Bob Collins1) WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU OWNED THE MLK SPEECH?
Much of our programming today will likely look back on what happened 50 years ago today — the March on Washington, punctuated by the now famous speech by Martin Luther King Jr.
The speech is rarely broadcast in its entirety, so many people have never heard it. This would be a good day to hear the speech that was supposed to go only 4 minutes.
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Audio not found
Whatever happened to the paper that speech was written on? King gave it to George Raveling, a volunteer who got near King. He’s still got it. He has had offers to sell it, but he won’t. “It belongs to the people,” he says. But he keeps it in a bank vault; it’s worth an estimated $25 million.
“We’ve seen change – the most significant that you’ve got to believe would have pleased Dr. King is having a black person in the White House, which none of us thought we’d see in our lifetime,” he tells the Los Angeles Times. “But at the same time, you’ll see articles that point out the unemployment numbers for blacks in 1963 are almost equal to what they are today.”
A NewsCut reader raised an interesting question the other day. When’s the last time someone gave a memorable speech that’s oft quoted?
Related: How a Carousel Ride Became Part of America’s Civil Rights History (PBS NewsHour)
2) WHOSE HOUSE GETS THE JET NOISE?
This is what the noise situation around the flight paths at Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport comes down to: Is it better to have a lot of people complaining about the noise, or a comparatively few?
Now that GPS is in the cockpits, the FAA is allowing airlines to fly more direct, precise routes, which puts them over the same house on most takeoffs.
Last night, two area congressmen held a meeting of affected residents, along with a representative of the FAA, MPR’s Jon Collins reports. They said their gathering information as Congress may intervene.
People living in south Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs questioned why there were no studies about the environmental, health or economic impacts of rerouting air traffic, Collins reported. That one’s easy: Congress waived the requirement when it reauthorized funding for the FAA in 2012.
“Please don’t allow the FAA to let airlines take off directly over our homes,” one woman said.
But it’s got to take off over someone’s home.
It’s not just Minnesota. Fifteen other airports are doing the same thing. In New York, for example, the new system is concentrating noise over Queens.
“Geographically, the aircraft will always be over the same spot every day — the same house,” said Joe Devito, manager of flight standards compliance at JetBlue told the New York Times. “Under the old procedures, I’d come in with engines powered up,” he said. “Today I’m going over the house with the engines on idle. That’s nice and quiet.”
People on the ground aren’t buying it.
The growing opposition wouldn’t be happening if not for a decision Minnesota officials made in the ’90s. After years of study, state officials rejected the idea of building a new airport in Vermillion in Dakota County. It was mostly cornfields and provided plenty of room for expansion. Minneapolis wasn’t thrilled about losing the economic benefit of the airport, and a lot of passengers thought the area — which now sprouts new neighborhoods — was too far to drive to get a plane.
I thought it was just newsrooms that were deathly quiet, compared to the old days. Apparently, things are too silent in offices all over the country, the Wall St. Journal says. And companies — especially sales offices — are losing money because it is.
The problem? Kids. Those kids under 35 who are more comfortable with the disembodied relationships of email instead of the telephone.
While Millennials—usually defined as people born between 1981 and the early 2000s—are rarely far from their smartphones, they grew up with a wider array of communication tools, such as texting and online chatting, and have different expectations for how and when they’d like to be reached. In the workplace, some managers say avoiding the phone in favor of email can hurt business, hinder creativity and delay projects.
Stephanie Shih, 27, says phone calls are an interruption. The brand marketing manager at Paperless Post, a New York-based company that designs online and paper stationery, doesn’t have a work phone. Nor do the majority of her co-workers. The company says that not having individual phone lines in open-plan areas protects people from unwanted calls, which can interrupt conversations.
This paragraph is a head scratcher, though:
Dana Brownlee, a corporate trainer based in Atlanta, says the issue of phone aversion frequently comes up in her project management training sessions. One of her clients, a manager at a large utility company, recently had to teach his young employee what a dial tone was and explain that desktop phones don’t require you to press “Send.”
More workplace: Former Patch editor sues over treatment during pregnancy, chronic illness (TwinCities.com).
Science is the only field, it seems, that regularly gets things done. University of Washington researchers Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco have succeeded in hooking up one person’s brain to the Internet, and controlling the finger of another person, NBC reports.
“We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain,” Stocco says.
Stocco said the technology could eventually be employed to help disabled people send distress signals through their thoughts alone — or even allow flight attendants or passengers on a plane to “mind-meld” with an operator on the ground if the plane’s pilot became incapacitated.
Rao and Stocco say their pilot study marks the first demonstration of noninvasive human-to-human brain interfacing. But Rao stressed that their signaling system deals only with simple on-off brain signals, rather than a person’s thoughts. Also, the system can’t be used to force subjects to do anything against their will.
Yet.
(h/t: Matt Black)
5) THE DANGER OF TEXTING WHILE NOT DRIVING
A New Jersey court says someone who sends a text message to someone who’s driving a car can be held liable.
An Appeals Court ruled in the case of an accident in which a girl texted a friend in a pickup truck, just before he hit a couple riding a motorcycle. The cyclists lost parts of their legs. They sued not only the truck’s driver, but also the girl who was texting him.
On Tuesday, a state Appeals Court ruled that the girl in that particular case could not be held liable. But it also ruled “that a person sending text messages has a duty not to text someone who is driving if the texter knows, or has special reason to know, the recipient will view the text while driving,” CBS reported
Bonus I: No explanation needed, really. The Wisconsin guy sings while he sells you some corn.
Bonus II: Airlines Still Trying to Make Passenger Boarding Less Annoying (Wired.com).
Bonus III: Kids in a store find out there’s no clerk. They pay for their purchases anyway. Kids today, eh?
TODAY’S QUESTION
Do you support a “limited strike” against Syria?
WHAT WE’RE DOING
Daily Circuit (9-12 p.m.) – First hour: President Obama’s college rating plan.
Second hour: Duluth sex trafficking.
Third hour: Fifty years ago today hundreds of thousands of people joined together for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Among the inspiring and historic speeches and music, people were demanding equality and opportunity. What do Minnesotans remember from that historic day? And how far have we come in achieving equality since then?
MPR News Presents (12-1 pm): Gov. Mark Dayton. MPR’s Mike Mulcahy hosts.
The Takeaway (1-2 p.m.) – TBA
All Things Considered (3-6:30 p.m.) – A famous psychology experiment of the 1960s told subjects to deliver electric shocks to other people. Many of the subjects followed the order. Did that reveal a dark side of human nature? NPR will have the story.
