Hasta La Gadget!

In the face of the deadly Ebola outbreak, 2002 World of Children Award Honoree, Luke Hingson, is leading a major mobilization to help supply desperately needed medical equipment and supplies to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Brother’s Brother, Hingson’s organization, has already shipped five 40-foot containers of supplies into this ravaged region of the world and more 40-foot shipping containers are being prepared now for shipment very soon.

“Basic protective gear is in high demand right now because every patient arriving at a clinic or hospital in these areas must be treated as a potential Ebola patient,” says Hingson. “Health care workers double and triple their use of protective gear and all of it is incinerated after contact.”

There is an urgent need for more of these supplies as well as for items that we, in the United States, would dispose of but could be recycled into use there. An example is hospital mattresses because once these are in contact with Ebola patients in Liberia or Sierra Leone they should be destroyed.

Children are being heavily impacted by this epidemic in 3 ways:

1. First, children are in constant physical contact with the adults around them, and Ebola is spread exclusively by contact with bodily fluids including perspiration
2. Second, children are highly susceptible to the disease as they are not strong and are often undernourished, which means their survivability potential is minimal
3. Third, because children are losing parents and guardians, they are being left even more vulnerable than before

Brother’s Brother has always been responsive to crises, but this one presents special challenges. Shipping items into the affected areas has been slowed down due to fear of the disease spreading, so airlines and shipping companies have either withdrawn from the area or restricted their shipping into the area, creating a backlog. Because Brother’s Brother works directly with the governments and the health care organizations in the areas, they are generally able to make sure their supplies get through on a timely basis, but there can still be a shipping lag of many weeks or even months. Thus, it is imperative that a steady stream of shipments is maintained.

To complicate matters, there are some 200 hospitals and clinics being supplied in the affected areas so internal distribution can be challenging. In spite of all the exigencies, Hingson states, “We are responding to direct requests on a regular basis and shipping everything we can collect, from disinfectant soaps to hospital gowns, from protective gloves and masks to mattresses and even body bags for those who do not survive the epidemic.”

Maintaining a steady stream of protective gear is essential to keeping the local health care workers on the job as the fear of contracting the disease has frightened many off. In the meantime, fears of a further spread of the disease are fueled by the actions of those who, for lack of education, or because of local ethnic beliefs and rumors, do not believe this is an epidemic and thus leave the clinics and hospitals, or are taken away as a result of armed conflict.

In 2002, Hingson was honored with the prestigious World of Children Award. Today, World of Children Award is eager to continue to help Hingson in his efforts. Those who wish to help with either donations of usable materials such as protective gloves, masks, footwear, full body protective gear or other medical supplies, and those who wish to make a cash contribution can do so at World of Children Award’s website by visiting www.worldofchildren.org/support-ebola-victims

World of Children Award is grateful to Geisinger Health System for their generous donation of critical supplies to this program.

There are few of us who haven’t dreamed of living the life of a spy — dashing about the great capitals of the world, being chased by evil agents bent on destroying our freedoms, and, best of all, getting to make use of super spy gadgets. Just like James Bond (in an alternate universe) you can get this way cool Capt. Jules’ Extraordinary Telescope Ring with an awesome steampunk look.

Happy Saturday! Welcome to another edition of Feedback Loop! This week we’re exploring obscure TV channels, the gadgets you travel with and just how much space is too much on your phone. So sit back, get comfy and get ready to talk with fellow…

Late Friday afternoon (August 22), the University of Illinois broke its three-week long silence on the controversy regarding the Chancellor’s revocation of a tenured offer to Steven Salaita, who had accepted a faculty position in the American Indian Studies Program at the flagship campus at Urbana-Champaign. Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy both issued statements explaining the revocation, but in terms far more alarming than the original decision itself. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees have now declared that the First Amendment does not apply to any tenured faculty at the University of Illinois.

A bit of background to Friday’s bombshell statements. Last October, Professor Salaita, then teaching at Virginia Tech, accepted a tenured offer from the Urbana-Champaign campus. He went through the regular appointments process at the University of Illinois, and received approval by the relevant departments and deans after a review of his scholarship and teaching. The offer, which he accepted, was conditional on approval by the Board of Trustees. Such approval clauses are typical in all teaching contracts and had, previously, been pro forma at Illinois, as they are at all serious universities: it is not the job of the Board of Trustees of a research institution to second-guess the judgment of academics and scholars. Well before the Board took the matter up, even University officials were describing Salaita as a faculty member, and he moved to Illinois and was scheduled to teach two classes this fall.

Salaita also has a Twitter account. “Tweets” are limited to 140 characters, so the medium is conducive primarily to spontaneous and superficial commentary. As a Palestinian-American and scholar of colonialism, Salaita tweeted extensively about the Israeli attack on Gaza. Contrary to the initial misrepresentations put into circulation by far right websites, none of the tweets were either anti-semitic or incitements to violence. Some were vulgar, some juvenile, some insulting, some banal. The First Amendment unequivocally protects Salaita’s right to express every one of those opinions on a matter of public concern, and to do so, if he wants, with vulgarity and insults. As a matter of American constitutional law, this is not a close case.

Part of the First Amendment’s protection of such speech is that government, including a state university, is prohibited from punishing the speaker for his expression or viewpoint. Revoking a job offer because of such speech would, again, be clearly unconstitutional. Salaita’s constitutional and contractual claims will no doubt be adjudicated in court, and the University should lose.

That now brings us to Friday’s shocking statements. Chancellor Wise declared that “we cannot… tolerate… personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” Yet as a matter of well-settled American constitutional law, the University of Illinois must tolerate “words… that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” The University has no choice, both as a matter of constitutional law and as a matter of its contractual commitment with its faculty to academic freedom. Scathing critiques of both viewpoints and authors abound in almost all scholarly fields; it would be the end of serious scholarly inquiry and debate were administrators to become the arbiters of “good manners.” More simply, it would be illegal for the University to start punishing its faculty for failure to live up to the Chancellor’s expectations for “civil” speech and disagreement.

The university, of course, need not and should not tolerate the mistreatment of students in the classroom, but there is no evidence of any such pedagogical misconduct in this case; indeed, the public evidence is that Salaita is a successful and popular teacher. No serious university evaluates pedagogical fitness based on speculative inferences from twitter accounts, yet the Chancellor’s statement implies that this is what Illinois has done in this instance. Faculty have pedagogical and professional obligations to their students, but that does not include the obligation to refrain from expressing views, whether about matters of public concern or matters within the purview of a faculty member’s scholarship, that some student somewhere might find upsetting, leading that student to conclude that that faculty member might not “value[] that student as a human being.” A student’s entitlement is to be treated seriously and professionally in the classroom; students have no entitlement to never find the views of their professors offensive or upsetting.

Chairman Kennedy’s statement is even worse than the Chancellor’s. While endorsing the Chancellor’s abrogation of the constitutional and contractual rights of the faculty, he goes even further, declaring that “there can be no place” for “disrespectful and demeaning speech” “in our democracy, and therefore, there will be no place for it in our university.” We may certainly hope for more civility in public life, but “disrespectful and demeaning speech” not only has an extensive presence in our democracy (as everyone knows), it has a constitutionally protected place as well, as the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed. Yet Chairman Kennedy says he believes only in “free speech tempered in respect for human rights.” But there is no doctrine of “free speech tempered in respect for human rights” in American constitutional law. It is a national embarrassment that a public official, the Chairman of the University of Illinois’s Board of Trustees, apparently does not know even the basic facts about the American constitutional system.

At moments like this, one wonders: Where are the lawyers? Chancellor Wise and Chairman Kennedy have made statements that commit the University of Illinois to illegal because unconstitutional courses of action. They should resign, or be removed from office, before doing further damage to one of the nation’s great research universities. Their public statements make clear they are unfit to lead academic institutions in which both freedom of speech and freedom of research and inquiry are upheld.

Water is heavy—ask anyone who screwed up the Ice Bucket Challenge . And California and the rest of the West Coast have precious little of it . The water is so depleted, it’s not weighing down the earth’s surface—and geologists have measured a rise of up to 15 millimeters at GPS stations across the West.

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