For the longest time, I couldn’t get worked up about privacy: my

right to it; how it’s dying; how we’re headed for an even more wired,

under-regulated, over-intrusive, privacy-deprived age.

I should also point out that as news director and a guy who makes 【M1】_________

his life on the Web, I know better than most people that we’re hurtling 【M2】_________

toward an even more intrusive world. We’re all being watched by

computers wherever we visit websites; by the mere act of “browsing”, 【M3】_________

we’re going to public in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago. I 【M4】_________

know this because I’m a watcher, either. When people come to my 【M5】_________

website, without ever knowing their names, I can peer over their

shoulders, recording what they look at, timing how long they stay on a

particular page, followed them around the sprawling webpages. 【M6】_________

None of this would bother me in least, I suspect, if a few years ago, 【M7】_________

my phone, like Marley’s ghost, hadn’t given me a glimpse of the

nightmares to come. In Thanksgiving weekend in1995, someone 【M8】_________

forwarded my home telephone number to an out-of-state answering

machine, which unsuspecting callers trying to reach me heard a male 【M9】_________

voice identify himself as me and say some extreme rude things. Then, 【M10】________

with typical hacker aplomb, the prankster asked people to leave their

messages. This went on for several days until my wife and I figured out

that something was wrong and got our phone service restored.

Hello, my name is Richard and I am an ego surfer. The habit began

about five years ago, and now I need help. Like most journalists, I can’t

deny that one of my private joys are seeing my byline in print. Now the 【M1】_________

Internet is allowing me to feed this vanity to ever greater extent, and the 【M2】_________

occasional sneaky web search has grown into a full-blown obsession for 【M3】_________

how high my articles appear in Google’s ranking where I put my name 【M4】_________

into the search box. When I lastly looked, my best effort was a rather 【M5】_________

humiliating 47th place. You know you have a problem how you find 【M6】_________

yourself competing for ranking with a retired basketball player from the

1970s.

Not that I’m lonely for suffering from a dysfunctional techno-habit. 【M7】_________

New technologies have revealed a whole raft of hitherto unsuspected

personality problems: think crackberry, power-pointlessness or

cheesepodding. Most of us are familiar in sending an e-mail to a 【M8】_________

colleague sitting a couple of feet away instead talking to them. Some go 【M9】_________

onto the web to snoop old friends, colleagues or even first dates. More 【M10】________

of us than ever reveal highly personal information on blogs or My Space

entries. A few will even use Internet anonymity to fool others into

believing they are someone else altogether. So are these web syndromes

and technological tics new versions of old afflictions, or are we

developing fresh mind bugs?

There are a growing number of language immersion schools in the

US. including one that was founded in Columbia called La Petite Ecole,

which teaches children French as a second language at an age when

children’s brains are the most compliant. Statistics, however, show that

language instruction in regular schools is actually decreasing, and

relatively few Americans know the second language. Scholars have spent 【M1】_________

years studying why Americans seem to regard the importance of learning 【M2】_________

languages. While they have developed theories and posit potential 【M3】_________

solutions, the future of language learning in the US remains hazy.

Since 1997, the percentage of elementary and middle schools that

offer foreign language courses has dropped significantly, from 31

percent to 25 percent at the elementary level and from 75 percent to 58

percent at the middle school level.

However, the decline in elementary schools appeared primarily in

public schools, as private elementary schools teaching foreign language 【M4】_________

remained roughly same at 51 percent. The percentage of high schools 【M5】_________

teaching foreign language have remained at about 91 percent. This 【M6】_________

information comes from a nationwide survey of public and private

schools conducting in 2008 by the Center for Applied Linguistics in 【M7】_________

Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, the number of language immersion schools designed to

teach a second language to English-speaking children and young adults

has actually increased. Since 1962, 367 two-way immersion programs—

schools that pair native English speakers with these who speak another 【M8】_________

native language—developed rapidly in 28 states, including Washington, 【M9】_________

D.C. And, as in 2007, 263 total and partial immersion schools have 【M10】________

seen established.