Sunday, February 14, 2010

Almanacs “Peters Township teenager sent to Adelphoi Village for evaluation - Pennsylvania Almanac” plus 3 more

Almanacs “Peters Township teenager sent to Adelphoi Village for evaluation - Pennsylvania Almanac” plus 3 more

Peters Township teenager sent to Adelphoi Village for evaluation - Pennsylvania Almanac

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 04:55 AM PST

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Peters Township teenager sent to Adelphoi Village for evaluation

By Linda M. Ritzer Staff writer lritzer@observer-reporter.com

A Peters Township teenager who was found delinquent in juvenile court for hitting another teen in the head with a baseball bat will spend 45 days in an inpatient diagnostic program before a decision is made on whether he needs more treatment.

Taylor DiBart, 17, of 117 Simmons Road, McMurray, was sent immediately to Adelphoi Village in Connellsville, Fayette County, for the evaluation after a hearing Friday before Washington County Judge Janet Moschetta Bell. DiBart's attorney, Chris Blackwell, had argued that DiBart should serve a probationary sentence at home with any needed treatment.

DiBart had initially been charged as an adult with aggravated assault for hitting Hunter Braden, 18, formerly of Peters Township, in the head with the metal bat on April 30 after Braden went to DiBart's home. Braden was hospitalized with a fractured skull and a brain injury, and continues to suffer from cognitive problems.

DiBart's case was transferred to juvenile court in November. Judge Paul Pozonsky, who formerly handled juvenile cases, found him delinquent in December of simple assault under an agreement between DiBart and the district attorney's office. He has been on electronic monitoring.

Under the juvenile act, the court must determine what treatment, supervision or placement is needed to rehabilitate the child.

Psychologist Paul Bernstein testified that DiBart did not have a mental disorder but was impulsive, reactive and immature. He said DiBart completed seven counseling sessions with another psychologist and has shown improvement in his grades, school attendance and behavior and is not using drugs or alcohol. He said he did not believe he needed further treatment.

However, juvenile probation officer Michael Porter recommended the 45-day placement, noting that DiBart had a prior juvenile record for underage drinking and possession of a small amount of marijuana. He said DiBart admitted to some use of alcohol and marijuana.

DiBart testified that after the assault he decided to turn his life around. He said the counseling helped him to realize what he had done to Braden, and "it made me feel terrible about it."

The courtroom was packed with friends of DiBart's family, and Moschetta-Bell received 45 letters in his behalf.

Braden, who now lives with his family in Charlotte, N.C., testified that he suffers from aphasia, which is a problem with word identification and speech, and just completed speech therapy. He is now taking several community college classes.

Noting the seriousness of the injuries, Moschetta Bell said she was not convinced that the treatment DiBart had received was sufficient and that nothing like this would happen again.

"This was a serious act, and it displayed a serious lack of judgment, even for a 17-year-old," she said.


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Daily almanac - Columbus Dispatch

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 03:51 AM PST

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In 1979, Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.

In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world's first heart-liver transplant recipient, at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. (She lived until November 1990.)

In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a novel condemned as blasphemous.

Ten years ago: Two sophomores at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. were found shot to death in a fast-food restaurant just two blocks from the school, which was still reeling from the April 1999 massacre. (The restaurant killings remain unsolved.)

Five years ago: Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated with explosives.

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About that winter forecast . . . - Omaha World-Herald

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 03:22 AM PST

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So much for that "mild winter."

The Midlands forecast that missed by a mile shows just how little scientists understand long-term weather patterns.

"It is humbling. It shows we have a lot of work to do," said Ed O'Lenic, head of the federal team at the Climate Prediction Center that issued the forecast in October.

"That's not to make excuses. It is a difficult business."

And while it might surprise snowbound Midlanders, the fact is that the Climate Prediction Center's overall forecast was reasonably accurate for many parts of the country:

--The Southeast was projected to be cooler than normal. It has been. Unseasonably cold weather threatened the citrus crop.

--The Southwest was forecast to be wetter than normal. It has seen flooding and mudslides.

--The Northwest was projected to be drier than normal. It has been. Vancouver is short on snow for the Winter Olympics.

But eastern Nebraska and western Iowa are in a pocket of the country where the weather diverged the most from initial long-term projections of both federal scientists and forecasters at AccuWeather Inc., The World-Herald's consultant.

No one knows why.

The explanation could be simple bad luck — getting hit by two massive December snowstorms. So much snow covers the ground that it could be driving the warmth from the air.

There was one correct early forecast for the region — the Old Farmer's Almanac. But it missed the mark for much of the rest of the nation.

Still, meteorologists are getting credit for their short-term forecasts this winter.

When it really mattered — on life-or-death threats posed by numerous individual storms — local forecasters for the National Weather Service have been stunningly accurate.

"They nailed those," said Ken Dewey, an applied climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

"They said the storms would start at a certain hour, and they did. The short-term forecast was extremely reliable. I think they saved lives," he said.

Still, what lingers in many minds is last fall's predictions of a mild winter.

Brad Dickson, who writes a weekly sports humor column for The World-Herald, spoke for many when he wrote: "Tuesday is Groundhog Day. … I say after local meteorologists predicted a mild winter, we should start getting all of our weather predictions from rodents."

And this was a winter when forecasters had an ace up their sleeves: the El Niño weather pattern.

El Niño is a periodic, significant warming of the Pacific Ocean. It and its cooling opposite, La Niña, are the best-understood, most predictable engines that drive large-scale weather patterns.

El Niño usually brings higher-than-normal temperatures to the Northern Plains. Scientists can see and measure El Niño brewing months ahead of time. Once ocean temperatures reach El Niño levels, they typically remain that way for months.

In most El Niño/La Niña winters, the Climate Prediction Center's seasonal forecasts are 60 percent more accurate than a simple average of temperatures and precipitation over the previous 30 winters. Sometimes the center's forecasts are 80-plus percent more accurate.

This winter, O'Lenic said, his forecasters scored just 12.5 percent better.

The reason?

A "very rare, extreme climate event," O'Lenic said.

A strengthening El Niño acted in harmony with an unprecedented spike in the Arctic Oscillation over the Atlantic. That atmospheric circulation over the polar region this year aggressively pushed cold air down into North America, Asia and Europe.

An Arctic Oscillation can spike in intensity within a week or two — with no real warning. That happened in December, burying October's "mild winter" forecast after an unseasonably mild November.

The early December and Christmas holiday blizzards contributed to the persistent cold in the Omaha-Lincoln-Norfolk areas, said UNL's Dewey.

Now many feel this winter will never end.

"What people are missing this year is a break from winter, where the snow goes away and temperatures rise," Dewey said.

"We were just unlucky. If we had had just one (December) storm, we could have worked our way out of the problem. But with almost two feet of snow, it was utterly impossible to get out from under it."

Dewey understands why this winter's seasonal forecast might prompt people to conclude that meteorologists don't know what they're talking about.

What the average person doesn't realize, Dewey said, is that the success rate with seasonal forecasts is low.

"The probability of being accurate is not very high. You're going to have failure on a regular basis that you don't have with day-to-day forecasts. This is probably the biggest disconnect I've seen with people," he said.

Dewey said daily forecasts have achieved 90 percent accuracy this winter, something unheard of when he started as a climatologist 30 years ago.

But despite research and technological advances, that level of accuracy won't be reached in long-term forecasting anytime soon.

"Not in my lifetime," Dewey said.

Contact the writer:

444-1102, nancy.gaarder@owh.com


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Why settle for Mr Good Enough? - The Guardian

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 05:24 AM PST

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Single women, duck and cover, it's Valentine's Day – the season of mysterious chocolates, big-eyed teddy bears, and red books with titles designed to make you feel like crap. In the latter category, this year already has a clear winner, the much discussed book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough. In it, author Lori Gottlieb argues that single women, particularly those who have hit the big 3-0, need to have more realistic expectations when it comes to men. They cannot rule out potential suitors simply because they have red hair, or no hair, or find chores disagreeable. It they do, they risk spending the rest of their lives alone and lonely, their only backscratcher a blunt pencil, their only spider killer a tattered Sex and the City DVD case.

The book's jacket claims this is all new – the author, it states, has said "the unthinkable" – but of course nothing could be farther from the truth. American culture has long been bothered by the image of single women, the idea that women could live happily without men or a family. In 1869, a Farmer's Almanac called them "diminished goods". A few decades later, a 1920s-era critic described singletons as "waste products of our female population … vicious and destructive creatures". More recently, Cosmopolitan warned women that "in the United States, the 20s are the picture-perfect decade for saying I do. The farther you stray from that magic era, the more freakish you start to feel."

I wish I could say Marry Him turns a corner on this subject, but it actually follows this old paradigm to a tee. The women in it are mostly caricatures, ditzy and overly "picky" women who seem not to have a thought beyond that of their partner's physical appearance, while men escape pretty much scot-free, almost always portrayed as emotionally balanced and sensible, as if there could not be parallel books out there for them called Commit You Idiot! and Eyes Off the Boobs!

This is frustrating for many reasons, but especially because Gottlieb's subject – the question of compromise in modern relationships – actually deserves attention, just not of the sort she gives it. I'd venture that, oh, 80% of the book implies women turn down potential mates solely because of their hand size or their penchant for light-green bow ties, but even when she attempts to engage with the difficult choices facing contemporary women – women who have grown up with feminism, and who rightly expect respect in both personal and public settings – Gottlieb takes the cheap and well-travelled path of dismissing these choices as extravagant, burdensome, or even petty. At one point, she empathises with a woman who wished she had accepted, at 23, her college boyfriend's marriage proposal. She had refused because she felt she was supposed to pursue her dreams first. "The goal was to go out and become 'self-actualized' before marriage," writes Gottlieb about herself. "I didn't imagine that one day I'd be self-actualised but regretful."

She goes onto blame the women's movement for making women feel this way, but how not to lose oneself in a relationship is hardly a silly concern. Whether you're married or not, the question of compromise is and should be constantly on the minds of women. How much can you give up in a relationship? What does an equal, mutually fulfilling relationship look like? These are definitely more difficult questions to answer now than 40 years ago, when women did not have the economic and social standing they often have today. But they shouldn't be dismissed for this reason, only treated with the appropriate amount of care and scrutiny.

And yet time and again, this fact is ignored. For instance, as an example of women's fussiness and perfectionism, Gottlieb sympathetically quotes one man who complains, "Our wives want us to do half the childcare and half the laundry, but they don't want us to earn half the income." On the surface, this may seem reasonable, but it becomes a much more problematic statement when you factor in how much earning potential mothers give up by staying home with children and the fact that part-time workers, who are overwhelmingly female, earn 20% less (and by some reports, up to a dizzying 40% less) per hour for doing the same work as their full-time counterparts.

Lori Gottlieb knows this, which is perhaps the most frustrating thing about the book and one that gets to the heart of a much larger problem – the tremendous amount of false naivety in culture today regarding women's status and choices. I'm not one for blanket statements, but if you're a female writer today your best bet at making it is to write this sort of book – one that forgoes nuance and thoughtfulness for "controversy" and "counter-intuitiveness," a book, that is, that claims to be about empowering women, but is actually aimed mostly at pissing off feminists, that supposedly dying breed whom publishers nevertheless need to get things going.

In the end, a huge disservice is done to women. Instead of focusing on the real issues they face in modern relationships – and, no, that's not likely to be whether their suitor wears a bow tie or not, but whether he will still be interested if they make more money than him, or still respect them once the kids come along – culture gives us fake debates, an endless stream of pathetic-looking singles, or in other cases haggard looking mothers, with the words "picky", "petty", and "pathetic" scrolling underneath them. I just hope that, along with the bears and the chocolates, women don't actually buy it.

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