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This particular study has found that our concern with children as the central focus of marriage is declining, and more people are choosing to pair without reproducing.There is a rising cut off between American children and marriage -- society's chief child-rearing institution -- according to the latest report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Fewer children are living in married-couple households and fewer married couples families have children when compared to past decades, according to "Marriage and Children: Coming Together Again?" from "The State of Our Unions 2003," a report issued annually by the National Marriage Project.

The Census Bureau projects that by 2010 families with children will make up only 28 percent of all U.S. households, the least number in a century. Also, a greater part of Americans disagree that the main purpose of marriage is rearing children, the report finds.

Marriage is making a big comeback in the fashionable culture through such hit movies as "My Big, Fat Greek Wedding" and reality television shows like "The Bachelor." Yet, while American adults still reward marriage and seek it for themselves, American children are less able to count on it as a secure foundation for their family lives, according to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, co-directors of the National Marriage Project.

"If there is a story to be told about wedding in recent decades, it is not that it is withering away for adults, but that it is withering away as a family experience for children," said Whitehead.

• Like kids and feels fine as long as they belong to someone else.
• Get grossed out by baby drool.
• Would rather give a dog a flea bath than change a diaper.
• Never heard the tick of a biological timer.
• Get tired of being challenged by total strangers, met with hostility and suspicion for our choices, and told that there is something wrong with us for not interested to have children.
• Feel that being a family doesn't necessitate anything more than one person.
• Respect the choice of those who have determined to have children.
• Expect the same respect from those with children for our choice to remain child free.
• Look forward to the day when our relatives and friends will finally accept our decision.

If you feel that you belong to any one of the above, then may be you belong to the Proud, Childless by Choice.

Like Meredith, I’m coming up on the end of a further semester teaching. It’s still unclear whether I’ll be allowed to teach any more courses at UW-SLIS, but I’ve already had feelers from other institutions with distance-ed programs, so one way or another, I’ll keep doing this—because just like Meredith, I get a significant charge from it.

I can see that I need to change some things about the course the next time I teach it ($DEITY volent). The lecture on standards and DNS needs to move way earlier in the semester. Some nuts-and-bolts “what’s in a computer?” stuff needs to happen, mostly for the sake of the jargon. And I need to do a lot more things hands-on, especially early in the semester when people are feeling at their most tech-stupid and vulnerable. It’s a little like language teaching—students don’t internalize grammar until they use it, but by the same token you don’t want to leave them entirely alone with the language because they’ll get lost and frustrated.

That said, I think it was a successful semester, and I owe Jason Griffey a lot of props for his final-project idea. (Last year’s final project was pretty disastrously underspecified and vague. This year’s is definitely getting there.) What some of them did absolutely blows my mind.

One of the technology-implementation problems I set was to create “Kiosk Firefox”—a library computer with kiosk-only web functionality, where pesky patrons couldn’t get in to mess with the machine’s innards. One group that took this on seriously went whole-hawg with it. They came to the last class session dispirited because (for various reasonable reasons) they didn’t actually have a kiosk machine they could show me. I think they knew me well enough to know that their grades weren’t going to suffer. I think they really wanted to show me it worked! But no, the whole-hawgness was things like figuring out how to disable keyboard hotkeys (!) and getting rid of the Microsoft taskbar. Real above-and-beyond stuff.

I couldn’t be happier about them. They’re departing my class with a can-do attitude that will mean more in the long run than anything specific I actually taught.

As is my way after a long talk, I’m a bit sensitized to interrelated issues… so I’m noticing copyright-related tidbits more than I usually might.

The central logistical complexity is the one-time nature of these discussions. Once something is signed, that’s all she wrote—going back to renegotiate agreements is so costly in time and hassle that it pretty much never works out. It is thus fatefully important to get this right the first time, the first time being the only. That’s a burden on all areas of the question.

(This doesn’t just hit publishers, either. I have had to disappointedly turn down collections of student work for the repository because no one considered at the time of authoring that students are copyright owners too, and we can’t just make free with their work without their permission.)

I don’t have a magic answer to this; I note that my own personal preferred word in a copyright concord is “non-exclusive.” I also doubt idly if some of the author-identity ferment happening right now may result in a world where it’s easy enough to find former authors that renegotiation when essential becomes a viable thing

Few people would rather hate to be childfree, they wouldn't choose it. But that's for the reason that they love and adore kids and being a mother. Childfree = Lonely? Might be! But even being a parent, someone can be lonely at some stages. You feel lonely when you are stuck in the quarters exhausted looking after toddlers. You feel lonely the day your youngest child moves out of home. Loneliness is a normal human emotion and we can't completely avoid it by having children.

For other people it is good to have a choice. In the old days you had to get married and bear kids, or you were considered as a freak to be pitied. These days there are many ways to fill your life and if people prefer no kids then it’s their choice. We can’t say that they are selfish as there are various examples where you can find people childfree but they would enjoy the life to the fullest and give life and love.

The only thing which is to regret is about ''childfree'' tiny minority who is aggressive and hate parents and kids.

I was browsing through the web one day and tripped over a list of articles in scientific journals involving voluntary childlessness. This was posted by one Adam H., a member of the St. Louis Childfree Meet up group -- thanks Adam! I've explained a little here rather than just linking as all this was in an excel file (much easier to read on the web). I also thought about providing a synopsis for each, but I've got adequate on my plate as it is (perhaps down the way...)

I am excited that the child-free lifestyle has engrossed serious attention from such a wide range of scientific communities -- sorry I can't link directly to the journals, but you'll have to find them at your local library or sign up for online research access through a university.

Breaking Through Traditional Barriers

Gender, Internalization Of Expressive Traits, And Expectations Of Parenting -- Sex Roles (2007)
Defending The Voluntarily Childless Decision -- Dissertation Abstracts Intl. (2006)
Understanding The Gender Identity Of Voluntarily Childless Women -- Gender And Society (2003)
Stigma Management Among The Voluntarily Childless -- Sociological Perspectives (2002)
Perceptions Of Parenthood Among Young Adults -- American Journal Of Family Therapy (2001)
Childless By Choice? Ambivalence And The Female Identity -- Feminism And Psychology (2000)
Unwomanly Conduct: The Challenges Of Intentional Childlessness -- Dissertation Abstracts Intl. (1990)

For the cause that I know a number of my academic-library colleagues lecture Zotero classes, and a rather larger number of my academic-library colleagues become concerned on the subject of piracy of academic materials, I thought I’d offer a quick elaboration-and-clarification of the Zotero sync feature, now in beta.

Firstly, it’s significant to note that Zotero syncing is totally optional, and it is off by default. Would-be adopters need not worry that Zotero will instantly and involuntarily scatter their personal libraries all over the Internet; Zotero just doesn’t work that way.

There are, in fact, two Zotero sync features. One feature syncs between your local Zotero datastore and zotero.org, and it copies only metadata, not files. Collections on zotero.org can be public (in which case they are viewable at zotero.org  or private, and the default is private. This means that one can use zotero.org as a backup for one’s library without random other people viewing it; however, doing so places trust in zotero.org not to be hacked or to inadvertently or intentionally reveal private user data. (I trust them, don’t get me wrong, but it’s good to put these things out on the table.)

The other feature syncs between your local Zotero datastore and a directory available through the WebDAV protocol. This syncs files at least; I assume the metadata goes as well, but I haven’t checked and don’t know how it works.

The gotcha here is that any user of this sync feature is responsible for ensuring that the resulting datastore is secure, because a WebDAV folder is web-accessible. Again, talk to your IT shop about this, before you become an inadvertent piracy enabler! The sync features are independent of each other; you can use none, one, or both as you see fit.

I would also welcome some intelligent assessment of items present in different libraries for purposes of data cleanup, but I accept that that’s a very hard problem. Otherwise, I’m very happy with these features, and believe they have been intelligently and responsibly implemented; three cheers for Zotero!

I’ve been longing to post about this for quite some time, but it wasn’t general knowledge. Now it is, and I want to call interest to it.

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational attempt to bring together researchers in arts and humanities, computer and information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to cooperatively tackle the question: How can we improve arts and humanities research through the improvement of shared technology services?

It’s a scholarship project that they’re asking Mellon to fund, and Mellon would be fools and madmen not to. But yet it is a condensed brilliance for anyone who’s interested in research computing, humanities research, digital humanities, or (yes) repository services. You should read it. You simply must. I can’t talk about how brilliant it is without jabbering absurdly and everyone else I know who’s read it has been excited at its wonderfulness.

Any study project of this nature faces two main hurdles: have you fully and clearly understood the problem, and have you had a workable and practical solution to it? IRs clear the first bar, but fall all above themselves at the second. This proposal fly’s high over both bars. I couldn’t be more impressed.

This is just my effort to get a little buzz happening around it.

Why should we go through so much effort and suffering to coach undergraduate students to use library-provided subscription databases when the greater part of them will in no way all over again have access to those databases once they graduate?

Why do people adopt the idea to remain childfree?
There are various factors which tend to make a person think and choose the option to live childfree. A survey was conducted on this and they found several motivating factors which encourage childless theory. People had the choice to add the motivating factors too in addition with rating them.

Some of the motivating factors are:

• My lifestyle/career is contrary with raising children.
• I would like to be independent and enjoy freedom.
• I can better serve the society by not having children.
• I can better provide myself by not having children.
• I have no wish to have a child, no maternal/paternal instinct.
• I don't think I would be a good parent.
• I am worried about the physical risks of childbirth and recovery.
• I have seen or experienced first hand the effects of bad or unintentional parenting,
  and I don't want to risk the chance that I might bring about that situation.
• I love our life, our relationship as it is, and having a child won't improve it.
• I delayed having children and eventually decided I wanted to remain childfree.
• I want to focus my time and energy on my own interests, needs or goals.
• I do not want to take on the responsibility of raising a child.
• People I know have not realized the rewards they expected as a parent.
• I want to accomplish/experience things in life that would be difficult to do if I was a parent.


The top 4 motives are:

• I love our life, our relationship, as it is, and having a child won't enhance it.
• I value freedom and independence.
• I do not want to take on the responsibility of raising a child.
• I want to accomplish/experience things in life that would be difficult to do if I
   were a parent.

The least rated motives or compelling statements are:

“I delayed having children and eventually decided I wanted to remain childless.” Only 21 percent of women and 22 percent of men gave this statement a rating of 4 or 5.

“I am fretful about the physical risks of childbirth and recovery.” Only 24 percent of the women rated this statement a 4 or 5. However it is remarkable that 12 percent of the men surveyed rated this statement a 4 or a 5 representing that some men are worried about the risks of childbirth and recovery, too.

However, it shows that most of the people are going Childfree with lack of compelling factors which makes the motive factors strong to go for childfree.

Living Child Free

After a brief brake from blogging i am back to blogging. I was Busy traveling all over US. There was a reason for me to do a long stay in Miami. I was there with my friends running around the beaches and hanging around with girls.

ill share more of my trip soon. I will be active in coming days please excuse me for now.