Our year with Max

In inner city Chicago, Max negotiated the rough terrain of street life, wrestling with whether to fight or run when facing gang members. Concerned about his safety, Max's parents sent him "down South" to live with a relative for a year. The experience transformed the lives of three people. Read the featured essay in Journal of Family Life, published by Emory's MARIAL Center.

Why Gen-Y can't read 'the silent language'

Mark Bauerlein, English professor and author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future," writes in the Wall Street Journal:

We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the "silent fluency" that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to "read" the behavior of others, they are all thumbs.

Nobody knows the extent of the problem. It is too early to assess the effect of digital habits, and the tools change so quickly that research can't keep up with them.

Read the full opinion piece by Bauerlein in the WSJ.

Surprising find on brains of risky teens

From Scientific American:

"Thrill seeking and poor judgment go hand in hand when it comes to teenagers—an inevitable part of human development determined by properties of a growing but immature brain. Right? Not so fast. A new study published in PLoS One turns that thinking upside down: The brains of teens who behave dangerously are more like adult brains than are those of their more cautious peers. ...

"The findings by neuroscientists Gregory S. Berns and Sara Moore and economist Monica Capra of Emory University suggest that teen risk-taking is associated not with an immature brain but with a mature, adultlike brain—exactly the opposite of conventional wisdom. ...



"Reckless behavior might in fact be a sign of adultness. Some adults do risky things (speeding, drinking, having unprotected sex) quite commonly without causing great alarm. Automatically considering such behaviors to be more objectionable just because someone is young runs into what the researchers call in their paper "a conundrum of defining risk (or dangerousness) based not on the objective attributes of the activity but on the person engaging in them."

Read the full Scientific American article about the neuroeconomics research done at Emory's Center for Neuropolicy.

Read the Time magazine article on the Emory study: "The Teen Brain: The More Mature, the More Reckless."

Stop and smell the sunflowers

Welcome back, to everyone who was away for summer. Be sure to check out the sunflowers blooming in front of the Depot. They are the most spectacular crop of the sustainability initiative's Educational Garden Project. We hope your summer was bountiful as these gardens.

Swine flu's warning shot

From Discover Magazine:
Emory Global Health Institute's Jeff Koplan warns that public officials need to pay much more attention to zoonoses, as one human disease outbreak after another has originated in animals.
See video of Koplan during a recent panel discussion on swine flu, beginning at 1:10.