• AVC: Urban Architects
  Fred Wilson writes about new urban architects: "And one of the crowd favorites at TC50 this past week was a company called CitySourced, which built "a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution". This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in my "public channel" post earlier this year.

  These and many others are our new urban architects. I am not suggesting that the traditional roles of urban planning and architecture aren't still important to our cities. They are and will continue to be."

  (tags: web2.0 city technology mobile twitter planning urbanplanning)

• Republicans Already Trying to Scuttle Net Neutrality Regulation
  The FCC's new push to enforce net neutrality is being fought by Republicans. Ironically they are arguing that regulating ISPs will harm competition, but anyone with more than a monkey brain knows the opposite is true. You know it's backwards when Ensign and Brownback are pushing it.

  Quote from Ensign: "In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation," Ensign said in a statement. "We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now." Reminder to Ensign: The internet exists because of the government and flourishes despite the monopolistic tendencies of the telecomm companies.

  (tags: internet government netneutrality politics)

• Shorter Lex: Ken Lewis is Hosed
  Lex says: "My guess? No way the table gets run — the banksters take too much care of one another for that — but right now Lewis is probably commenting over cocktails about the view from under the bus."
  (tags: banks governmentwatchdog economy)

• 1337arts: Project Icarus
  This is way cool: "We are a group of MIT students seeking to share the artistic aspects of science with others. On Sept. 2, 2009, we launched a digital camera into near-space to take photographs of the earth from high up above. (see “Flight”)

  Several groups have accomplished similar feats (see “Other Launches”), but as far we know, we are the first group ever to:

  (1) Complete such a launch on a budget of $150 total. All of our supplies (including camera, GPS tracking, weather balloon, and helium) were purchased for less than a grand total of $150."

  (tags: science)

• SI: Just go for it!
  The HS football coach who won the state championship without punting or kicking. I always wondered why more coaches didn't try the no-punting thing (never thought about the kicking), especially high school coaches with relatively weak punting that doesn't do much to change field position. I also love stuff that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but is actually backed by some good data/logic.
  (tags: sports)

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

• Economist: Global Public Debt Clock
  The Economist has a cool graphic display of public debt. Just put your cursor on a country and you can see how much public debt the country has, the per capita debt, the % of GDP that is debt, etc. FYI, the US public debt per capita is $21,973.60. That's bad, but Canada's is $28,347.10, France's is $31,971.90 and Italy's is $41,035.80. On the other hand Zimbabwe is in some sort of parallel universe with $0 per capita debt while their debt as % of GDP is 285.1%.
  (tags: economics)
• Triad Biz Journal: U.S. House votes to end bank-based student lending
  The House voted to stop subsidizing bank-based student lending and shifting the money to the federal direct-loan program and grants to community colleges.
  (tags: education studentloan)
• Fec: The Lie Machine
  Fec provided this outtake from Rolling Stone: "The campaign to mobilize the town-hall mobs began with a script written by the right’s foremost fearmongerer, Frank Lutz…

  Lutz writes: 'Takeovers are like coups – they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom…

  'It is essential that ‘deny’ and ‘denial’ enter the conservative lexicon immediately,' he writes, 'because it is at the core of what scares Americans most about a government takeover of health care.'”

  (tags: healthcare government politics)

• The Real Banker Boondoggle
  Don't be distracted by the compensation kerfluffle for the bankers; the real juice is in their equity holdings which were preserved by the big bailout. h/t to Lex for the link.
  (tags: banks economics government)

• Blankenhorn: Blogging for Money
  "When blogging first began, several years before I got into it, there was a feeling that individuals would be able to use blogging to build their own little businesses. This proved true in only a very few instances. The most successful blogs now are group efforts — sometimes the group is quite large — and the need for professional management (on the technical and ad sides) means that I am, effectively, what I was 25 years ago, a freelance, an independent contractor, a typist for hire."
  (tags: blogs blogbusiness blog media mediaincome)

• Google Just Showed Amazon How to Save the Content Biz " blog maverick
  Mark Cuban: "I thought it was a good idea for media conglomerates to package all their digital assets into subscription offers. Its a far better idea for a marketer like Amazon to package cross company offerings into bigger and better packages."
  (tags: media)
• The Bank Implode-o-Meter: Wells Fargo’s Commercial Portfolio is a ticking time bomb
  "In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo’s (quote: WFC) commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books… and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank’s outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank.

  Wachovia, which Wells purchased last fall as it teetered on the brink of collapse, was so desperate to increase revenue in the last few years of its existence that it underwrote loans with extremely shoddy standards and paid traders to take them off their books."

  h/t to Ed Cone for the link

  (tags: banks economy)