Paywalls and Reading

Recently, just about everything I want to read is behind a paywall. The cost of entry is not one I am willing to pay though some of the content is great. I am definitely part of a large consumer trend here in my unwillingness to pay for content that may even be of interest. It seems like a pay per read would be a more palatable option for most people. Forcing a subscription down our throats can only meet with resistance. Consequently, everyone loses out - niche publications that are investing in content creation or curation will lose out because they lack in volume and variety to make  the subscription option attractive. 

Mainstream publications that have the volume and variety issue solved do not offer enough in terms of spike in level of interest to trigger the subscription commitment. Add to this the growing use of ad-blockers. All of this makes for a very complex situation to negotiate between producers and consumers of content. In the meanwhile, I just go look for free content on the topic that I am pay-walled from. So far, that has been a positive experience and lead to discovering publications that are absolutely wonderful - but for the maze of paywalls, I would have never discovered them.

Having to De-annonymize

I have always trod with caution when it comes to social networking. My blog has presence all over - Facebook to Foursquare but personally I stay out of everything. My buddy C takes annonymization to extremes only alpha nerds can take things to. He does not have a rewards card for any store, he usually pays with cash and makes sure he does not follow any kind of "buying pattern". His goal in life is not allow himself to become a data point for retailers today and context brokers in the future.

I am curious about what Google+ is trying to do with the idea of Circles for non-intersecting areas of people's lives. A step in the right direction certainly but with their track record, with the whole Buzz episode I would be skeptical for a long time to come. Specially when their competition believes that de-annonymization is necessary and almost inevitable. 

Anonymity on the internet has been of particular significance to me. More than ten years ago, when I desperately needed help understanding what was going in my marriage and the chances of me being able to work through all that ailed it, having an anonymous email address saved my life. 
I did not have the courage to open up and share the deepest, darkest secrets of my life with anyone who knew me. I did not have the ability to get professional help without my putting myself in harm's way. More than anything else I was very afraid - I cloak of anonymity gave me the courage I sorely lacked.
I knew that not telling everything in the most painful detail would make it impossible for anyone to understand my situation or be able to help me out. Using my assumed name, I reached out a large cross section of people - psychiatrists, university professors, therapists, counselors and yes even the occasional psychic who promised to read the stars in my horoscope . 

It was a desperate cry for help and the response was quite overwhelming. A lot of people wrote me back with their insights into the situation, recommended what they thought would be the best course of action based on what information I had provided. A lot of them observed my message was brutally honest - exactly as I had wanted for it to be. 

Between the dozen or so responses I got from a wide cross section of people I had reached out to, I was able to see a the couple of distinct themes that helped my chart the course of the rest of my life. If I had not reached out anonymously, a lot of these wonderful people may not have been able to respond with the candor they did with. What is more, I would not have been able to muster the courage to present them with the unvarnished, unflattering and ugly truth. We had made a connection between one human heart and the other which made every other barrier fall way.

For many years, this blog has been where I was able to share what I thought, events in my life that I felt had potential to offer someone somewhere a little something of value. Over the years, many readers have reached out to me anonymously, shared secrets that would never have with someone they knew in real life, thanked me for writing something that touched them very deeply. In a sense, I used my blog as a way to give back what I was given in a time of great crisis. If I had to de-annonymize myself or required anyone who wrote to me to do so, it would break the very foundation on which this can all work. 

Randi Zuckerberg, demonstrates a staggeringly limited comprehension of the human condition when she makes her case of stripping anonymity online.“People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.” In every age, the media of social communication and interaction have lent themselves to a variety of abuse - it is no different now. Anonymity is not an invention or artifact of the internet or social media. To suggest stripping it online and "exposing" people is somehow for the greater good is disingenuous at best. 

Digital PR

Great summary of the gotchas of digital PR and SEO. The one I like best is :

Embrace the social, not the drive by. Some PR agencies have been able to fully embrace these shifts at their core, and not only become successfully involved with online communities but have been instrumental at facilitating PR’s role in the various online channels such as social networking, blogs and search. These agencies are best prepared to represent brands in a win-win situation over those firms that skim social media with drive by pitching and promotion tactics and without a full understanding of the medium.

Easier said than done mainly because the medium is evolving so rapidly. The rules of the game change the minute you have it all defined. Often you are lucky to even have the same game. By when old media has finally has it figured out, the circus has usually left town. Nevertheless, this article is full of good advise.

Endless News

Having lived without a television in the house for over four years now, my tolerance for it is close to non-existent. There are all the usually cited reasons I don't like TV at home but reading this article on the convergence between Chinese and American economies gave me one that is very important that I had not really thought about. 24/7 news is a big part of television and I positively hate it. Now, I know why. Ted Koppel of Discovery Channel, says :

My analogy [of 24/7 news] is it's rather like standing 2 feet away from a railroad track and watching the trains go by. And, boy, you're close and it's exciting and there's a lot of energy and you really feel as though you're on top of it, but you can't for the life of you see what's going on. And if you really want to know what's going on, you've got to step back 10 feet, 20 feet, 50 feet, sometimes half a mile, so that you can see the locomotive and the caboose and everything that is in between.

I would add that I feel clobbered by the noise and the pressure of non-stop information, analysis and spin. Not to mention that fact that the volume of bad news overwhelms the good - there is something horribly negative about that. There is never the pause or peace needed to gain perspective let alone independent understanding - the experts always weigh in before you have had a chance to process information you have seen and heard. You live in fear that the opinions you come to hold might well actually those of others who enjoy the abundance of airtime to force their world view on you - often unawares.

SocialSpark

I learned about SocialSpark recently and had an opportunity to chat for a bit with the company's CEO Ted Murphy and learn more about the concept of being sponsored to produce content for your blog.

HC: I'll start with the most obvious question - Why SocialSpark ?
TM:That's a broad question but I will try to answer.
TM:There was a need in the market for a service that allowed advertisers and bloggers to more efficiently and effectively connect.

HC: Does this offer the blogger and/or the advertiser something that an AdSense type service does not ?
TM:Yes. Adsense is purely display advertising with no real connection between the advertiser, the blogger and the product or service. SocialSpark is all about sponsorship. Bloggers create sponsored content on behalf of the advertiser or have the advertiser sponsor their blog. The relationship is more intimate and each party selects the other.

HC: What kind of bloggers would find a paying market for their content through SocialSpark ?
TM:We see all sorts of bloggers making money. From mommy bloggers to “dogs that blog”. SocialSpark advertisers aggregate campaigns on blogs, so it isn’t so much about traffic as it is about quality and topic.

HC: How do you see the content of blogs evolve in terms of the freedom of expression that bloggers enjoy in the largely non-monetized world of today ?
TM:I believe it is imperative to keep that freedom, that is what makes blogs so great. We don’t allow advertisers to stipulate tone, so each sponsored post is free to be in the uncensored voice of the author. If it’s not authentic it won’t work in the long term.

HC: Do you think a venture like SocialSpark was made possible because blogs are creating huge quantities of content where none existed before ? Or in other words would you call SocialSpark a business fueled by blogging ?
TM:I believe we have a bit of co-dependancy. We could not exist with the content bloggers create, but at that same time we help them create more content. We find that bloggers that participate in our marketplace blog more often and generally spend more time building their audience.

HC: Could you describe a typical blogger-advertiser relationship in SocialSpark and how the larger marketplace benefits from it ?
TM:I am not sure if there is a “typical relationship” but I will try to explain how it works on a high level. An advertiser creates a profile in SocialSpark, then searches SocialSpark for bloggers that meet their particular criteria. Let’s say I am looking for entertainment bloggers. I would build a “blog roll” of entertainment bloggers by looking at each blog and adding them to my list. I would then create an “Opportunity” in our marketplace targeted at that list of entertainment blogger. Think of an Opportunity like a listing on eBay. If you are a blogger on that blog roll or meet other criteria the advertiser may set you can choose to take that Opportunity.

HC: You mentioned that the blogger is sponsored to create content by the advertiser. Does the content then reside on the advertiser’s site ?
TM:No. That content is on the bloggers own blog.

HC: How does the advertiser benefit from the content they sponsored ?
TM:It helps generate buzz by people reading the post, it generates clicks by people clicking on links and it is syndicated through rss and social search sites.

HC: So the content would like a plug for a product/service that the advertiser provides ?
TM:not really a plug, generally more a review of a site or product. It all has to be fully disclosed. http://socialspark.com/code_of_ethics

HC: How do you see SocialSpark evolve as the blogging medium does ? For instance how would this business model work with Twitter ?
TM:It would work in much of the same way. We plan to bring socialspark to twitter in the near future.

HC: What are the bloggers who are not part of the SocialSpark network missing other than the opportunity to make some money for their content ?
TM:I would say the biggest thing is additional traffic and exposure. We have a great community and they use socialspark to discover new blogs.

HC: It was great chatting with you ! One last question - What are some of the other interesting opportunities like SocialSpark you see coming the way of bloggers in the near future ?
TM:I think bloggers will have lots of opportunities to creatively monetize their blogs in the future. Bloggers will continue getting more and more attention from mainstream advertisers, allowing more individuals to take their blogging more seriously. I think that is a good thing for everyone.Thank you for your time. Have a great night!

Emotion Quotient Help

J was playing a game on PBS called About Face which teaches kids to recognize facial expression. This could be a first level EQ game and a definitely a good thing to learn. Watching J play, I was thinking about the ways the idea could be extended and still remain kid friendly. Recently, J's best friend L told her she does not want to be her friend anymore. Thankfully, J has another best friend M and was able to ignore the provocation and hang out with M. As expected L now is wedging herself between J and M - she wants M to be her best friend.

J is feeling insecure - what will happen if L and M become best friends and she is left alone. We have talked about the situation and I have helped her figure out a few different options. The scenario we have at hand is hardly exceptional. It is also the kind of thing EQ games could help with. Arthur and friends could be placed in a situation like J's. The game would offer several ways out of the impasse. It will have the child select one and explain the merits of the decision and suggest alternatives.

The idea is obviously to present something serious and complex in a fun way that kids can easily grasp. When such solutions are developed by subject matter experts, the outcome would prove more useful to the child than the guidance of their layperson parents. I often wonder about the soundness of the advice I give J. How do I know for a fact that I am right ?

After all, I do not live in the social ecosystem inhabited by J and her peers. Chances are, I do not understand the context in which my advice will be acted upon. What are the consequences of errors in my judgment ? I am sure any parent without the right credentials would feel the same way. This is a gap that game developers might find very profitable to fill.

Ambient and Immersive

I think they should go a few steps further and create and immersive internet experience rather an ambient one. Have all the walls in your house be net and wi-fi ready. The widgets on the bedroom walls can be doing romantic travel destinations, chick-flicks and the like whereas the ones in the kitchen connect you to online grocery stores, recipe ideas for the RFIDed odds and ends it detects in your fridge not to mention exotic food blogs. After all there is a time and place for everything.

What a shame the we have to come untethered from the internet when we log off at night and have to confine our online experience to one monitor that we must tote with us where we go.

Immersion should not exclude community. Walls in all public places could double as prime real estate for browsers. We could be creating mash-ups anywhere, anytime sharing neat widgets with friends and strangers alike. True immersion is not possible without having your own skin in the game and it looks like they are already making strides in that direction. While I may not find it easy to participate in the communal web immersion opportunities, I can easily imagine reclining on a couch and reading a book online as it gets written on the wall. That's a whole lot easier than peering into a Kindle.

For parents who swear by hot-housing their kids to be ready for top ranking schools, education could go 24/7, online and on the walls of their rooms. Math on one, reading comprehension on the next and Mandarin on the third. No matter which direction they stare, something will get force fed into their system. A few clicks around the different widgets around the room and the homework paper gets printed. I wonder if all this would mean brisk business for mental health service providers.

I'll probably hang on to my Sony Vaio relic to get some non-ambient, non-immersive internet time when the grandkids have an e-granny beaming from the wall telling them bedtime stories with the sophistication of technique that I so woefully lack. Talking of which, it seems like I might have been pink-slipped from the job I was coveting the most post-retirement.

Unbeaten Path

Your frame of reference when you try to find something often limits the range of possibilities. A simple example would be a search on Google. Lets' say I am looking for an eggplant recipe .Logically those would be the keywords I enter in my search.

I would then have results that match my query. I would most likely never know about a travel and food blog that might have provided unconventional inspiration for an eggplant dish. It may be been unlike anything that shows up handily on a Google search. When I find do it accidentally, I realize my search criteria was not able to connect me to what I sought - infact I had no idea what I was looking for until I had actually found it.

You never know how to seek out what you don't know to look for. Sometimes serendipitous connections do happen. But more often than not, problems seek solutions along the beaten path and end up with mediocre outcomes. The idea of Innocentive seems to make those connections happen more organically and lead seekers of innovative ideas to unusual solvers.

Getting Wrong

This article on how Hollywood routinely gets Africa wrong is aptly under the Provocations section of GOOD Magazine. While it is completely true that "An Africa that is more than lush landscapes, bloodthirsty tyrants, and trigger-happy killers is long overdue.", Hollywood's distorted perspectives on cultures and peoples outside North America has its own benefits.

As an immigrant it helps you understand the broad brush stereotypes that are associated with your kind and come up with some handy coping mechanisms. For desis it could be the fake gurus, Patels running motels, thick accents and arranged marriages with an occasional doctor thrown in for good measure.

So when the course of casual social interaction, some or all of those assumptions are made about you, you don't feel overly perplexed. You do what you can to give folks a sense of where the median India lies - somewhere between the extremes of a Bollywood Musical and Salaam Bombay, you encourage them to check out some of the better made Bollywood flicks, indie and parallel cinema from India maybe a book or two by R.K Narayan.

Investment And Change

Solving for world hunger and improving your vocabulary while you are at it - that's an unbeatable combination. This can get addictive specially if you are working on getting past your best level - I got stuck at 46 and remained there up until 12000 odd grains of rice. It was really hard to pry myself away from this site and put my time to uses far more mundane than solving world hunger.

The idea can be extended to yield bigger and better returns for highest reading, history, critical reasoning or math scores; make learning fun and rewarding for kids. So many grains of rice for every correct answer; the top scorers could earn seeds, clothes, livestock and even land for the poor. The Freerice.com about page summarizes what makes this concept click :

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide.

I must be in dire need of change and self-improvement these days because soon after Freerice, I discovered these simple free hand drawings that can change my life.

East Is West

The last few days, I have been tuning into to NPR's series Yellow River: A Journey Through China on the commute back home. In one episode, Rob Gifford talks about a group of young people living together in a house and sharing their lives in ways reminiscent of the "Friends" gang. He talks about how little separates the youth of boom town China from their peers in the west.

I was also recently introduced an Internet TV show titled Sexy Beijing. The producer describes it as "A show which follows the ups-and-downs of Sufei, a 30-something singleton looking for love in China. Along the way, we cover topics like feminism, hip-hop, migrant workers, and Chinese romance. One thing that's unique about our show is that it appeals to both Chinese and Western audiences. We also do the show in Mandarin and it's a big hit on Chinese video-sharing site tudou.com"

The blog post titled Money, Love and Numerology draws parallels between east and west just as Rob Gifford does. The blogger reports :

According to the China Daily, a "growing number of the country's young adults" consider money to be a determining factor when looking for a partner.

"Nearly half the 8,932 respondents said that money and other financial packages are the most important preconditions for love."

A poor sap named Lu Yun tells the paper that his girlfriend recently dumped him over housing. "She made it very clear: An apartment works. No apartment, no-go," he told the paper. The guy is only 28 years old!

Later in the post, he writes:

Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw was hung up on an emotionally unavailable real estate mogul, not a romantic but underemployed security guard from the Bronx who still lived with his mom.

But still, home ownership as a pre-condition for love at the age of 28 would surely rule out about 99% of young singles in New York or San Francisco. Little wonder many young Chinese complain that the pressures of life are mounting in contemporary Chinese society.

Imagining Voices

As far back as I can remember, I woke up to the sound of Akashvani playing in the background. It was not until six or seven that I actually paid attention to what the news readers were saying, understanding would follow a few years later. Seduction by the rich male baritone happened in the early teens. I cannot remember the name of this news reader but I was most positively infatuated with his voice.

In my mind, he was a very handsome young man with the savoir faire of the classical romantic hero - the kind that left a trail of broken hearts in their wake. I envied the woman in his life to whom he whispered sweet nothings in that killer voice. I must have been a year into this voice lusting phase when I saw a picture of my news reader in some magazine. He was an average looking, slightly chubby middle-aged man - not nearly the Amit Ray of Shesher Kobita come to life that I had in mind. I was ever so disappointed to have been forced to connect voice to face and thus abandon my favorite fantasy.

While that picture spelt the end of my first romance with the baritone, the spell of a seductive male voice stayed on specially in how it sounded when someone laughed. Some relationships were formed or broken on the strength or weakness of the man's voice alone. I love listening to the radio to this day and prefer some commentators over others because I find their voice particularly attractive. It makes the stories they report more compelling and worthy of attention. I still find myself imagining the ideal man when I hear a perfect voice.

Their picture on the station's web-site may take me by surprise but I have learnt to brace and cope with disappointment. I tune back to their program glad to enjoy the sound of their beautiful voice without all the visual distractions. In time, the reality of the picture is supplanted by that of the voice. In my imagination, he can still embody male perfection. Even so, I wish their pictures were much harder if not impossible to come by, leaving the best things in life shrouded in mystery and therefore endless possibility.

Whiting Out

The case for and against open-source software that allows you to white-out online ads is fairly nuanced. I find pop-ups as annonying as the next person but don't worry too much about watching an ad for Ralph Lauren in return for a day-pass to Salon. The annoyance is outweighed by what I get in return for it. Every individual must have specific criteria for what ads they would like to see or perhaps tolerate versus what they would white out without hesitation.

The all or nothing approach would not bode well either for the seller or the potential consumer. Handing the controls over to the consumer would yeild valuable data for the advertizers and enable them to fine tune their campaigns. If the vast majority of a target group have a certain product on their white-out list, chances are that ad-space was not driving in any traffic even when the option to white-out did not exist. Instead of having to guess at the outcome and have to pay for it, there would now be a way to acertain a priori and get the formula right the very first time. That is certainly a good thing.

Best Sites

There are some nice new discoveries for me in Time's list of the 50 best web sites for 2007.

GrandCentral is a great idea for managing the three of four phone numbers many of us have. A "free one-number-ringing-multiple-phones routing service" presents the perfect solution for the confusion we are faced while deciding which number to give whom.

SimpleWeather is nice just for reason the name suggests - simplicity. There is way too much clutter in typical weather reports for a common person trying to make some simple decisions based on what the day may be like outside.

My favorites LastFm and Etsy made the list. Joost might be what I can tune into on those rare occasions when I miss having a TV at home to watch the news. All the advantages, little to none of the nuisance that the boob-tube is about. My favorite has to be CellSwapper. They should have something along these lines for people to get out of all sorts of onerous contracts - apartment leases come to mind easily but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Future Imperfect

Ineresting essay about how we envision the future for the society very differently than that for ourselves and our loved ones.

" We tend to see utopia as relentlessly personal, while the apocalypse is one of the few shared universals. In other words, while we can posit a future for ourselves as individuals (and even as members of a family) we have little in the way of positive imagination for the realm of the social, much less the political."

Fear of the future is apparently something that grows because media outlets feed it. The 24/7 coverage of bad news from around the world is hardly conducive to nurturing hopes for a happy and peaceful future. We imagine the worst will happen, the media seeks out just the kind of negatives that would align with our imagination until it becomes a virtuous cycle.

Citizen Filmmaking

Saw a short movie called Ten about a man who breaks all ten commandments before breakfast. An idea with potential but not the best execution. Consent on the other hand is a six minute movie that's interesting, funny and different. As filmmaking becomes as easy as having something to say and a cell phone video camera to say it with, the diversity and number of really short movies can only grow exponentially.

While these citizen-filmmakers may not be able to churn out Hollywood epics, they can certainly tell a good story with moving images, words and music. It would not be surprising if filmmaking became compulsory teaching and learning at schools. Maybe ten years from now, a Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation would be considered primitive - you would need to be able to pitch your ideas in a richer and more textured media than that for anyone to notice.

Newfoundland

Hilarious article in The Observer on the acceptable use of the female erogenous zones for public display on newsstands.

But I do find it surprising that there is a region of the female body called the underboob - I had previously thought I had a complete mental map of all the female erogenous zones. Until the discovery of underboob, I believe I had worked out the perfect formula for identifying them. It was simple, and it was accurate. It goes thus: everything on a suitable female body is an erogenous zone, apart from the following: ears, armpits (esp. unshaven), nostrils, palms. But to return to the underboob and its implications. The sudden emergence of this hitherto unidentified region of skin has introduced a whole new dimension to the study and categorisation of the erogenous zone.

Maybe Lott will take upon himself the task of revising the antiquated map of the female body to include such recent discoveries as the trout pout, the tramp stamp and toe-cleavage. Indeed, there is a whole raft of erogina that is currently uncataloged and undocumented.

Ads In Textbooks

Textbooks and I have had nothing to do with each other for many years. While it is revelation to me that an algebra textbook could cost $100 and must go through revisions each year (who knew that the subject was evolving so rapidly), it does not hit my budget yet. The idea of using ads in textbooks to make them free for students is certainly novel though do I wonder about the distraction it may cause.

The epithet "dry" that is often ascribed to textbooks may not ring true for future generations who will get to read a couple of lines of witty copy between theorems. Maybe our fears about loss of concentration are unfounded. That colorful ad for a pre-paid cellular phone just before the solution to a problem could end up serving as a perfect mnemonic device.

Gaming For Good

For the last several weeks it had been impossible to tune in to the news and not hear updates on the Israel-Lebanon conflict. As an uneducated listener who has no real understanding of the issues involved, inundated by factoids and analysis by media spin doctors, you wonder why and how it helps for you to stay informed.

Most 24/7 news channels seem to revel in making the common person feel that they should be grateful for having some semblance of a "normal" life in a world that had been overtaken by warring terrorists, natural calamities of epic proportions and HIV pandemics in a burgeoning catalog of gloom of doom. Watching a well-heeled news reader, straining every botoxed nerve on her face, to read her litany of death and despair on a HDTV plasma TV perched high up on a wall in a public place has something sinister and Orwellian about it.

That gamers should take a serious turn and try to save the world "one game at a time" sure feels like the only piece of empowering and good news I have heard in a while.

Plugged-In Drug

J and her friends learnt some basic Japanese thanks to Miss W, their teacher at daycare from Okinawa. There was nothing formal about her method but all the kids learnt quite rapidly. She had taught them songs about colors and numbers besides the Japanese equivalent for commonly used words.

Soon after Miss W left, the kids started to forget what they had learnt from her. A year later J does not have the slightest recollection of Japanese. The early exposure to a foreign language had an unexpected side effect (maybe it is entirely expected and I am uninformed) - J wants to learn other languages besides English. She is eager to relearn Bengali, sing along with old Hindi songs and speak Spanish because her friend Anna knows how to.

I got her the Language Tree DVD - Spanish for Kids from the library hoping she could learn from it. J is an anachronism in her day and age given that there is not a TV in the household or any electronic toys. The occasional DVD she watches on my laptop is the sum total of her media immersion. She was very pleased with the Spanish learning DVD and did learn a few things watching it.

However, she was not demonstrating her characteristic desire to absorb everything the very first time. Miss W never had to repeat the Japanese word for the color red. J paid attention and got it right away. With her ability to replay the DVD as many times as she wishes, her incentive to focus and retain was non-existent.

By the time we were on volume 2, she seemed more interested in the replays than in learning. When I asked her to teach me what she had learnt she said "I need to watch it again, because I forget the moment its over. You need to watch it yourself and learn" Back in the time of Miss W, she would have never said that - I was force fed Japanese every evening after we got home.

I have been reading "The Plug-In Drug" by Marie Winn where she talks about how television impairs the cognitive abilities of the children. First published in 1977 and revised recently, much of the problems from back then are still completely relevant. She quotes sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner as saying:

"Like the sorcerer of old, the television set casts its magic spell, freezing speech and action, turning the living into silent statues for as long as the enchantment lasts. The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces - although there is danger there - as in the behavior it prevents: the talks, the games, the family festivities and arguments through which much of the child's learning takes place and through which his character is formed. Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people"

The DVD played in auto-replay mode stands in for the absent TV in our home and its effects on J were as deleterious as Bronfenbrenner describes. Under the "sorcerer's" spell, my otherwise alert and eager to learn child had been transformed to a zoned out zombie. Needless to say, her Spanish lessons taught by the friendly Senor Language Tree, have been deferred for a while - muchísimas gracias.