Health and the Mobile Phone Source: American Journal of Preventive Medicine
Within the next 8 years, annual U.S. expenditure on health care is projected to reach $4 trillion/year, or 20% of the gross domestic product. Whether resource consumption of this order of magnitude is sustainable is an open question, but at the very least it suggests the need for population-level solutions for everything from the primary prevention of disease to improving end-of-life care. By June 2007 there were 239 million users of mobile phones in the U.S. or 79% of the population, and users are highly diverse. Mobile phones are beginning to replace landline telephones for some, and except for very young children, may ultimately reach an effective penetration of “one phone: one person” as is already the case in some countries such as Finland.

Global Census of Marine Life Releases Interim Report
News release: The 2,000-strong community of Census of Marine Life scientists from 82 nations has announced astonishing examples of recent new finds from the world’s ocean depths. As more than 700 delegates gather for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity (Valencia, Spain Nov. 11-15), organized by the Census’s European affiliate program on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning, the report details major progress towards the first ever marine life census, for release in October, 2010.
Full Highlights Report: "Eight years into a ten-year initiative to produce the first comprehensive assessment of life in the global ocean, the Census of Marine Life has much to report. The last two years have brought many highlights as Census participants stayed the course toward discovering diversity, charting distribution, and assessing abundance of marine life throughout the world’s seas. Although inquiring waders, swimmers, fishers, and sailors have ventured into the ocean for millennia, an estimated 95 percent of the global ocean remains unexplored...During the first eight years of discovery, Census investigators have found more than 5,300 likely new species, of which at least 110 have gone through the rigorous process needed to award the title of truly “new.”

Today in legal history
On November 14, 1881, Charles Guiteau went on trial for the assassination of President James A. Garfield. The trial of Guiteau pointed up problems with nineteenth century law's treatment of insanity; Guiteau's trial is also problematic in retrospect as Garfield's death was immediately attributable not to Guiteau, but to Garfield's doctors who--before sterilization was well understood-- probed his wound with unwashed hands while searching for an embedded bullet.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/thisday/2006/11/guiteau-tried-for-assassinating.php

Keepers (books I would read again)
The Man with the Black Worrybeads by George N. Rumanes
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
A Year Without Time by Cate Allen and Jen Whiting

November 14 is the birthday of cartoonist and author William Steig, (books by this author) born in New York City (1907). He's best known for his children's book Shrek! (1993), about an ugly green ogre who hears the prophecy of a witch that he will marry a princess even uglier than he. It was made into an animated movie in 2002.
The Writer’s Almanac