The Durable Human

Bike Rodeo Rustles up Kid Safety

Last time, we saw that being able to bicycle has historically given women a special sense of freedom. Well, kids like freedom, too. Not so long ago, lots of them biked or walked to school and very few were driven. Today those numbers have flipped. Now, in part because they’re getting less regular exercise, kids are prone to put on weight and develop health problems previously limited to adults.  

But a scrappy federal program called Safe Routes to School is bucking the trend. SRTS offers elementary schools no-strings-attached grants for things like adding sidewalks or educating communities about the lost art of active transportation. Last fall, SRTS gave out “mini-grants” for taking small steps to make big changes in kids’ health and happiness.

In a traffic-clogged suburb of Washington, D.C., Principal Anita Blain wanted her students to know the rules of the road before Bike to School Day (May 9), which her school system is endorsing for the first time this year. So she jumped at a parent’s idea to use a mini-grant to pay for a kid “bike rodeo,” which ponied up lots of benefits:

All year round, the Bike to School Day website has an online tool for mapping a safe biking or walking route. If your child is age ten or younger, you or another grownup will also get the benefits of riding or walking because kids that age don’t have the judgment to cross a street alone. SRTS has a great guide for teaching kids of different ages how to safely walk and bike plus information about how to apply for SRTS grants in your state.       

Now if only Congress would keep the program alive in the next federal transportation bill…

Helping Women get Comfortable with Cycling

Riding my bike to a meeting the other day, I suddenly realized how happy I felt. Being so close to nature was wonderful, amid crimson cardinals darting through the underbrush and the sound of rushing creeks, but there was more to it than that. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom.

Apparently, that’s not a new feeling for women who bike. In fact, we have enjoyed that special kind of autonomy since the late 1800s, when the bicycle was introduced in America. As suffragette Susan B. Anthony put it, having the ability to ride away from the protective atmosphere of the home “changed women.” 

Those and other fascinating tidbits from the history of women and bikes were provided by Sue Macy, author of the book Wheels of Change and keynote speaker at the first-ever National Women Cycling Forum, held this week in Washington, D.C. 

The Forum, sponsored by the Alliance for Biking and Walking and  the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals, focused on finding ways to get more women comfortable riding bikes. Cornelia Neal of the Royal Netherlands Embassy says it starts with Safety: “If bicycling is safe, people will get on their bike.” She reminded a substantial crowd that her country hasn’t always been the pinnacle of bike mobility. In fact, the Netherlands was once as car-oriented as the U.S. is today. Only after the oil crisis hit in the 1970s, did the country change its policies to make bicycle travel a top priority.

Other speakers agreed that the bicycling industry needs to center less on “mamils,” or “middle-aged men in lycra.”  The thinking was that advertisers need to depict more women cyclists, more bikes should be designed to female tastes, and bike shops should cater more to women’s needs. One panelist said shops could start by “keeping the bathrooms cleaner.”

Because women are “communal,” they also need to cycle, talk and get together, like the Birmingham, Alabama-based Magic City Cycle Chix. “Women-only groups are critical to generating momentum for women” said Veronica Davis, co-founder of #BlackWomenBike, a city of D.C. group which has grown phenomenally in less than a year, as she says“> here. 

“To get women to bike, you can’t operate in a vacuum,” added Davis, saying women need to be involved in advocacy and transportation planning, but also make connections with other government departments like health and land use. “You don’t have people biking to school because half the time schools are all the way across the city.” She advised localities to adopt a “Complete Streets” policy so road facilities provide for all modes of travel and travelers of all abilities. 

Panelists also emphasized that more girls are needed in engineering, pointing to role model Fionnuala Quinn, a D.C.-area bike advocate and engineer who helped plan the Forum.

The sendoff message was short, sweet and not so hard for women or men: “Bike as much as possible.” 

When’s the last time you rode a bike?

Toward an Author Bill of Rights

One of my most useful souvenirs is from the gift shop at Alcatraz—the notorious, now-closed penitentiary perched on a rocky island off the coast of San Francisco. The utilitarian black coffee mug is printed with these white letters: 

REGULATION 5:

YOU ARE ENTITLED TO FOOD, CLOTHING, SHELTER, AND MEDICAL ATTENTION.

ANYTHING ELSE YOU GET IS A PRIVILEGE.

Marching orders issued at Book2Camp

When I used the mug last week, it reminded me of Book²Camp, the “un-conference” I had just attended in New York.

“Book Squared” is an informal, no-cost gathering of writers, book producers and publishers. The group sets the agenda, so any attendee can suggest a topic as long as he or she is willing to lead the discussion.

About halfway through, I heard over the din: “Publishers should give a bill of rights to their authors.” 

The speaker was Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager of Digital Book World. Matt has a unique overview of the industry. He sees how publishers are hurt when an author’s brand “goes out” -  that’s an inside term for when an author decides to self-publish.

To combat the impression that “my publisher hasn’t done anything for me,” Matt says publishers should make open declarations such as: 

WE PROMISE WE WILL LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES.

WE PROMISE WE WILL TRY NEW THINGS.

WE GUARANTEE WE WILL HAVE SALES REPS PUSH YOUR BOOK TO THE INDIES.

To Matt, a “value add” would be to offer this lagniappe:

I CAN BE YOUR GLOBAL CONCIERGE.

From an author’s perspective, the road to self-publishing is getting easier, but deciding whether to take that route remains difficult. It would be reassuring if traditional publishers offered some guaranteed basics, just as it must have been for prisoners on The Rock.

Give the Gift of Less E-Mail

As we face a new year’s load of fresh information, consider this resolution: abiding by the Email Charter.  

It’s Chris Anderson’s idea. As curator of the TED thought leadership conferences, he gets a torrent of e-mail. Chris pines for the good old days when people didn’t “barge into someone’s house or office and expect, then and there, 20 minutes of thoughtful, focused attention.”  

As he warned in the Washington Post, your inbox is “a to-do list that anyone in the world can add to. If you’re not careful, it can gobble up most of your week.” Or someone else’s.  

Here’s an example. Say I get an e-mail about a grant which could benefit my non-profit. I begin reading the lengthy attachment and soon my attention wanes. What do I do next? Forward it on to someone else, with the note: “Do you think we should bring this up at our meeting next week?”

In one quick phrase, I become an evil Time Dictator. I have dumped my thinking time onto an unsuspecting Other whom I hope will read the whole thing and get back to me.

Chris calls that a “tragedy of the commons.” In this case, the “commons” is humankind’s total amount of attention. He goes on: “Instant communication makes it a little too easy to grab a piece of that attention. The result of all those little acts of grabbing is a giant drain on our time, energy and sanity.”

Well, it’s time for me and everybody else to stop being so lazy and inconsiderate.

Luckily, Chris can help us. Thousands of people sent him ideas for putting a stopper on the time drain. He boiled them down into the Email Charter. Just five of its ten tenets are a good start:

1. Respect the Recipient’s Time. If you start the e-mail process, you control the time it will cost others. Think before you press send. If you can do the mental work yourself, don’t slough it on others.
2. Short or Slow does not equal Rude. Understand that when you send a message it may take a while for someone to get back to you. If the reply is brief, be grateful not miffed.
3. Avoid Open-ended Questions. Stop sending e-mail with questions like “Thoughts?” Give the recipient finite choices such as: “Would you like me to a) call b) stop by or c) butt out?”
4. Use EOM and NRN. If possible, slim down your message into a phrase and put it in the subject line followed by the letters EOM. “End of Message” indicates the recipient does not have to bother opening the e-mail. If you need to write a longer message and it doesn’t require an answer, end the e-mail with the letters NRN. That means “No Response Necessary,” which is one letter shorter than Chris’s “No Need to Respond.” 
5. Disconnect. Limit the time you spend each day on e-mail or read it only at a proscribed time of day. One day a weekend, don’t check e-mail. Set up an auto-response with a link to the Email Charter.

After I read the Charter, I was so impressed I clicked on “Join Our Mailing List” even though I didn’t really want more mail. I almost cheered when up popped these words:

 NO!!   Don’t do this!
The last thing you need is another email newsletter!
In fact, we pledge never to email you.
Never. Ever.  (Now please go unsubscribe from the other newsletters you never read.)

Author’s note: The preceding is an excerpt from my upcoming book.

Advice for Parents who “Friend” their Kids

Sometimes parents are their own worst enemies when they “friend” their kids on Facebook.  

Thinking back on high school, no one wanted to be embarrassed in front of their friends. So why would we want to bring that on our children?

This week, the Family Online Safety Institute and Microsoft invited top researchers to talk about teens and social media. Turns out that kids tend their Facebook gardens very carefully. “There’s a delight in sharing yourself with others,” said Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, but ”they have a specific audience in mind.” 

To young Facebook users, the site is a vast public stage. Since they know their every move can be viewed by others, when depicting themselves “the choice is to exclude rather than include,” says danah boyd of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “There is a high level of encoding. They are going to public spaces to socialize, but they are trying to achieve privacy in a social context where they could never assume they have privacy.”

So, although many nouns, adjectives and explanation points may appear in their profiles, other information is deliberately left out. Teen users speak and behave according to shared mores, often using terms only their peers fully understand. 

The last thing they need is for Mom to say something stupid or over-react to a comment which is no big deal to the target audience.

Kim Sanchez, FOSI Chair and Microsoft Director of Privacy and Online Safety explains:

So how to does a parent attain peaceful coexistence on Facebook and other “networked publics”? Sanchez says the first step is to talk with your child–and accept gracefully if you’re asked to watch quietly from the wings.

Though it’s tempting to try to fit in with the younger crowd, Sanchez says we do our children a disservice if we act like one of the kids. As we saw in the last post, Lenhart’s research proves that kids look to parents for digital solace and advice. So we are most useful when we act our age and model sensible behavior—in and out of social networks.

Then again, maybe none of us should be on Facebook in the first place. Also this week, the New York Times hit a nerve with a story called “The Facebook Resisters.”  Scan some of the hundreds of comments, then ask yourself (and comment here): Is being on Facebook worth it?

Social Networks Mirror Teen Social Lives

How teens get along within social networks reflects what happens in real life – for good and for bad.

Just as they do face to face, kids love to socialize online. Four out of five online teens hang out on social networks. Some of them may like to tweet or dabble in MySpace, but practically all have a profile on Facebook. “No one had any idea how quickly and or how widely this would spread,” says Stephen Balkam, director of the Family Online Safety Institute which sponsored the new report by the Pew Research Center.

The majority of kids between age 12 and 17 think people are mainly friendly in the digital space. But many, especially black teens, have witnessed mean and cruel behavior. Some younger girls have been so shook up by what they’ve seen, they were worried about going to school the next day. 

The most common response to observing meanness is to ignore it. “Parents have instructed kids to stay out of these things to avoid conflict and in-person conflict where things move back and forth from online to physical space,” says Amanda Lenhart, senior researcher on the study.  Her data is from phone surveys of hundreds of teens and their parents as well as focus groups held in the Washington, D.C. in the spring and summer of 2011.

Parents have by far the biggest influence on how their kids behave online. Almost all parents talk to their kids about what’s appropriate to share on the Internet and the proper use of a cellphone. About half the parents surveyed also use computer controls to regulate how their children surf the Internet. But only 1 in 4 sets limits on their child’s increasingly sophisticated cellphone.  

Some other surprises:

Sexting is much less prevalent than has been portrayed.  Only 2% of teens have sent a nude or nearly nude picture of themselves, although 18% have been on the receiving end. Says Lenhart: “There is a lot of knowledge about it but not as much direct experience as you would think.”

Older teens think twice about what they post online.  17 year olds in particular, who have college and jobs in mind, say they have refrained from posting images which might reflect poorly on their judgment and reputations. Balkam observes: “Pew found how much kids are learning how to adapt to the new realities of social network sites.”

Many 12 year olds lie about their age to get on Facebook.  Even though Facebook is off limits to anyone under 13, 45% of online 12 year olds say they have accounts. 

Parents are paying attention. Two out of three teens say their parents have checked their Facebook profiles. Many parents “friend” their children, but that doesn’t seem to have much impact on their online social lives, at least while selective blocking remains an option. 

So – looking at all this juicy new data – are parents too involved with their kids’ online social lives – or not involved enough?

I spoke with Amanda Lenhart and Stephen Balkam about their new report on November 3, 2011.

Want To Start a Rail~Volution?

That’s the raison d’etre behind Rail~Volution, a conference where professionals who care about public transportation share great ideas. I wrote about some of them on the blog Greater Greater Washington, including the story behind this pretty picture (hint: it’s not a mountain in Japan). 

Washington D.C. Farm Grows More than Food

Little kids aren’t the only ones reaping benefits from a new farm in the heart of the Nation’s Capital.  

Because he likes to cook, 16 year old Daniel Martinez has been appointed “executive chef” at the Farm at Walker Jones. Whenever he volunteers, he whips up dishes in the farm stand with whatever is picked that day. “It’s really neat to see plants and herbs I’d never heard of before like swiss chard – in the middle of D.C.” Daniel walks to the farm from a nearby private high school where he is a sophomore.

The half-acre plot primarily serves students, families and neighbors of a D.C. Public School called the Walker Jones Education Campus. Last year, even though groundbreaking wasn’t until early summer, the farm managed to raise 3,000 pounds of food which went to residents, a retirement community and a kitchen which serves the homeless.

The farm boasts a cornucopia of vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers – and this year added honeybees and a butterfly garden.

Daniel at the farm stand

Young hearts and minds are tended just as carefully. As the website says, “It is an outdoor classroom where experiential learning integrated into the school curriculum happens side by side with the social and emotional education required to train the leaders of tomorrow.”

Just like other kids who visit, Daniel has learned a lot. Before he became a volunteer, he “wasn’t big into picking fresh ingredients.” But now he says he appreciates “when one second they’re in the ground and the next second they’re a delicious appetizer.”

Daniel was delighted when a woman from the neighborhood tried one of his signature recipes and gushed, “I don’t usually like zucchini, but I sure like this!”

Anyone is welcome to volunteer at the farm on Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday afternoons. You will receive a selection of the day’s produce, so don’t forget to bring a bag.

This post is brought to you by Blog Action Day 2011. The subject this year is FOOD.

Where News is Going

People go where they need to go to get the news they want. New online research and a gathering of Internet trend-setters tell a tale of widespread practicality.

According to a new Pew Internet and American Life Project report, local TV news is still the go-to source for weather, traffic and breaking news. But people are looking elsewhere for other information, often using their phones.

How the Internet has revolutionized the way messages are delivered was the focus of this year’s Activism + Media + Policy, or “AMP” Summit held last month in Washington, D.C. 

Andy Eller is the Director of Business Development at place-sharing site, Gowalla. In a panel presentation, he told AMP attendees he gets all his news from Twitter because it’s unfiltered and current. Twitter’s own Adam Sharp then took the opportunity to mention that tweets about an earthquake hit New York before the actual tremors did. 

In his AMP remarks, CBS White House reporter Mark Knoller says he likes writing news on Twitter “because it doesn’t have to go through a copy editor.”  Twitter, he continued, is like “having my own personal wire service” – on which he has churned out 40,000 tweets in two years.

Yet, despite the growing popularity of micro-blogs, people today rely on many information platforms, some of which aren’t so new. For instance, the Pew report shows that young adults often get their news by word of mouth. Kelly Wallace is Chief Correspondent for iVillage, the largest content-driven community for women on the web. She says iVillagers prefer message boards so they can anonymously share personal information.

Veteran print journalist Howard Fineman gave the AMP sendoff message. A year ago, Fineman leaped from Newsweek to become Editorial Director of Huffington Post Media Group. Although his former and new office buildings are located so close he didn’t have to change Starbucks, Fineman says he did change ”his entire outlook on everything.”

Fineman calls HuffPost “a combination of news site and social networking site,” which he’s convinced is where news is going. These are his reasons why:  

• We live in a news community that is omni-directional. Unlike the days of Walter Cronkite, when viewers hung on his every word, communications are no longer one-way. Now anyone can join – and sometimes direct – the news conversation. 
• News is no longer a mass discussion. News sources can now speak discretely to individuals. At present, Huffington Post has 30 different vertical content sections. The Politics page often draws more traffic than the site’s front page.
• News today is constant and immediate, not periodic and episodic. There used to be two news cycles. Now there is only one – and it happens 24/7.
• The distinction between global and local has disappeared. The Arab Spring was experienced by people worldwide in present tense. As Fineman says, “We were all there in Tahrir Square.”
• Old-style, long narratives are gone. Shorter and live are what work today, preferably mixed with video and pictures.
• There’s no more pyramid of authority. The days of the hard-bitten, all-controlling executive editor have passed. With little or no editorial oversight, many writers now monitor and judge the content of their own messages.
• The media is more openly ideological. News curators unabashedly admit the biases they bring to the table. Transparency is the new objectivity. 

So, it makes sense that the online society is seeking out a variety of news platforms. Many of us likely share Fineman’s final thought: “you shouldn’t assume any one source of authority is the only one to look at.”

Shatner Rules

If you ever hear or see anything about William Shatner’s Shatner Rules, do not attempt to avoid it. You will be powerless to resist the book’s black-hole-like magnetism and relentless cross-promotion.

Shatner Rules caught me with something called a “Klout Perk”. As someone who spends too much time on Twitter, I received a peppy little email asking if I’d like a free book about the “Shatnerverse.” I bit on the bait, it arrived in the mail, and I was hooked from the first page.  

First of all, it’s funny. The Shatnerisms made me laugh out loud, like when he said “Few are worthy enough to call me an egomaniac!” and described his kidney stone as “an onyx of agony.”

Then there’s the Wow Factor. Did you know Bill Shatner is 80? If you did the math, you could figure that out. But you have to be a pretty huge fan to know he has recorded three albums in his lifetime. On his new release, Searching for Major Tom, Bill belts out Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” accompanied by renowned heavy metal guitarist Zakk Wylde.

Since Shatner’s been in show business for 75 years, the book is also about acting. If you thought Captain Kirk was his only real role, prepare to be amazed. He’s appeared in productions from major motion picture Judgment at Nuremberg to the 1960s TV series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Right now, he has not one, but two talk shows including Aftermath where he interviews such notables as Daniel Ellsburg, Bernard Goetz and Lee Boyd Malvo.

Oh, and by the way, Shatner Rules also offers Bill’s heartfelt, upbeat philosophy of life.

All this is wrapped up in a compact 50,000-word hardcover. I wondered why Penguin USA, a foremost publisher of cutting-edge digital products, would send me a little print book. Well, this no-tech tome is a true marvel of multi-platform marketing. Shatner effectively pushes his Facebook page, commercials and shows on YouTube, music on iTunes, and Twitter feed. He and co-writer, former The Daily Show with Jon Stewart comedy scribe Chris Regan, even have a sneaky trick to get you to www.WilliamShatner.com.

Shatner Rules reminded me why print books still work. In this case, the format controls the game through a clever layout which delivers laughs with maximum impact. Punch lines are often perfectly timed with page turns.  

For the mere price of one copy plus postage, Dutton Publicity managed not only to get me to read and write about their book, but also to buy more. The sweet thing about paper books is that they are great keepsakes and gifts. As opposed to my somewhat dour gift choice for last Christmas, this year my loved ones will receive Shatner Rules. 

All kidding aside, Bill’s an awesome example of how to wring the most out of life, even when you’re 80.

Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large. On sale everywhere October 4.