Accreditation Issues

I just caught this post at Spazeboy who links to NBBlogs re accreditation at New Britain High School.

As far as I know, NB is not even on probation. I can’t find a source at NBBlogs. A few more attributions and description of how information is being gathered would be helpful. NEASC responds to public disclosure requests.

Prediction Games

I need to get out of the prediction game and go back to studying medieval literature and recursion and fractals in AS3.

I predicted Gore in 2000 (still think I was correct).

A no go in Iraq.

Kerry in 2004.

And that Bush wouldn’t touch the Scooter Libby affair. Why this and why now?

At least the Mandelbrot set behaves according to rules of logic. TPMMuckraker links to one reason why arbitrary action and decision-making is a dumb idea. Bizarro world keeps branching out. What’s happening on the other forks?

Spazeboy on VBing

Spazeboy has published his Guide to Political Video Blogging.

There are a few reasons why I undertook this project:

* Videoblogging is a powerful way to document local government

Take, for example, MattW’s video of a recent Energy Policy Forum featuring State Representative Steve Fontana. Not everyone could attend that meeting, or knew that it was taking place, but because Matt filmed it and published it online, we all benefit.
* Videoblogging provides a way to hold our leaders accountable

Look no further than Connecticut Bob’s October 6, 2006 encounter with Senator Lieberman. Bob asked about Lieberman’s use of the words “partisan frenzy” and Lieberman denied it. Not only that, Lieberman went one step further, saying that in fact those were Ned Lamont’s words. All Bob had to do was splice in the 3 seconds of video from the day prior wherein Lieberman says “partisan frenzy” and the case was closed.
* There’s a need for this kind of a guide

There are many tutorials and guides on the web that teach you how to do this or that with your video camera or editing software, but I was unable to find any guide that addressed the needs of the political videoblogger from gearing up to uploading.

Opinion and Weblogs

Carolyn writes:

Now onto a completely different topic: blogs. What’s up with them? Clearly I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I don’t want people to read this thinking I’m some Truman Capote pundit, or worse, a person who thinks they’re a Truman Capote pundit. Yikes. Frankly, no sarcasm here, no one should believe what they read on the internet. There’s some truth, sure, but how can you separate it from the swill? It’s all mixed in. Oh, what does it matter? Blogs are more about opinions loosely based on fact.

We don’t need to cover anything. But we can respond to and examine what we experience. She has already demonstrated a nice range.

And Susan Gibb makes excellent comment on Borges’ Englishman.

Morse v. Frederick and What Things Might Mean

Part b of the holding from the Morse case follows, tracked down from ScotusBlog:

(b) The Court agrees with Morse that those who viewed the banner would interpret it as advocating or promoting illegal drug use, in violation of school policy. At least two interpretations of the banner’s
words–that they constitute an imperative encouraging viewers to smoke marijuana or, alternatively, that they celebrate drug use–demonstrate that the sign promoted such use. This pro-drug interpretation gains further plausibility from the paucity of alternative meanings the banner might bear. Pp. 6–8.

I don’t really understand the court’s reasoning here or in its other parts. The Court agrees with Morse’s interpretation of how others might view or determine the words “Bong Hits 4 Jesus,” all of which must be guessed at. The dissent reads as if this has all been a simple waste of time, and I agree.

All this could’ve been laughed off by the school and the students. Rather, we have what I would suggest is a sweeping gesture by the court about a “very serious” matter. BH4J is now advocacy for drug use. Now any kid can wear the statement on a shirt and call it political speech. Right?

Space and Speech

It’s nice to see Bruce Katz and Jennifer Vey writing about the city. They provide three criteria for people who think in spatial terms:

First, the state should develop a strategy to better target its market-shaping resources (infrastructure, economic development) toward existing commerce centers – the established cities and towns still struggling to find their way in an economy that has for years rendered them obsolete.

A more strategic focus of existing resources would go a long way in helping to foster private investment and development in these communities, while at the same time helping to curb sprawl and preserve rural areas.

Imagine, for example, the economic, fiscal and psychological impacts of revitalizing Connecticut’s downtown cores such that they became home to 2 percent of their respective metropolitan areas’ residents. This equates to about 23,000 residents in downtown Hartford, almost 16,500 in downtown New Haven, and nearly 18,000 in downtown Bridgeport – numbers that would bring life, vitality and a virtuous cycle of growth to these important metropolitan hubs.

Second, Connecticut needs to provide a new funding stream dedicated specifically to redevelopment activities in ailing commercial cores.

To this end, the state should establish a Regional Reinvestment Fund – modeled after a similar fund proposed for counties in northeast Ohio – that would be used to make investments in land assembly and infrastructure improvements in urban areas. This low-risk fund would be capitalized by a state-backed revenue bond, to be repaid with a real estate transfer tax on new land acquired with money from the fund. It would then operate in perpetuity, with municipalities taking half of the property tax revenue generated by the resulting new development, and putting the other half back into the fund so it can continue to be used for new projects.

Finally, the state should implement the recommendations of the Task Force on Brownfields Strategies, which calls for a new package of programs dedicated to the cleanup and development of contaminated sites, most of which are in the state’s cities. Modeled in large part after similar programs in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, this effort would provide more flexible financing tools – including loans, grants and tax incentives – to put blighted properties back into productive use and help stimulate new investment in their surrounding urban neighborhoods.

Money and strategy would do a lot. But we also need to invest in the training required to change the way we think about the human reqional landscape. Partly, this has to do with instruction and practice in a certain kinds of discourse. Sure, it sounds like a small thing, but incoming students don’t know how to talk to one another (right, who really knows how?), and I want them to stay in the state to live, and I want them to work on realistic local improvements. What they want and need has a lot to do with how they get along with one another in a situation of conflict.

In speaking of budget matters, Kevin Reenie writes

That no part of this year’s $1 billion budget surplus is going back to the people who created it tells the story of state government. There’s always an unending list of “unmet needs” that legislators, lobbyists and the governor can trot out to try to shame reluctant citizens into quiet aquiescence [sic].

Certainly government could give the billion back somehow. Or we could encourage discourse on different terms.

On Time

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 wanted that? But if we can at least grant that the architects of old possessed a decent set of wits, they knew from experience that the present isn’t eternal, that the horizon of the future is uncertain … and can’t we imagine, without too much of a leap of faith, that a project like Stonehenge is sent into that future in part to stabilize it, but in part also to keep an ever-receding present alive, even beyond the demise of those who inhabited it?

I’d also want to emphasize what is truly remarkable about a building project that takes several human life spans to complete: it cannot be an ad hoc, day by day labor, but takes planning that exceeds human time and mortal duration. That fact has vast significance when thinking about these architectures, especially in their design for long endurance. It tells us nothing about specific intent, I suppose — i.e., it won’t let us know whether Stonehenge was a fertility shrine or a ceremonial ground or whatever — but it will remind us that such architectures that from their start have inhabited a future more than a present reveal an ancient and enduring human desire.

This comes as a response to this question:

. . . Sylvia Huot asked a question that goes to the heart of the kind of thinking we attempt here at ITM: how to intertwine meditation upon past and future while retaining some confidence that we are doing justice to history?

I would ask this question because it goes directly to Professor Cohen’s mention of building projects in the context of mortality: do we know enough about the Stonehenge builders’ notion of time as both concrete duration and abstract companion. How did they, for example, express “immediacy” or “now” and “later”?

In our own world, time is a thing to watch closely, classify, and beat. Time is a ubiquity as a technological construct: it’s staring at me from the computer now as a personified bot of the interior mechanism. The processor is clocked and so is the heart and DVD drive. Time and death are related: we do call them “deadlines” after all.

The notion of mortality in the west is heavily shaped by conceptualizations of technological futures, generational landscapes and forecasts, and by religion. How heavily do these influence our inferences about the Stonehenge builders?

On Kilns

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 the site, not least living and working quarters, and I’d love to see it stripped down to the bone on a larger scale. Unfortunately this would a) be expensive and b) obliterate Jan Peder’s garden, and so is unlikely to happen.