: Annie Knapp of Milford, N.J., collected $675 at her Sweet 16 in April for Heifer International, which provides livestock to poor families. Zachary Greene, who lives in the Chicago suburbs, turned 8 in November surrounded by books that his friends brought for a local reading program. And in Randolph, N.J., 6-year-old Jack Knapp (no relation to Annie) even got his grandparents to lug a 50-pound bag of kibble to his party for the local animal shelter.
Maggie Jones, director of Children for Children, a New York nonprofit, said that in the last year the number of participants in the group’s Celebrations program — which encourages “a tradition of giving” around milestones like birthdays, bar or bat mitzvahs and graduations — has more than doubled to 100-plus families. Ms. Jones said that she knew of four private schools in New York City that had made such parties the standard.
Davida Isaacson, a principal with Myerberg Shain & Associates, a fund-raising consulting firm, says that no-gift parties are one prong of a growing movement to involve even the youngest children in philanthropy. Some parents match children’s charitable donations dollar for dollar, she said, while others invite them to research causes and help decide which ones to support.
She recalled one wealthy couple telling their son when he was 18 or 19 that they were dividing their estate as if they had four children instead of three, the fourth being charity.
“The kid stormed out of the room,” she said. “And he came back a few minutes later and said, ‘You know, that’s really neat.’ ”
The gift-free party does have its detractors, most eloquent among them Judith Martin, who writes the Miss Manners syndicated column.
“People seem to forget that you can’t spend other people’s money, even for a good cause,” Ms. Martin said in a phone interview. “Do you really want the birthday child to grow up hating philanthropy because it’s done him out of his birthday presents?”
While she sympathizes with parents’ desire to avoid materialistic feeding frenzies, Ms. Martin advised: “They’d be much better off getting together with the other parents and agreeing on very small presents.” Besides, she noted, children learn valuable lessons giving gifts they would rather keep for themselves — and saying thank you even for things they do not like.
Toyi Ward, president of Favor Party Planning in Somerset, N.J., recalled a slightly traumatic no-gift party in which the birthday boy watched guests pile up items destined for underprivileged children through the group Toys for Tots. “The birthday child was 4, and it was a little difficult, because there were some toys in there he might have really wanted,” Ms. Ward recalled.
Catherine Racette gave the thumbs-down to a recent no-gifts party she attended (bringing a gift anyhow). “I mean, it’s the kid’s birthday,” she wrote on a community bulletin board, Maplewoodonline.com. “Let them get gifts — that’s kind of the fun of being a kid.”
Bill Doherty, who helped create Birthdays Without Pressure, a Web site opposed to expensive, competitive parties in the Nickelodeon set, said the no-gift notion was “great, especially if the child is involved in choosing the charity,” but cautioned that “it could become another source of competition.”
“Kind of like rich people and their gala charity balls,” he explained, “so people would ask, ‘How much did your child raise for charity?’ ”
In Randolph, N.J., Jack Knapp’s family has a five-year tradition of redirecting birthday benefits: They have collected dress-up clothes for a girl with cancer, items for the pediatric emergency room at Morristown Memorial Hospital and groceries for the Interfaith Food Pantry.
After seeing her two older siblings treated like heroes when they dropped off their haul, the youngest, Emily, recently told her mother, Mindy Knapp, that she wants gifts for her 4th birthday next month to go to the neonatal unit. Not that she can define neonatal.
“She said, ‘Could we give stuff to the babies at the hospital?’ Mrs. Knapp said. “Now they wouldn’t think of doing it any other way.”
Mrs. Knapp said her children’s grandparents “always support whatever cause the kids are into,” but also insist on giving them gifts, noting, “Otherwise it would be like a scene from ‘Mommie Dearest.’ ” As for skeptics, Mrs. Knapp said, “once they come to the party and see how the kids are all so excited, every single parent who expressed any doubt to me has said later, ‘I take it back; it’s a beautiful thing you’re teaching your kids.’ ”
Last year, Jack went to a party for twins where there was what Mrs. Knapp described as “a mountain of birthday presents.”
“He went up to them and said, ‘Wow, who’s getting all that stuff?’ ” she recalled. “It never occurred to him that they were bringing them home.”
Here at Gavin’s party, the 20 children did not bring gifts, but they left with them: organic cotton Ecobags filled with fruit leathers, likewise organic, and wooden toys.
Gavin’s mother, Shelley Brown, said she began talking with her son about the possibility of a present-free party several months ago. “We’re trying to raise him in a way of not being too much of a consumer,” said Ms. Brown, 35, who carried his year-old brother, Griffin, in a sling most of the afternoon. “He definitely has enough things.”
Kyle Miller of Cranford, whose 2-year-old daughter, Cady, attended the party, appreciated the life lesson that came with it. “We’re incredibly fortunate — we have an abundance of material things — but maybe that’s not the message we want to give our kids,” she said. “We want a different message.”
Another guest, Glenn Johnson, admitted to being a bit nervous about the prospect of showing up at a child’s party empty-handed (though he did bring $20 for the firefighters). So a model airplane, neatly wrapped, sat outside in his Toyota, just in case.
On emoticons
(-: Just Between You and Me ;-)
By ALEX WILLIAMS
THERE are many ways to console someone when a multimillion-dollar business deal falls through. Firing off a “tough break” e-mail message punctuated by a frown-face emoticon is not one of them.
More than once, Alexis Feldman, the director of the Feldman Realty Group, a commercial real estate company in Manhattan, has been moving forward on a major deal when, she said, “at the 23rd hour, I get an e-mail from the broker saying, ‘Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn’t make the big bucks’ — then there’s a frown face!”
“I mean, it’s ludicrous,” said Ms. Feldman, 25. “I’m not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.”
Emoticons, she added, should be reserved for use by “naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled.”
If only.
Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of computer-geek shorthand, emoticons — an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation — are now ubiquitous.
No longer are they simply the province of the generation that has no memory of record albums, $25 jeans or a world without Nicole Richie. These Starburst-sweet hieroglyphs, arguably as dignified as dotting one’s I’s with kitten faces, have conquered new landscape in the lives of adults, as more of our daily communication shifts from the spoken word to text. Applied appropriately, users say, emoticons can no longer be dismissed as juvenile, because they offer a degree of insurance for a variety of adult social interactions, and help avoid serious miscommunications.
“In a perfect world, we would have time to compose e-mails that made it clear through our language that we are being cheerful and friendly, but we’re doing these things hundreds of times a day under pressure,” said Will Schwalbe, an author of “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” (Knopf, 2007), written with David Shipley, the deputy editorial page editor at The New York Times.
Mr. Schwalbe said that he has seen a proliferation of emoticon use by adults in delicate and significant communications. “People who started using them ironically are now using them regularly,” he said. “It’s really in the last couple of years that the emoticon has come of age.”
In fact, a recent Yahoo study indicates that the days in which emoticons were considered as unacceptably casual as flip-flops at work are over.
In a survey of 40,000 users of the Yahoo Messenger instant-message program, 52 percent of the respondents were older than 30, and among those, 55 percent said they use emoticons every day. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said they first discovered emoticons within the last five years.
Christopher P. Michel, the founder and chairman of Military.com, a military and veteran affairs Web site, said that usage of emoticons has grown “hyper-pervasive” in his communiques even with admirals at the Pentagon, where they provide a certain cover for high-ranking leaders to comment on sensitive matters.
“A wink says quite a lot,” said Mr. Michel, a former lieutenant commander in the Navy. “An admiral could say a wink means a thousand different things — but I know what it means. It’s a kind of code.”
THERE was a time, of course, that emoticons seemed intrinsically youthful. Just as children shared the special ability to see Big Bird’s magical friend Snuffleupagus on “Sesame Street” — a character who was long supposed to be invisible to adults — they seemed to easily recognize that the characters 3:-o represented a cow, or that @>--> -- symbolized a rose or that ~(_8^(I) stood for Homer Simpson.
But after 25 years of use, emoticons have started to jump off the page and into our spoken language. Even grown men on Wall Street, for example, will weave the term “QQ” (referring to an emoticon that symbolizes two eyes crying) into conversation as a sarcastic way of saying “boo hoo.”
Kristina Grish, author of “The Joy of Text: Mating, Dating and Techno-relating” (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2006), said that she grew so accustomed to making the :-P symbol (a tongue hanging out) in instant messages at work that it once accidentally popped up, in three dimensions, on a date.
“When the waiter told us the specials,” she recalled in an e-mail message, “I made that face — not on purpose of course — because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said, ‘Did you just make an IM face?’ ”
Though we think of emoticons, or “smileys,” as an Internet-era phenomenon, their earliest ancestors were created on typewriters. In 1912, the writer Ambrose Bierce proposed a new punctuation device called a “snigger point,” a smiling face represented by \__/!, to connote jocularity.
The first commonly acknowledged use of the contemporary emoticon was in 1982. Scott Fahlman, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was linked to an electronic university bulletin board where computer enthusiasts posted opinions on matters as divisive as abortion and mundane as campus parking.
In one thread, a wisecrack about campus elevators was misinterpreted by some as a safety warning, so Dr. Fahlman suggested using :-) as a way to indicate jokes and :-( for remarks to be taken seriously (the latter quickly morphed into a signifier of displeasure).
To Dr. Fahlman’s surprise, his “joke markers” spread quickly on the board. Within a month, he heard, some peers out in Stanford had picked them up, and soon after, techies at Xerox were circulating a list of strikingly sophisticated new emoticons.
He never received a trademark for his invention, and never made a dime from it.
“This is just my little gift to the world,” said Dr. Fahlman, now 59 and still doing computer-science research at Carnegie Mellon. “If there had been a way to charge a nickel each time, no one would have used it,” Dr. Fahlman explained. “It had to be free.”
In classic Internet fashion, an application born of technological necessity soon flowered in unimagined directions. Soon there were emoticons for historical figures, like Ronald Reagan: 7:^]
And for bearded, sunglasses-wearing celebrities, like certain members of the band ZZ Top: B-)===>
Before long, emoticons had accomplished what Esperanto never could: establish a universal lingua franca. The Japanese, no strangers to the marketing of cute, devised a smiley which could be read without turning one’s head sideways: {*_*}
But the fundamental whimsy of the form belies the more serious usage of emoticons by adults now. In the early stages of dating, where text communication often replaces the telephone, the emoticon can be a Trojan horse, a device to sneak a greater level of intimacy into otherwise benign communiques.
When exchanging e-mail messages with a younger prospective girlfriend, a suitor from the generation that still used typewriters in college can, with a few well-placed smileys, bridge the age gap, softening the masculine edge to his humor, and making the pursuing male seem less aggressively predatory.
Indeed, people naturally look for signals of intimacy and trust in the human face — even a crude representation of one, said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. This tendency is a result of countless generations of evolution, he said, during which people relied on the subtle contortions of facial muscles as life-or-death signals to survive, cooperate and reproduce.
When infants are given a series of geometrical patterns, Dr. Keltner said, their eyes will naturally be drawn to those that seem to represent a face. “So what these emoticons are capturing,” he said, “is this platonic, idealized form of an evolutionary device.”
Some members of the species seem more drawn to these particular face icons than others. In the Yahoo poll, 82 percent of respondents considered women more likely than men to use emoticons. For men who have a hard time using terms of tenderness, particularly “love,” emoticons can convey the affection that they are otherwise afraid to express — the graphical equivalent of a dozen roses from a bodega, with roughly the same level of effectiveness.
“I have one friend in L.A. who IMs me ‘Hey sexy :)’ every morning,” Ilana Arazie, the author of the videoblog Downtowndiary.com, said in an e-mail message. “It’s his way of flirting and maybe seeing how far he can take our relationship. But no, I’m not getting on a plane to L.A. anytime soon.”
But as with any technology, nothing stands still.
Just as ring tones lost their rustic charm a few years ago when they moved past a simple monophonic melody, emoticons have lost a bit of their soul by becoming animated and corporate, aficionados say.
Many programs for e-mail, instant messages and word-processing are now programmed to change text emoticons into cartoon smileys, some of which bear a striking resemblance to the frenetically chipper candy-men of the M&M ads. The Web site Lolfamily.com allows users to create three-dimensional super-emoticons that gyrate, wink and wiggle with almost Pixar-like complexity.
Like indie rock fans who squeal when their favorite underground band signs with a major label, purists see the dawn of elaborate graphics as the end of the emoticons’ golden age.
“I hate image emoticons, and turn them off in every application I use in which I can do so,” said one emoticon traditionalist who gave his name only as Elliott, in a post on Fluther.com, an Internet question-and-answer site. To trick the autocorrect functions imbedded in many applications, he types his emoticons backwards, so :-) becomes (-: , and neither he nor the recipient of the message has to stare down “the yellow abomination.”
But such gestures of defiance seem to barely register, given the generally increasing embrace of emoticons.
Amy Cohen, an author and a former dating columnist for The New York Observer, joked that she could “tell the whole story of a relationship in emoticons: Happy, happy, happy, sad, happy, sad, sad.”
That would be :) , :) , :) , :( , :) , :( , :( , of course.
Pressure Builds to Ban Plastic Bags in Stores
By IAN URBINA
ANNAPOLIS, Md., July 23 — Paper or plastic? It is a question that has long dogged grocery shoppers. But the debate may soon be settled for this maritime city, where a bill aimed at protecting marine life would ban plastic bags from all retail stores.
San Francisco enacted a ban in April, but it applies just to larger groceries and drugstores. Similar measures are being considered in Boston; Baltimore; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Santa Monica, Calif.; and Steamboat Springs, Colo.
Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau and director of EarthEcho, an environmental education group in Washington, said, “Banning plastic makes sense for the simple reason that it takes more than 1,000 years to biodegrade, which means that every single piece of plastic we’ve ever manufactured is still around, and much of it ends up in the oceans killing animals.”
Ms. Cousteau attended a public meeting here on Monday to support the measure. More than 70 people attended the meeting.
The bill aims to help protect Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, whose fish and birds often die after ingesting discarded plastic bags. Stores would be required to offer paper bags made from recycled material under the bill, which goes to a final City Council vote in October.
Critics say the ban would be expensive and counterproductive.
“It sounds good until you consider the cost,” said Barry F. Scher, a spokesman for Giant Food, the grocery chain based in Landover, Md.
Instead of taking away plastic bags, which cost 2 cents each compared with 5 cents for paper bags, Annapolis should enforce its litter laws, Mr. Scher said.
He added that Giant already offered a 3-cent credit for every plastic bag that customers return to the store and that 2,200 tons of bags a year were recycled and turned into backyard decks and park benches.
Paper bags are bulkier to transport than plastic bags, Mr. Scher added, and more trucks, fuel and pollution are involved in delivering them to stores.
“That may be true,” said Alderman Sam Shropshire, the sponsor of the bill here. “But what they don’t tell you is that to make 100 billion plastic checkout bags per year, which is how many we use in the U.S. each year, it takes 12 million barrels of oil. No oil is used to produce recycled paper checkout bags.”
Jeffrie Zellmer, legislative director of the Maryland Retailers Association, said it took far less energy to recycle plastic than to recycle paper. Mr. Zellmer added that 90 percent of retailers used plastic bags and that costs could increase threefold or sixfold, eventually reaching consumers.
The commercial recycling coordinator for the City and County of San Francisco, Jack Macy, said that nationally 1 percent of all plastic checkout bags were recycled. “That means the rest end up in landfill,” Mr. Macy said. “And so the argument about plastic recycling being energy efficient isn’t a strong one.”
“Look,” Mr. Shropshire said, “in the end, the best option is for people to bring their own reusable bags. But if they fail to do that, then they can use paper bags that biodegrade faster than plastic and yet do not require any trees to be cut down.”
At the hearing, a lobbyist for Safeway called the bill un-American, saying it would take choices away from consumers.
For now, Mayor Ellen O. Moyer of Annapolis, a Democrat, remains undecided on the measure.
A spokesman for Ms. Moyer, Ray Weaver, said the city planned to distribute reusable bags to residents by the fall. To accomplish that, Mr. Weaver said, the city is considering teaming with sail makers to use excess material that teenagers in a jobs program may sew into sacks.
“I think it’s a smart move,” said Jim Martin, owner of the Free State Press, a small printing and copy store several blocks from the State Capitol, as he ordered business cards for a City Council member to be delivered in a plastic bag.
Mr. Martin said he was more than willing to phase out the plastic bags because he was tired of the litter in the streets, trees and bay.
Brian Cahalan, owner of 49 West, a coffeehouse about two blocks from the Capitol, said that regardless of whether the measure passed, the debate had compelled him to act.
Though his store uses plastic bags, Mr. Cahalan said, he plans to encourage customers to use their own bags or none by adding a fee of 25 cents for each store bag used.
“That way,” he said, “we won’t have to figure out which of these two types of litter is worse.”
An article on isolating carriers of dangerous diseases in hospitals... I'm not phrasing this right, just read it.
Swabs in Hand, Hospital Cuts Deadly Infections
By KEVIN SACK
Correction Appended
PITTSBURGH — At a veterans’ hospital here, nurses swab the nasal passages of every arriving patient to test them for drug-resistant bacteria. Those found positive are housed in isolation rooms behind red painted lines that warn workers not to approach without wearing gowns and gloves.
Every room and corridor is equipped with dispensers of foamy hand sanitizer. Blood pressure cuffs are discarded after use, and each room is assigned its own stethoscope to prevent the transfer of microorganisms. Using these and other relatively inexpensive measures, the hospital has significantly reduced the number of patients who develop deadly drug-resistant infections, long an unaddressed problem in American hospitals.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected this year that one of every 22 patients would get an infection while hospitalized — 1.7 million cases a year — and that 99,000 would die, often from what began as a routine procedure. The cost of treating the infections amounts to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
But in the past two years, a few hospitals have demonstrated that simple screening and isolation of patients, along with a relentless focus on hygiene, can reduce the number of dangerous infections. By doing so, they have fueled a national debate about whether hospitals are doing all they can to protect patients from infections, which are now linked to more deaths than diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease.
At the Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh, officials say the number of infections with a virulent bacterium known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, dropped to 17 cases last year from an average of 60 before the program started. The 40-bed surgical unit that began the experiment in 2001 has cut its infection rate by 78 percent.
Such results are not unprecedented. Several European countries, including the Netherlands and Finland, have all but eliminated MRSA through similarly aggressive campaigns. But at many American hospitals, experts say, high infection rates have been accepted as a cost of doing business. Barely a quarter of American hospitals screen patients for bacterial colonies in any methodical way, a recent survey found.
“People don’t believe it’s in their institution, and, if it is, that it’s too big to do anything about, that you just have to accept it,” said Terri Gerigk Wolf, director of VA Pittsburgh Healthcare Systems. “But we have shown you can do something about it.”
Three state legislatures, including Pennsylvania’s, broke ground this year by passing bills to require that hospitals routinely test high-risk patients, like those in intensive care units. But some infection-control experts warn that such regulations may have unintended consequences, including lesser care for patients who linger in isolation. Studies have found that patients in isolation are seen by hospital staff members half as frequently and tend to suffer more from falls, bed sores and stress.
Dr. John A. Jernigan, a MRSA expert at the disease control agency, said there was “a legitimate scientific debate” about whether hospitals should devote precious resources to screening every patient.
“It is a daunting problem, and it has been a recalcitrant problem,” Dr. Jernigan said. “We’re starting to see encouraging results. But I think we’ve been so stuck in this argument about what works and what doesn’t that people have not put programs in place.”
The problem of infections in hospitals is growing. MRSA has been a particularly troublesome pathogen since its emergence in the United States in 1968. Resistant to a number of antibiotics, it can cause infections of surgical sites, the urinary tract, the bloodstream and the lungs, leading to extended hospital stays.
MRSA can be brought into hospitals by patients who show no symptoms, and it then thrives in settings where immune systems are weakened and where incisions provide inviting ports of entry. It now accounts for 63 percent of hospital staphylococcus infections, up from 22 percent in 1995.
Johanna Sullivan Daly, a 63-year-old Brooklyn woman, developed MRSA and other infections after surgery to repair a broken shoulder in 2004, said one of her daughters, Maureen J. Daly. Ms. Daly said that just before her mother’s discharge from a Manhattan hospital, she watched a doctor remove her dressings with bare, unwashed hands.
Five days later, her mother developed intense pain and they went to have her wound examined. “When the dressing came off,” Ms. Daly said, “I saw this — I can’t describe the smell, it was the foulest thing — just this greenish fluid coming out of her arm, oozing and oozing.”
Soon after, her mother developed a high fever and then lost the ability to move her limbs, Ms. Daly said. She spent several months on a ventilator before dying in a nursing home. The hospital bill came to $600,000 for what was to have been a $40,000 procedure.
“I have lost friends to breast cancer, to AIDS, to car accidents, to things we don’t have answers to,” she said. “That I lost my mother to someone not washing their hands or cleaning a hospital room properly is disgusting to me.”
The disease control agency projected seven years ago that the added annual cost of treating infected hospital patients was nearly $5 billion. Now officials there believe it may approach $20 billion, or 1 percent of the nation’s $2 trillion health care bill. Other experts put the number above $30 billion.
As at other hospitals experimenting with rigorous controls, the Pittsburgh veterans hospital has found that preventing infection is cost-effective.
Dr. Rajiv Jain, the hospital’s chief of staff, said its infection control program cost about $500,000 a year, including test kits, salaries for three workers and the $175-per-patient expense of gloves, gowns and hand sanitizer. But the hospital, which has a $431 million budget, realized a net savings of nearly $900,000 when the number of infected patients fell, Dr. Jain said.
The V.A. began phasing in the program at each of its 140 acute-care centers in March.
Dr. Richard P. Shannon, who championed a program to reduce catheter infections at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, was able to show administrators that the average infection cost the hospital $27,000. He demonstrated that reimbursement payments for weeks of extended treatment were not keeping pace with actual costs. “I think it was assumed that hospitals didn’t mind treating these infections because they were getting paid for it,” Dr. Shannon said.
A major emphasis at the Pittsburgh hospitals has been hand hygiene. Studies have consistently shown that busy hospital workers disregard basic standards more than half the time. At the veterans hospital, where nurses have taken to pushing elevator buttons with their knuckles, annual spending on hand cleaner has doubled.
State governments, which reimburse hospitals for infection-related costs through Medicaid and other insurance programs, have taken notice and are beginning to impose new mandates.
Eighteen states now require hospitals to publish their infection rates. Last month, legislatures in New Jersey and Illinois approved bills that would make those states the first to require hospitals to screen all intensive-care patients for MRSA.
Here in Pennsylvania, Gov. Edward G. Rendell recently signed a bill requiring MRSA screening of certain high-risk patients. Mr. Rendell did not, however, win legislative approval to end state reimbursements to hospitals for the treatment of infections and to test all hospital patients for drug-resistant bacteria.
It is the screening and isolation of patients that draws the most debate. Screening presents an upfront cost for hospitals, and administrators worry that keeping patients in isolation will further clog emergency rooms and reduce the quality of care. Some researchers believe that improving hygiene and surgical practices alone may be equally effective.
In guidelines released last year, the centers recommended that other precautions be taken first and that hospitals resort to screening high-risk patients if they cannot otherwise reduce their infection rates. The guidelines are endorsed by the American Hospital Association, which believes that hospitals must be able to tailor plans to varying needs.
Others do not see the issue that way. Betsy McCaughey, who became a hospital infection crusader after serving as the New York lieutenant governor, said it was paradoxical that the centers encourage hospital screening for H.I.V. but not for bacterial infections, which are associated with seven times as many deaths. Ms. McCaughey said the agency “is largely to blame” for the failure to contain drug-resistant organisms.
“Their lax guidelines,” she said, “have given hospitals an excuse to do too little.”
Correction: July 28, 2007
A chart yesterday about hospital-acquired infections at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh omitted a label describing the data. The chart showed a substantial decline in the infection rate in a 40-bed surgical unit at the hospital — not in the hospital as a whole.
On children's birthdays where presents are eschewed in favor of charity
Cake, but No Presents, Please
By TINA KELLEY
CRANFORD, N.J., July 22 — At Gavin Brown’s 4th birthday party, the usual detritus lined the edges of the backyard: sippy cups, sunscreen, water shoes, stuffed animals. There were 44 guests and as many buns on the grill, in addition to an elaborate ice cream cake adorned with a fire truck. For the adults, there was sangria and savory corn salsa.
But the only gift in sight was a little red Matchbox hook and ladder rig. All the bounty from Gavin’s birthday — $240 in checks and cash collected in a red box next to a plastic fire helmet — went to the Cranford Fire Department.
“Thanks, buddy,” Lt. Frank Genova said on Sunday when Gavin handed over the loot, after which he took a tour of the pumper truck and tried on a real captain’s helmet. With the party proceeds, the birthday boy suggested, the firefighters “can buy new fire trucks, new equipment, and more food.”
In part to teach philanthropy and altruism, and in part as a defense against swarms of random plastic objects destined to clutter every square foot of their living space, a number of families are experimenting with gift-free birthday parties, suggesting that guests donate money or specified items to the charity of the child’s choice instead.
Witness, perhaps, the first hyper-parenting trend that does not reek of wanton excess.
Grown-ups who have everything have long politely requested “presence” instead of presents for later-in-life birthdays and anniversaries, and some couples have recently shunned the wedding registry, instead directing loved ones to donate.
Now, the trickle-down effect: Annie Knapp of Milford, N.J., collected $675 at her Sweet 16 in April for Heifer International, which provides livestock to poor families. Zachary Greene, who lives in the Chicago suburbs, turned 8 in November surrounded by books that his friends brought for a local reading program. And in Randolph, N.J., 6-year-old Jack Knapp (no relation to Annie) even got his grandparents to lug a 50-pound bag of kibble to his party for the local animal shelter.
Maggie Jones, director of Children for Children, a New York nonprofit, said that in the last year the number of participants in the group’s Celebrations program — which encourages “a tradition of giving” around milestones like birthdays, bar or bat mitzvahs and graduations — has more than doubled to 100-plus families. Ms. Jones said that she knew of four private schools in New York City that had made such parties the standard.
Davida Isaacson, a principal with Myerberg Shain & Associates, a fund-raising consulting firm, says that no-gift parties are one prong of a growing movement to involve even the youngest children in philanthropy. Some parents match children’s charitable donations dollar for dollar, she said, while others invite them to research causes and help decide which ones to support.
She recalled one wealthy couple telling their son when he was 18 or 19 that they were dividing their estate as if they had four children instead of three, the fourth being charity.
“The kid stormed out of the room,” she said. “And he came back a few minutes later and said, ‘You know, that’s really neat.’ ”
The gift-free party does have its detractors, most eloquent among them Judith Martin, who writes the Miss Manners syndicated column.
“People seem to forget that you can’t spend other people’s money, even for a good cause,” Ms. Martin said in a phone interview. “Do you really want the birthday child to grow up hating philanthropy because it’s done him out of his birthday presents?”
While she sympathizes with parents’ desire to avoid materialistic feeding frenzies, Ms. Martin advised: “They’d be much better off getting together with the other parents and agreeing on very small presents.” Besides, she noted, children learn valuable lessons giving gifts they would rather keep for themselves — and saying thank you even for things they do not like.
Toyi Ward, president of Favor Party Planning in Somerset, N.J., recalled a slightly traumatic no-gift party in which the birthday boy watched guests pile up items destined for underprivileged children through the group Toys for Tots. “The birthday child was 4, and it was a little difficult, because there were some toys in there he might have really wanted,” Ms. Ward recalled.
Catherine Racette gave the thumbs-down to a recent no-gifts party she attended (bringing a gift anyhow). “I mean, it’s the kid’s birthday,” she wrote on a community bulletin board, Maplewoodonline.com. “Let them get gifts — that’s kind of the fun of being a kid.”
Bill Doherty, who helped create Birthdays Without Pressure, a Web site opposed to expensive, competitive parties in the Nickelodeon set, said the no-gift notion was “great, especially if the child is involved in choosing the charity,” but cautioned that “it could become another source of competition.”
“Kind of like rich people and their gala charity balls,” he explained, “so people would ask, ‘How much did your child raise for charity?’ ”
In Randolph, N.J., Jack Knapp’s family has a five-year tradition of redirecting birthday benefits: They have collected dress-up clothes for a girl with cancer, items for the pediatric emergency room at Morristown Memorial Hospital and groceries for the Interfaith Food Pantry.
After seeing her two older siblings treated like heroes when they dropped off their haul, the youngest, Emily, recently told her mother, Mindy Knapp, that she wants gifts for her 4th birthday next month to go to the neonatal unit. Not that she can define neonatal.
“She said, ‘Could we give stuff to the babies at the hospital?’ Mrs. Knapp said. “Now they wouldn’t think of doing it any other way.”
Mrs. Knapp said her children’s grandparents “always support whatever cause the kids are into,” but also insist on giving them gifts, noting, “Otherwise it would be like a scene from ‘Mommie Dearest.’ ” As for skeptics, Mrs. Knapp said, “once they come to the party and see how the kids are all so excited, every single parent who expressed any doubt to me has said later, ‘I take it back; it’s a beautiful thing you’re teaching your kids.’ ”
Last year, Jack went to a party for twins where there was what Mrs. Knapp described as “a mountain of birthday presents.”
“He went up to them and said, ‘Wow, who’s getting all that stuff?’ ” she recalled. “It never occurred to him that they were bringing them home.”
Here at Gavin’s party, the 20 children did not bring gifts, but they left with them: organic cotton Ecobags filled with fruit leathers, likewise organic, and wooden toys.
Gavin’s mother, Shelley Brown, said she began talking with her son about the possibility of a present-free party several months ago. “We’re trying to raise him in a way of not being too much of a consumer,” said Ms. Brown, 35, who carried his year-old brother, Griffin, in a sling most of the afternoon. “He definitely has enough things.”
Kyle Miller of Cranford, whose 2-year-old daughter, Cady, attended the party, appreciated the life lesson that came with it. “We’re incredibly fortunate — we have an abundance of material things — but maybe that’s not the message we want to give our kids,” she said. “We want a different message.”
Another guest, Glenn Johnson, admitted to being a bit nervous about the prospect of showing up at a child’s party empty-handed (though he did bring $20 for the firefighters). So a model airplane, neatly wrapped, sat outside in his Toyota, just in case.
On emoticons
(-: Just Between You and Me ;-)
By ALEX WILLIAMS
THERE are many ways to console someone when a multimillion-dollar business deal falls through. Firing off a “tough break” e-mail message punctuated by a frown-face emoticon is not one of them.
More than once, Alexis Feldman, the director of the Feldman Realty Group, a commercial real estate company in Manhattan, has been moving forward on a major deal when, she said, “at the 23rd hour, I get an e-mail from the broker saying, ‘Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn’t make the big bucks’ — then there’s a frown face!”
“I mean, it’s ludicrous,” said Ms. Feldman, 25. “I’m not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.”
Emoticons, she added, should be reserved for use by “naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled.”
If only.
Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of computer-geek shorthand, emoticons — an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation — are now ubiquitous.
No longer are they simply the province of the generation that has no memory of record albums, $25 jeans or a world without Nicole Richie. These Starburst-sweet hieroglyphs, arguably as dignified as dotting one’s I’s with kitten faces, have conquered new landscape in the lives of adults, as more of our daily communication shifts from the spoken word to text. Applied appropriately, users say, emoticons can no longer be dismissed as juvenile, because they offer a degree of insurance for a variety of adult social interactions, and help avoid serious miscommunications.
“In a perfect world, we would have time to compose e-mails that made it clear through our language that we are being cheerful and friendly, but we’re doing these things hundreds of times a day under pressure,” said Will Schwalbe, an author of “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” (Knopf, 2007), written with David Shipley, the deputy editorial page editor at The New York Times.
Mr. Schwalbe said that he has seen a proliferation of emoticon use by adults in delicate and significant communications. “People who started using them ironically are now using them regularly,” he said. “It’s really in the last couple of years that the emoticon has come of age.”
In fact, a recent Yahoo study indicates that the days in which emoticons were considered as unacceptably casual as flip-flops at work are over.
In a survey of 40,000 users of the Yahoo Messenger instant-message program, 52 percent of the respondents were older than 30, and among those, 55 percent said they use emoticons every day. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said they first discovered emoticons within the last five years.
Christopher P. Michel, the founder and chairman of Military.com, a military and veteran affairs Web site, said that usage of emoticons has grown “hyper-pervasive” in his communiques even with admirals at the Pentagon, where they provide a certain cover for high-ranking leaders to comment on sensitive matters.
“A wink says quite a lot,” said Mr. Michel, a former lieutenant commander in the Navy. “An admiral could say a wink means a thousand different things — but I know what it means. It’s a kind of code.”
THERE was a time, of course, that emoticons seemed intrinsically youthful. Just as children shared the special ability to see Big Bird’s magical friend Snuffleupagus on “Sesame Street” — a character who was long supposed to be invisible to adults — they seemed to easily recognize that the characters 3:-o represented a cow, or that @>--> -- symbolized a rose or that ~(_8^(I) stood for Homer Simpson.
But after 25 years of use, emoticons have started to jump off the page and into our spoken language. Even grown men on Wall Street, for example, will weave the term “QQ” (referring to an emoticon that symbolizes two eyes crying) into conversation as a sarcastic way of saying “boo hoo.”
Kristina Grish, author of “The Joy of Text: Mating, Dating and Techno-relating” (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2006), said that she grew so accustomed to making the :-P symbol (a tongue hanging out) in instant messages at work that it once accidentally popped up, in three dimensions, on a date.
“When the waiter told us the specials,” she recalled in an e-mail message, “I made that face — not on purpose of course — because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said, ‘Did you just make an IM face?’ ”
Though we think of emoticons, or “smileys,” as an Internet-era phenomenon, their earliest ancestors were created on typewriters. In 1912, the writer Ambrose Bierce proposed a new punctuation device called a “snigger point,” a smiling face represented by \__/!, to connote jocularity.
The first commonly acknowledged use of the contemporary emoticon was in 1982. Scott Fahlman, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was linked to an electronic university bulletin board where computer enthusiasts posted opinions on matters as divisive as abortion and mundane as campus parking.
In one thread, a wisecrack about campus elevators was misinterpreted by some as a safety warning, so Dr. Fahlman suggested using :-) as a way to indicate jokes and :-( for remarks to be taken seriously (the latter quickly morphed into a signifier of displeasure).
To Dr. Fahlman’s surprise, his “joke markers” spread quickly on the board. Within a month, he heard, some peers out in Stanford had picked them up, and soon after, techies at Xerox were circulating a list of strikingly sophisticated new emoticons.
He never received a trademark for his invention, and never made a dime from it.
“This is just my little gift to the world,” said Dr. Fahlman, now 59 and still doing computer-science research at Carnegie Mellon. “If there had been a way to charge a nickel each time, no one would have used it,” Dr. Fahlman explained. “It had to be free.”
In classic Internet fashion, an application born of technological necessity soon flowered in unimagined directions. Soon there were emoticons for historical figures, like Ronald Reagan: 7:^]
And for bearded, sunglasses-wearing celebrities, like certain members of the band ZZ Top: B-)===>
Before long, emoticons had accomplished what Esperanto never could: establish a universal lingua franca. The Japanese, no strangers to the marketing of cute, devised a smiley which could be read without turning one’s head sideways: {*_*}
But the fundamental whimsy of the form belies the more serious usage of emoticons by adults now. In the early stages of dating, where text communication often replaces the telephone, the emoticon can be a Trojan horse, a device to sneak a greater level of intimacy into otherwise benign communiques.
When exchanging e-mail messages with a younger prospective girlfriend, a suitor from the generation that still used typewriters in college can, with a few well-placed smileys, bridge the age gap, softening the masculine edge to his humor, and making the pursuing male seem less aggressively predatory.
Indeed, people naturally look for signals of intimacy and trust in the human face — even a crude representation of one, said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. This tendency is a result of countless generations of evolution, he said, during which people relied on the subtle contortions of facial muscles as life-or-death signals to survive, cooperate and reproduce.
When infants are given a series of geometrical patterns, Dr. Keltner said, their eyes will naturally be drawn to those that seem to represent a face. “So what these emoticons are capturing,” he said, “is this platonic, idealized form of an evolutionary device.”
Some members of the species seem more drawn to these particular face icons than others. In the Yahoo poll, 82 percent of respondents considered women more likely than men to use emoticons. For men who have a hard time using terms of tenderness, particularly “love,” emoticons can convey the affection that they are otherwise afraid to express — the graphical equivalent of a dozen roses from a bodega, with roughly the same level of effectiveness.
“I have one friend in L.A. who IMs me ‘Hey sexy :)’ every morning,” Ilana Arazie, the author of the videoblog Downtowndiary.com, said in an e-mail message. “It’s his way of flirting and maybe seeing how far he can take our relationship. But no, I’m not getting on a plane to L.A. anytime soon.”
But as with any technology, nothing stands still.
Just as ring tones lost their rustic charm a few years ago when they moved past a simple monophonic melody, emoticons have lost a bit of their soul by becoming animated and corporate, aficionados say.
Many programs for e-mail, instant messages and word-processing are now programmed to change text emoticons into cartoon smileys, some of which bear a striking resemblance to the frenetically chipper candy-men of the M&M ads. The Web site Lolfamily.com allows users to create three-dimensional super-emoticons that gyrate, wink and wiggle with almost Pixar-like complexity.
Like indie rock fans who squeal when their favorite underground band signs with a major label, purists see the dawn of elaborate graphics as the end of the emoticons’ golden age.
“I hate image emoticons, and turn them off in every application I use in which I can do so,” said one emoticon traditionalist who gave his name only as Elliott, in a post on Fluther.com, an Internet question-and-answer site. To trick the autocorrect functions imbedded in many applications, he types his emoticons backwards, so :-) becomes (-: , and neither he nor the recipient of the message has to stare down “the yellow abomination.”
But such gestures of defiance seem to barely register, given the generally increasing embrace of emoticons.
Amy Cohen, an author and a former dating columnist for The New York Observer, joked that she could “tell the whole story of a relationship in emoticons: Happy, happy, happy, sad, happy, sad, sad.”
That would be :) , :) , :) , :( , :) , :( , :( , of course.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2007-07-28 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 01:26 am (UTC)Carts are a good idea. Or, if you know how much food you generally get, you can extrapolate how much it weighs. Some of the bags they sell for grocery shopping can hold some 25 pounds each. Add that to your backpack, and you actually don't need that many bags... unless you routinely carry 200 pounds of grocery home on the bus :P
no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 01:26 am (UTC)Carts are a good idea. Or, if you know how much food you generally get, you can extrapolate how much it weighs. Some of the bags they sell for grocery shopping can hold some 25 pounds each. Add that to your backpack, and you actually don't need that many bags... unless you routinely carry 200 pounds of grocery home on the bus :P
no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 02:15 am (UTC)