• My evil dad: Life as a serial killer’s daughter
  You always hear about serial killers in the news, but you don’t always hear about how their families cope with the fact that their loved one is in fact a serial killer. Here’s the story of a serial killer’s daughter.

  When I was 13, we were driving along the Columbia River, a beautiful wide river that separates Washington State and Oregon. We were just getting close to the Multnomah Falls area when my Dad announced: “I know how to kill someone and get away with it.” Then he just started to tell me how he would cut off the victim’s buttons, so that there wouldn’t be any fingerprints left, and he would wear cycling shoes that didn’t leave a distinctive print in the mud.

  At the time, I put this down to my father’s penchant for detective fiction, but years later I realised we had been driving through the area where he had disposed of Taunja Bennett’s body three years earlier. I think he wanted to relive it and enjoy the moment again. My dad felt compelled to share his crimes, as he did in the messages that he left at truck stops, or sent in letters to the media. They were always signed with a smiley face, leading the media to dub him the “Happy Face Killer”.

• The Programmer’s Price
  An article about an agency that’s taking a Hollywood approach to programmers by being a programmer’s agent and helping them find work for the best pay possible.

  Solomon leaned back in his chair and flipped through a mental Rolodex of his clients. “I definitely have some ideas,” he said, after a minute. “The first person who comes to mind, he’s also a bioinformatician.” He rattled off a dazzling list of accomplishments: the developer does work for the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, where he is attempting to attack complicated biological problems using crowdsourcing, and had created Twitter tools capable of influencing elections. Solomon thought that he might be interested in AuthorBee’s use of Twitter. “He knows the Twitter A.P.I. in his sleep.”

• When Mommy and Daddy took the Toys Away
  Kids have a lot of toys today because consumer goods are so cheap. This article talks about a couple of parents who are trying to limit the amount of toys their kids have.

  Moreover, Becker says that the value of minimalism comes with the lifelong lessons they are able to teach through it. When his children become envious of another child who has a lot of toys, Becker and his wife try to help them “deal with that emotion as opposed to thinking that they’ll overcome it by getting more stuff.”

  “We don’t overcome envy in our lives by getting what another person has,” Becker says. “We overcome envy by being content with what we have and being grateful for what we have.”

• The Cutthroat world of Elite Public Schools
  I think its a good idea but meritocratic public schools are coming under fire because poorer candidates are not being admitted as much as they should be (one reaspn being that you actually need to put in effort to apply)

  “The idea was that, if you wanted to provide an excellent, gifted, and talented education for public school students, one could do a better job of that if in large cities there were specialized schools that would bring academically talented students together,” said Kahlenberg, who opposes test-only admissions policies such as those in New York City. Secondly, selective-enrollment schools “are very sought after by upper-middle class people who might not consider using public schools if it weren’t for the selective-enrollment institutions. Essentially, it’s a way of ensuring greater participation from wealthier families who might otherwise move to the suburbs.”

• The secret Hollywood procedure that has fooled us for years
  We know all about photoshopping magazine covers and so enhancing celebrities in movies is not a stretch. But this article has some juicy gossip about who might have had it done.

  A recent comedy hit featured a top actress in her 40s who required beauty work on every single shot she was in — some 600 total. With artists working around the clock, seven days a week, the beauty work alone took close to three months.

  The payoff? Nearly everything written about the film remarked at how fit and young the actress looked. No one suspected it was anything but good genes and clean livin’.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: hollywood, parenting, pocket, publicschools