A tail of rescue
A university colleague once suggested that my wife Anne and I might find therapeutic help by starting a 12-step recovery group called Pets Anonymous. That was the time when we had just added a fourth foster dog to our breed brood, along with a cat and another stray dog who took to camping out in our garage. Ray thought maybe we were falling into a pet addiction profile?
Over the past 10 years, we have been a way station for Golden Retrievers, Labs, Goldendoodles, Labradoodles, a Chow, several Greyhounds (very underrated by many as pets), and one strange low-body beagle mongrel we called “Mr. Stubblefield” who loved me, hated everyone else, and often got inexplicably mad at his right rear foot. He was the garage dog who couldn’t decide whether to stay or go.
A lot of dogs are adrift and wating to be rescued by loving individuals. In fact, many of the dogs who are rescued go on to perform outstanding service for others, as is the case in the story below and of this group of lifeguard dogs from Italy who train to help stranded swimmers and boaters, often jumping from helicopters into the water to perform those rescue acts. (AP Photo/Courtesy of the Italian School of Canine Lifeguards)
The Web Connection
The connection between all these animals and the Web 2.0 media is that most of them came our way through online portals. Just about every animal rescue group has taken to the Web to find permanent or foster homes for the available animals. A very brief, partial listing of these sites includes:
- www.theanimalrescuesite.com
- www.adoptapet.com
- www.bestbriends.org
- www.puppysites.com
- www.akcorg/vreeds/rescue
- www.thepetrescue.com
- www.animalrescueinc.org
- www.purebredcatbreedrescue.org
- www.dogrescue.org
- www.animalleague.org
- www.nextdaypets.com
- www.petfinder.com
There is even a site for those wanting to rescue older dogs (www.srdogs.com) and several for those wanting to rescue horses like www.indianahorserescue.com. Then of course there are the many breed-specific sites like the Greyhound site of www.fastfriends.org.
A rescue database
To show you how these rescue sites work, let’s take a look at one of the largest and most well-known: Petfinder.com, or the last one on the above bulleted list. This outfit, which is really a kind of Grand Central Station for individual adoption agencies, is the virtual home of some 350,000 dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, reptiles, pigs, and other barnyard animals.
Petfinder is a Discovery Communications company, the same outfit that brings us the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, Planet Green, etc. Sounds like a neat group to work for if you’re into animals, or exploring/saving the planet. Petfinder says of itself the following:
“Petfinder is an online, searchable database of animals who need homes. It is also a directory of more than 13,000 animal shelters and adoption organizations across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Organizations maintain their own home pages and available-pet databases.”
The folks at Petfinder and the myriad of other individual adoption sites know that pet lovers have become accustomed to using the Web to find pets that best match their needs. Online searches allow them to access an individual shelter’s Web page and find out what kind of pets they have, what the rules of adoption are, whether they are no-kill shelters, how they take care of their animals, etc., etc.
Petfinder is made up of animal-care professionals and everyday animal-lovers who volunteer for local and national animal welfare organizations and groups. Together, these people maintain active and accurate homeless pet lists, and Petfinder acts as a central database for most of these organizations. It is very much like a one-stop shopping mall for pets online.
Gotta read this one
I’ll close out with the tale of one rescued tail, this one attached to a fawn-and-white Whippet named Dapper
Some breeds, like Whippets, are "acquired tastes" but the case of Dapper show the results can be great. (AP Photo/Jane Mingay)
who was jettisoned to the ASPCA because he was ill and his owner didn’t take the time to find out what exactly was wrong. An employee took interest in the dog, however, had him examined and the problem turned out to be minimal. The result? The loving owner writes:
“As the saying toes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. What a gem! Dapper was easily assimilated into my furry family of one Italian Greyhound and three cats – ass rescues. He aced his obedience class and went on to a career as a therapy dog, working with mentally challenged adults and nursing home residents. However, his most important work was with young men and women dying from AIDS-related illnesses. His story of being cast out because of an illness struck home with many. By empathizing with a skinny, old Whippet, they could finally express their own pain and anger.” (http://www.petfinder.com/before-pet-adoption/tale-dapper-dog.html)
What else is there to say other than, “Wow!” Or maybe even (grrrr…) “Bow Wow?”
Reading the young brain
Read a good book lately? Ever wonder why the last book that moved you drew a lukewarm reaction to your best friend who you recommended it to? And vice versa?
Could be that we all just have different tastes or memorable experiences that resonate with books that clang off our friends like a peice of iron off a metal gate. Or, some might say, it suggests something about how are brains are wired.
Vittra School students in Sollentuna Sweden read in groups at their school where kids of various ages share the same classroom. (AP Photo/Christopher Grant)
The Web and the brain
A book by Nicholas Carr called, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” takes a look at the concept that constant online usage is affecting how the neural circuits of our brain are wired. And Mediapost writer Gord Hotchkiss explains that, “The brain has a habit of developing multiple paths to the same end goal. Many functions that our brain controls tend to have dual routes: a quick and dirty one that rips through the brain at lightning speed and a slower, more rational one.”
Guess which route the brain takes when reading content from the Web?
Some would say there is a danger here, especially if Internet reading supplants books and long-form articles for the young brains of children and teens. Others would ask, “Is there really much difference between this situation and when we were reading ‘Cliff’s Notes,’ instead of the longer version of ‘War and Peace’?”
Video games a threat?
OK, but what about the time young minds spend with video games? Can any good come from that?
Steven Poole of London’s online edition of the newspaper, The Guardian, has written, “As has always been the case … the adult paranoia expressed here about the supposedly harmful influence of videogames depends on a sublime ignorance of the form. In fact, you’re not going to get far in most modern videogames if you can’t read. And some of them make you read an awful lot.”
Phoenix Wright
In support of his assertion, Poole cites the series of games Nintendo DS produced starring Phoenix Wright. These are games in which you play the part of a defense lawyer in a series of wild criminal trials that get more complex as you move along through conversations that you must recall and sift for contradictions. Says Poole, “At a rough estimate, one Phoenix Wright game contains at least as much text as your average children’s novel.”
Another game, “The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass,” has many scripted conversations and written signs to read and also makes players write, jotting down notes on their maps via a touchscreen and stylus so they can solve the puzzles and navigate through increasingly hazardous temples.
Getting children and teens away from the Internet is probably not going to happen as the following stats show:
Are there dangers in young minds spending too much time on the Web? You bet. The vulnerability that children and teens have in spending time with inappropriate sites is alarming. But the danger of them spending so much time reading on the Internet — even if it is reading the posts of Facebook friends — is probably less than spending 270 minutes a day in fron the TV set.
Like everything else, balance and moderation are the best bet, and it is up to parents to insure that their kids are reading longer-form books and articles as well as reading the Web.
Hello Operator … could you help me make this call?
I wonder how the late great singer Jim Croce would have titled his “Operator” song today about a love-starved guy trying to reach out and touch someone. Keying in a URL on the Web doesn’t capture the same angst as confiding in an unknown telephone operator, does it?
In last week’s post I made mention of a stat I found somewhat hard to believe: that one out of eight couples who were married over the last year first met online.
Glen and Dorothy Zimmerly relax at their Wooster, Ohio, home in 2004. Glen decided to go online and find a date after living alone for two years following the death of his wife of 50 years. The Zimmerly's met online and later married. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
And that doubt comes from a guy who met his own wife online just over a decade ago when this idea was seen as crazy by most friends of Anne and me.
Numbers higher?
In truth, the percentage of marrieds who met online may be higher and the time frame wider.
The London Daily Mirror reported in its online site on Aug. 14, 2008, “Single men and women are more likely to find true love on the internet than at work or at a party – especially if they are over 45. A poll of 10,000 married couples in 2006-2007 found 19 percent met online compared with 17 percent who got together at work and 17 percent who paired up through pals.”
And that was four years ago. With the rush to the social media increasing geometrically, those numbers are likely up from that today.
Middle-age crazy
But there’s more: Of those surveyed, those between 45-54 were even more likely to meet online. In fact, the survey showed 31 percent of these couples met online. And it doesn’t stop there as many seniors are turning to the Web to find a new lease on love as the above picture of Glen and Dorothy shows.
In grad school I was taught to always check the source of surveys, and it’s not surprising that this one apparently came from Internet dating giant eHarmony, although that fact is somewhat fuzzy in the Mirror story which quotes a eHarmony exec who made the following analogy:
“Wanting to get married and not going online will soon be seen as equivalent to trying to find an address by driving around randomly rather than using a map.”
A different kind of map
Given that most guys prefer getting lost to using maps, it is ironic that surveys show men go fishing online even more than women do.
In any event, here are some stats (with obligatory author observation in italics) regarding online dating and marriages that ensue from them, and they come from a nicely-sourced site called Dating Sites Reviews.com :
• There are about 1,400 online dating sites in North America. I think there were maybe five when I was surfing for love.
• Married couples who met online had an average courtship period of 18.5 months. Married couples who met offline had average courtships lasting 42 months. Not ones to procrastinate, Anne and I were at the altar six months after our pixels met. We take pride in the fact our marriage has outlasted the dating site in which our worlds collided.
Alfred Mederer, 27, a newsreel photographer on the lookout for a mate, watches Siglinde Fendt, 19, on the screen in the privacy of the "Ethos" Studio in Munich, Grmany, Feb. 3, 1952. And you thought video dating was something new? (AP photo/Heinrich Sanden Sr.)
• The Better Business Bureau in the U.S. said in 2009 they received 2,660 complaints about dating services. That number is up from 824 in 2004. But so are the numbers of online daters. Complaints? How about the Knoxville woman who sent me a key to her condo before she even met me. Then, when she offered me a guest bedroom after an eight-hour drive, she slept on the floor outside my door (which I locked) daring me to leave unexpectedly. I just stepped over her as she snored.
Making money with love
• The online dating industry is now worth $4 billion worldwide.
• This year, 17 percent of couples who married met on a dating site. That is more than one in eight, and the source is Match.com.
• One in five singles have dated someone they met on a dating site. And one in two have regretted at least one of those dates. In my case, it was the Knoxville lass.
• For singles who use dating sites, 33 percent form a relationship, 33 percent do not, and 33 percent give up on dating online. All of which adds up to 100 percent smiles or headaches, or both.
• The mobile phone dating market was worth $330 million in 2007, $550 million in 208, and is predicted to double by 2013 to $1.3 billion annually.
Sex, love, and the Web
• Adult dating sites are cited by some for causing the $1.2 billion sex industry to drop $74 million in revenue in 2009 alone. Does this mean we’re taking sex out of the fantasy realm and inserting it into reality?
* 30 percent of women who met men online had sex on their first date, with 77 percent not requiring a condom to be used. I rest my case.
• Singles who are more likely to use dating sites are ones who are more sociable and have high self-esteem. They also put more value in romantic relationships. So much for the idea that only pet-shop Adrians (Remember Rocky?) are regulars on dating sites.
• With free dating sites, it is estimated that at least 10 percent of new accounts created each day are from scammers.
About that last stat, I can warn you with a special degree of certainty to beware of Russian women named Tanya who post pictures looking like Julia Roberts and who say their dream is to come to America and find a man who looks just like you.
Shall we save the topic of Internet dating scams for another session? I think so.
Brave New World 2.0h!
“The social media is the biggest change in society since the industrial revolution,” proclaims an eye-popping video posted recently on YouTube.
After reading the support for this claim, I am inclined to agree. And, like a lot of you, I’m wondering where these changes will lead us in the future.
We’re talking about media rituals here, or any lifestyle habit we succumb to that is created and/or influenced by the media.
Microsoft employee Jonathan Cluts is silhouetted against a large video screen as he explains a feature in the living room of the company's "Home of the Future" at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
Turn the radio on
For example, radio altered the lives of most Americans when it began offering nightly entertainment and news programming. Families who had previously spent the evenings talking or reading, came to spend them clustered around the big furniture cabinet spewing out the comedy of Fibber McGee and Molly or the daring adventures of The Shadow.
Television did the same thing, as did the Internet, and the social media of Facebook, twitter, flickr, YouTube, Myspace, et al, are doing the same thing now.
Marshalling a thought
The late media guru Marshall McLuhan would be telling us from the Other Side, “I told you so! The medium is the message!”
And that brings me back to this YouTube video produced by a futurist named Erik Qualman who has written a book called “Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business.” It’s found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&feature=related
Qualman is a 38-year-old Michigan native who graduated in business from Michigan State University, where he played basketball, and then got an MBA from the University of Texas. He is now global vice president of Digital Marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland, and is a professor of digital marketing for Hult International Business School.
As a columnist and blogger for Search Engine Watch and ClickZ Magazine, he spends a lot of time doing essentially what I do with this blog, only he gets paid more for it. Amazing what an MBA will do for you.
In this photo released by Sega, the hedgehogs and his pals race on futuristic hoverbaords in "Sonic Riders: Zero Garvity." (AP Photo/Sega)
Fasten your seatbelt
Here are a few boldface observations Mr. Qualman makes about our world and the way social media are changing our lives. Because I can’t help myself, I’ve added a comment to each of his insights. If you’re not sitting down, perhaps now would be a good time to do so.
• Over 50 percent of the world’s population is under 30. For those of us toward the other end of the life cycle, this is depressing news enough.
• 96 percent of Millennials have joined a social network. And, BTW, a lot of their parents and grandparents have done the same thing.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest. I’m still searching for a word to express my amazement at this. “Wow!” just doesn’t quite cut it.
• Facebook tops Google for weekly Web traffic in the U.S. This isn’t bad for a media site that had to have Leslie Stahl explain its basic workings to America just two years ago. It’s also not a bad startup venture for a guy named Mark Zuckerberg who is now all of 26.
• Social media have overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Web. If this is true, then it shows that not all new media rituals are bad for us.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via the social media. Like several of Mr. Qualman’s observations, I don’t know how this one was established or what it’s based on. But I do know one thing: This is how I met my wife 10 years ago.
• Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users; TV 13 years. The Internet took only 4 years, and the iPod did it in 3. We are becoming fast learners, no?
• Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year. I wonder if Mr. Zuckerberg has bought him a real bed yet with all the money he’s raking in. Two years ago he told Leslie Stahl he has only a mattress on the floor.
• The U.S. Department of Education revealed in a 2009 study that online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction. OK, now this is a study I would really like to see for myself. I find it just a tad hard to believe, as well as being overgeneralized.
• 1 out of 6 higher education students are enrolled in online courses. This I do believe, and I teach some of them.
• The fastest growing segment of users on Facebook is females age 55 to 65. I learned long ago not to make pronouncements about the lifestyle habits – and motivations behind them — of women. This is pretty startling, though.
• Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Facebook followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Panama, and Norway. Well, these two celebrity icons are easier on the eye than parts of Belfast or the Gaza Strip.
Climbers work on the futuristic facade of a new shopping mall in downtown Frankfurt in 2009. The mall is completed now but the future may dictate more of us shopping virtually from our living rooms. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passe’. And this news comes at a time when my public library is just starting a new class for seniors on how to log on to your e-mail accounts.
• What happens in Vegas says on Facebook, twitter, flickr, and YouTube. Vegas aside, I think I wrote a couple posts a few months ago on what the social media are doing to our private lives.
• 100+ hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every 4.5 minutes. And the YouTube monitors take down an equal amount, some of which are movies I was hoping to see before they were deemed to have copyright problems.
• If you were paid $1 for every article posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $1,712.32 per hour. Interesting, but tell me again how the owners of Wiki are making any money at all?
• There are over 200 million blogs. Which, of course, is why no one is reading mine.
• 78 percent of consumers trust peer reviews of products and services; 14 percent trust advertisements. This is another way of saying we have all become advertising execs, without the pay or other perks of the Mad Men.
• Kindle eBooks outsold paper books last Christmas. Again, I would like to see the source of this assertion. Just too hard to believe.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men: listening first, selling second. If so, this is a change that is long overdue.
And the final observation is one that any journalist or media executive should turn into a screensaver for his or her laptop. As for trying to divine what the implications are, good luck. It goes like this:
• We no longer search for the news. The news finds us. And we no longer search for products and services. They will find us. And they will find us on the social media.
The zing’s the thing
Before I start this week’s post, I want to thank those of you who chimed in last week via e-mails and Facebook posts about your own “customer service” misadventures.
My favorite was actually one from my wife Anne who wrote, “In calling my bank to ask a question, an electronic voice put me on a long hold during a busy time of my day. I became more upset when the inanimate entity said my call was very important and I would be connected to a ‘relationship specialist.’”
Okay, so now we turn from relationship specialists to dogs. Seems like an appropriate transition.
Dogs do not come sweeter than Margie, but tough love can dictate that an electronic "zinger" collar is needed to keep her out from under car wheels. One mild zing has kept her safe in her own yard for three years.
Often the ideas for these posts are born out of streams of consciousness (“Really?” you ask in feigned surprise, wondering why this post should be any different), and today’s is, in fact, no exception.
The link is there
Lest there is one or two of you who might ask, “What do dogs have to do with new media technology?” let me explain.
I’m talking about the messages that underground fences impart to digital collars worn around the necks of unsuspecting (until it’s too late) dogs. Hi-tech messaging, right? No one said this blog had to be about how humans communicate. Relevance established, we proceed.
A lot of people collect a lot of different kinds of things. My wife and I collect dogs. More accurately, our home has served for years as a way station for wayward tail-waggers. Some have stayed several years, and some have moved on to other homes that we’ve located for them. One such interloper was a brindled Greyhound named Juggler who had the bad habit of waking up every morning at 3 and insisting we let him out to run around the front yard. That got old pretty fast, and Juggler is now living in Columbus, Ohio.
You can stay, but …
Every dog we’ve shepherded over the past several years has had to meet our unseen fence as a pet safety measure. I swore it could never contain a Greyhound, but I was wrong. In the race between electricity and speed, the former wins every time.
Among the half-dozen or so dogs we’ve fostered since the wire went into the ground, only two of them had problems with it. In their case, however, the problem wasn’t trying to cross the wire; it was trying to get them back outside at all once they encountered the initial zings while crossing the arc of the learning curve.
One of those dogs was a manic hound named Buddy who thought the grass was electrified so refused for a long time to ever venture off the front porch and driveway. The second case was even more interesting. That was our fostered black lab, Shadow, a rough-and-tumble lovable dog who seemed totally fearless of any challenge put in front of him. Except an invisible fence, that is.
Just a thought, but you might find it more convenient to contain your dog at home with an invisible fence rather than pushing him around town with you in a cart like Jim Willcutt did with his dog Lucky at the Bloomsburg, Pa., fairgrounds. (AP Photo/Bloomsburg Press Enterprise, Jimmy May)
Electra beats electric
Shadow’s reaction to the first electronic zing was to assume not, as Buddy had, that the grass was electrified. Shadow assumed that the entire ground was electrified, so he concluded the only safe place to be was on the roof of our Buick. And that is where he scampered and took up residence for a few hours until being coaxed by his pal Margie to come on down and give the earth another try.
These invisible fences contain three elements that usually do the trick for all dogs: the buried wire (fence) itself, the control box that’s mounted on a garage wall and allows you to increase or decrease the zing on a scale of 1-10, and the electronic collar wrapped around Fang’s neck. Of the three items, you don’t want to lose the collars because they run about $300 each. The whole fence set is way cheaper than your standard privacy or chain-link fence, though, and it’s in line with a lot more subdivision covenants than above-ground fences which have a way of deteriorating in a few years time.
You go first, Dad
If you’ve never used an invisible fence, you will discover that the installer will first ask you to feel the zing that your dog will feel before installing it, so you won’t feel like a sadist when you flip the on-switch. While noticeable, the sensation is, in fact, more like a mild sting than a power-line shock. Of course most of these human tests are run at lower levels rather than higher, but the fact is that many dogs are contained with the same level 3 or 4. We do have one dog now, Stitch, who won’t stop under anything less than a level 9 zing, and I’m not even sure that really bothers him.
All dogs get an aural warning in the form of a beep (which I’ve never been able to hear) when they get too close to the line and, like Pavlov’s canine, that stops most of them because they know what might come next if they keep going.
Human applications?
Watching this electronic warning system work over the years has often made me wonder if an invisible fence application might not work to keep us humans away from things that are bad for us, just as the street is for dogs. Here are a few places where installing an invisible fence, emitting stronger jolts to say, electronic belts, might work for us:
* A three-foot radius around the refrigerator.
* A mile radius around a casino.
* The entry to our driveways on afternoons we have pledged to work out at the gym first before going home. (Exiting the gym after 30 minutes would deactivate the driveway wire.)
* The entire circumference of a golf course on afternoons we husbands should be spending doing home or yard improvements.
* The bag containing our laptop and the clip containing our i-Phone or Droid on weekends and vacations.
Feel free to add to the list. Might as well make technology help us live the kind of lives we, as well our dogs, should be living.
