Real Battles

Bob Kerry is making a fool of himself at the moment on Biill Moyers’ Journal. Worse, he seems out of touch with logical determinations of reality. That al Qaeda would be recruiting actively despite our involvement in Iraq is false justification for the inspiration now. Secondly, thinking the Iraq action a major blunder does not mean that one supports dictators (a fallacy of the false middle).

“What are we supposed to do, let dictators like that stay in place?” he asks. Please.
“What are we supposed to do, encourage middle class debt, dishealth, and shirk on present and future generations?”

The trillion spent and so many losses later, for what then?

The argument about whether to “stay the course” or “withdraw” is a simplistic dichotomy. “Course” is undefinable and “withdraw” does not describe the reality of the situation: withdraw from what? In my view, course, given the Iraq context, means perpetual: a “war on terror,” much like a war on stupidity, cannot end. In the case of withdrawal, we have a dark and troubling comedy. In the case of a gigantic misstep, it’s a little odd to destroy and then say “Oops, see ya” in the place of the “administration” who committed the destruction in the first place and who will not be the one to say “oops” at all. Solve the problem: perhaps a competent government could figure it out.

The real battle is for the heart of government in this country, a battle the democrats have already lost, as far as I’m concerned.

Connecticut Optimism

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 inviting. Our efforts to reach out to these “cold New Englanders” have been met with interest and a focus on what we can accomplish together.

He’s writing about opportunity and involvement and the future of Connecticut. I think he nails the relationship. He’s also given me more to think about for course content in the Fall.

But how about a little web design.

Lybrel, Schools, and Word Frequencies

I found these two strange articles in the paper and had a sense that certain words were repeated, either for emphasis or because of the nature and contexts of the subjects. I decided to use Daniel Steinbock’s TagCrowd application to test what I sensed from the reading. Here’s a link to the article on Hartford’s schools. Here’s the link to the article on new products for women.

The frequency for the first example reveals the repetition of the words “school” and “schools.” This repetition in the reading made for a sense that schools are going to spread like bubbles in Hartford. The article hints at the superintendent’s plans (Adamowski and plan are also repeated signifiers) to reorganize the school system into several types of schools. “Schools on” this theme and “schools on” that theme scaffolded the article.

created at TagCrowd.com

The idea of “more schools” stands out in the article. “Learning” and “well-being” are never mentioned.

My sense of the second article was that “bleeding” and “period” would have high frequency. This sense may be explained by the oddness of the subject from my own perspective. It seems presumptuous to me that such a pill would be devised in the first place. Then again, research and development in this area seems logical in an era of performance enhancing pills for men.

Lybrel, from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, takes the trend to its logical conclusion by attempting to suppress periods altogether.

“Why have a period at all?” asked Dr. Gerardo Bustillo, assistant chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif.

I don’t know. I’m sure there’s some reason. Maybe medical school exams ask the question, too. Why not a drug that will grow one of my fingers into a penis or eliminate nuisance facial hair?

created at TagCrowd.com

In the second case, it’s the product that stands out. “Consequences” gets a tiny glow. “Women,” “period,” “pills.”

Passage

Thus made their mourning the men of Geatland,
for their hero’s passing his hearth-companions:
quoth that of all the kings of earth,
of men he was mildest and most beloved,
to his kin the kindest, keenest for praise.

Swa begnornodon Geata leode
hlafordes hryre, heorðgeneatas,
cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyninga
manna mildust ond monðwærust,
leodum liðost ond lofgeornost.

Beowulf ends with a bitter sweet taste. We’ve been through monsters; we’ve watched the Geats rise and sense that they will fall, change, suffer. There’s something about ends here, transitions, a sensibility about passage through time and space. We doubt our abilities and are anxious about having to face the world without the aide of the elves. It could be argued that we capture the proportions of time through story in this way and objectify the feel of transitions. Existentially, change itself “passes” because we mark it as a point. We don’t really experience extended periods of change. We celebrate moments, such as the death of a great leader, and then wake up to a new day and move into life as usual. Alternatively, we often measure periods of change by the moments that close them. A couple looks forward, for example, to the birth of their child.

There is a mental or cognitive topography to this mediation. One style of ethic may prioritize change, another may see to the clocking of moments in between as a way of managing or mediating well being. We can map the seasons as a way of measuring ourselves. Winter is a time of sleep or death or pause, Spring is an awakening, signaling the approach of a new Beowulf or Aragorn, who will rise and lead us to safety. Persistent anxiety disrupts the mental topography of the seasons. Constancy is ahistorical. “This never ends” means “this never began.”

DOT, Contracting, and the Wonders of Road Work

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 and Cheshire. The state paid The Maguire Group, a private consulting engineer, another $6 million to inspect the DeFelice work.

The audit by J.R. Knowles/Hill International concluded that DeFelice did millions of dollars of work incorrectly or not at all, that Maguire failed to inspect the work or ignored incorrect work and that the state paid for the work “without following proper procedures including field verification and signoffs.”

Sounds pretty complicated to me. Nevertheless, the results of incompetence will be felt for years to come and projects that would have been good for the state will probably feel the pain. How to trust any budget then that has gone through any sort of prioritizing. Whose priorities? Against what standards?

Mahony continues:

Although transportation officials have said nothing to indicate that there is any immediate hazard, the Federal Highway Administration is concerned that failures in the highway drainage system may be creating underground washouts that could lead to road collapses.

While placing most of the blame for the problems on the contractors, Rell said the audit also shows a “cultural failure” by the transportation department because it “did not anticipate or expect that deficient work of this magnitude by the contracting and inspection firms could even occur.”

The audit confirms one fact that has been known for months: that the redesigned roadway’s drainage system is a nearly complete failure. Other experts have estimated the state may have to pay anywhere from $20 million to $30 million to correct the drainage failures alone.

In addition to the FBI investigation, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is looking into the project. “This audit reveals outrageous and far-reaching failures at every level in the I-84 expansion project,” he said Friday.

What does that first sentence mean? “Although transportation officials have said nothing to indicate that there is any immediate hazard, the Federal Highway Administration is concerned that failures in the highway drainage system may be creating underground washouts that could lead to road collapses.” Let’s parse this: “Although transportation officials have said nothing to indicate that there is any immediate hazard . . .” The problem with this statement is that it’s written in prepositional status yet doesn’t link to a subject. It should’ve been cut from the paragraph. The paragraph should begin: “The FHA is concerned that failures . . . ” What does it matter that “transportation officials” either confirm, deny, or say nothing about . . . Was there a question?

Thousands of people drive I-84 everyday. Do the “officials” have some newfangled spyglass that can see under ground and into a “complete failure”? What does complete failure mean, by the way? If I build a structure and it’s pronounced a complete failure does this mean it would last a windstorm? Underground washouts. Governor Rell wants to change the culture of the DOT and reform the agency, but how does one reform DOT? I suggest that government hire people who can actually do inspection work themselves. The governor also wants DOT Commissioner Carpenter to “take action against any workers who have performed inadequately on the I-84 project .”

What does “inadequately” mean? Does the audit not answer some of this?

So many holes.

Mashup Quest

The comments on this post by Nik at TechCrunch are somewhat revealing about the actuality of mashup concepts.

Popfly might be used to create an interesting tool for synchronizing different kinds of communications and data into an educational weblog or library site.

At this point I can’t think of any mashup use except to modify something like Sphere to target kinds of journals and subject matter weblogs, but sphere may evolve to cover this anyway.