A friend was searching online for pics of our town and stumbled across a picture from my flickr feed. She emailed for permission to use it on our church's website, and when I looked at it I couldn't fathom how I could have produced it. Just goes to show that the right camera in the wrong hands occassionally produces results:
Taken in Lewisville, NC on Christmas Day, 2010.
Who do you hate more: your municipal government or your phone/cable/internet company? The answer to that question probably depends on which one failed you or which one's bill you most recently grumbled about paying, but after reading about a battle in the NC legislature over the ability of municipalities to provide high speed internet, you might be surprised at how you feel about your local government. From "The Empire Lobbies Back":
After a city in North Carolina built a Fiber-to-the-Home network competing with Time Warner Cable, the cable giant successfully lobbied to take that decision away from other cities.
The city of Wilson’s decision and resulting network was recently examined in a case study by Todd O’Boyle and Christopher Mitchell titled Carolina’s Connected Community: Wilson Gives Greenlight to Fast Internet. The new report picks up with Wilson’s legacy: an intense multiyear lobbying campaign by Time Warner Cable, AT&T, CenturyLink, and others to bar communities from building their own networks. The report examines how millions of dollars bought restrictions that encourage cable and DSL monopolies rather than new choices for residents and businesses…
Big cable and DSL companies try year after year to create barriers to community‐owned networks. They only have to succeed once; because of their lobbying might, they have near limitless power to stop future bills that would restore local authority. North Carolina’s residents and businesses are now stuck with higher prices and less opportunity for economic development due to these limitations on local authority.
The report, which details industries efforts over the years that eventually resulted in the 2011 legislation that effectively banned municipal netorks, can be found here – and yes it's fairly biased, but still raises some really good points. One excerpt:
Far from providing a "level playing field" the Act has stifled public investment in community broadband networks and no one anticipates a local government building a network as long as it remains in effect. This reality should trouble all in North Carolina, as it cannot be globally, or even regionally, competitive simply by relying on last-generation connections from Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, or AT&T.
Cities near the border of North Carolina, including Danville, Virginia; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Bristol in both Tennessee and Virginia all offer gigabit services via municipal utilities. Chattanooga's minimum network spped of 50 Mbps both downstream and upstream dwarfs what is available from DSL or cable networks. Many east coast communities outside of the Carolinas have access to Verizon's fiber optic FiOS, which also dramatically outperforms cable and DSL services. Services from AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and CenturyLink cannot compare to the services offered on modern networks.
Sounds like we in the Carolinas are doomed to live in a digital backwater for the foreseeable future. Perhaps municipal networks aren't the answer, but in this era of intense competition between states/cities to recruit new businesses wouldn't it be nice if our municipalities had kick-butt networks in their economic development quivers? And if the private sector can't provide it do we really want our cities/towns hamstrung by the inability to provide it themselves?
Ever noticed the seemingly endless – and often mind-numbing – number of magazines dedicated to mothers? Well, there's a new entry into the relatively unexplored "dad-zine" field:
Kindling Quarterly is an exploration of fatherhood. Through essays, interviews, editorials, art, and photography we highlight creatie individuals whose work and lives are inseparable from their role as a parent. There is no shortage of familiar portrayals of dads in media yet we aim to present a thoughtful dialogue about fatherhood that is missing from our cultural landscape. Men who are active caregivers are not a novelty and we do not depict them as such. While the subjects of our stories are fathers, each issue appeals to anyone interested in art, creativity, and community. Kindling Quarterly playfully assesses and celebrates a multitude of experiences that form contemporary fatherhood.
It's a mistake to judge a magazine by its cover before you even see the cover, but this sounds like it will appeal to roughly .5% of the fathers in America. Another mistake is to engage in gross generalizations, but what's life if nothing but a series of mistakes interrupted by occassional success? So here are some general descriptions of dads that would argue against the vast majority having any interest in a magazine focused on "art, creativity and community":
Hopefully the folks at Kindling will find enough dads who don't fit the mold described above to make their venture a success, but based on the description above there's reason to be concerned for its viability. It appears they're aiming for an elite crowd, which of course precludes this dad from being a suitable target, so perhaps these points are moot. Hopefully so and here's hoping that the folks at Kindling enjoy great success.
For your Friday viewing pleasure:
With two kids in college I'm offered many, many opportunities to recall my own years in school. One of my biggest regrets about how I approached my education is that I saw it as something I needed to do in order to not disappoint my parents, to set myself up for a decent job/career, and to have lots of fun partying in the process. I didn't approach it the way I would now – as an opportunity to learn about interesting topics from people who have spent their lives becoming experts on those topics.
Luckily for me there's a relatively new development in the world of higher education – massive open online courses (MOOCs). From a story in the Wall Street Journal:
Professor Jeremy Adelman has taught a world-history class at Princeton University for several years, but as he led about 60 students through 700 years of history on the ivy-covered campus this past fall, one thing was different: Another 89,000 students tuned into his lectures free of charge via Coursera, an online platform.
Those kinds of numbers, and their potential for remaking higher education, have generated plenty of excitement about massive open online courses—dubbed MOOCs. They've also lured venture investors and universities, who have put millions of dollars into companies like Udacity, Coursera and edX, which partner with schools or instructors to offer these courses.
So here I am in my middle years, 25 years removed from my last fling with higher education, and I have the change to learn at the (digital) knees of some of the finest professors from the finest universities in the land. I'm sticking my toe in the water by taking the "Introduction to Statistics" course offered by University of California-Berkeley on edX. Why stats? It and Finance are the two courses I actively avoided taking in school because they were "hard" and I've regretted it on oh-so-many occassions during my career. Later on I'm hoping to dabble in some courses in various other areas that strike my fancy, and to be honest I'm as excited about this as I've been about anything in a long time.
If you're interested here are the four MOOC resources listed in the Journal story:
In a letter he wrote to Adlai Stevenson in 1959 author John Steinbeck wrote the following:
Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence. Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, "Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?"
Then there is the other kind of Christmas with present piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents thrown down and at the end the child says—"Is that all?" Well, it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.
May we all get what we need and deserve, which of course is not always what we want.
You probably think that the day-to-day business of running a municipality is boring – zoning hearings, council meetings, utility commission hearings, etc. – and for the most part you're right. But boring stuff is often important, and when it's no longer boring you probably have a problem. Take, for instance, Kodiak, Alaska's "Fecal Cliff":
The city has turned to composting as its solution, but a composting plant in Middle Bay has been hotly opposed. A competing plant design to be housed at the landfill will not be ready for several months.
In the meantime, [officials] have come up with a tentative agreement. Sludge will be stockpiled at the landfill until a temporary composting plant can be set up. This temporary facility cannot create garden-safe compost, but it can solidify the sludge to a point where it can be safely disposed of in the landfill.
If you're considering cosmetic surgery you may want to steer clear of some procedures involving the use of stem cells:
Wu could see that something was wrong: Her eyelid drooped stubbornly, and the area around her eye was somewhat swollen. Six and a half hours of surgery later, he and his colleagues had dug out small chunks of bone from the woman's eyelid and tissue surrounding her eye, which was scratched but largely intact. The clicks she heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.
About three months earlier the woman had opted for a relatively new kind of cosmetic procedure at a different clinic in Beverly Hills—a face-lift that made use of her ownadult stem cells. First, cosmetic surgeons had removed some the woman's abdominal fat with liposuction and isolated the adult stem cells within—a family of cells that can make many copies of themselves in an immature state and can develop into several different kinds of mature tissue. In this case the doctors extracted mesenchymal stem cells—which can turn into bone, cartilage or fat, among other tissues—and injected those cells back into her face, especially around her eyes. The procedure cost her more than $20,000, Wu recollects. Such face-lifts supposedly rejuvenate the skin because stem cells turn into brand-new tissue and release chemicals that help heal aging cells and stimulate nearby cells to proliferate.
This kind of puts the potential risks of botox to shame doesn't it?
Winston-Salem's a/perture cinema was recently profiled for a story in The Street about alternative forms of raising funds for small businesses:
The art-house movie theater in Winston-Salem, N.C., needs $50,000 to snag a lease to rent the lower level of the building that will open up space for an additional screening room and larger lobby.
But the owners are tapped out. The business' long-term debt includes a recent bank loan that is funding an expensive film-to-digital conversion.
So a/perture cinema is trying something new to find financing. The art-house is asking its customers, fans, friends and family, and other independent cinema enthusiasts to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign onIndiegogo.
"It's kind of now or never, so we need to get the community behind us and those who just want to keep art-house theaters open around the country on board," curator Lawren Desai says.
Last I heard Lawren and her crew were about half-way to their goal. They're a great asset to the Camel City so hopefully they'll get there.
Remember Nate Silver? He's the guy who got so much attention for accurately predicting (in an eerily detailed way) the results of the last election. He's come out with an analysis of gun owners in the US and going by his numbers it looks like the most well-armed segment of our population is white middle-aged men, who are married with children, make between $50-100k, belong to the Republican party, are Evangelical Christians (but only go a couple of times per yeare, i.e. Chreasters), didn't graduate from college, live in the rural midwest and served in the US military.
I can't imagine that fits anyone's stereotype of a gunowner.
Befuddled 