Surprise!

Continuing its steam-rolling of the divestiture, AT&T today announced that it would acquire its former sister company, Bell South, in a deal valued at $67 billion. (That's with a B, folks) The pressure's on for Verizon to snap up Qwest.

Excellent Book

The best book I've read all semester: The Sprit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. The book is about a Hmong refugee family and their interactions with the American medical establishment. But it speaks to so many larger issues. How should immigration policy encourage assimilation? Is the question different for refugees than for immigrants? How do our obligations change based on America's relationship with the refugee's home country? This book raises so many questions, but it is also an excellent, artfully written story. Here's a summary:

On October 24, 1982, three-month-old Lia Lee was carried into the emergency room of the county hospital in Merced, California. Lia's parents, Hmong refugees from the hill country of Laos, spoke no English; the hospital staff spoke no Hmong. On a later visit, Lia's doctors would determine that she was suffering from a severe case of epilepsy, a misfiring of the brain's neurons. Her parents, however, believed that her seizures were caused by the flight of her soul from her body and called her condition by its Hmong name: qaug dab peg ("the spirit catches you and you fall down").

This essential misunderstanding, leading to and surrounded by a host of smaller confusions, ultimately resulted in tragedy for Lia. Anne Fadiman presents Lia's story from both perspectives. We learn how devotedly Lia's parents, Nao Kao Lee and Foua Yang, cared for their daughter, carrying her everywhere, arranging animal sacrifices for her, and making traditional remedies from herbs grown in the parking lot behind their apartment building. We also see the case through the eyes of Lia's doctors, the husband-and-wife team of Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, who went to great efforts to fine-tune Lia's treatment and spent many sleepless nights pondering how to give her the best care possible.

And yet doctors and parents looked on helplessly as Lia's condition worsened, each blaming the other. The doctors were angry because the parents failed to give Lia her prescribed medications in the proper doses; the parents were angry because the medications had side effects. In an attempt to understand this sad impasse, Fadiman casts her net ever wider, examining Western medical culture and the history and spiritual traditions of the Hmong. The Hmong, a legendarily fierce and invincible tribe, were driven from their homes after the U.S.-sponsored "Quiet War" in Laos, during which many had been recruited to fight by the CIA. More than 100,000 ended up in America, but, especially in the early years, retained strong Hmong cultural values: family and community were prized; coercion was hated. As Fadiman discovers, Western physicians, trained to practice a technical art bound by strict rules and traditions, could be equally uncompromising.

Conference Press Coverage

The press is already reporting on the conference we ran this weekend:

Article on Powell in Rocky Mountain News

Info Week Article on Powell

Rocky Mountain News article on Video over IP

The Latest

I'll be spending my weekend working on a conference while Katie will be helping RMIAN. In other news, our friend Doug is selling his photography from his new website, which includes pictures of puppies.

A few shots

Naavah studying.
One of a series of potential headshots of Katie for the website of her summer firm, Faegre & Benson.

Winnings

Today Katie was elected managing editor of the University of Colorado Law Review.

Last week I was elected editor-in-chief of the Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law. This weekend, I also won "best brief" in the National Telecommunications Moot Court, and was a semifinalist in the competition.

A little Ag/Political Humor

Something from Aaron McGruder's "The Boondocks" to get your day started off right. (Click on the image to expand)

Jofah

Our nephew, Joseph Schwalb, may actually be as cute (or cuter?) than his sister, but it's difficult to judge.

Is that a gang sign?

Xmas photos

Gettin' an Xmas tree
Originally uploaded by schmicah.

We've posted some photos from the holidays over on Flickr. Check them out when you get a chance.

Convergence

Rural America, satellite television...could this story be any more relevant to the Schwalbs?

IPTV

Some regulators view the emergence of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) as the next driver of broadband build-out. However, unlike DSL and Cable, IPTV is not a naked commodity regulated for anti-monopolistic purposes. The question then arises as to what sort of regulation IPTV merits, if at all. The answer . . . eludes me, but I have the next seven days to figure it out before I have to hand in an essay on this topic.

Ag to Urban Transfers - Drying up the West

The (Colorado) Statewide Water Supply Initiative estimates more than 200,000 acres of farmland will have to be dried up in the next 25 years to meet urban demand in the South Platte. Cities are growing into areas that were not farmed; the question is how to address growing municipal water needs.

The answer . . . eludes me, but I have the next 10 days to figure it out before I have to hand in an essay on this topic.

Happy New Year!

We had dinner at Markt last night, I locked Jeremy out of his bathroom, and then we saw the Russia! exhibit at the Guggenheim. Whee!!

Law School Friends

This was almost a year ago...we need to get a new group photo.

New Years Resolutions

1. Keep in touch with friends and family. Hence, we have started this blog (modeled after the JCR and JR version).