Steve Ersinghaus

In a comment thread, JJ Cohen of In the Middle writes:
Massive projects require the leap beyond the horizon of your own death. They have to be a message to someone who comes after, and very often to someone who comes LONG after. That person isn’t “us” — as you say, how could the builders have [...]

Martin Rundkvist reports on medieval kilns
The site is on land belonging to Boo manor, right by a heavily trafficked Medieval shipping thoroughfare toward Stockholm, where there was great demand for bricks from about 1250 onward. I guess that would be the lower limit of the kilns’ possible dates. There must have been many buildings at [...]

Does this mean happy days in Bogota
“This is a learning experiment! We are realizing that we can live without cars!” Mr. Peñalosa bellows as he cruises across the southbound lanes of Avenida 19, pausing on the wide, park-like median. A flock of young women rolls up the median’s bike path, shouting, “Mayor! Mayor!” though it [...]

This NYT article plays with the money issue in teaching and technology:
The Cluster originated as an idea of Fred Phillips, a professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute, a research university, and was promoted by Kelvin Ng, an investment banker in Portland. Their vision was that a cluster would expand the capabilities and horizons of small [...]

I’m going to be jotting a few notes down in Tinderbox (Ha, Mark, I no longer have to wait for the Windows version) for my up-coming romp on spatial studies in Fall writing courses, so I have to nail down the Mac keyboard and gather my thoughts on how human-designed spaces (i.e., places) shape experience [...]

A couple of articles in the paper this morning illustrate why spatial analysis is important. They also reveal why we have to take a serious look at the criteria we target to solve problems. The first point comes from Leonard Pitts, who presents examples of conversations he had with people at YouthBuild U.S.A.
“Some parents,” [...]

Important to military and Intelligence thinking today is the notion of “Ethnographic Intelligence. Thanks to Anne of Space and Culture for the link. Here’s Fred Renzi on the issue (notes in original)
The proliferation of empowered networks makes “ethnographic intelligence” (EI) more important to the United States than ever before.2 Among networks, al-Qaeda is of course [...]

You could argue that health is a way of passing through space. I can go with an injury or I can go with repair or crutches. It could also be argued that health has intrinsic value. Well, that last one may beyond argument.
Some commentators get caught up in what they call the culture of entitlement [...]

Scott Davis writes
Fast-forward to the present and our point of view is very different. This region has provided everything we could hope for and more. We have earned graduate degrees from local universities, purchased a home and put down roots in our community. Professionally we found the senior leadership of the Hartford region engaging and [...]

I’ve been following this story in various areas of this weblog and the news has perhaps spread widely now on the I-84 imbroglio. Edmund Mahony of the Hartford Courant reports:
The transportation department paid the now defunct L.G. DeFelice construction company about $52 million to build the redesigned, 3.5 mile stretch of I-84 in Waterbury [...]

Rick Green in this column scratches his head at the recent Julie Amero case, where new media meets law
The state of Connecticut spent two years investigating before it won a speedy conviction of Julie Amero - the infamous Norwich porn teacher - this January.
But it was never as tidy as the Norwich Public Schools, the [...]

About a month ago I wrote a little on a study that found little improvement in learning from educational technology. Unable to find the study, I had to take analysis from the newspaper to form a conclusion: that studies critiquing edutech will always come to wrong conclusions if questions are begged. Now this article on [...]

One of my hobbies is studying how the design of spaces–landscape, architectural, digital–shape experience and encourage problem solving, creativity, and interaction. So it was fun to finally experience the Stata Center. A few photos from the trip on Friday:
The Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences is built on the site of MIT’s legendary [...]

I’m an advocate of open borders. I’d like to see gates and walls come down and any plan to maintain and build structures along the US Mexico border cease. This is, of course, a position of hypothesis that asks: what would happen if border gates, walls, and barriers were removed? And why would a particular [...]

Emily Gertz has this to say about future investment in clean tech, which bring back to mind Connecticut’s plans for the future.
Are clean technologies the investment opportunity of the 21st century? That was the breathless question at the panel I went to on Thursday, the second day of the “Advancing Sustainable Prosperity” conference in Boston. [...]