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Tuesday, October 2, 2012
How to Handle Negative Feedback on Your Blog
Keep calm and carry on. As soon as you are notified of a less than pleasant remark from a reader, the first thing you want to do is take a deep breath. It is human instinct and completely normal to get defensive and react negatively when faced with ill words. Instead keep clam, take a deep breath and think before you respond.
The faster you respond the better. This almost becomes a game because once that comment has been posted you can count on your other readers seeing it. The ball is now in your court and once other readers see the comment they will wait for your response. Addressing the comment quickly will show your upset reader, as well as your other readers, that you are in the game and on the ball.
As much as you may want to delete the comment, do not delete it. Think of the negative comment like a child that gets caught taking something that doesn’t belong to them. When you approach the child, the first thing they do is hide the item behind their back, signifying to you that they know they have done something wrong by taking the item. Taking away or deleting that comment will only show your unhappy reader and other readers that you have done something wrong. The only exception to deleting is if the comment contains curse words or any other offensive language. If that is the case, take a screen shot of the comment and file it away for reference if anything else progresses with that problem.
Do not apologize. This may puzzle you, but one of the most important rules in any industry or business is that you never admit to doing something wrong. Though there are obviously certain cases when it is needed and okay, you should only use apologies when absolutely necessary. Typically negative comments come from unhappy readers that aren’t satisfied with a lot of things in life. Avoid saying, ‘I am sorry’ but use phrases like ‘I understand’, ‘I want to remedy this situation’, and ‘I’d love to discuss this with you’ etc.
Take them offline. Once you have addressed the negative comment quickly with ‘I’d love to discuss this situation with you more’ direct them offline. You want the negative exchange to end right there and to continue addressing the problem offline. Ask the reader to message you with their email address and/or phone number so that you can discuss everything. This shouldn’t be too hard because most readers are happy to speak with you offline.
Treat the negative comment like you would with any other comment. Just because the comment was made on your blog or on your Facebook doesn’t mean you treat and resolve the problem any other way. Treat it as if the person said it to your face and not online. Nothing changes.
Don’t take it personally. One thing you have to learn when you put yourself out there for the whole online world to see is that you will not always please everyone. As much as you want to make everyone happy, it just doesn’t work all the time. Take notice that for every negative comment you get, you probably have at least five positive comments. Don’t take the comment personally and don’t take offense. Learn from it and move on.
No one is perfect, and in a world where social media and blogs rule, we are bound to run into a few unhappy people. The only difference in a negative comment or review is that it is public and not private. Handling your negative comment correctly will speak volumes towards your work ethic. When that happens it is important to remember to remain clam, address it quickly, don’t delete it or apologize, take it offline and never take it personally. Good luck and happy blogging!
Taken From Longhorn Leads10 Risky Teen Behaviors You Should Be Aware Of
- Planking- Kids have taken what started out being a move done for strengthening the core to a trend that was kind of cute to something downright dangerous. Planking is where you lay face down on any surface and have your picture taken. The picture is then uploaded to Facebook or some other social media site. Teens turned this fun trend into a dangerous stunt when they started planking on things like escalators, moving cars, trains and rooftops.
- Car surfing- Instead of surfing in the water standing on a surfboard, teens are standing on moving cars. Some start by standing on the trunk with the car moving very slowly, and in an effort to continually raise the stakes they have moved to more even more dangerous locations on the car, and now teens have been killed doing this.
- Smoking Smarties- According to tutorials online, the candy is crushed to a fine powder and the end of the tube is opened and the powder is puffed and inhaled like smoke. On the surface the activity is not illegal or all that harmful, but it could lead to infections and chronic coughing. The bigger concern is that this behavior could lead to more dangerous experimentation with drugs in the future.
- Vodka eyeballing- To avoid getting caught with alcohol on their breath, teens have started pouring vodka directly in their eyes. The alcohol is absorbed through the mucus membrane and goes directly into the blood stream. This trend has been shown to cause blindness in a worst case scenario, but at a minimum it can burn the cornea and cause scarring.
- Chatroulette- Chatroulette.com is a site that connects users through their web cams with people from all over the world for live chat sessions. They do have filters which allow the user to speak to only English speakers or only females. While the policy on chatroulette is against nudity and other inappropriate activities, risky behavior still happens. Sexual predators could use this medium as a way to interact and ultimately harm kids.
- Purple drank- Drinking this mix of jolly ranchers, cough syrup with codeine and Sprite can lead to hallucinations and is extremely toxic. Kids love to copy the next celebrity trend, and for some celebrities, this purple drink it is.
- Rainbow parties- A group of girls at a party will wear various shades of lipstick and perform oral sex on the same guys. At the end of the evening the genitals of the guys have many colors of lipstick, thus mimicking a rainbow.
- Choking game- The choking game is where kids choke each other or themselves with various things like belts or scarves, to cut off the flow of blood to their brain in order to get a high. When the choking stops the blood goes back to the brain quickly and they get a natural high. Many teens who have tried this have passed out doing it and could, and have, died of asphyxiation.
- Distilling hand sanitizer- By combining salt with liquid hand sanitizer the alcohol can be distilled out of it. The alcohol is very strong and some teens who have drank it have ended up in the ER with alcohol poisoning.
- Rummy bears- Kids and adults alike are soaking gummy bears in various alcohols, like rum or vodka. The gummy soaks up the alcohol and kids are said to be eating them at school and getting buzzed.
Knowledge is power. If adults are aware that these trends are going on in other areas of the country they will be better able to spot them in their own kids or their friends.
Taken From Babysitters5 Realities of Beverly Hills Nannies
Parents may judge a nanny on the way she looks. On the show one couple rates a nanny on several different factors, including her cuteness. Other nannies spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out what interview outfit will show that they can fit into the family’s prosperous lifestyle without making them “too beautiful” to be hired.
While most families aren’t specifically looking at a nanny’s cuteness factor or the brands she’s sporting during the interview, they are judging her by her appearance. Families often shy away from overweight nannies, assuming (often incorrectly) the nanny doesn’t have the energy needed to keep up with kids, that she’s a poor role model for healthy eating, and that she’s going to pass on her unhealthy food habits. Parents are also leery of nannies who have multiple tattoos and piercings, wear heavy make-up or skimpy clothes, or otherwise fall outside the middle-of-the-road look. Parents worry about giving their kids the idea that those things are acceptable and appropriate. They also imagine having to explain why it’s OK for Nanny Kim to have her nose, eyebrow, tongue and belly button pierced but it’s not OK for their 8 year old daughter to get her ears double pierced.
Dressing in khaki pants or jeans and a polo shirt or blouse and ensuring that your hair is neat and your nails are clean can send the message that you care about presenting yourself as a professional.
At some point, you’ll have to do something way outside your job description. Beverly Hills Nannies has lots of examples of nannies doing things outside the typical nanny job description. While most nannies won’t be asked to pick up dog poop or massage her employer’s feet, every nanny will at one time or another be asked to do something that’s not in their job description. It may be walking the dog, watching the neighbor’s kid, changing the sheets in the guest room, or sending out holiday cards. Families get into tight spots and need something done right away. The nanny is often the quickest and most convenient option. While most nannies will pitch-in at crunch time, they’ll also make it clear those favors are a one-time deal.
Having a written work agreement can prevent job creep and help to ensure that everyone understands what the nannies duties are.
Nannies and employers often say one thing when they’re thinking something completely different. Throughout the show, viewers get to hear conversations between nannies and employers. After the conversation, each side adds private commentary. It’s no surprise that when talking with each other, the nanny and parent are in complete agreement about the topic, but they have a completely different take on it once the other person is out of the room.
For example, when talking to the employer the nanny agrees to take on a task completely outside her job description with a smile and a cheerful “No problem!” Privately she scowls and blasts, “That so isn’t my job. Is she crazy?”
Or, when the nanny asks for a day off to take on a side gig, the employer says “Of course you can!” Privately she fumes and asks, “What is she thinking? She knows I need her to be there that day!”
This doesn’t happen only on reality TV. Nannies and parents routinely hide their true feelings, concerns and needs from each other, afraid to rock the boat. This only leads to an accumulation of bad feelings, unmet expectations and a shaky employment relationship.
Keeping the lines of communication open and addressing issues as they arise can help prevent resentment and help to keep nannies and parents on the same page.
The job is hard because of the parents, not the kids. It’s clear the nannies on the show love and enjoy the kids they care for. Their feelings for the employers, however, are less positive. This is often the case in real life too. Most nannies are fired or quit their jobs because of problems within the nanny / family relationship, not because of an issue related to the children.
Choosing a family that has a similar parenting style and communication style can make a nanny’s interaction with the parents easier.
Part of the job is winging it. On the show, one cooking-challenged nanny has to Google the kid’s favorite recipe before she can make dinner. Another meat and potatoes kind of nanny has to decode the ingredient labels in a bakery to make sure she’s giving a hungry toddler a vegan snack. Again, every nanny watching can tell a similar story.
Every nanny receives instructions from an employer and thinks, “How am I going to pull that off?” Because every job, every child and every employer is different, it’s a guaranteed part of the job that at some point you’ll have to wing it. You’ll have to be resourceful and quickly and creatively find a solution to a challenge before it becomes a problem.
Knowing your employer’s parenting philosophy and being in tune with their needs and expectations can help you wing it successfully, when the time comes.
Beverly Hills Nannies gives its audience a ringside view of the life and times of nannies working in one of the most famous cities in the country. While most real nannies don’t share the 90210 zip code, they do share many of the nannies’ experiences.
Taken From Nanny30 Blogs for Tracking Kids Activities
Tracking Internet Activity
The Internet can be one of the most valuable learning and educational tools that your child has at his disposal. The ability to immediately access the most extensive store of information that civilization has ever known puts your child on the fast track to intellectual expansion and academic success. Unfortunately, the Internet can also be a very dangerous place for children. These five blog entries are dedicated to Internet safety and the ethical implications of tracking – or choosing not to track – the websites that your kids visit.
- Do Not Track Kids’ Online Activities
- Keep Track of Your Kid’s Internet Activity With Recover It
- A FREE Way to Monitor Your Kids’ Online Activity
- To Monitor or Not to Monitor: Tracking Children’s Digital Lives
- Monitor Your Kids Internet Use Without Spying
Tracking Phone Activity
Just one generation ago cell phones were seen as extravagant luxury items owned only by well-heeled, powerful adults. Today, the majority of kids and almost every teenager in the country carry their own little piece of mobile connectivity in their pocket. While a cell phone is a great tool for keeping tabs on your kids and ensuring that they can always access an adult when they’re in trouble, they can also present kids with the opportunity to access and share inappropriate content. Learning to track and monitor your kids’ cell phone activity is detailed in these five blog posts.
- Impact of Tracking Kids’ Smartphone Activities
- Track Cell Phone Text Messages
- Mobile Software for Remote Tracking of Kids’ iPhones
- Should You Use Your Smart Phone to Track Your Kids?
- How to Monitor Your Kids’ Use of Their Mobile Phone
Tracking Social Networking Activity
Commenting, posting, liking and tweeting are all commonplace activities for the modern kid. Social networking is, however, an avenue for cyber-bullying and predators to access children. Help your kids learn to use social networking safely and responsibly with the pointers offered in these five blog entries.
- Parents Beware: Instagram & Kik Messenger Are a Dangerous Combination & What Social Dangers to Check For
- 4 Security Concerns for Kids Under 13. What to Do?
- Social Networking
- Kids and Social Networking: Pros and Cons
- Social Media: What Parents Should Worry About
Tracking Extracurricular Activities
Between soccer practice, dance classes and academic clubs, today’s kids have schedules that rival those of their parents in terms of fullness. Managing your kids’ activities in addition to your own jam-packed routine while still tracking expenses to ensure that you don’t exceed the family budget can present a very real challenge, which is where these five bloggers offer their assistance.
- How Do You Stay on Top of Your Kids’ After School Activities?
- Keeping Track of Kids’ Schedules
- 15 Tips for Managing the After-School Activities Juggle
- Trying To Manage Extracurricular Activities? Our Six Sanity Saving Tips!
- How To Determine The Total Cost for Kids’ Extracurricular Activities
Tracking Chores and Household Responsibilities
Whether your children are tasked with completing chores in exchange for their allowance or are simply expected to perform them as a matter of daily routine, kids and parents alike can benefit from a bit of chore management. These five blog posts offer hints, tips and ideas for tracking which chores have yet to be completed, and which can be crossed off your child’s list.
- Free Printable: Kids’ Chore Chart
- Works for Me Wednesday: Chore Tracking With No Chore Chart!
- An App That Prompts Children to Do Their Chores
- Automating Allowance and Chore Tracking for the Bank of Helbig
- Kids and Chores: Do You Track ‘Em?
Tracking Screen Time
There are a wide variety of reasons for modern parents to be concerned with tracking and applying reasonable limits to the amount of time that their children spend engaged with electronic devices. When kids get off the couch and away from the computer, they have more time available to engage in healthy, physically active pursuits. The ideas put forth by these five blogs make managing kids’ screen time a bit less of a Herculean task.
- Multiplying Media Make It Harder To Manage Kids’ Screen Time
- Screen Time Conclusions
- MOMARAMA: Too Much Media? Managing Kids’ Screen Time
- Is Screen Time Halloween Candy for Your Brain?
- Tips for Managing Kids’ Screen Time
Monday, October 1, 2012
With Limited Budgets, Pursuing Science Smartly
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
Published: October 1, 2012
With the first presidential debate coming up on Wednesday, it is striking — if not surprising — how bland and predictable the candidates have been in discussing America’s role in space.
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True, President Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney, each responded at length to a question posed by ScienceDebate 2012 about the nation’s goals in space. But while both emphasized the importance of space exploration, with Mr. Obama briefly mentioning the need for monitoring the Earth, neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of why we want to bother with exploring space.
The issues that were addressed explicitly — national pride, technological innovation, national security — may be interesting and relevant, but they are largely spinoffs of what is usually claimed to be a grand scientific adventure. This is not a new phenomenon. Tapes of John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office released last month made it clear that from his perspective, science was irrelevant to the space race he proclaimed back in 1962. What counted was beating the Russians to the Moon.
Maybe scientists should simply face reality and accept that science doesn’t play a central role in the government’s equation. Yet as much as GPS navigation is of great help to me, and as fun as it looks to be an astronaut floating around the International Space Station, I suspect I am not alone in being far more excited by the images produced by NASA’s unmanned space probes — which do the science, after all.
For example, every time I see a Hubble Space Telescope photograph showing hundreds of galaxies, each containing billions of stars whose light has taken billions of years to travel to the Hubble cameras, it inspires me to ponder whether they may have been surrounded by now-frozen planets harboring long-dead civilizations.
And closer to home, I have to admit that I am in love with Curiosity.
When that NASA rover landed on Mars this summer, I was privileged to be near the deep-space antenna in Tidbinbilla, Australia, where the signals from Curiosity were beamed before they were forwarded to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. I haven’t been as excited to watch a spacecraft land on another body since I was a kid and stayed home to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the Moon.
Maybe I was more excited about Curiosity, not just because I was closer to the action but because the astounding complexity of the landing was achieved without any direct human intervention, in just nine minutes — considerably shorter than the time light takes to travel from Mars to Earth. Knowing that the spacecraft had either landed or crashed 15 minutes earlier made the anticipation seem even more pronounced.
And that is why unmanned space exploration seems to me much more exciting and scientifically worthwhile than human spaceflight, especially at a time of restricted budgets and nascent technology. Sending Curiosity to Mars cost only about 10 times what it would cost to make a movie about sending Bruce Willis to Mars — and perhaps a hundredth of the cost of actually sending humans there and back.
Many of my colleagues are geologists who are not shy about pointing out that a human geologist could do in a few days what Curiosity may do in a year or two. But we aren’t likely to send geologists there anytime soon — and if we did, they wouldn’t be able to stay much longer than a few days, while Curiosity can silently and gently move about the planet for a decade or more, powered by its plutonium generator. Moreover, by the time we might get around to sending humans, in two to three decades at best, robots will have advanced to the point where they might easily compete in real time.
In terms of scientific payoff, it makes far more sense to spend money on Mars rovers, since 99 percent of the cost of sending humans into space involves keeping them alive and getting them back, leaving precious little for science.
But cost aside, I find the adventure more exciting. The thought of Curiosity braving the Martian days and nights alone — rolling slowly along, zapping rocks and occasionally picking them up, sending stunning, detailed photos of an alien terrain like a tourist using a cellphone to communicate with loved ones back home — is both heartwarming and bittersweet. Every time I go to the NASA Web site and open up a new photo of the day’s tour, I feel as if I am there. If it takes a year to get to the base of a nearby mountain, who cares? I will enjoy every step of the journey even more because it is a gentle one.
Over the coming decades we may send more robotic explorers to even harsher climes, maybe to explore deep oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa, or to search on comets for telltale signs of life’s origins. We may send powerful telescopes into space that may one day photograph distant worlds that may harbor life. For me, sending these probes where no man or woman has gone before is every bit as thrilling as imagining Captain Kirk being teleported down to an alien surface.
And while such probes may do less for national security than sending satellites to orbit the Earth to spy on our friends and enemies, I am reminded of a statement by Robert R. Wilson, the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. When asked during a Congressional hearing whether the particle accelerator would aid in the defense of the nation, he said it would not — but it would help keep the nation worth defending.
Barry Commoner (1917-2012)
By DANIEL LEWIS
Published: October 1, 2012 69 Comments
Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights.
Liz O. Baylen for The New York Times
Barry Commoner, senior scientist at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, in a portrait made May 16, 2007.
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His wife, Lisa Feiner, confirmed his death.
Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War IItechnology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them.
Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
From there it was a natural progression to a range of environmental and social issues that kept him happily in the limelight as a speaker and an author through the 1960s and ’70s, and led to a wobbly run for president in 1980.
In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology. He was by no means the only one sounding alarms; the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to draw public attention to environmental dangers.
(The same issue of Time noted that President Richard M. Nixon had already signed on. In his State of the Union address that January, he said, “The great question of the ’70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?” And he followed through: Among other steps, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970.)
Dr. Commoner was an imposing professorial figure, with a strong face, heavy eyeglasses, black eyebrows and a thick head of hair that gradually turned pure white. He was much in demand as a speaker and a debater, especially on college campuses, where he helped supply a generation of activists with a framework that made the science of ecology accessible.
His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Although the rules were plain enough, the thinking behind them required leaps of faith. Dr. Commoner’s overarching concern was not ecology as such but rather a radical ideal of social justice in which everything was indeed connected to everything else. Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem.
A Critic of Capitalism
Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist “systems of production” in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences: greenhouse gases, nonbiodegradable materials, and synthetic fertilizers and toxic wastes that leached into the water supply.
He insisted that the planet’s future depended on industry’s learning not to make messes in the first place, rather than on trying to clean them up. It followed, by his logic, that scientists in the service of industry could not merely invent some new process or product and then wash their hands of moral responsibility for the side effects. He was a lasting opponent of nuclear power because of its radioactive waste; he scorned the idea of pollution credit swaps because, after all, he said, an industry would have to be fouling the environment in the first place to be rewarded by such a program.
In a “Last Word” interview with The New York Times in 2006, videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Dr. Commoner elaborated on his holistic views and lamented the inability of society to connect the dots among its multitude of challenges, calling it “an unfortunate feature of political development in this country.”
Noting the success of movements that had promoted civil rights, sexual equality, organized labor, environmentalism and an end to the war in Vietnam, he said one might think that “if they would only get together, they could remake the country.” But, he added, that has not happened.
Then he said: “I don’t believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together. For example, if you’re going to revise the productive system to make cars or anything else in such a way as to suit the environmental necessities, at the same time why not see to it that women earn as much as men for the same work?”
Dr. Commoner’s diagnoses and prescriptions sometimes put him at odds with other environmental leaders. He is rightly remembered as an important figure in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a nationwide teach-in conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and he himself regarded the observance as historically important. But Earth Day also illustrated the growing factionalization of a movement in which “environmentalism” comprised a number of agendas, all competing for attention and money, and could mean anything from ending the Vietnam War to growing one’s own cabbages.
That was the context for the rift between Dr. Commoner and advocates of population control, who saw environmental degradation as a byproduct of overpopulation. They had become a force on the strength of Paul R. Ehrlich’s huge best seller “The Population Bomb.” Conservationist groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation were strong supporters of Dr. Ehrlich’s views.
Dr. Commoner took aim at the “neo-Malthusians,” as he called those who, like the English scholar Thomas Malthus, foresaw perils in population growth. In a panel discussion with Dr. Ehrlich in 1970, he said it was “a cop-out of the worst kind” to say that “none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first.”
He elaborated in his best-known book, “The Closing Circle,” published the next year. Reducing population, Dr. Commoner wrote, was “equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard.”
“One is constrained to ask if there isn’t something radically wrong with the ship.”
In the science establishment, Dr. Commoner’s standing was ambiguous. Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.
It was a concern remarkably similar to that of the distinctly unradical Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned of the dangerous power of “the military-industrial complex” as he was leaving the presidency. But although Dr. Commoner had a record of achievement as a cellular biologist and founding director of the government-financed Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, he was seen primarily as the advocate for a politics that relatively few considered practicable or even desirable. Among other positions, he advocated forgiveness of all third world debt, which he said would decrease poverty and despair and thus act as a natural curb on population growth.
His platform did not get him very far in the 1980 presidential race, which he entered as thehead of his own Citizens’ Party. He won only about 234,000 votes as Ronald Reagan swept to victory. Dr. Commoner himself conceded that he would not have made a very good president. Still, he was angry that the questions he had raised had generated so little interest.
His own favorite moment of the campaign, he recalled many years later, was when a reporter in Albuquerque asked, “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?”
Barry Commoner was born on May 28, 1917, in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, the former Goldie Yarmolinsky and Isidore Commoner, were Jewish immigrants from Russia, his father a tailor until he went blind. (The original family name, Comenar, was Anglicized at the suggestion of an uncle of Barry’s, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, chief of the Slavonic department at the New York Public Library.)
Young Barry grew up at a time when it was possible to be both a tough street kid and a studious sort. He spent hours in Prospect Park collecting bits of nature, which he took home to inspect under a microscope that Uncle Avrahm had given him.
He was so shy at James Madison High School that he was referred to a speech correction class, and after graduation he set out on the track of a quiet academic career. With money earned from odd jobs, he put himself through Columbia, earning honors in his major, zoology; election to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi; and a B.A. degree in 1937, at 20. He went on to do graduate work at Harvard, where he got a Ph.D. in cellular biology. He taught for two years at Queens College and served in the Naval Air Corps in World War II, rising to lieutenant. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis.
Role in Nuclear Test Ban
Parallel to his life as a public figure, Dr. Commoner had a reputation as a brilliant teacher and a painstaking researcher into viruses, cell metabolism and the effects of radiation on living tissue. A research team he led was the first to show that abnormal free radicals — groups of molecules with unpaired electrons — might be the earliest indicator of cancer in laboratory rats.
He found his political voice when he encountered the indifference of government authorities to the high levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere from atomic tests. Quite simply, he said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 1993, “The Atomic Energy Commission turned me into an environmentalist.”
He helped organize the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958, and was eventually its president. Dr. Commoner told Scientific American years later that the committee’s task “was to explain to the public — first in St. Louis and then nationally — how splitting a few pounds of atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global poison.”
“At about that time,” he continued, “several of us met with Linus Pauling in St. Louis and together drafted the petition, eventually signed by thousands of scientists worldwide.” The petition was part of the scientific underpinning for President John F. Kennedy’s proposal of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 — “the first of continuing international actions to fully cage the nuclear beast,” Dr. Commoner said
As the founding director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, he led a staff drawn from many disciplines in investigating, among other things, lead poisoning in slums, the ecology of ghetto rats, the economics of conventional versus organic farming, and the pollution of rivers by fertilizer leaching.
Dr. Commoner moved the center from St. Louis to Queens College in 1981. He remained in the thick of things, helping to set up New York City’s trash recycling program and defending it against critics like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had declared the recycling law irresponsible.
In 2000, at 82, Dr. Commoner gave up the center’s directorship to concentrate on new research projects, including work on the effects of genetically altering organisms.
Waning Influence
By then he was no longer getting anything like the attention he had enjoyed in earlier times. Some experts had begun to think that his view of the planet, as a place harmoniously balanced by the trial and error of long evolution, left out too much complexity and too much potential for the unexpected.
Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, reviewing Dr. Commoner’s book “Making Peace With the Planet” for The Times in 1990, said that it “suffers the commonest of unkind fates: to be so self-evidently true and just that we pass it by as a twice-told tale.”
“Although he has been branded by many as a maverick,” Dr. Gould added, “I regard him as right and compassionate on nearly every major issue.”
Dr. Commoner married Ms. Feiner in 1980. He is also survived by two children, Lucy Commoner and Frederic, by his first wife, the former Gloria Gordon; and one granddaughter.
Dr. Commoner practiced what he preached. In his personal habits he was as frugal as a Yankee farmer, and as common-sensical. He drove or took taxis if the route by public transit took him far out of his way. On the other hand, he saw no need to waste electricity by ironing his shirts.
And when a Times writer once asked his Queens College office to mail some material, it arrived in an old brown envelope with the crossed-out return address of the botany department at Washington University — where he had last worked 19 years earlier.
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