Shall We Meet for Lunch or Hold a Walking Business Meeting in the Park?

“Let’s have lunch, OK?” That used to be my suggestion when I wanted to talk with someone, whether it be catching up with a friend or the need to discuss business. That was before the biometrics of Fitbit, among other things, nudged me to reach for a different way to conduct a small business meeting. Now, when I need to talk business, I often ask whether, instead of lunch, my acquaintance would like to talk while we walk in a park. I started doing this a couple years ago, and to my surprise the great majority of people would rather walk than sit in a restaurant or coffee shop.

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It’s Time to Clean Up Missouri Politics: About the CLEAN MISSOURI Ballot Initiative

Today I had the privilege of attending an informational meeting regarding the CLEAN MISSOURI ballot initiative. The organization will be finished collecting signatures in a few weeks, and is on target to having the initiative on the Missouri statewide ballot this coming November. Who could possibly be against a Ballot Proposition that will read exactly like this:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to: ● change process and criteria for redrawing state legislative districts during reapportionment; ● change limits on campaign contributions that candidates for state legislature can accept from individuals or entities; ● establish a limit on gifts that state legislators, and their employees, can accept from paid lobbyists; ● prohibit state legislators, and their employees, from serving as paid lobbyists for a period of time; ● prohibit political fundraising by candidates for or members of the state legislature on State property; and ● require legislative records and proceedings to be open to the public? State governmental entities estimate annual operating costs may increase by $189,000. Local governmental entities report no fiscal impact.
Here is the Policy Summary. Here is the actual text being proposed for the Missouri Constitution. Here is the website for Clean Missouri. If you would like to get involved in this effort, contact Campaign Director Sean Soendker Nicholson at sean@cleanmissouri.org.

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Research Tools – the Beginning of a Collection

I decided to create a new category today: "Research Tools" I wanted to create a place where I could find interesting places to find things. Here's the first entry, describing seven such places for high quality research: "7 Great Educational Search Engines for Students" It briefly describes the following: 1) Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) [M]aintained by the U.S. Department of Education. You’ll find more than 1.3 million bibliographic records of articles and online materials . . ." 2) Lexis Web Searches validated legal sites. 3) Google Scholar From Wikipedia: "Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines." 4) Microsoft Academic From MA: "Microsoft Academic understands the meaning of words, it doesn’t just match keywords to content." 5) Wolfram Alpha.   From the website, "he introduction of Wolfram|Alpha defined a fundamentally new paradigm for getting knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms and methods." 6) iSeek Education  From the website:  "iSEEK Education is a targeted search engine for students, teachers, administrators, and caregivers." 7) ResearchGate From the website:  "ResearchGate is built by scientists, for scientists.It started when two researchers discovered first-hand that collaborating with a friend or colleague on the other side of the world was no easy task."

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John Oliver Exposes Fake Abortion Clinics

Back in 2005, I took a look at fake abortion clinics--organizations that are set up to look like abortion clinics, but which are set up to actively discourage abortions. Thousands of these deceptive "clinics" are still operating and many of them are funded by tax dollars. John Oliver has dedicated this recent video to exposing many ways that theses "clinics" are fraudulent.

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