Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Urban Land Institute’s Las Vegas conference webcast live

Not all of the Urban Land Institute’s annual conference presentations are being webcast, but several key ones are, and furthermore they’re supposed to be archived for later viewing, too. Surf over to this site and follow the links:

ULI – the Urban Land Institute | 2007 ULI Fall Meeting

I listened to a fantastic presentation on P3s (public-private partnerships), by a panel that included David Leininger of the City of Irving; Robert C. Lieber of the NYC Economic Development Corporation; and John Stainback of Stainback Public/Private Real Estate. The panel was chaired by Patrick L. Phillips of Economics Research Associates. Lots of frank talk, from both sides of the fence (the private & the public side of the partnership). The fence will likely morph into something else entirely, as the panel described P3s as an “avalanche.”

This is definitely something to listen to again — I sent in a question, but it wasn’t read out, and I’m not sure this panel could have addressed it anyway. My question had to do with how Canadian cities can leverage P3s, given that we have not only a “weak mayor” system in Canada, but that Canadian cities are wholly the creatures of the Provinces, rely on property taxes for 53% of their budgets, and can’t raise revenues by collecting sales taxes (these go to the Provinces) or income taxes (they go to the Feds & Province). So how do we fund infrastructure — the responsibilities for which have been downloaded on to municipalities by the Provinces, which have had them downloaded by the Feds? And how do we offer incentives to the private side of the development that will give us — the city, the public — the control we want in shaping our own destinies? The Provincial government in BC is totally enamoured of P3s, but somehow it’s not so good for us (city) when the Province calls the shots, or tells the cities to develop via P3s without giving us the tools we need to talk turkey with developers.

Just some thoughts…

I guess it’s a question of leadership. If we had municipal leaders and mayors who just identified the right thing, committed to it, went all Terminator-like on our Premier (he gets Terminator, he’s buddies with Arnold, and gets the green agenda, too), and told him what we want and how we want it, maybe something good would come of it. But our city leadership consists of politicians who’ll go wherever the wind blows, who dream of other posts or something… We undersell and underassert ourselves, and the Province thinks we’re idiots.

Like I said, just some thoughts…

Here’s the line-up for webcasts tomorrow and the day after (see this page):

Writing for a magazine: what level of difficulty?

(see update, bottom of this entry)

I’m in the middle of returning to an article for the December issue of FOCUS Magazine, the Victoria monthly for which I’m a regular contributor. My column is called “City Smarts,” and I’m usually limited to 800 words — which is really tough for someone as loquacious as I am. I spend most of my time whittling, editing, deleting, and sometimes telescoping waayyyy too much, which then means more editing to make the whole thing more comprehensible again. I have to pay plenty of attention to being comprehensible: people whose intelligence I don’t especially seek to emulate have told me that they don’t understand a word of what I write on my blog, but let’s face it: here in my blog domain I don’t have to keep an eye on popularity anyway because that’s just the kind of stubborn, ornery person I am. For the magazine, however, that’s a different story altogether. I really have to …well, focus!

I typically have these BIG ideas and only so few words to express them, which means that every word counts. Hard. I can’t afford to be obscure, fey, overly intellectual, snooty, …heck, none of the things I so enjoy doing on my blog!

So there I am, in the midst of this draft (number five million and three), and because I’m also working on another text (totally unrelated to FOCUS) and using google docs, I thought it would be easier to have two tabs open and write them both in that format. Since word count matters, I clicked on that feature (found under the “file” tab), and saw something new: my 400+ words so far (see?, I really am in the middle of this thing, never mind that the middle I have might not be the middle I end up with — ditto for the beginning…) have scores for readability. “What’s this?” I think to myself. I see something about a grade level, and I’m reminded of something I read about blog popularity and grade levels: that blogs written at grade 9 level or below are most popular…

I click through on the little question mark next to my “readability” score for the 400+ words I have so far, to this wikipedia page: Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well, who knew? I didn’t. See how much I don’t know?

Here’s my little assessment:

Readability

oops, see update, below…

For some reason, this algorithmic assessment makes me feel uncomfortable — despite hitting the magic “grade 9″ level tone… And I’m certainly not sure that I want to work hard all the time just to get my blog to that supposedly magic number, even if it did mean that my words could conquer the world!

Let’s face it, if this proves anything it’s that numbers are conquering the world, not words.

Update, Oct.31/07: I just posted another entry on this, and realized (while checking back on this one) that the numbers for my “Readability” score weren’t reproduced here, just a little box that says Readability — in teeny-tiny letters, to boot. Sorry about that, and I can’t seem to find the old draft now to pull the exact numbers in this entry. The point was, however, that my “Flesch Reading Ease” was somewhere in the 50s (I think?), and the “Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level” was 9. In the final revision, I slipped off that magical “grade nine” level, to “grade 11″ and a “Reading Ease” score of 39.21. According to Wikipedia’s entry, The Harvard Law Review’s stuff is in the low 30s, which I guess is supposed to mean that its texts are appropriately lawyerly and opaque… Perhaps somewhere in the mid-30s you escape opacity, enter a level of transparency, but don’t quite liberate yourself from the palimpsest of complexity.

Using YouTube to recruit for jobs

Here’s another way that new platforms — in this case YouTube — are affecting more traditional businesses (in this case personnel search firms) and the venues for information they relied on in the past:

YouTube – Seeking Project Architect (Midwestern U.S.)

It’s a relatively boring, straightforward read of a job description for an architect, the visual consisting of digitally-generated fly-overs (and fly-throughs) of a hospital project.

But it represents an innovative, even stealthy, way of getting the job posting out to millions of people, globally, practically for free. Headhunters, take note.

(found via Architekturvideo.de)