Buffalo – We’re Not in the Top Ten!

Today’s Yahoo News brings this article, which is from Forbes.com describing the ten most miserable cities in the U.S.  The criteria for determining what was used to qualify a city for a miserable ranking includes the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, commute times, weather, crime and the number of nearby toxic dumps.

That’s some interesting, selective criteria that did not include other factors like social inhomogeneity, employment diversity, education opportunty, proximity to potable water, obesity, cancer rate, mortality rate, affordable housing, shopping experience or any other factors that you and I could devise with a few minutes of brainstorming.

According to Forbes, the 10 most miserable cities are

• Detroit
• Stockton, CA
• Flint, MI
• New York City
• Philadelphia
• Chicago
• Los Angeles
• Modesto, CA
• Charlotte, NC
• Providence,RI

The article is so much crap.  A much more interesting (and perhaps socially relevant) article would have been one that surveyed a few thousand Americans and asked what they considered to be the most miserable cities, and why.  I bet the answers would have been very different.  Buffalo might have been included in the top ten of that survey.

Perception alone has a major influence on how a municipality is treated with respect to government, business and the media.   Buffalo knows this all too well, probably ranking extremely low on the national scale (perception) yet much higher locally.  We (mostly) consider this a great place to live and raise a family; the rest of the nation might have a different opinion.

At least we’re not in this week’s Forbes top ten.  Whew.

Power Breakfast

Buffalo Business First sponsored a Power Breakfast (more like a Power Continental Breakfast) this morning.  About maybe 300 business people were there to listen to a panel discussion among Tom Kucharski, Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Eric Recoon and Carl Paladino. 

The questions that were asked?  I’ve already forgotten.  Basically, the panelists’ answers were pretty much a regurgitation of the same complaints we’ve been hearing for decades here in Western New York:  The lack of leadership, economic stagnation, lack of vision, parochialism, taxes, inefficient government, poor education, and lawsuits.  Carl Paladino was particularly negative; I hope he was just having a bad day.

But there was little conversation about solutions and only mild optimism, mostly from Tom Kucharski.  Norm Bakos crept up from somewhere and vented during the open mike portion of the event.  Several other audience members who approached the microphone also seemed to have agendas not in sync with the discussion topics.

Inasmuch as I enjoy attending these events, it seems that if the panelists or sponsors want us business leaders to jump on the bandwagon, they need to be cheerleaders rather than grumps.  I did not walk away with any sense of communal enthusiasm, nor – from the lack of reaction from those attending – did I think the group as a whole was eager to participate in a new phase of the Buffalo renaissance.

The gist was this:  We are here, it’s a place full of neglect and bureaucracy and corruption, and we need to get there, to sweetness and delight.  Only there is so great a leap that not many in the audience could understand how this community is going to cross the chasm between here and there.

What was missing was the cheerleading, and a frank discussion about the little steps we could take – not the grand vision but those little solutions that, over time, would add up to significant change – something tangible and attainable by us mere mortals, in our lifetimes.

We have been making many incremental steps in the past few years.  We need to emphasize these wins rather than whine about not achieving the impossibly big leaps.

Management 101

I’m taking a management course. My first assignment was to make a list of 10 personal lifetime objectives. Here is what I came up with:

• Start exercising regularly
• Go out on a date (with my wife) at least once a week
• Get back to more volunteerism
• Finish rebuilding my bathroom
• Rebuild my kitchen
• Build a workshop
• Build a grandfather clock
• Go on a few exotic vacations
• Continue writing my blog
• Read everything and anything

I am not interested in shopping per se; I am not interested in personal wealth, so “getting more stuff” didn’t pop into my mind. So many goals were about “building” something that it’s obvious I have this need for tangible personal accomplishments. There’s probably some psychological pathology defining some inadequacy in my life that drives me to do this.

This was not at all easy to do. Maybe, when I was younger, I might have included things like “find a mate” or “get a honkin’ great stereo”; but for the past couple of decades my goals have simply been to try to learn and do as much as I can with the time I have to do them.

Neither my hands nor my brain are ever idle.

China’s One-Child Policy

I wanted to write about how China’s one-child policy will be a death knell for that society.  I wanted to say that this is a typical Communist takeover of a fundamental right and how it is causing discord and internal strife.  However, it’s not working out the way I thought it would.  In fact, it’s currently working out pretty well. 

Some of it has to do with the fact that before China even implemented the policy in 1979 China had already begun to reduce its birth rate, from over 5 to under 3 children per couple.  The trend toward smaller families follows that of other developed Asian countries.

The policy itself is a little misnamed.  There are enough exceptions to the policy such the official fertility rate today is around 1.7 children per couple.  In the long run, China’s population will eventually fall.  Assuming that the birth rate remains constant, China’s population will peak at 1.5 billion around 2030 and then start to decrease.  Contrast this with India, whose fertility rate of 2.8 pretty much guarantees that it will soon become the world’s most populous nation.  Where are they going to put all those people?

There are some unintended consequences to the one-child policy, however.  In some areas the male to female ratio is skyrocketing as female babies are either selectively aborted before birth or die shortly after birth at a much greater rate than male babies.  This is a genuine concern for the Chinese government as it will eventually encourage more sex trafficking and prostitution, with the resulting associated health and crime problems.

Then there’s the 4:2:1 problem:  A couple simultaneously caring for a single child and four elderly parents.  70% of the elderly rely on their children for support, and there is no government-provided safety net.

All in all, the one-child policy will cause a demographic shift to a more middle-aged society similar to other developed Asian countries like Japan and Singapore.  And while it may be difficult for China to control its population exactly the way it wants to, for a country that is running out of arable land the solution it chose seems to be more or less equitable, and practiced by most of its citizens.

Follow the Leader

Who led the Buffalo area when it was at its greatest? Mayors like Charles Bishop, Edgar Jewett and Conrad Diehl, that’s who. I never heard of them, but they were the mayors at the turn of the 19^th century when Buffalo was home to the largest number of millionaires per capita, so they must have been doing something right. Call this the age of the politicians.

Then came the immigrants, steel manufacturing and lifelong jobs. The early 1900s was also known for the rise of the great churches, strong ethnic neighborhoods, and community strength. Call this the age of the diocese.

The political leadership that followed the wane of the Catholic Church’s influence in the 1950s did not provide the moral and ethical strength that the Church could, and ever since we have been living through a period of weak and ineffective leaders. They’ve given us a legacy of patronage jobs and little else.

So who will come and save us? Where can we find great leadership today? Whom can we trust? Maybe the University at Buffalo?

The UB 2020 plan calls for 10,000 more students, hundreds more faculty and a cool $80 million additional community revenue from just the students alone. UB also plans to get a much bigger share of federal and state research dollars to pump up what they call a knowledge-based economy. But that’s not why we’ll rely on them for community leadership.

We’ll rely on them because they’ll be the big gorilla. I look forward to the day when the University has so much clout that politicians, business leaders and the community at large will get behind it out of the fear of being left behind.

We have been a rather timid collective society led, poorly at times, for 8 generations. We will welcome our new overlord with open arms. And I think the University will succeed in taking us a heckuva lot further than any of our elected officials have taken us in God knows how many years.

Leaving Our Children Behind

I had the chance to listen to a rebroadcast of author Susan Eaton’s discussion of her book The Children in Room E4, a look at the attempts of one teacher’s making a difference in the Hartford public school system.  The book itself has taken some critical hits, most notably on its attempt to portray the city’s Sheff v. O’Neill civil suit as something akin to Brown v. Board of Education.

The discussion of the book was not nearly as interesting as Eaton’s contention that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, so vigorously pursued by the Bush Administration and overwhelmingly ratified by Congress, was based on a sham called “The Texas Miracle”.  In 2002 the Houston Independent School District, under then-superintendent Rod Paige, reported that its education policies had reduced the public school dropout rate to practically zero.  In reality the data was faked.  Robert Kimball, a former assistant principal who blew the whistle on the fraud, went so far as to claim that the miracle was choreographed  to make Presidential candidate George W. Bush look better during his run for the White House.  Paige later became Secretary of Education under Bush.

The jury’s still out as to whether or not NCLB has been successful, although the scientific evidence indicates that it probably isn’t having much effect.  What is known is that the Bush Administration and Congress have failed to adequately fund the testing requirements set forth by the law itself.  The budget was cut by $12 billion in 2006 alone.

The NCLB’s intention to force better education through testing has been criticized as a test and punish law, not a school improvement law.  This article points out numerous faults with the law, not the least of which is that the U.S. cannot test its way to better schools.  The article, I’m sure, is written by teachers, for teachers. 

Nonetheless, from an Administration that gave us a song and dance about the Iraqis welcoming us with open arms, I was hoping that something so important to our collective future as education would not be the subject of similar rhetoric and faked data.  It appears that nothing is sacred to this Administration.

Except perhaps embryonic stem cells.

Lessons from the IPhone Hack

George Hotz, now a student at RIT, was highlighted in the press for hacking Apple’s IPhone to work on any GSM-enabled network.  [From a business perspective Apple is probably overjoyed, but Apple’s business partner, AT&T, is most likely pissed.]  George’s blog on the steps required to unlock the phone is a fascinating technical read.  The link takes you to his summary explanation of the hack; and all subsequent steps follow, starting with “Step 1” in his blog archive.

For anyone really technically savvy about electronics and software this will not be a hard read, but that’s not what’s interesting, anyway.

Lesson 1:  It’s the eloquence of George’s instructions.

Read any step in the instructions.  Then read the blog comments, ignore the shorthand geekspeak and note how poorly most of these comments flow:  bad grammar, atrocious spelling and a worse than elementary grasp of the English language.  George is more than just technically astute.  Relative to his audience he’s also a great communicator.

George does not take solo credit for this hack; on the contrary, throughout the blog he compliments those who helped work out the hack.

Lesson 2:  Teamwork rules the workplace.

The best employees are not necessarily the most intelligent.  The best employees are the ones who are able to constructively participate in group developments.

I understand that corporate trade secrets are necessary in a capitalist society, but I wonder how much further along we’d be in technology and especially medicine if information sharing were the norm rather than the exception.

The Technology Chasm

When I was a kid I needed a tachometer, a timing light and a wrench set to tune my car.  Today’s vehicles are so complex that much more specialized equipment than this is needed to gain a toehold on engine maintenance.

When I was a kid I put together Heathkits and learned about amplifiers, television and radio electronics by reading the step-by-step manuals, soldering the components, applying power and hoping that I didn’t see smoke.

When I was a kid the gap between the design of technology and the use of it was small enough so that my friends and I could admire the design – and even do design – at a young age.

That gap has grown inexorably in just a generation as electronics, sophisticated mechanics and materials have rendered the observation of design to such an incredible microscopy or enormous complexity as to be impossible for the young to comprehend, much less master.  Excepting those extraordinarily bright and inquisitive children, most of our young are being denied the privilege of learning and understanding practical science and engineering, simply because the technology that we can put our arms around is way beyond our ability to experiment with it.  It is small wonder that so many students fail science and mathematics.  They can’t ever apply it.

Science and mathematics abilities are rapidly defining the distinction between societal haves and have-nots.  If we can’t instill technology learning into our children, how do we prevent ourselves, as a society, from becoming even more classed than we already are?

How does anyone who is missing the drive to get through the fundamental yet complex learning curve even consider a future in science or engineering?

Our country’s economic gears will fall off if we can’t solve this problem.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

You do not have to read far into this Wikipedia article to understand why the English language is both difficult to master and beautifully rich.  Homophones wreak havoc with most people (witness the number of times the word “its” is confused with “it’s“, even by people who know better); add in a few hundred thousand words that have attained subtle alternate meanings, and mastering the language becomes all the harder.  Then add to that the problems associated the difference between phonetics of the spoken tongue and the spellings of those same words (dough, pneumatic, two) and integrate some foreign words for yucks (rendezvous, potpourri, khaki).  The complexities of English could spell its future doom.

English is a beautiful, multi-cultural language not afraid to embellish itself with the best from other languages.  But in our haste for visual entertainment, and our willingness to de-emphasize reading, we run great risk in sacrificing our native language for a low-cal substitute, which will become foreign to other English-speaking peoples of the world.

The English language may be destined to become another Latin:  Historically significant, but replaced with simpler, similar but dissimilar offshoots.

I intend to live this language to its fullest.

Hawk Creek

A stone’s throw from the village of East Aurora and twenty-two minutes from downtown Buffalo, nestled back off the main road, is Hawk Creek Wildlife Sacntuary where they take in broken birds and fix them. Some, like the two eagles that cannot fly, remain as permanent residents.

The sanctuary is not normally open to the public, but they do give educational tours by request and over the past two weekends, opened its doors to the public for its annual Wildlife and Renaissance festival. I’m not into the Renaissance part and in fact, I thought the jousting and fake battles were a little hokey; but the outfits that some of the young maidens had on were very flattering if not sweltering on the hot, humid day.

Protections for birds of prey (eagles, in particular) have been in effect since their numbers were decimated by the use of pesticides – mainly DDT – 50 years ago; and their numbers have been increasing yearly. There are nesting perigrine falcons in downtown Buffalo and several nesting eagles pairs throughout Western New York. Whenever I cycle into the hills in southern Erie and Wyoming counties, I usually spot at least one or two falcons or other birds with large wingspans.

It’s great to see them back. I hope we maintain some respect for them and let them continue to thrive in this area.

Hooray for Harry Potter

I’m hoping that the success of the Harry Potter series means that there are many, many children who have established an enjoyment for reading.

Books are great.  They open doors to many worlds.

We’re Not So Smart

Have you ever watched that show “Are You Smarter Than a 5^th Grader”? I’ve never seen it but I understand a lot of adults come off looking like fools on it.

For all of you who are afraid of science and are curious but too embarrassed to ask questions, there’s a new book out that may be worth the read. It’s called The Canon and attempts to bring back the joy and wonder of how our world works without scaring you off.

The U.S., as a whole, way underachieves when it comes to science and math. Most Americans are uncomfortable with the reasoning that’s required to understand scientific principals. The Canon’s author, Natalie Angier, tries to put the difficult in simple-enough and interesting terms so that the average American can get through the book.

The book is not written at a fifth-grade level but it also does not try to delve into the concepts much more deeply than would you might get out of a fifth-grade science book. It digs into physics, probability, even evolution (you know, that so-called science that’s not Creation) with elegance.

I have previously expressed dismay at the brush-off that so many people – who generally argue from the side of ignorance – give to science. That prejudice, and people’s willingness to pass that prejudice on to their progeny, are compounding the problems we have keeping up with the other industrialized countries. Indeed, many of our students’ test scores rank right there with the third world.

We need to get smarter quickly or we will quickly get poorer.

Talker, Inc.

Kris Schindler and Mike Buckley both teach in UB’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.  Out of their lab, which focuses on assistive device technology for the handicapped, came an idea whose real name is “Augmentative Communications Device for the Speech Impaired Using Commercial Grade Technology”.  It has been licensed by UB to Kris’s company, Talker Inc.  It is a communications tool to help those who cannot speak.

With respect to the UB 2020 initiative, this is a perfect relation-building exercise between the university, its faculty, students and the Western New York business environment.  It hits on many fronts:

• Its principal research comes out of the minds of students and faculty who are involved in Kris’s and Mike’s lab at the university, which focuses on devices to aid the handicapped;
• The students meet regularly with handicapped individuals as well as the therapists and teachers who work with them;
• The university provides the license to a local company who is better skilled at turning the lab’s ideas into marketable products;
• The local company hires students to further assist in product development and maturation;
• The university gets great PR and a royalty stream for every product sold.

Local businesses, students, faculty, the university and the handicapped all win in this scenario.  It fits UB 2020 like a glove.

I had the privilege of attending a meeting with Mike and Kris and plan to help these guys succeed as much as I possibly can.

Possible Buffalo Pundit Story #4

Since he’s been down for so long, I’m making up stories for Buffalo Pundit so you don’t have to.

If Buffalo Pundit were able to write today, he’d possibly write about UB 2020 and the push to grow the University of Buffalo into an academic powerhouse comparable to Ohio State or the University of Michigan.  He’d possibly tell you that Marsha Henderson, VP of External Affairs, has hired a consulting group to interview local businesses and institutions during the month of June to determine what the University is doing right – and wrong – with building the business/research relationship between the University and the rest of Western New York.  BP might possibly say that It’s about time; the University has been a big island onto itself for way too long.

In addition to improving relations, BP might possibly relate that UB’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership graduated 48 small business leaders from its core and advanced programs tonight, and that the CEL program now has 600 graduates who employ 20,000 Western New Yorkers.  He might just say that the CEL business leaders are themselves becoming an influential local collective. 

Yay!  UB is a great treasure in the area and as they increase their student population by 10,000 and their faculty and staff by 1,000, they will generate $100 million in direct additional revenue, plus potential for significant other local growth and spinoffs.  I can only encourage UB to grow even more.

I’m amazed that news articles, editorials and letters to the editor aren’t appearing daily in the paper about this.  If GM or Intel announced that it was building a facility that would add 10,000 jobs, every news channel and the paper would have a daily countdown.  What’s with that?  UB will soon be one of our very largest employers.  They deserve the attention.

The End of the Valedictorian

NPR had an article yesterday about Eden Prairie High School in Minnesota, which is graduating its last valedictorian this year.  They are eliminating the honor starting next fall.  The article claimed that this was a growing national trend.  Too many students connive with their parents as early as middle school to figure out how to attain the honor, and this supposedly leads to less collaborative efforts with other students who also want to succeed.

I was not valedictorian of my high school but I knew who was likely going to be valedictorian and I did everything I could to get as close to his grades as possible.  It became my goal to try to reach that bar.

The article didn’t mention whether or not the school was also eliminating the award for the top athlete in the school, or the election of the prom king or the prom queen.  If I had to guess (and I do) I would guess that these other number one positions were not eliminated.

I don’t get this at all.  I can find no rationale for justifying how the elimination of a goal helps more students to achieve it.  I am terribly discouraged to think that our educational system is setting the bar closer and closer to mediocrity.

The Cost of College

Both of my boys will be going to the same university next fall.  I was unable to get a “two-for-one” deal, so this afternoon was spent reading lots of directions and filling out yet more financial aid forms, signed copies of tax returns and other paperwork needed to complete the requirements for financial aid.  To get my boys through school requires a combination of scholarship, savings, student loans, parent loans and work study.  In January I will repeat the process with the FAFSA forms (one for each child) and in May do it all over again for the loans and work study applications.

I can’t imagine what parents with three or more college-bound kids must go through; two is a jolt.  We set aside money for college the day each of the boys was born, and that has saved us today.  Even though we’ll eventually have to borrow in order to finish paying for their education, it will be *reasonable* compared to the debt that some parents and their children will incur to get through four years of university.

The cost of a private college education has octupled since I went to school, while salaries have not quite tripled.  For a newborn today the cost of a public four-year education, in 2005 dollars, is estimated to be $92,000.  This article didn’t even bother to estimate the cost of a private education but the general rule of thumb would be to increase the costs by a factor of three, to roughly $270,000.  By that time there will be no such thing as a poor college students, as poor students will no longer be going to college.

The college inflation rate must come down soon, or institutions will price themselves out of existence.

Better start saving today for your yet unborn children.

Graduation Night

My youngest is now a high school graduate, looking forward to his first semester in college come September. The St. Francis graduation ceremony at the OLV Basilica was great. Kudos to the St. Francis high school chorus and to all the speakers who kept their speeches short. It was over in an hour and a half.

Good luck to my son and all the new graduates of St. Francis High School.

 

Google Class

I took a Google class today. Jeff McCaskey, CEO of Aurora Consulting Group, did a presentation on Google’s capabilities at the Jacobs Management Center on Delaware Avenue.

Most people know that Google is much more than a search engine. The depth of its databases, and the sheer speed at which it is able to add to these databases, is unfathomable. The company’s ability to mine this data in various ways has allowed it to produce dozens and dozens of programs that give this capability to anyone with an internet connection. For free.

Example: Type in a UPC code in the search box. Just the 12-digit number, nothing more. Google will figure out that it’s a UPC code and provide all the product information associated with the code. The same is true if you type in just a vehicle’s VIN number. Or a FedEx tracking number. Google can determine the context based on just the codes, do a lookup in the appropriate database, extract the pertinent information, and display it in about as much time as it takes to blink.

One of my favorites was the view:timeline command, which will present information on any subject as a timeline. For example, type “October surprise storm view:timeline” and you’ll get references all the way back to 1900, which is pretty cool considering that the “October Surprise Storm” that I was referring to occurred in 2006 (the articles referring to this storm are categorized in time order starting around October 13, 2006, as would be expected).

Need a quote from Shakespeare? Books.Google.Com/Googlebooks/Shakespeare contains the complete works. Books.Google.Com allows you to search the full text of all books that Google has gotten permission to digitize, and then some.

Finally: Google has created Google 411, a voice-recognition system that allows you to call Google to get the number for any business in your local calling area. It will also dial the number for you. It doesn’t cost a penny, and it’s hands-free.

I find it likely that in my lifetime, virtually every word that’s ever been written down that can be digitized, will be digitized and absorbed into Google’s database. This is a mind-boggling amount of data. I can’t imagine what to do with this much data but I know there are brilliant minds coming up with myriad ideas.

Jeff does the Google lecture to any group willing to make a donation to his non-profit benefit that provides copies of Buffalo Business First to high school students.

Highly recommended.

More on the U.S. Prison System

The Mouse House has a blog entry about appropriate punishment for criminals in our overcrowded prison system.  The Madmouser likened the current U.S. prison system to Home Sweet Home, that it’s too cushy.

The Madmouser’s point is that a prison stay needs to be so difficult that people would think twice about doing a criminal act for fear of going to prison.  It needs to be a better deterrent rather than a home away from home.  Google up articles on recidivism rates in the U.S., however, and you’ll find that hard labor and long prison sentences – like the death penalty – are unfortunately not much of a deterrent to future crime. 

For brevity, I’m going to generalize here and lump inmates into the category of violent criminals, even though many are incarcerated for non-violent felonies.  I think that the Madmouser may be misjudging the nature of the U.S. prison system.  Spend a day there – or to talk to anyone who counsels inmates or employees – to get an appreciation for the brutality of the current system, which is based almost solely on punishment.  Rehabilitation – or rather, preparing the inmate for an eventual release back into society – is nearly nonexistent.  We throw our prisoners into prison and when their time is up we throw them onto the street.  We literally try to train them to become less violent and more like us by beating the crap out of them.

The prison system is brutal for many reasons, not the least of which is the pervasive personalities (think gangs) of many inmates themselves.  The U.S. system is also designed to take away basic choices and to replace them with no choice but that of the corrections officers.  The biggest brutality is that the system encourages rage, and rage provokes action without thinking. 

It is true that many inmates (and ex-inmates) think of prison as a home away from home.  After all, compared to how they lived their lives on the outside, it’s a stable environment, and long confines in that environment create enduring relationships, often the only enduring relationships the person ever had.  Old friends, however, are generally not the reason that so many felons become repeat felons.  As a country we’ve been great at eliminating inmate re-entry services whose aim was to provide support to get ex-cons back on their feet.  As a country we don’t do much of anything to re-integrate ex-felons, so it’s only a matter of time before isolation and societal ostracism lead them to desperate or criminal acts.

Figuring out a way to reduce rage – to calm the savage beast – might be a good deterrent to crime, but that’s got to begin before someone commits a criminal act.  We have to take back our children if we hope to solve the prison problem.  Our society doesn’t seem to want to do this; it’s not as easy as locking someone away, but I’d bet that it would be much less expensive in the long run.

Sex Education and the Economy

In 2006 our government gave $176 million to sex education programs that teach abstinence until marriage.  Here’s what we got for that money:

Nothing.

In light of the current Administration’s push for cutbacks in the Adult Employment and Training program, the Job Corps and other so-called education programs because they demonstrate little significant improvement for the money spent, I think the Administration should fess up to the reality that all the money in the world isn’t going to change teenagers’ penchant for humping each other.  Worse, those teens that fall off the abstinence bandwagon are at risk for unwanted pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases, since these programs are not allowed to talk about condoms and contraception alternatives.

The historical context for abstinence until marriage was affected in small part by the very short time frame between the onset of puberty and the onset of marriage (for girls this was often measured in weeks).  Today there’s easily a 10-year average gap between puberty and marriage – an impossibly long time to try to control one’s hormones and the biological urges innately associated with them.  If nothing else, the $176 million thrown at these programs, with no change in sexual activity between those who participate in abstinence education and those who do not, is ample proof that the programs are not accomplishing what they intended to accomplish.  And they never will.

Here’s an idea:  Invest that money in condom awareness and safe sex while discouraging promiscuity.  Be open about the practice of sex instead of just the anatomy of sex.  Embrace the condom and in half a generation condom angst will disappear.  At least four things will happen:

• The incidence of STDs will go down
• The incidence of unwanted pregnancy will go down
• The number of abortions will go down
• The number of out-of-wedlock children who stand a good chance of becoming delinquent and a burden to society when they reach adulthood will go down.

Every one of these points:  STDs, unwanted pregnancy, abortion and juvenile delinquency costs real money – billions and billions of dollars.  Funnel that $176 million to something that would really make a difference and we’d save a heckuva bundle.  [Indeed.  In 2000 the cost of STDs alone was pegged at $6.5 billion.]  And the best part is that the success of the condom program is measurable:  It will only take around 9 months to determine if it’s effective.