Author Archives: Peter Levine

the high school rat race

A day spent frantically working on grant proposals for CIRCLE and the

Prince George’s Information Commons—three proposals in all. I did

have an interesting phone conversation about the degree to which high

school students volunteer in order to improve their chances of being admitted

to college. This is very common, apparently. I don’t necessarily draw

cynical conclusions about the kids’ characters. Instead, I’d tend to blame

an increasingly efficient system of sorting the whole national student

body by "merit," which causes everyone to compete on a common

scale, whether they aspire to Harvard or the local public college. More

and more people know how to play the game of college admission. As a result,

I fear that kids are waiting until after high school for their real lives

to begin, and much of what they do as adolescents feels hollow.

grant-writing for local work

In between dealing with various financial issues involving CIRCLE,

I wrote most of a proposal to the NSF

to support high school classes for the next two years—including money

for curriculum development, assessment, and research. The specific activity

that we’ll ask NSF to fund is map-making. If funded, our kids would make

a whole variety of interactive maps of their community that they would

post on their website: asset

maps, network maps, environmental maps, problem-solving maps, and historical

maps of the County. My current dream is that we will get funding from

several specialized sources to suppport work in particular fields over

the next 2-3 years. One source might fund a journalism after-school program

on Tuesdays; another would fund map-making on Wednesdays; and still another

would support community history work on Thursdays. (Clearly, since I have

another full-time job, I would only be able to come to these classes occasionally.)

All the classes would produce material for the Website. Once the site

was full of valuable material, we would convene community leaders and

citizens and say (in effect): This is something that belongs to all of

us, because it reflects the richness of our community. Would you like

to join us in adding material? Would you like to run the site as a nonprofit

association? We’re at your service, and we’re willing to back away if

it’s time for someone else to manage things.

The idea, in short, is to strengthen the community by building a new

independent association connected to a Website. But to get people interested,

the site has to have content. And since no one wants to fund us to build

an association, we need to go after specialized funders in various content

areas—such as NSF for geography. We’ll see if it works.

Mike Weiksner and Archon Fung have contributed nice replies to my posting

on the

blog.

renaissance portraits

I stayed downtown today. Some of us from CIRCLE

had an interesting lunch in Union Station, discussing research ideas with

some potential applicants. I was also on my cell phone a fair amount,

mostly talking to fellow NACE members

about opportunities to mobilize the organization. In between things, I

ran—literally ran—into the National Gallery. I headed for an

area that I hadn’t been in for a long time, and found myself looking at

a couple of striking portraits of Guiliano de’ Medici, who was murdered

at mass in the Pazzi conspiracy. The Gallery has Botticelli’s amazing

painting

(which looks almost like a fine modern cartoon, with its bold blocks of

color and exeggerated features) and also Verocchio’s large bust

of the same young man. Guiliano is ugly but charismatic; confident or

perhaps arrogant; and very much an individual. I can’t think of anything

else to write about these portraits except art-historical cliches ("Renaissance

individualism," "unsentimental realism" …), but it was

a 25-minute break that will stay with me for a long time.

medical information online

In between phone calls on practical issues, I worked on my paper concerning

the reliability of medical information on the Web. As a little experiment,

I tried searching for "mononucleosis" on Google. (MEDLINEplus,

the ambitious federal portal, notes that "mononucleosis" is

one of the most common search terms on its site. Since the disease is

not serious but lacks a cure, some reasonable patients and parents may

want to diagnose it and treat the symptoms on their own.)

I noticed a few things:

First, MEDLINEplus does not appear very prominently among the search
results. Sites with much less funding and institutional support, and

with much less detailed information, are at least as prominent on the

Web. Indeed, a Hungarian student who once had mononucleosis and has

written 700 words on the subject is almost as prominent as MEDLINEplus,

which is a major product of a federal agency with a $250 million annual

budget.
Second, it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis of mononucleosis
using the Internet, because its symptoms vary and resemble the symptoms

of other diseases (including HIV/AIDS). There is a fairly reliable blood

test that only a physician can conduct. Therefore, many people who suspect

that they have mononucleosis will learn from the Web that they may be

right, but their diagnosis must be confirmed by a physician. The value

of using the Internet in this case is somewhat limited.
Third, you are more likely to find yourself using MEDLINEplus if you
know that you are interested in "mononucleosis" (a scientific

term), rather than if you only know that you have fever, headache, swollen

glands, tiredness, and malaise (the main symptoms of the disease). If

you look for symptoms, most of the sites you find with Google will be

irrelevant or unreliable.
Fourth, the apparent reliability of prominent sites that describe
mononucleosis differ widely, but the main information that they offer

is similar (with the exception of the material on homeopathy that appears

in some of the non-governmental sites.) Even the 700-word site constructed

by a Hungarian student offers fundamentally the same message as MEDLINEplus—on

this particular topic.

snow

I had a string of meetings today, the first day back after almost a week

off for snow. Since travel was still disrupted in many parts of the city,

I agreed to meet one out-of-town colleague at her previous appointment

in Silver Spring; we then conducted most of our business on a campus shuttle

bus to College Park. Two of the meetings were with graduate students who

are just starting on major research projects. I tried to give them lots

of research ideas so that they wouldn’t be overly influenced by any particular

idea I suggested. In one case—again because of travel disruptions—we

conducted most of the meeting standing on top of a pile of plowed snow

in a median strip in a residential neighborhood near the College Park

Metro.