Hasta La Gadget!

What was the scariest moment you have ever experienced in your life?: originally appeared on Quora: The best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Answer by Ken Miyamoto, Produced screenwriter, former Sony Pictures script reader/story analyst

This is a true story…

I’ve told this to a select few.

I was a freshmen in high school in my home town of La Crosse, Wisconsin.

I was sleeping over at my friend Tom’s house. We were watching a movie in his living room when he suddenly got a phone call. I watched as he listened to what was being said on the other line. I watched as emotion poured over his face as he threw the phone across the room.

After moments of crying, he told me that a boy at my school had committed suicide. Now, I knew this boy only through seeing him in the halls. My friend Tom and I didn’t go to the same high school but Tom had gone to middle school with this boy. Apparently, Tom bullied him during those years. He wasn’t proud of it, and to be honest, I was pretty surprised because he was/is a great guy.

He had utter remorse.

We decided to sneak out and go for a walk. The year was roughly 1990. Maybe 1991. We were freshmen in high school.

Now, sneaking out was nothing new. We always did it. At the time, we weren’t into drugs, alcohol, or partying. We just liked the freedom of walking the streets at night. The discussions were always great.

Normally, we’d go walk through the big cemetery that was near my house. It was behind the train tracks that still run through La Crosse to this day. We loved the danger of the cemetery. The scares. We were kids. It was a rite of passage.

As we walked along the train tracks, leading to the cemetery, we stopped. To this day, I can’t explain why. We had walked into that cemetery a dozens of times… and on scarier nights.

For whatever reason, we didn’t want to go in there. I don’t know if the thought of death on our minds due to my classmate’s suicide was a factor. Perhaps. Regardless, without really saying anything to each other, we stopped, turned around, and decided to head down a nearby street.

Now, in retrospect, I do have to say that throughout this walk, things seemed off. There wasn’t a car in sight. This was suburbia. Even walking through the town’s main street was odd because there just weren’t any cars. Odd. It was roughly after midnight. It was a weekend night. Where was everybody. Perhaps just a strange coincidence.

Lastly, there was something in the air. Both Tom and I felt it. We even brought it up.

“It feels weird tonight. The air. The lights.”

So we decided to walk down a dead end street. At the end of the street was a ditch with a simple up, down, and up trail that led to the street that I lived in. Simple enough.

Keep in mind, as I get into the horrifying part of this story, that we were in the suburbs. These weren’t old, creepy houses with strange individuals. And the trees were small. It wasn’t a brand new development, but it wasn’t that old either.

So as Tom and I are walking down this street, we’re looking down to the road beneath our feet as we talk. I don’t remember the exact conversation at this particular moment. Perhaps we were talking about the tragedy of that night. But it could just have easily been about Star Wars or Akira.

As we approached the dead end, which was a few houses away…

Tom and I suddenly stopped.

We did so at the same time without saying one word to each other.

Our heads slowly turned towards each other, both sensing something. The hair on our arms and backs of our necks standing high. Then our gaze slowly moved forward in unison, slightly to the right.

That’s when we saw it.

About two houses away, in a virtually barren front yard of a suburban home, besides some bushes, was a DARK FIGURE.

It was someone or something in dark robes.

No face. No features at all. Just the robe.

Now, this figure didn’t acknowledge us. Not yet.

It instead walked or moved in a certain way. I can’t articulate it correctly. As if it was walking in circles slowly… without really walking.

It held something that was blowing in the wind. And yes, the wind picked up a little bit as well.

Another odd element was the light that illuminated it somewhat. There was a street light a few houses up, but it wasn’t strong enough to illuminate this figure as it was.

Tom and I were frozen. In fact, I’m almost frozen as I write this. It’s been awhile since I have thought about this night.

So there we stood, frozen in fear, staring at this dark figure moving, yet doing so without moving.

And it was holding something. Or perhaps what was blowing in the wind was more of its robe. I’m not sure.

We stared at this… thing… for I don’t know how long… until…

IT STOPPED AND SUDDENLY LOOKED UP AT US, as if finally alarmed by our presence!

That was enough for us. We ran away as fast as we could. We cut through a side street that was to lead us to a parallel street towards my neighborhood. This street lead to a slight hill. As we rounded the corner and started running up the hill in a panic…

We stopped. Because on top of that hill, we saw another dark figure with its arms raised.

We turned around and ran away in the direction of Tom’s house, which at this distance was at least five miles away.

We ran. Time stood still.

The next thing I remember, we’re lying in the middle of a courtyard of some other neighborhood that we’d never been in, gasping for breath.

We sat up and without saying a word, we walked in silence back to his house. The air felt normal again. Although we felt like we were in a haze of sorts. Albeit out of danger.

We fell asleep in his house. I woke up that morning and went home.

A few days later, I rode my bike to the location.

Perhaps it was shadow play? Perhaps there was a certain tree or bush or maybe a For Sale sign or something that made it look like there was something else there.

Nothing. It was an open yard.

Tom and I didn’t speak of that night for a long time. Years later when I brought it up, he replied, “Yeah. What the hell was that?” As if no time had passed.

What was it? I have no idea.

We hadn’t taken any drugs. We hadn’t been drinking any alcohol.

I often wonder if it could have been a haunting, a spectre, a ghost, etc. Maybe it was an alien abduction or sighting. We saw no craft but there was that unexplained light. Or maybe it was some other kids messing with us. But how would they have known we were coming? How could they be so prepared?

I just don’t know.

That was roughly 23 years ago, give or take.

And I do believe that this was the scariest moment in my life.

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How can big data help improve child maltreatment response and prevention?

At 18, Miranda Sheffield got the shock of her life when a pregnancy test came up positive.

Sheffield’s first reaction was “devastation, disappointment, depression, tragedy: any and everything that could be negative.”

She was a track star and a senior at Pomona High School, set in the vast urban tracts surrounding Los Angeles. Unlike anyone else in her family, Sheffield was on her way to college.

Even if she didn’t fully realize it as a pregnant teen in 2004, the prospects for her baby girl were less than optimal. She was single, on public health insurance and had been in foster care for almost half of her quickly fading childhood.

In 2013, Emily Putnam-Hornstein and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of California-Berkeley released a groundbreaking study that tracked what happens to the children of young mothers who had experienced the child protection system in Los Angeles.

By age five, 40 percent of children with mothers who had been suspected victims of abuse were reported themselves. For sons and daughters of moms who had been confirmed victims, 18 percent would wind up as confirmed victims themselves.

Applying Predictive Analytics to Child Maltreatment Response and Prevention

This is only one facet of a growing body of research that is clearly linking certain data points available when a baby is born with their subsequent involvement with the child protection system.

What is emerging is a new paradigm, where big data can be crunched in a way that helps determine which children are at greater risk of being abused.

For Los Angeles County, which committed itself to an overhaul of its child protection system last year, the idea of applying “predictive analytics” to child maltreatment response and prevention has gained a new currency. Its Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection recommended that the county implement a predictive analytics model piloted in Florida that is meant to reduce child fatalities. It also pointed to Putnam-Hornstein’s research, which could be applied to targeting services to families and individuals, like Miranda Sheffield, before a call of abuse is ever made.

The transition team charged with seeing the blue ribbon commission’s recommendations through has taken little substantive action towards launching a robust predictive analytics system in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the county’s Department of Children and Family Services has quietly developed a system of its own.

“There has been a lot of excitement and discussion about predictive analytics and predictive risk modeling as of late, which is terrific,” Putnam-Hornstein said in an interview.

In the context of child protection, it can be applied as a tool for risk stratifying or risk classifying cases – and this information can be used for a range of activities – as a ‘check’ for clinical decision-making, to assign more experienced workers to more serious cases, to prioritize families for limited services slots, or to take some other action.

But the prospect of using risk models to identify families and individuals is not without debate. For some, the idea inspires worry that families accused of abuse and neglect will experience an overly ratcheted-up response based on a probability that something will go wrong. When it comes to offering child maltreatment prevention services before a call of abuse is made, there are lingering questions of stigma and labeling.

Putnam-Hornstein’s research relies on linking birth data to subsequent involvement with public social services, including child protection. In 2011, she and a group of researchers at Berkeley’s Center for Social Services Research released a study tracking instances of reported and substantiated child maltreatment for more than two million babies born in California between 1999 and 2002.

By age five, the researchers found that certain at-birth risk factors were linked to heightened rates of reported or substantiated abuse. These included:

– Children born without fathers listed on their birth certificates
– Mothers on public health insurance
– Mothers who had not completed high school
– Teen mothers

Subsequent analysis revealed that the cumulative effect of having more than one of these risk factors increased the likelihood of CPS involvement even further.

While Sheffield wasn’t aware of the numeric probability that her child would be reported for abuse, she did feel like she was letting down her supporters, mostly her “heart mother,” foster mom Ms. Lisa.

“She had this face of disappointment,” Sheffield said. But Ms. Lisa wiped it clear and simply asked: “How are we gonna move forward?”

Sheffield had the baby.

Applying Risk Models after Abuse is Suspected

Los Angeles County’s blue ribbon commission issued its final report in April, where it recommended that the county “immediately implement the process used by Eckerd in Hillsborough County, Florida and in other industries to achieve remarkable safety results.”

Richard Martinez, the superintendent of Pomona Unified School District, was a member of the commission and also serves on the blue ribbon transition team, which has worked to move the county along in implementing the commission’s recommendations.

Martinez said the transition team hasn’t made any headway on seeing a predictive analytics tool like Eckerd’s is implemented.

“That is something we truly need to implement from my perspective,” Martinez said. “To predict potential risk based on family history or risk factors, I think that would be critical for this community.”

The Eckerd model, called Rapid Safety Feedback, was developed by looking at 1,500 cases of child maltreatment in Hillsborough County Florida, where Eckerd is the private provider operating child protection services. Eight of those cases were fatalities.

Eckerd found that fatality prevention had to focus on children under the age of three who are left in their home. Every child who had died in the previous two years fell into that category.

Eckerd also created a nine-point risk assessment checklist that child protection workers must fill out. If the issues aren’t resolved rapidly, the case is moved up from the manager to the director level so that an adequate response is forthcoming.

While the blue ribbon commission was showing off the Eckerd model, DCFS was inching ever closer to launching a risk prediction tool of its own. As far back as 2008, the department started developing a program called Approach to Understanding Risk assessment, or AURA, according to Francesca LeRúe, who heads the 50-person Risk Management Division.

AURA analyzed risk factors for cases that were deemed critical incidents, near fatalities or fatalities over a three-year period starting in 2011. The results from 2011 and 2012 yielded a risk score, which was then tested against the 2013 data.

The risk scores were helpful in indicating which children would end up with the most serious cases of abuse, according to Le Rúe.

LeRúe, who spent a good part of her 26 years at DCFS investigating child abuse, sees AURA as an invaluable tool for child protection workers. But even so there are limitations.

“People ask me, why don’t you just take that child away from that family?” she said. “Risk of maltreatment doesn’t mean maltreatment has happened. You detain a child if there is an immediate risk and can’t develop a safety plan. You can’t detain, but more services can be directed – absolutely.”

Armand Montiel, spokesman for Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), agrees that using data to determine risk is critical, and also thinks that predictive analytics’ real potential lies before a call of abuse is ever made.

“Instead of predictive analytics, lets do preventive analytics,” Montiel said in an interview. “DCFS is not the proper agency for social engineering. The school system, mental health, public health, probation, law enforcement, they all see these families before we do.”

Offering Services Before Abuse is Reported

Margaret Henry is a juvenile dependency judge in LA County, and is a member of the blue ribbon transition team. Judge Henry remembers a presentation given by Putnam-Hornstein before a group of child protection leaders last year.

“There was dispute about labeling people,” Henry said. “Some people thought it was labeling and discriminating.”

Indeed, Putnam-Hornstein is grappling with this very same question.

“It is just a tool that will hopefully allow for the better classification of risk, but we need to think carefully about the downside if we misclassify an individual,” she said.

I think there is actually very little downside to using predictive analytics in the context of prevention. When we don’t have enough slots to serve everyone – we are simply talking about trying to identify the children and families who most need available voluntary services.

Judge Henry also pointed to the upsides of better targeting voluntary services.

“You do not want DCFS detaining every child just because of the predictive analysis,” she said. “But if it were through public health, if young women in situations [of heightened risk] were identified by public health and offered additional services, that is the way to do it.”

For Sheffield, no such services were forthcoming.

Now 28, she sees having her daughter as the single best thing in her life. The situation sure didn’t seem that way at first.

She had her baby in 2004, eight years before California would extend foster care to age 21. But even then, Los Angeles County’s juvenile courts often allowed for children to stay in past their 18th birthday on the county’s dime.

Sheffield recalls her social worker and supervisor coming over to Ms. Lisa’s house with a stack of papers for her to sign shortly after her 19th birthday, and within months of her baby being born.

Sheffield said she wasn’t ready, that she needed help, at which point she says the county workers became forceful.

“If you won’t close your case,” she remembers them saying, “We will say there is some form of neglect taking place.”

“They were saying if I do not close my case they could have some ability to show that I have no income, that I have nothing to provide my daughter,” she said. “They were bullying me.”

Scared, she signed the papers. Now a youth representative working for the Children’s Law Center of California at the children’s court in Monterey Park every day, she can see ways she could have advocated for herself more. She said she didn’t even call her county-appointed lawyer, because, as is often the case, he had only recently been assigned to her case and she barely knew him.

At that time, there was no transitional housing for young mothers leaving foster care that Sheffield could find. Her only option was to go to a shelter for homeless mothers. Luckily, Ms. Lisa let her stay on. Sheffield’s church also pitched in.

But for all intents and purposes, the system had left her, and her baby, to face the risks we now know await teen mothers with CPS histories.

In the 10 years since she had her child, there have been no reports of abuse or neglect. Sheffield would go on to get a bachelor’s degree, intern for Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and now serves as a peer coordinator for youth who are eligible for extended foster care benefits.

By all accounts, Sheffield is a success story. But that her child, now ten and happily situated in a fifth grade classroom, didn’t endure the abuse and neglect that Sheffield faced is the larger victory.

This happened in absence of a comprehensive system.

What could be done for the thousands of other Miranda Sheffields if such a system was in place?

Daniel Heimpel is the founder of Fostering Media Connections and the publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change.

Bishop of Rome from 1963 to his death in 1978, Paul VI is now Blessed Paul VI. But why would Pope Francis have thought it significant to beatify this pope, so soon after canonizing John XXIII and John Paul II? Were there not enough beatified or canonized popes already, or indeed perhaps too many?

Elected as John XXIII’s successor, Giovanni Battista Montini chose the name Paul not so much to honor earlier popes that had also taken that name, but to make St. Paul, the itinerant apostle of the Mediterranean world, his role model. In his younger days, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli had spent many years outside Italy, in Turkey, Bulgaria, France, but as Pope John XXIII he confined any travel to Italy. Paul VI deserves the title the first global pope, for he boarded jet airplanes and went where popes had not gone before, including East Asia and the Americas. In 1965, he was the first pope to travel to the United States and to address the United Nations. His impassioned appeal at the U.N. for no more war is still frequently cited, and he did an enormous amount in his 15-year papacy to make the Catholic Church a prophetic voice for peace and justice for all peoples, of every land, of whatever religion or no religion.

The best biography of Pope Paul VI, in English and perhaps in any language, is Peter Hebblethwaite’s Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (1993), a work of some 750 pages. A British ex-Jesuit, Hebblethwaite did not lightly pass over the negative reception of Paul’s 1968 encyclical on birth control, but neither did he allow it overshadow Paul’s many accomplishments, some with much enduring value for the Catholic Church in its dialogue with other faiths and with the world. In analyzing Paul’s journey to Bogotà, Colombia, Hebblethwaite states that Paul was consoled to go to part of the world where he “was hailed as the author of Populorum Progressio rather than reviled for Humanae Vitae.”

Populorum Progressio, published in 1967, was Paul VI at his best, as he placed the Church with the poor, and articulated a vision of the Church as for the poor, especially the poor in the developing, newly independent countries of the post-colonial world. Denouncing “flagrant inequalities” between a privileged minority enjoying wealth and a deprived majority relegated to living and working conditions unworthy of human beings, Paul appealed for a “global perspective” and for a “human solidarity” that would recognize that the earth belongs to everyone, not solely the wealthy. Paul insisted that the right to private property was not absolute, and that it may not be exercised to the detriment of the common good. With the passionate zeal of a prophet’s voice, Paul VI warned that continued avarice on the part of wealthier nations would “arouse the judgement of God and the wrath of the poor, with consequences no one can foresee.” Cautioning against a naïve adoption of so-called “free” trade policies among nations, Paul VI warned that “free” trade is just “only when it conforms to the demands of social justice.” Turning to the plight of migrant workers, Pope Paul asserted that a “hospitable reception” of them is “a duty” of human solidarity and Christian charity. For Paul, taxation of the wealthy was to be increased: Their luxuries were to be taxed in order to promote the development of nations and the promotion of peace.

While in Populorum Progressio Paul VI invoked the specter of judgement and wrath if the wealthy and the wealthy nations did not change their ways, in Humanae Vitae, the encyclical in which he rejected “artificial” forms of birth control, Paul adopted a gentle, pastoral voice when he acknowledged that many couples would find very difficult putting the moral norm he articulated into practice. Though in later decades some Catholics sought to make adherence to Humanae Vitae a kind of litmus test or badge of a faithful Catholic, nothing in the remaining ten years of Paul’s pontificate anticipated or promoted a move in that direction.

Paul VI appointed Jean Jadot as Apostolic Delegate to the United States, a position that gave Jadot, a Belgian, a great deal of say in who was named a bishop in the U.S. Episcopal appointments in that era were quite varied, including what were considered liberals as well as conservatives; most of those appointed had strong pastoral priorities. Many of Paul’s bishops played central roles in the 1980s in producing two significant letters of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: one on peace and nuclear armaments, and one on a just economy.

Most of Paul VI’s severe critics were not liberals or progressives but conservatives that abhorred change and wanted to believe that the Church of the 1950s had been one of timeless truth and of unquestionable certitude, and thus one to be retained and restored at all costs. In 1969 Paul VI published a revised Roman Missal, and made official many liturgical changes that were underway in the wake of Vatican II’s 1963 decree on the liturgy. Though some arch-conservatives continued to oppose such updating and modernization, and used appeals for a restored Latin Mass as a way of denouncing nearly everything the Council had done, Pope Paul VI did not turn back. He showed exemplary courage in remaining faithful to Vatican II’s vision of a Church in the world and not merely against the world, a vision of Catholics in dialogue with other Christians, with Jews, and with persons of other faiths, a vision of a pilgrim people of God, and of a Catholic Church increasingly diverse and truly global, a Catholic Church not only teaching but also learning.

In 1975 Paul VI appealed for mercy for several men condemned to death by General Franco’s regime in Spain. Pope Paul’s prophetic stance against the death penalty offered a sharp contrast to some earlier popes that had given uncritical support to Franco. In this and in many ways, Blessed Pope Paul VI showed how the Church can change for the better. May such openness to change be a precious way of honoring his memory, in our era and beyond.

Surfing is known for being a meditative sport, but cinematographer Chris Bryan just took its calming nature to the next level.

Shot at 1,000 frames per second, according to the Vimeo description, the video captures the zen of surfing perfectly.

Transport yourself to a calmer place by getting lost in a sea of slow-motion waves.

The Bloom Foldable Helmet from Toyo Safety, Japan’s leading supplier of industrial safety and health equipment, is designed to protect the wearer in an emergency while saving valuable storage space when not needed.