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The death of a family pet is difficult, especially when you have to make the awful decision to put your pet down. When the time came for my family to make that decision last month, I was not expecting it to be as difficult for me as it was, and the moment we made it, shit got real — cue the Flo Rida song, “Going Down For Real” (too soon?).
If you have ever read anything I've written, or talked to me at any length, you will know I am not a proponent of extending life just because we can. Having been a critical care nurse for a short while, I have seen the suffering that is caused by doing “everything possible.” Animals are lucky; they are allowed to be humanely euthanized when they no longer enjoy any quality of life. As firm believers in this, my wife and I knew we had to make that difficult end-of-life decision for our dog. If it was me, I'd beg to be humanely put down, so please remember this post when my time comes!
Almost 15 years ago, my wife decided to surprise me with a puppy. She had been searching the pet adoption site, Petfinder.com, for months for the “perfect” dog, and she found her in Staten Island, NY. So, one brisk, clear weekend morning in October, with me sick with the flu, we drove 1.5 hours north from Philly to NY. When we pulled up, we spotted ourselves an adorable 9-week-old, fawn-colored pit bull puppy waddling along outside. It was love at first sight and a forever home for that puppy.
We spotted ourselves an adorable 9-week-old, fawn-colored pit bull puppy waddling along outside. It was love at first sight and a forever home for that puppy.
Like all excited new parents, we showed her off to everyone we could think of that day, going from place to place. We ended up at my in-law's house, where she was given the name Scout, after the character in Harper Lee's book, To Kill A Mockingbird (our daughter, born 10 years later was to be named Harper after Ms. Lee herself).
For the first few weeks we did nothing but sit on the floor with Scout for hours playing with her and loving on her. For us, she was the epitome of a perfect puppy. But we have a biased home when it comes to pit bulls. As anyone who has owned a pit bull can attest, they truly are the sweetest of dogs. Dating back to the 1900s, pit bulls were considered “nanny dogs,” due to their sweet temperament and intelligence. And our Scout was no exception!
Over the years Scout grew to become a 75-lb. lap dog who just wanted to be with her people. She loved to sit up front with us in the car, lay on top of us on the couch, and sleep between us in our bed! She was gentle to the point of complete passiveness with kids and people alike, she adored cats, and she loved the dogs who had grown up with her. The only time Scout ever growled at a person was when she sensed her people were in trouble and needed protecting. We had a visitor outstay their welcome in our home once and the situation became tense; Scout let the visitor know it was time to go! We were so proud of her and from then on we knew she would always protect us — as we would her!
When our daughter was born, the love affair between dog and child began. Scout and Harper loved each unconditionally from the time Harper was born until the day Scout passed. After Scout died, we went through our old photos. One after the other was of Harper and Scout — hugging each other in the car, in the back yard, on the couch, at the park — different locations, but same big smiles, same embrace, same unconditional love. They did this together for more than 10 years. The sweetest, most genuine of relationships: a girl and her dog. A dog and her girl.
Scout started visibly declining in November of last year, and then slowly over the following months she became less and less mobile and having more and more visits to the vet. Then finally, after a week of not eating, not going for walks, throwing up and having diarrhea, we came home one evening to find Scout sitting in a puddle of diarrhea, either unable to get up or unaware, or maybe a little of both. It was then we knew it was time.
We decided to euthanize Scout at home, in the place she knew and felt most safe. I called Lap of Love Hospice Care to come to the house that next day and do the deed. Not wanting Scout to be alone that night, I slept in the kitchen on the floor with her, wishing she would just die in her sleep.
It was the hardest decision of my adult life. But in the end, it was the best decision we could have made for Scout...
The next day she was visited, and utterly spoiled, by many of the people who knew her as a puppy and who loved her over the many years of her life. When 5 o'clock rolled around, and the fateful knock at the door came, I lost it — we all did! It was the hardest decision of my adult life. But in the end, it was the best decision we could have made for Scout, and as my sister stated on her Facebook page later that day: “Steak and potatoes and vanilla ice cream surrounded by friends and family, not a bad last day on earth! Love you Scout Dog!”
I wasn't expecting to be so emotional, and was completely caught off guard by the depth of sadness I felt in the hours and days following. After all, Scout lived a long, happy life and it was time. I pride myself on being a realist and understanding the doctrine of impermanence. I also have a pretty good grasp of the realities of life and death being a resuscitation scientist. But all of that was out the window, I was a hot mess! I missed her and that was all there was to it. I still do. It has taken me multiple tries to even write this post.
After Scout died and her body was taken away, we were sitting in our kitchen, looking out at our back yard through our sliding glass doors. A cardinal flew into our yard, sat for a moment and then flew away. My wife became quite excited — apparently seeing a cardinal is a sign of hope when someone dies... momentary solace for a bunch of skeptics!
When we are ready, our family has decided to foster shelter dogs instead of adopting, at least at first. In the U.S., approximately 2.4 million adoptable dogs (and cats) are put down every year, about one EVERY 13 seconds! Which means there are many dogs that need a good home and we have a good home that will always need a dog (or two)!
For now, we will remember our incredible dog Scout, knowing that she has gone over the Rainbow Bridge — a term I just learned during this ordeal taken from a poem of the same name — and as the poem says, “So long gone from [our] life but never absent from [our] heart[s].”
We love you Scout dog!
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Science writer Ed Yong talks about his new book, which looks at diet and the microbiome and whether poop transplants and probiotics are all they're cracked up to be.
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Glowing meteors streaking across the night sky marks the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower which is expected to be an even more striking spectacle this year, thanks to Jupiter.…
Big Think | The Science Guy Big Think People already use automated trains, elevators, and most planes have some kind of autopilot system. In the more developed countries, that is. In less developed countries, the idea of robots taking over isn't nearly as scary. Outside of major cities ... and more » |
Times Higher Education (THE) (blog) | Four ways that artificial intelligence can benefit universities Times Higher Education (THE) (blog) We need AI systems that move beyond the machine learning and neural network techniques that dominate the work of the main AI protagonists within and beyond education, such as "robot tutor" Knewton and Google's game-playing algorithm, DeepMind. and more » |
And you thought we just made the gas. #EnergyLivesHere pic.twitter.com/4328aORwot
— ExxonMobil (@exxonmobil) August 5, 2016
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You may know the caddis fly as a fishing lure. But bioengineers hunting a better way to seal wounds and set bones say the larvae of these insects have a few tricks we should try to mimic.
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Thomas Telford Scientist of the Day
Thomas Telford, a British civil engineer, was born Aug. 9, 1757.
Washington Post | This robot lawyer helps the newly evicted file for housing aid Washington Post He's the creator of DoNotPay, an online robot that has successfully challenged over 160,000 parking tickets for drivers in London and New York City. Following the success of ... “Automation can be helpful, but it can also be incredibly flawed. A lot of ... |
British cleaner maker's first robot vacuum was worth waiting for, but costs a lot, can't do the stairs and isn't perfect despite being the best available right now
Dyson's 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner has finally been released in the UK after an extensive trial in Japan and it claims to be the best available. How does it stack up against the market leading Roomba and is it really worth buying?
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Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast kicked off this summer and in his very first episode, he took on the question of how women have broken into male-dominated fields, and the many reasons that so often hasn't happened. Having set this tone, Gladwell asks in a more recent inquiry—a three-part series spanning Episodes 4 through 7—a similar question about what we might call meritocracy in education, a value fundamental to liberal democracy, however that's interpreted. As Gladwell puts it in “Carlos Doesn't Remember,” “This is what civilized societies are supposed to do: to provide opportunities for people to make the most of their ability. So that if you're born poor, you can move up. If you work hard, you can improve your life.”
Over some sentimental, homespun orchestration, Gladwell points out that Americans have told ourselves that this is our birthright, “that every kid can become president.” We have seen ourselves this way despite the fact that at the country's origin, higher offices were solely the property of propertied men, a small minority even then. Lest we forget, for all their good intentions, Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack and later collection, “The Way to Wealth,” were written as satires, “relentlessly scathing social and political commentary,” writes Jill Lepore, that mock wishful thinking and exaggerated ambition even as they offer helpful hints for organized, diligent living. Americans, the more cynical of us might think, have always believed impossible things, and the myth of meritocracy is one of them.
But Gladwell, skimming past the cultural history, wants to genuinely ask the question, “is it true? Is the system geared to serve the poor smart kid, or the rich smart kid?” Apart from our beliefs and political ideologies, what can we really say about what he calls, in economics terms, “the rate of capitalization” in the U.S.? This number, Gladwell explains, measures “the percentage of people in any group who are able to reach their potential.” Better than “its GDP, or its growth rate, or its per-capita income,” a society's capitalization rate, he says, allows us to judge “how successful and just” a country is—and in the case of the U.S. in particular, how much it lives up to its ideals.
The first episode in the series (Episode 4 of the podcast, stream it above) introduces us to Gladwell's first subject, Carlos, a very bright high school student in Los Angeles, and Eric Eisner, a retired entertainment lawyer who devotes his time to scouting out talented kids from low income families and helping them get into private schools. Eisner did exactly that for Carlos, finding him a place in an upscale private Brentwood school in the fifth grade. Early in Gladwell's interview with Carlos, the question of what James Heckman at Boston Review identifies as the “non-cognitive characteristics” that inhibit social success comes up. These are as often “physical and mental health” and the soft skills of social interaction as they are access to something as seemingly mundane as a pair of tennis shoes that fit.
Carlos, a “really, really gifted kid,” Gladwell reiterates, cannot make it into and through the complicated social system of private school without Eisner, who bought him new tennis shoes, and who provides other material and social forms of support for the students he mentors. Students like Carlos, Gladwell argues, need not only mentors, but patrons in the mold of an ancient Roman patrician: “not just any advocate: a high-powered guy with lots of connections, who can get you in and watch over you.” The key to class mobility, in other words, lies with the arbitrary noblesse oblige of those who have already made it, generally with some considerable advantages of their own. The remainder of the episode explores the obvious and non-obvious problems with this modern-day patronage system.
In “Food Fight,” the next part of the mini-series on “capitalization,” Gladwell and his colleagues open the door on the world of prestigious liberal arts colleges' dining services, starting at Bowdoin College in Maine, a place where the food services are “in a whole different class.” Bowdoin's excellent food, Gladwell argues, represents a “moral problem.” To help us understand, he makes a direct comparison with Bowdoin's elite competitor, Vassar College, whose student dining is more in line with what most of us experienced at college; in one student's understated phrase, there's “room for improvement.” What the food comparison illustrates is this: when many elite institutions doubled their financial aid budgets a decade or so ago to increase enrollment of low-income students, other budget lines, so Vassar's president claims, took such a hit that food, facilities, and other services suffered.
Vassar's current president transformed the student body from primarily full-tuition-paying students to primarily students “who pay very little.” The egalitarian move means the college must lean too heavily on its endowment and on the paying students. Gladwell doesn't delve into what we've also been hearing about for at least the last decade: as institutions like Vassar accept and fund increasing numbers of low-income students, other schools charged legally with providing for the public good, like the University of California system, have raised tuition to levels unaffordable to thousands of prospective students.
Colleges across the country may have raised tuition rates to their current astronomical levels in part to better fund poorer applicants, but they have also faced stiff criticism for spending huge amounts on athletics, building projects, and exorbitant administrative salaries. The food comparison presents us with an either/or scenario, but the moral problem inhabits a much grayer reality than Gladwell acknowledges. Likewise, in the story of Carlos, we come to understand why smart kids from poor neighborhoods face so many impediments once they arrive at elite institutions. But we don't hear about why so many poor kids fail to achieve at all due to what what Heckman calls “the principle source of inequality today”—children born into poverty begin life at a severe disadvantage from the very start, leading to social divisions of the “skilled and unskilled” even in early childhood.
We do get a broader picture in the final episode in the series, “My Little Hundred Millions,” in which Gladwell looks into another moral problem: In the story of Henry Rowan, who in the early ‘90s donated $100 million to a tiny university in New Jersey, we see a stark contrast to the way most philanthropists operate, almost as a rule making their generous gifts to elite, already wealthy schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. This system of philanthropy perpetuates inequality in higher education and keeps elite institutions elite, even as—in places like Vassar—it gives them the reserve capital they need to fund lower-income students. Like any complex institutional system with a long, tangled history of exclusion and privilege, higher education in the U.S. offers us a very good model for studying inequality.
To hear Gladwell's full assessment of meritocracy or “capitalization,” you'll need to listen to the full series as it builds on each example to make its larger point. Each episode's webpage also includes links to reference documents and featured books so that you can continue the investigation on your own, correcting for the podcast's blind spots and biases. What Gladwell's series does well, as do many of his pop sociological bestsellers, is give us concrete examples that run up against many of our abstract preconceptions. It's an interesting approach—structuring an extended look at exceptionalism and its problems around three exceptional cases. But it is these cases, with all their complications and complexity, that often get lost in over-generalized discussions about higher education and the myths and realities of social mobility.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Malcolm Gladwell Asks Hard Questions about Money & Meritocracy in American Higher Education: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Podcast is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
This week, the eyes of the world are on the city of Rio de Janeiro, as visitors and Cariocas alike revel in the celebration of an historic moment: the first time the Olympics and Paralympics Games have ever been held in South America.
The Games are all about competition between individuals, teams and nations. We cheer for our nations and delight in the competitive spirit of the games. And yet, when we speak of the Olympics, we don't discuss host countries -- we talk instead about host cities. And the Olympic Games are only one example of how cities are commanding greater influence on the national stage, an evolution that has significant implications for our global community.
While nations go to great lengths to best other countries in everything from economic growth to football, the story at the city level is quite the contrary: it is a quiet but powerful story of collaboration and cooperation, especially when it comes to taking action against climate change.
As megacity mayors, we have long considered cities laboratories for great ideas, but it wasn't until the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris last year that we recognized the scope of our capacity as local leaders to influence the course of the planet. World leaders made a commitment through the Paris Agreement, but it's up to cities to deliver on that ambition and prevent runaway climate change. How cities develop in the coming years will set the stage for humanity as a whole.
The good news is that for more than a decade, the mayors of the world's megacities have come together with passion and momentum to share knowledge and drive measurable and sustainable action on climate change through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40). Today, 85 cities are members of the network, representing 650 million people and a quarter of the world's economy.
Created and led by cities, C40 is focused on tackling climate change and driving urban action that reduces greenhouse-gas emissions -- C40 cities have already committed to reducing their emissions by a total of more than 3 gigatons of C02 by 2030 -- the equivalent of taking 600 million cars off the road. Mayors are sharing ideas, driving ambition and creating the momentum that will be essential in keeping the increase in global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
Crucially, the exchange of ideas between cities is genuinely global. More than half of the cities in the C40 network are from Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East -- these city leaders are showing incredible commitment to low-carbon development and climate action.
And cities are taking every opportunity to pursue the twin goals of urban sustainability and economic growth. For Rio, the Olympics have given us the chance to coordinate all efforts toward a common goal: an eye toward a better future for the city. The Games provided Rio with an opportunity to move toward a more sustainable, equitable and green future, enhancing urban mobility, fortifying and unifying the city's data systems, revitalizing neglected areas of the city and undertaking some of the most ambitious legacy projects an Olympic City has ever seen.
Though Paris is a much older and more storied city, we have found innovative ways to welcome the principles of sustainability to its heart: closing the iconic Champs-Élysées to cars once a month, pedestrianizing the banks of the Seine, retrofitting buildings and establishing a citywide long-term emissions-reduction goal.
As the star power from the Paris climate talks fades, city leaders are in the trenches, tackling the daily challenges of a city's needs while creating the framework for long-lasting commitments to building cities healthier, safer and greener.
In fact, at the end of this year, mayors, urban experts, businesspeople and celebrities from around the world will come together at the C40 Mayors Summit in Mexico City. There, delegates will work to continue positioning cities as a leading force for climate action around the world, defining and amplifying their call to national governments for greater support and autonomy in delivering climate action and creating a sustainable future.
Exactly one year since the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris, these leaders in the global effort against climate change will once again provide the vision and inspiration to political leaders everywhere to deliver on the Paris Agreement. As the current Chair and Chair-Elect of C40, we are determined to see the world's largest and most influential cities continue to mobilize to deliver on this promise. Our ambition is not only to create low-carbon cities that are safe against the shocks of a rapidly warming world, but to deliver sustainable, equitable and healthy futures for millions of urban citizens worldwide.
*Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, was recently elected to succeed Eduardo Paes, Mayor of Rio De Janeiro, as Chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. Mayor Hidalgo will take the role in December 2016.
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Teens showed an image that was deemed to have lots of "likes" tended to also like the image. Seeing popular pictures also produced greater activation in the reward centers of the brain.
