Do You Want to End Your Days talking to a Robot?

An article in today’s (May 20) New York Times business section drew my attention with the pull quote: “Should we entrust the care of people in their 70s and older to artificial assistants?”

Since I’m over 70 and one of my parents died with dementia, I read the article avidly and learned that the future is here for us seniors, and it’s scarier than any science fiction movie.

The article, by Nick Bilton, begins by citing a film called  “Robot & Frank” about an overly busy son who presents his elderly, live-alone father with a humanoid robot called  VGC-601.  The dad, Frank, protests, “I’m not this pathetic!”

The reporter then cites facts showing that, as the baby boomer generation ages, the number of elderly people needing care is skyrocketing (72.1 million Americans by  2030—double today’s number)  while the number of  potential poorly paid caregivers is dwindling.  Hence, a variety of robots are already available to take care of  elderly patients.

There’s Cody, a robotic nurse who is allegedly “gentle enough to bathe elderly patients” .

There is HERB (for Home Exploring Robot Butler) who can fetch household objects like cups and  can even clean the kitchen.

Hector is a robot that can remind patients to take their medicines, keep track of eyeglasses and even help in the case of a fall.

There’s Paro, a therapeutic robot that looks like a baby seal and has a calming effect on patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

PR2, A robot designed at Carnegie Mellon works with people who have autism—it can blink and giggle as people interact with it.  The man who designed it said, “Those we tested it with, love it and hugged it.”

Wendy A Rogers, a professor at Georgia Tech and director of its Human Factors and Aging Lab said, “We are social beings, and we do develop social types of relationships with lots of things.”  She noted that patients with Roomba, the vacuum robot,  tend to give their machines names and even buy costumes for them.

Some people, like me, react to all this news about helpful robots with serious reservations. Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT and author of the book “Alone Together” said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman sharing stories about her life with her baby-seal Paro robot.  “This is sad,” Professor Turkle said.  “We have been reduced to spectators of a conversation that has no meaning.  Giving old people robots to talk to is a dystopian view that is being classified as utopian.”

The Times reporter does point out the ethical questions raised by tricking patients into thinking their robots are human and can understand them and adds:  “That’s the catch. Leaving the questions of ethics aside for the moment, building robots is not simply about creating smart machines; it is about making something that is not human still appear, somehow, trustworthy.”

I realized after reading the article that health care robots appear to be the inevitable result of a society that isolates its old people instead of incorporating them as venerated members of the tribe, cared for by all the younger members together.  It takes a village….

Meanwhile, I’ll be desperately trying to hold on to my physical and mental health, in order to stave off the moment when, on Mother’s Day, my kids present me with my own personal robot.

Yard Sale Heaven – I’m Obsessed

It's official!  Yard sale season is here and I've already marked up the classified section of the paper with the promising-sounding nearby  sales I'm going to hit this weekend.  It's May, the lilacs are in full bloom and the weather's beautiful, so to celebrate the season opening, I'm re-posting this essay, which I first published three years ago on Memorial Day weekend.

People can be divided into those who like to sleep late on Saturday morning and maybe go to church or golf on Sunday, and those who are on the road at 8 a.m. both days, clutching the newspaper classified section, searching for flea markets and yard sales, determined to be the first one through the gate. Guess which category I’m in.

Those of us with “I brake for yard sales” bumper stickers are motivated by tales of life-changing finds—an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or a Paul Revere tea pot from grandma’s attic, or those Jackson Pollack paintings someone found in the trash. Every yard saler has a tale of the Big Find.



Here’s mine. Maybe 25 years ago, when I was just starting to collect antique photos, I saw a cardboard box labeled “Instant Ancestors” on a front lawn not far from the village green in my own village. In the box I found a battered small, thick leather-bound album filled with CDVs. “CDV” means Carte de Visite, and the photos, wildly popular around the time after the Civil War, are the size of a business card.

I noticed that maybe a dozen of the photos in the album were of Native Americans. The portraits were identified in type as taken by Joel Emmons Whitney at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, of Dakota warriors imprisoned after the Sioux uprising of 1862. Each one, including Chief Little Crow, was identified along with how many white men he had killed.

I was happy to pay the five-dollar price of the album. When I eventually put it up for auction at Skinner’s Galleries and got $500 return on my investment, I felt very smug. Not so much today, because I know that the value of those Whitney Indian photos has climbed so that each one of them would now bring around $500.

All yard salers are looking for that Big Find and my village of Grafton is a happy hunting grounds. (So is Brimfield MA, about 20 minutes away, where in May, July and September they roll out maybe the biggest flea market in the country.) (News update--this year, 2013, the spring Brimfield sale is going on RIGHT NOW until Sunday, May 19.)

I think Grafton is one of the prettiest New England villages, thanks to its carefully preserved historic district around the Common. That’s why they filmed “Ah Wilderness” here back in the 1930’s. And around that historic common, with its 300-year-old Inn, I just KNOW there are treasures that will someday appear in a yard sale on someone’s front lawn.



Today, Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, was a very good day, although I don’t think any of the treasures I bought will make me rich. The first place I hit was the home of Carol and Richard, who for many years owned the Grafton Country Store—one of the longest continuously operating. They have a great collection of primitives and early prints, tools, cookware, etc. not to mention hot coffee and free donut holes to welcome the early birds. I bought 21 things, the most expensive of which was an ironstone butter crock at $20.



The next yard sale, also near the Common, greeted me with a wicker antique doll carriage --the twin of one I had as a little girl. But I wasn’t about to spend over a hundred dollars on a duplicate doll carriage, with no granddaughter to give it to. But I then I saw a stunning set of Madeira Lace work – ten place mats and a table runner—with their own blue brocade carrying case plus a handwritten note that it was “Made on the Island of Madeira for the Beede Family, makers of Madeira Wines”.



I have never been able to resist fine textiles and embroideries, so I bought the set of Madeira work, telling myself it was for a daughter’s trousseau, but at the moment, both daughters have a strict embargo against my bringing another thing into their apartment “if I can’t eat it, drink it or date it” as one put it.



The third yard sale, in a red barn in nearby Shrewsbury, was mostly furniture and there’s no more room in my house for furniture, so I came away with only a child’s rocker, which I cleaned up to put in my booth at a nearby group antique shop.



That’s how I justify my obsessive collecting— I say that it’s merchandise for the store.

So after I got back from the yard sales, I cleaned up my treasures and put price tags on them and took them to North Main Street Antiques—at least the ones I couldn’t fit into my own décor (such as my apple-themed bathroom with its red lion-footed cast iron tub or the wall in my kitchen that’s filled with heart-shaped cookie cutters and other objects featuring hearts.)



At least I got to play with my treasures before carting them off to the store. And tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll hit the road early, trolling for that One Big Find.

You Know You’re the Grandma of a Toddler When……..

…when you get undressed at night and Cheerios fall out of your bra

…when your arms and legs are embellished with bandaids featuring the Muppets and Dora the Explorer

….and your shoes, purse and glasses cases are embellished with an eclectic collection of stickers

….when you feel no qualms about plopping the little angel in front of the computer to watch multiple episodes of “Pocoyo” or “Elmo’s World” while you shovel food into her mouth.  (Quote from daughter Eleni—“Right!  I’ve always wanted to train my child to eat mindlessly in front of the TV.”)

…when you hear yourself coming out with conversational gems like: “Grandma has to go pee-pee in the toilet now.  No, you can’t watch.”

and….”If you go poo-poo in the potty chair, Grandma will let you watch another Pocoyo

…when you refer to your glass of sauvignon blanc as “Grandma juice”

…when, every time a camera is turned your way, you grab the toddler and place her in front of your less photogenic body parts

....when the pacifier falls to the ground in the middle of Park Avenue and you invoke the five second rule, wipe it on your sleeve and pop it back into her mouth.

…when you never leave the house without checking the contents of your emergency kit:  extra pacifier, juice box (make sure the straw is attached) goldfish crackers, baby wipes, extra diaper, Elmo band-aids, bubble blowing stuff.

…. when a temper tantrum in the middle of a fancy restaurant forces your ultimate weapon--you hand over your smart phone tuned to favorite episodes of Pocoyo.

…when you can recite “Mr Brown Can Moo, Can You?” by heart.  Not to mention “Goodnight Moon,” which you haven’t forgotten since you first learned it 35 years ago.

….and when your “Absolutely not!” can be transformed into “Maybe just this once” by those four little words: “I love you Grandma.”

The Scourged Back-- A Famous Photo of a Beaten Runaway Slave, Revisited

Yesterday (Thursday May 2, 2013) I came home at night and saw that my blog had received nearly 700 hits in a few hours, most of them for a post I wrote over four years ago called "The Scarred Back of a Slave Named Gordon".  I couldn't figure out where the interest in this famous and grisly photograph was coming from until my sharp-eyed sister-in-law, Robin Paulson, alerted me to an on-line essay in The New York Times' Opinionator blog in the  "Disunion" section, titled "A photo taken 150 years ago of a runaway slave changed the way Americans saw the Civil War".  The essay by Ted Widmer discussed this watershed image,  which dramatized, through the still-new science of photography, the brutality of some slave owners and served as an effective tool for the abolitionist cause.  Widmer went on to discuss other photographs currently on view in the exhibit "Photography and the American Civil War" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I think that readers wanted to know more about the story of this particular slave, and that's why they searched out my original blog post.  I've had a number of comments since it was first published in October of 2009 and I'm re-posting it below along with the comments and also with an additional image of Gordon and his scarred back, which I added to the post only about a week ago.

On page 14 of the Sept. 20, [2009] Book Review, The New York Times published a shocking photograph of a slave with a horribly scarred back to illustrate a review of “Deliver Us from Evil”.

Because I collect antique photos and have many dealing with slavery and the life of black people in the 1800's, I wrote to the Times the back story behind this photo, and the letter, somewhat abbreviated, is in the book review section this Sunday--Oct. 4, 2009.

I wrote: This famous photograph, usually titled “The Scourged Back”, was widely circulated by abolitionists and is one of the earliest examples of photography used as propaganda. A contemporary newspaper, The New York Independent, commented: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by the 100,000 and scattered over the states. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. (Harriet Beecher) Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye.”

As photo historian Kathleen Collins explained in The History of Photography Vol. 9 Number 1, January, 1985—it shows a slave named Gordon who escaped his master in Mississippi by rubbing himself with onions to throw off the bloodhounds. He took refuge with the Union Army at Baton Rouge and, in 1863, three engraved portraits of him were printed in Harper’s Weekly, showing the man “as he underwent the surgical examination previous to being mustered into the service—his back furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas Day last.”

The actual photographs of the escaped slave, taken by McPherson and Oliver of New Orleans, were widely circulated as carte-de-visite photos. On the verso of the mount were the comments of S. K. Towle, Surgeon, 30th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers: “…Few sensation writers ever depicted worse punishments than this man must have received, though nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness—but on the contrary, he seems intelligent and well-behaved.”

I have a colored glass slide of the same photograph (above) in my collection, undoubtedly used in anti-slavery lectures. Abolitionists exploited the new medium of photography, circulating, in addition to "the Scourged Back", CDV’s of a slave named Wilson who was branded on the forehead, and selling thousands of the series of emancipated “white”-appearing slave children from New Orleans, posed patriotically, including wrapped in the American flag. On the back was printed: “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the department of the Gulf now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”

April 24, 2013--Because of questions I've received about this famous image, I am now adding below one of the original CDVs of Gordon's back showing him with his head tilted farther back to show his beard.  I do not own this image, but I've always been aware of it. I always assumed that both these poses of Gordon were taken at the same time, but when I study them together I don't know.  Another question--I always assumed that "my" image up at the top was  reversed--something that could easily happen with a glass negative.  (All daguerreotypes and ambrotypes are reversed mirror images of the actual subject, so if the subject is holding a newspaper, for example, the headlines will be reversed mirror-image writing.)  Now, looking at these two photos of Gordon together, I can't tell if the images show him turned to face opposite sides, or is one of them reversed and he's looking over his left shoulder in both of them?  Or do you think they were taken at two different photo sessions, separated by time?  Opinions? 

May Baskets & May Wreaths

(I posted this last year and am posting it again--another reprise . Spring is glorious  right now in Massachusetts and our lawn is  full of violets--both  purple and white, and all the trees are blossoming.  Perfect weather for making and sharing May Baskets.) 

Some sixty years ago, when I was a little girl in (first) Milwaukee, Wisconsin and then in Edina, Minnesota, on the first of  May we would make May baskets out of construction paper and fill them with  whatever flowers we could find in the garden or growing wild. We would hang the baskets on the doorknobs of neighbors—especially old people—ring the door bell, then run away with great hilarity and peek out as the elderly person found the little bouquets on their door.

 Thirty-some years ago, when we moved  to Grafton, MA, I continued the same tradition with my three kids, but then they grew up and moved away.  Just today I looked out at all the flowers popping up in our yard and reflected that all the old people in our neighborhood had died.  In fact, I realized, the only old people left were my husband and myself, so I picked a small May Day bouquet for us out of what’s growing—white violets and purple violets, cherry blossoms, forsythia, wild grape hyacinth--  and here it is.

 In 1977, when the children were all small (the youngest was one month old) we moved from New York City to a suburb of Athens, Greece, courtesy of The New York Times, which had made my husband a foreign correspondent there.  In Greece, even today, whether in the country or the city, on May 1 you make a May wreath of the flowers in the garden.  Roses are in full bloom by then in Greece, along with all sorts of wild flowers. You hang the May wreath on your door.  It dies and dries and withers until, on June 24th, St. John the Baptist’s Birthday, the dried May wreath is thrown into a bonfire.  The boys of the town leap over the flames first. In the end everyone leaps over the fading fire saying things like  “I leave the bad year  behind in order to enter a better year.”

Here is daughter Eleni in 1980 wearing the wreath that was about to go on the door. Next to her is her sister Marina.

 In Greece, even today, you’ll find May wreaths hanging on the front doors of homes and businesses, although I don’t know if anyone still throws them into a St John’s fire.  In Massachusetts, the tulips and forsythia are out, the bleeding hearts are starting to bloom, and soon the lilacs will open, filling the air with their beauty and perfume.  But today I gathered a small bouquet of May flowers and remembered the years gone by.

Child Beggars in India

(I originally wrote this post in January of 2009 when I was back from an unforgettable trip to India and my blog  "A Rolling Crone" was just beginning.  It proved to be one of the most widely read of my posts  and also rather controversial, as I will explain in a note at the end.  Since I'm presently in New York City working against a couple of writing deadlines I am (again) re-posting one of my earliest essays, hoping to reach a larger audience than I did in 2009.  As always, I welcome comments from those who may be more informed about what's happening in India now, four years after I was there.)

Everyone who has not yet seen the film “Slumdog Millionaire” should do so at once. It’s an unrealistic fairy tale with an unlikely feel-good ending, but it graphically illustrates the lives of the countless millions of India’s children who live on the street with only one concern: “How will I manage to find enough to eat today so that I’ll be alive tomorrow?”

Everywhere you go in India you will find beggars. This is particularly true in the large cities like Delhi and Mumbai.

Mumbai is a city of 18 MILLION people and HALF of those people are homeless. That means that they live on the streets or in shacks made of tin or cardboard. A night-time drive from the airport in Delhi to Agra gave insights into these hovels and the families who consider home to be a piece of the median strip of the highway. It took an hour just to drive out of the city on a road that was jammed with rickshaws, camels, sacred cows and many, many beggars.

Frommer’s Guide to India in the “Mumbai” section deals with the problem of beggars: ”Families of beggars will twist and weave their way around the cars at traffic lights, hopping and even crawling to your window with displays of open wounds, diseased sores, crushed limbs, and starving babies, their hollow eyes imploring you for a few life-saving rupees…. In the worst of these tales of horror, children are maimed to up the ante by making them appear more pathetic. The choice is stark: Either lower the window and risk having a sea of unwelcome faces descend on you, or stare ahead and ignore them. To salve your conscience tip generously those who have made it onto the first rung of employment”

In India you quickly steel yourself to the crowds of children who are grabbing your arm, knocking on the window of your car, thrusting flowers into your pockets, repeating endlessly the only words of English they know: “Hello Madame, food, hungry, money, please, eat…”

If you give any of them money or even move toward your pocket or purse, their number suddenly increases tenfold and you cannot move for all the hands clutching at you.

In Mumbai, just outside our hotel, when we walked onto the shopping street of Colava Causeway, lined with stores on the right and street sellers’ booths on the left, all shouting their wares, there were two families of children who were particularly aggressive, following us for blocks, especially a girl of about 11 who kept thrusting flowers onto me anywhere they would stick, and her little brother who seemed to have no adult watching him as he skittered in front of us. I was so annoyed by them constantly clutching at me, but then one night, returning home about 11:30, I saw the family sound asleep on the sidewalk, the children curled into the prone body of their mother, and I felt guilt-stricken. The next day, before I left, I managed to give the girl a hundred rupees without anyone else noticing, and instead of unleashing a crowd on me, she grabbed it, grinned and ran. (It was worth only about $2.00 but that was probably a good day’s income to her.)

The beautiful and sad little girl from Jodhpur in the photo above, who was dressed and painted to look like a Hindu goddess, has a good gimmick, because the Hindu religion emphasizes giving money and food to holy persons as well as to sacred cows. On every street you can see poor Indians putting necklaces of flowers on the ubiquitous cows and feeding them. They also share their food with the bearded sadhus (holy men) dressed only in saffron loin cloths. These holy men live entirely on charity, renouncing all their worldly goods. Feeding them, like feeding the cows, is good karma for the Indians.

The little girls along the Ganges who sell small candles nestled in leaf-bowls are not strictly beggars – they’re actually young entrepreneurs, because everyone who comes to the Ganges wants to sail these candles into the river as an offering (as we did.) At night the boys in their rowboats row the pilgrims and tourists into large log-jams of boats gathered to watch the priests do their twilight fire worshipping on shore and the children selling floral chains, candles and pots of tea scramble agilely from one boat to another.

The children in India who manage to learn decent English are miles ahead of the ones who don’t—because they can move themselves and their families out of poverty and a life on the streets. All the tourists we saw – Japanese, Russian, Italian, Australian – use English as the lingua franca.

We hired Mark, a young man about 18—when we encountered him in Varanasi in a craft store that caters to tourists. His business card said he drove a rowboat and because his English was good, we booked him (at the usual rate of 150 rupees per person per hour) for a dawn trip down the Ganges the next morning.

As Mark paddled through the fog and darkness while the river woke up and the faithful began to bathe themselves and their cattle and their laundry, I asked him if the little girls who sold the candles went to school. He said all but one of them did – her parents couldn’t afford the 300 rupees ($6.00) per month that school cost. He also said that he personally was paying for one child to go to school. I learned that Mark was supporting his entire family of two parents and seven children with his three jobs (rowboat guide, craft store salesman and factory worker.) His father, formerly a carpenter, had TB. His mother had to stay home and care for his six younger siblings.

The biggest surprise was that Mark told us he, himself, despite his impressive business cards, could not read or write. “But how did you learn such good English?” we asked.

“From tourists in the store” he replied. If Mark had the leisure to go to school and become literate, he would probably become the Donald Trump of Varanasi.

I would like to find a philanthropy through which I could sponsor one or two children in India at six dollars a month to attend school rather than begging in the streets. (I already sponsor children through Plan but that goes to the community in Nepal not to the children themselves.) I’ve been googling, trying to find such a philanthropy with access to Indian children, but without any luck so far, so if you have any suggestions, write me at joanpgage@yahoo.com.

It’s really appalling that a country like India, which is now enjoying a huge boom in industry and technical know-how; a country that has a very wealthy class evident in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, cannot manage to provide free schooling for the millions of Indian children who live on the streets.
 

 One reader of the original blog post has repeatedly posted the same criticism of my article, that says in part: "england simply sucked on indias blood no literacy nothing all other factors are repurcussions to the first add to it politics and corruption and u get child beggary whatever this might be.  one very morally inhumane thing is tourist taking pictures of indian beggars to make a mockery . if u can help .help ...if u cant atleast dont spread hopelessness".  

In my defense, I'd like to tell him --(somehow I suspect it's a "him")-- that three years ago, when two friends of mine went to Varanasi, I sent with them multiple copies of the "Ganges girls" photos above to give to the girls along with money, because I suspected the girls owned no photos of themselves.  Whenever I'm photographing children in poor countries, I don't do it to mock them, I do it to celebrate their spunk and beauty--and I try to make sure that they receive copies of the photos. In every case, as with the Ganges girls, the photographs were received with great joy.)

Living and Dying on The Cell Phone

Photo-Getty Images

Yesterday I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office when the receptionist got a call from her son, 40 miles away at the end of the Boston Marathon.  “He says there were two explosions at the finish line,” she reported.  “I told him there’s nothing about it yet on the computer.”

He’d called to tell her he was all right. When I got home from the doctor, I sat down in front of CNN and watched, transfixed, for the next six hours or so.  I knew a number of people—all much younger than myself—who might have been there.  My daughter who lives in San Francisco and used to live in Boston called me when she got out of work.  She and her friends were at the finish line of last year’s Marathon. I told her that the cell phone service was down in the area surrounding the blast.  Some TV announcers said this was due to overload..  Runners were calling family members and vice-versa.  Where were they?  What had just happened?  Were they okay? The fears mounted as the hours wore on without answers.

Then some people on the TV began saying that phone service had been cut in the area of the attack to prevent more bombs from being detonated, in case the first two had been set off by a cell phone.   (It seems now, about 20 hours later, that the two bombs that went off were not that sophisticated, but rather primitive bombs using a “timing device” instead of cell phone signals.)

When their cell phone calls didn’t work, people my kids’ age turned to texting and Twitter and Facebook.  Last night, as I looked at my own Facebook page, I, and everybody else, read about nearly miraculous survivals—like one of my Pilates instructors, running for charity, who wrote:  “I finished right before it happened. Jon and 3 kids cleared out of grandstands with 3 minutes to spare. Thank you God...so much.”

Here’s another post I saw on Facebook last night, posted by one Lexi Gilligan, evidently a student at Tufts along with the blonde girl in the photo who was holding two thumbs up, named Jaymi Cohen.  What Lexi wrote under the photo was: “So, so thankful my best friend is doing well after surviving a bombing, hospitalization, tons of stitches and a FBI investigation—And she still looks beautiful after.  Love you Jay!”

Then there’s the ghastly graphic photo, posted several times on Facebook, of the runner who’s had both legs blasted off below the knee, except for one long protruding bone.  (I didn’t post this photo—nor did any of the papers or magazines I saw ---because it’s so horrific—but it’s all over the internet.)  The desperately wounded runner is being pushed in a wheelchair by three good samaritans, who are at the same time putting pressure on his legs so he doesn’t bleed to death before reaching the hospital.  One of them, wearing a cowboy hat, is Carlos Arredondo, an immigrant who lost a son in Iraq and now is a peace activist.  He is one of the many bystanders who, after the second explosion, ran towards the victims instead of away. As someone commented on the photo: “He’s actually pinching this man’s femoral artery closed with his bare hands.  Honorary citizenship for this guy!” Carlos was also photographed later holding an American flag, his jacket splashed with the blood of the people he aided.

Carlos Arredondo is only one of the heroes of this massacre, whom I feel I know personally after watching their courage and humanity on Facebook, internet , TV, and cell phone.

I am so old that I remember when every telephone was connected to a wall and had a rotating dial. (I even remember phones with party lines and phones you had to crank to get the operator’s attention!)

When I was growing up, there was no way to check on absent loved ones.  When I traveled around Europe in the summer of my 18^th year, the only way to communicate with my parents was by letter—I would pick up theirs at American Express offices in various cities.  When my youngest daughter lived in France during a junior year abroad, traveled to Amsterdam and then dropped out of sight for four days, I became hysterical, convinced she was dead, until she finally found a way to call home.

Now, thanks to our ever- present cell phones and internet, we can share our tragedies as they are happening and also reassure loved ones that we’re okay.  Thanks to the cameras in our smart phones, we can bear witness to instances of heroism, and perhaps record something that will help the FBI find clues to the murderer who planted yesterday’s bombs in the knapsacks. 

When hope is gone, as happened with the victims of 9/11, we can say, “good bye” and “I love you”.  The downside of this instantaneous connection is all the rumors, bad information and paranoid fantasies that can be transmitted from witnesses to cell phones to internet to TV screen within seconds, as happened yesterday.  This is where journalists must come in—to double check the facts and stop the rumors. 

But every time evil springs up and takes innocent lives, in this age of instant universal communication, I think the good of the cell phone outweighs the bad.  The Boston Marathon bombings will be remembered not for the perpetrator, but for the way the throng of people, gathered in Boston from around the world, ran toward the explosions and tore down the fences to help the victims, instead of running away.