Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Diigo Bookmarks 05/11/2008 (a.m.)

Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit - New York Times

Something to think about “out west,” where existing public transit might be spotty, or where the only public transit is buses. Rail definitely makes sense for many people here.

“Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges — of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year — are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited.”

tags: transportation, transit, transit_oriented_development, cars

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? - New York Times

Creating new habits = essential for innovation; old habits remain, but can be lessened (if bad,eg.) by new habits.

…brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

This reminds me very much of SEED magazine’s 2006 article, The Reinvention of the Self, by Jonah Lehrer, which profiled the work of Prof. Elizabeth Gould.

tags: psychology, brain, habits, innovation, success, business

Diigo Bookmarks 05/09/2008 (a.m.)

• “On Jane Jacobs” by Richard Florida (Creative Class Exchange)

  Nice synthesis by Richard Florida (written for his Globe & Mail column) of Jane Jacobs’s approach to thinking about economies. Let’s hope it makes more people read her 2000 book, The Nature of Economies.

  tags: jjacobs, economic_development

Diigo Bookmarks 05/07/2008 (a.m.): 4 from Christopher Hume

• In praise of the lost art of strolling, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star) - Annotated

  Last (so far) in what almost amounts to a series of articles on the importance to a true urban fabric of sidewalks and pedestrians. Hume adds some interesting speculation around Modernism’s aversion to mingling/ chance encounters.

  tags: thestar, christopher_hume, pedestrians, flaneur, toronto

• City needs to put its foot down, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

  This article, linked to the other Apr.26 piece in terms of theme and championing the idea that sidewalks (& therefore pedestrians) are key to a good urban fabric, tackles the question of planning & design. Too much is individual project driven, vs. falling into place as part of an overall sense of what the city should be.

  tags: thestar, pedestrians, infrastructure, toronto, urban_design, christopher_hume

• A flaneur’s lament for the sidewalk, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star) - Annotated

  Together with 2 other articles (Apr.26 and May 3), a nice trilogy in praise of walking and pedestrian rights.

  tags: thestar, flaneur, pedestrians, infrastructure, christopher_hume, toronto

• Roads, bridges, sewers: Essential but not sexy, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

  Hume’s article is about Ontario/ Toronto, but what he says applies to every major city across Canada. Of great interest: that AFPs or P3s translate to 15% involvement of private funding, not more.

  tags: thestar, christopher_hume, municipal_funding, infrastructure, toronto

Diigo Bookmarks 05/04/2008 (a.m.)

• Escapable Logic » Blog Archive » “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…” - Annotated

  Britt Blaser coins the compelling term “collaboration mall.” I left a long comment on April 28, but it appears stuck in moderation or has been deleted. Here’s what I wrote:

  QUOTE
  Thank-you for using my comment as a jumping off point to a thought-provoking blog entry here, Britt! (And I hope I didn’t sound as ‘despairing’ as all that — my despair, such as it is, stems as often as not from the fossilized pace of local governance here. Other than that, I’m a pretty optimistic, happy-go-lucky person, which is probably why I’m ready to stumble into pre-existing conversations! …Like, duh Yule: one quick google search could have told me that you, Britt, have been talking about open source government for …well, for a while.)

  But on to your post: I really like your descriptive term, “collaboration mall.” As a city person (and yeah, Victoria is a smaller city, but it’s pretty dense and urban and walkable), I’m of course loathe to admit that the suburbs might be places that produce appropriate symbols (”mall”) for civitas / civic life. But I can remind myself that in the 1920s Walter Benjamin wrote about 19th century Parisian arcades as localities of social meaning (and manufacture of meaning) — and what were the arcades but urban forerunners of suburban malls?

  I’d say that the urban street is still more democratic/ porous/ open, if only because it really is public space, vs. private or semi-private. But the mall can bring together all sorts of different (including “regular”) people, and it’s a great term (compared to “street”) because it acknowledges the reality of markets, fees for services, settings for enterprise, and consumer platforms.

  I’m at the very beginning of trying to create a community aggregator type service here, and your suggestion of a “collaboration mall” is intriguing. Just as with Doc’s entry on infrastructure, I find it helps my thinking when one (physical) thing typically seen in one context is transposed into another (more abstract) context. Till now, I was thinking for example of “public space” (physical) and how that manifests online (abstract). But narrowing that space to a mall brings things into better focus.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: infrastructure, britt_blaser, collaboration_mall

Persecuting smokers …and leaving everyone else to their own devices

There’s an editorial in today’s Times-Colonist, Persecuting smokers, which includes a reference to BC Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall that has me scratching my head. 

The editorial is about the Lower Mainland municipality of White Rock’s plan to ban smoking in all outdoor public places by 2010.  This would include streets, parks, beaches: everywhere.  The editorial notes that this "looks more like a plan to persecute smokers than a strategy for protecting non-smokers."  Agree.  Dr. Kendall, meanwhile, is fully supportive of this plan. 

Why am I scratching my head?  I’m just not clear on why Dr. Kendall thinks that banning smoking in all public spaces (including streets, beaches, anywhere) would "’de-normalize smoking’ so that fewer youths are tempted to take up the habit," while at the same time Dr. Kendall also advocates in favor of freely dispensing needles to addicts (who promptly take their needle and shoot up openly on the street or in a park, incidentally also in full view of "youths") and handing out "crack kits" (pipes, mouth condoms) to addicts, who (again) then openly ingest these substances on the street.  There seems to be no concern over the social disorder on the street that results from the sort of half-way "harm reduction" that simply involves giving addicts the tools, leaving them to continue as before. 

I don’t smoke, although I used to smoke.  I loathe the smell of smoke and ashtrays.  But I think there’s something really sick about our increasingly blinkered society that we’ll go after smokers, while we hand the streets over to users (and pushers — oh, yes, so many pushers in Victoria) of hard drugs.  It’s as though the nanny state is in overload mode.  It can’t "solve" the drug issue, so it downloads it to the street (that’s us).  It can’t "solve" the problems of addiction and mental health (and resultant homelessness — and crime, typically property crime to support drug habits), so it downloads them to the street (that’s us).  But it can appear "forward-thinking" and "health-minded" when it comes to "us" (citizens, who unlike the chronically homeless, can still be fined — the latter are beyond fining), so downloads another nanny-esque ban on us.   We’re just supposed to hold still and take it, just as we’re supposed to hold still for all the other downloading.

The editorial disagrees with a ban on all outdoor/ public space smoking, and succeeds in making a critique of Kendall’s stance on smoking by pointing out that we ban the consumption of alcohol on the street, but "youths" still drink.  But it doesn’t make the connection that we have given up on controlling the use of hard drugs on our streets.  It suggests instead that: "Smokers are a dying breed. We shouldn’t be so hasty to take away what few places they have left to indulge their habits." 

Oh really?  First, show me that smokers are a dying breed, unless that’s meant literally of course.  And second, is this "time will take care of it" attitude what’s letting our streets go to hell with regard to hard drugs? 

Diigo Bookmarks 05/03/2008 (p.m.)

• How do we fund journalism in future? | Greenslade | Guardian Unlimited - Annotated

  Roy Greenslade reporting from a “future of journalism” conference in Australia, asking after ‘the business model’ for newspapers / journalism of the future. He mentions Jay Rosen, who joined the conference via satellite hook-up, and this in turn sparks some interesting conversation on the comments board (particularly by Rosen himself).

  tags: greenslade, the_guardian, journalism, business_model, newspapers, jay_rosen

Diigo Bookmarks 05/02/2008 (p.m.)

• The House That Twitters Its Energy Use, by Katie Fehrenbach « Earth2Tech

  Among other things: “The Twitter stream is an exercise in using the data from home automation feeds, and the hope is that, by making energy usage data transparent and easy to digest, it will change consumer behavior and reduce energy consumption.” As I noted in bookmarking the related Wired Magazine piece, this relates to Wired Mag’s earlier article on Peak Water, too, where we learn that many London homes don’t even have water meters. Actually, it’s the same here in Victoria & Oak Bay. Not good.

  tags: twitter, earth2tech, andy_house, energy, consumption, infrastructure

• Comparing hard and soft infrastructure | Linux Journal - Annotated

  This is the 2nd in what looks to be a series. As the title indicates, Doc Searls compares infrastructures — what we’d traditionally consider infrastructure (the “hard” infrastructure of roads, sewers, etc.) and Linux/ the Net — programming — the “soft” infrastructure that pervades our existence today.

  tags: infrastructure, linux, doc_searls

• Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com - Annotated

  Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on “wired” homes, including andy_house, by IBM “master inventor” Andy Stanford-Clark who “rigged up his home to twitter its energy use.” See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (also listed in this batch, below).

  Compare to Wired Mag’s recent Peak Water article, which (among other things) pointed out that many London households aren’t even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

  In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, City road networks grow like biological systems (4/23/08).

  All this relates to infrastructure — and to how we’re just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls’ continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

  tags: twitter, infrastructure, data, architecture, housing, consumption, energy, wired_magazine

• London crime statistics sculpture - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics

  Room-sized installation — a landscape/mountainscape terrain “generated by datasets relating to the frequency & position of urban crimes.” Not sure over how long a period of time the stats were compiled, though, and how they cumulatively (literally) added up to create the “Mountain Fear” model. Interesting attempt at data visualization, at any rate.

  tags: sculpture, aesthetics, statistics, data_visualization, london, crime, art

• “How to Foster Tech Entrepreneurship” by Vivek Wadhwa (Business Week) - Annotated

  Report on research by Vivek Wadhwa, “a former tech entrepreneur, …Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and an executive-in-residence at Duke University.” Turns out that the idea that tech entrepreneurs are predominantly Mark Zuckerberg’s age are exaggerrated/ wrong.

  Another interesting finding is that lack of health insurance holds many older potential entrepreneurs back. (Yet Canada has affordable universal health insurance, but the US easily overtakes it in the entrepreneurship category.)

  Additional insights also re. education and training.

  tags: entrepreneurship, business_week, demographics, startups

Diigo Bookmarks 05/01/2008 (p.m.)

• In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

  - great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, “How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly.”

  tags: sightline_daily, seattle, urban_design, urbanplanning, cars, parking, architecture

More notes on Brandon Rosario, school reaction, and media fall-out

Doc Searls added to the threads on Brandon Rosario’s performance with the wonderfully titled entry, Think softly and punish a big schtick. We know where the soft thinking is…

Doc found a bonus link, Meet Brandon Rosario by Red Tory, a local blogger I hadn’t seen before. (His profile picture is of Francis Urquhart, or “FU,” as he was known to staffers, of House of Cards — a very funny BBC series worth watching.)

Red Tory’s comments board includes an extended discussion of the effect of Brandon’s remark about the physical attributes of a particular teacher. I added a comment to my own April 24 Brandon Rosario entry, partly in response to some of the Belmont students who expressed ambivalence about the “rack” remark. The teacher could use any fall-out that might occur as a teaching opportunity (teachable moment).

There have been a couple of follow-up reports — if one can call them that — in the mainstream media. They’re really laughable — except for the fact that the pot they’re stirring is the pot of stupidity. To see them all, please go to the Facebook group page, Support Brandon Rosario’s fight for Free Speech. There you’ll find not only all the relevant media items (including tv clips), but also the voice of the students and other youth themselves.

The main thing that comes through in those voices is this: Fuck the media.

Every single person on the Facebook comments board is upset by the way the mainstream media are blowing this thing up, and turning it every which way, to create a sensation. Of course the media always manage to find fools to do their bidding — case in point, the class-A fool (a professor of rhetoric) featured on A-Channel’s second report who calls Brandon’s performance totally inappropriate. Professor?

The really “totally inappropriate” thing here is just how incredibly stupid the media assume people are.

They’re digging their own grave, and as far as I’m concerned they can’t fall into it quickly enough.