| Saturday, September 20, 2003 |  |
| Fathers spurn long hours to reclaim family life | 0 comments |
| 20 Sep 2003 @ 14:55 Fathers spurn long hours to reclaim family life Many men, sick of being strangers in their own homes, are making radical career choices. Fatherhood is back in vogue, Julie Szego reports. Rob Schweitzer was touched by the pencil drawing from his five-year-old daughter, Julia, for Father's Day. It shows love hearts, an image of dad and daughter in the sun and some text that neatly summed up the man: "Dad likes going to the football, he barracks for the Western Bulldogs, he likes going to the park and playing on the swings, he likes Chinese food." Mr Schweitzer sees these observations as vindicating his decision earlier this year to sell the warehousing business he had set up a decade ago and work for the new owner. Life had been "a constant 60-hour-plus week", crammed with interstate travel. "Your mind was constantly somewhere else," he said. "My eldest daughter (12-year-old Elyse) bore the brunt of it, because I didn't have the time to communicate with her about the important things. I was a very driven person. My dad raised me from the age of two as a single parent- he did it tough for many, many years and I guess that drove me, too. But you get to the stage when success comes at a cost." Fathers like him, quietly transforming their lives, do so while public crusaders such as Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward call on men to fight their own "revolution" to shake up work and home. Hers is one in a broad chorus of voices urging the Federal Government to embrace the notion of "fatherhood" by reforming family law, boosting men's health funding and easing the tyranny of work. This week's contribution comes from Labor frontbencher and party intellectual Lindsay Tanner. In his new book, Crowded Lives, Mr Tanner proposes that "relationships" move "to the front of our thinking in politics and public policy". Government decisions should be accompanied by "relationships impact assessments", which could help create wide-ranging reforms. In the area of work, he suggests scrapping an "anachronistic" entitlement such as long-service leave and replacing it with more widely accessible family-friendly options. Altering male behaviour has to be central to the work and family debate, he says. "We have to be careful that we don't just end up relieving the pressure on women, without also making sure that we get men to take more responsibility in the home," Mr Tanner told The Age. Adrienne Burgess, a British fatherhood expert recently in Australia, says a significant proportion of men in Britain are, like Mr Schweitzer, making changes to benefit family life. "The research is showing men are making quite dramatic changes at some stage after the birth of their children. Men move around from job to job and employers never look at why they're leaving," she said, explaining how the trend remains statistically invisible. "Fatherhood is a secret men carry - they don't talk about it with other men." (It is interesting, though hardly surprising, that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's communications chief Alastair Campbell was greeted with cynicism when he cited family commitments as the reason for his resignation early this week.) Ms Burgess applauds countries like Sweden, which engage in social engineering to change men's behaviour. Couples there have the benefit of up to 18 months' parental leave, which can be used either in blocks or to reduce working hours. But men must take at least one month of the leave package, the so-called "daddy month", or both partners lose the entitlements. About 800,000 Australian men have access to paid paternity leave, but how many actually take it is unclear. Recent research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies found most men became less satisfied with their working lives as their hours increased, although a quarter of those working more than 60 hours a week reported high levels of satisfaction at both work and home. Perhaps a degree of Swedish-style compulsion is necessary. Two years ago, the Electrical Trades Union ruffled feathers among their blue-collar rank and file by pioneering a weekly 10-hour overtime cap for about 9000 Victorian workers. Now, 34-year-old electrician Ivan Balta, who admits to having been initially sceptical about the push, says the extra time with his children more than compensates for the extra income of the old 12-hour days. "Before, it was like I was a visitor in my own house; if the kids ever got hurt, they'd run straight past me to mum. Now they wait by the door for me to come home." |
| Sobering Infrastructure Report Card | 0 comments |
| 20 Sep 2003 @ 14:50 Sobering Infrastructure Report Card Although the American Society of Civil Engineers does have a vested interest in repairing our infrastructure, its report on the state of our bridges, highways, dams, tunnels and other public structures our lives depend on is sobering. |
| NASA Images Of Your favorite Planet | 0 comments |
| 20 Sep 2003 @ 14:47 Choose your planet and enjoy the images captured by our spacecraft in their voyages through the universe. |
| Car Info. By Consumer Advocate | 0 comments |
| 20 Sep 2003 @ 14:46 Car Info.com "Car Information provided by consumer advocate & auto expert Mark Eskeldson, author of What Car Dealers Don't Want You to Know." Includes money saving tips for buying and leasing cars, new and used car quotes, used vehicle history reports, auto repair secrets, and more. |
| Annual List of Richest Americans Released | 1 comment |
| 20 Sep 2003 @ 14:43 Annual List of Richest Americans Released By THERESA AGOVINO The Associated Press Thursday, September 18, 2003; 6:53 PM NEW YORK - The economy is improving for the super rich. After two years of declines, the total net worth of America's richest people rose 10 percent to $955 billion this year from 2002, according to Forbes magazine's annual ranking of the nation's 400 wealthiest individuals. Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates, who remained in the top spot, personified the trend toward increasing wealth. His fortune increased by $3 billion to $46 billion this year. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen held third place, with his net worth rising $1 billion to $22 billion. Investor Warren Buffett kept the No. 2 position although his wealth was unchanged at $36 billion. Forbes said the surge in collective net worth was largely due to gains in Internet stocks and tech fortunes. For example, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos saw his fortune expand by more than $3 billion to $5.1 billion as the stock of the online retailer skyrocketed. Bezos was the top gainer on the list, and holds spot 32. David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!, saw his net worth nearly triple to $1.6 billion, tying him with 13 others for the 126th spot. Yahoo!'s other co-founder, Jerry Yang, also nearly tripled his fortune, but he shared the 162nd spot on the list with 16 others with a $1.4 billion fortune. The gains are part of a continuing shift in wealth from the East to the tech-centric West. When the list was first published in 1982, there were 81 members from New York and 56 from California. Today, California boasts 95 Forbes 400 members, while New York has 47. "There's been this enormous shift in the geographic distribution of wealth," Forbes senior editor Peter Newcomb said. Newcomb said the migration of high-tech businesses and their founders to the West is a factor in this change, but he also noted that many wealthy East Coast families such as the du Ponts and Rockefellers have been passing on their fortunes to members of younger generations. The Walton family was again prominent on the list. Five members of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's family tied for the fourth spot, each with a net worth of $20.5 billion. Rounding out the top 10 were Oracle Corp. chairman Larry Ellison with an $18 billion fortune and Dell Inc. chief executive Michael Dell with a net worth of $13 billion. Dell replaced Microsoft executive Steven Ballmer in 10th place. Ballmer is now No. 11 with a nest egg of $12.2 billion. Notable drop-offs from the list include Global Crossing Ltd. founder Gary Winnick, whose company is in bankruptcy, and Motorola Corp. CEO Robert Galvin, whose company is suffering from the malaise afflicting the wireless and chip-making industry. Daniel Ziff, 31, is the youngest person on the list. He inherited his $1.2 billion fortune. His father William Ziff Jr., built and sold a publishing empire. The oldest person on the list is 95-year-old Max Fisher, who made his $680 million fortune through investments. Newcomb said Forbes compiled its list by estimating the value of stock and other assets held by the wealthiest Americans. Forbes used the stock prices of publicly held companies as of the end of August; for privately held companies, the magazine estimated a fair market value based on the stocks of their publicly traded peers. Real estate and other assets also were included. Where exact prices were not known, "we try to determine what a prudent shopper would pay for something," Newcomb said. "We try to be conservative with the estimates." More > |
| Gospel truth: Hebrides invented church spirituals | 1 comment |
| 20 Sep 2003 @ 14:39 Gospel truth: Hebrides invented church spirituals By Paul Kelbie, Scotland Correspondent 20 September 2003 A study into the roots of gospel music by an American professor has lead the accomplished musician, who has played with Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, to conclude that the "good news" music sung in black American churches originated from Scotland, not Africa. Professor Willie Ruff, of Yale University, said the roots of the music derived from evangelical spirituals and blues and jazz, had more to do with the crofters of the Outer Hebrides than slaves on US plantations. For years the accepted wisdom has been that gospel music was born during the period of slavery in the Deep South. But Professor Ruff conceded that his findings have startled a number of elders in black churches. "They have always assumed that this form of worship came from Africa," Professor Ruff, an Afro-American professor of music, said. "Black Americans have lived under a misconception. Our cultural roots are more Afro-Gaelic than Afro-American. Just look at the Harlem telephone book, it's more like Edinburgh or the book for the North Uists. "There is a notion that when African slaves arrived in America they came down the gangplanks of slave ships singing gospel music - that's just not true. What I'm talking about here pre-dates all other congregational singing by blacks in America." Traditional psalm singing, or "precenting the line" as it is correctly known, in which the psalms are called out and the congregation sings a response, was the earliest form of congregational singing adopted by Africans in America. Even today, psalm singing and gospel music are the backbone of black churchgoers in the US, with CD sales alone worth half a billion dollars last year. But Professor Ruff, 71, a Baptist from Alabama, said: "I, like everyone else, assumed it was unique to black congregations in the United States, having grown out of slavery, but I began to wonder if it was performed by white congregations in the same way," he said. He began researching at the Sterling library at Yale, one of the world's greatest collections of books and papers, where he found records of how Highlanders settled in North Carolina in the 1700s. "Scottish emigrants from the Highlands, and the Gaelic speaking Hebrides especially, arrived in parts of North Carolina in huge numbers and for many years during the slavery period black Africans, owned by Scottish emigrants, spoke only the Gaelic language. I found, in a North Carolina newspaper dated about 1740, an advertisement offering a generous reward for the capture and return of a runaway African slave who is described as being easy to identify because he only speaks Gaelic. There is no doubt the great influx of Scots Presbyterians into the Carolinas introduced the African slaves to Christianity and their way of worship," he said. But it wasn't until Professor Ruff travelled to Scotland that he became convinced of the similarities after hearing psalm singing in Gaelic. "I was struck by the similarity, the pathos, the emotion, the cries of suffering and the deep, deep belief in a brighter, promising hereafter. "It makes sense that as we got our names from the slave masters, we carried the slave owners blood, their religion and their customs, that we should have adopted and adapted their music. There are more descendants of Highland Scots living in America than there are in the Highlands - and a great many of them are black. "I have been to Africa many times in search of my cultural identity, but it was in the Highlands that I found the cultural roots of black America." Jamie Reid-Baxter, a history research fellow at Glasgow University and a psalm expert, said: "The Scottish slave-owners would definitely have brought that style of singing with them and the slaves would have heard it. Both these forms of music are a way of expressing religious ecstasy." More > |