Regarding the 1918 pandemic, the factor that troubles infectious disease and public health researchers is who died - not only the elderly, infirm and very young as is typical with influenza, but significant numbers of seemingly normal healthy adults. There are lots of hypotheses and plenty of conjecture as to why, but the best guesses reason that the 1918 strain was genetically novel and thus may people exposed had no (partial) immunity whatsoever derived from previous influenza exposure. This newly emerged virus was also thought to be better able to "take up residence" deeper in the lungs resulting in much more severe infections with complications like pneumonia and accompanying greater mortality.

This is the situation the DoD is expecting in a pandemic.

"The City of Gold and Lead" by John Christopher. I recall I lucked onto it in the 3rd grade. My gateway book to Science Fiction/Alternate Universe/Fantasy.

The Magic Tree House series kept my kids attention-Mary Pope Osborne

A lot of Jules Verne's work has been edited for younger readers.

As other have stated, let your kids guide you to what interests them. Let's hope they have access to a good reading program in school.

I've found any of the Newbery Award winners from the ALSC are usually good reading. Those librarians are on to something.

It drives me nuts that almost all of the consumer price range camcorders from most vendors are missing external microphone connectors and headphone jacks. Unstructured camera movement and far off camera audio are two of the obvious "amateur" mistakes.

It is much harder to create video that has creative value than this article suggests. Flickr (which I really like) does have some really great stuff, but I think much of it is of a particular style-super saturated colors, lots of depth of field, ample post processing-eye candy. Look for simple, well composed and exposed "straight" images without a lot of post processing and you don't see as much. The bar for "doesn't suck" isn't too high, the bar for uniquely outstanding is rarely reached.

In video the narrative is key, and as stated by others, many don't have much to say. To put it another way if you fill up a 4 Gb flash card with still images you are bound to get something. One can't shoot days worth of video with good audio, lighting, camera control, acting, and editing quite as easily hoping you might get something of value.