Interactively explore energy and material intensities in US cities

@10:30 Stop comparing with other countries. Americans should be more American.

explore trends in life expectancy in the United States between 1989 and 2009

Arnold moved to town in 1985 with an impassioned commitment to natural childbirth and an entrepreneur’s hunch about an untapped market. Mexican women had a long tradition of crossing the border to give birth, and Arnold soon made herself one of the busiest midwives in the state. Back when she started, getting over the border was as simple as wading across the Rio Grande or paying a ferryman a dollar for a tow on an inner tube. “They would come in with their jeans still wet,” she said [...]

running a business from afar involves all sorts of annoying inefficiencies. He was afraid to set foot in Juárez, but not all of his managers had U.S. visas. So when he had to see them in person, he sometimes conducted meetings at the center of a border bridge, in the buffer zone beneath the Mexican and American flags [...]

Local lore holds that one city was built on the other’s misfortune. Major battles of the Mexican Revolution were plotted in El Paso and fought in Juárez. When warfare broke out in the streets of the Mexican city in 1911, a newspaperman later recalled, “El Paso was delighted and moved en masse down to the riverbank to watch the scrap.” El Paso’s bank deposits increased by 88 percent in just a few years, as merchants made fortunes supplying all the warring parties. One hardware store sold barbed wire to the Mexican government and wire cutters to the rebels [...]

“Little by little,” Uranga said, “if you bring development, you bring security.” To illustrate, he pointed to some hills and said, “That’s where they used to dump the girls.” A decade ago, hundreds of women, many from the factories, turned up murdered around Juárez. Uranga claimed that such things were not happening in this area anymore. “Why?” he said. “We built the road.”

Some doubt Uranga’s theory that the outsourcing industry benefits the poor. They suggest that it’s hardly a coincidence that plants like his and the drug industry exist side by side. “To what extent does the very nature of the industry contribute to the patterns of social anomie and violence that we see in Juárez and elsewhere along the border?” asked David Shirk of the Trans-Border Institute. The maquiladoras provide low-skilled jobs, but their existence has made Juárez a destination for the rootless and the desperate. This population appears to have been susceptible to the richer promises of the drug trade, as well as to the lure of illegal immigration to the United States, with its comparatively well-paid opportunities.

agave farming in the state of Jalisco, where a tequila boom that started in the 1990s has provided jobs to an area that was largely rural and poor a generation ago

One might expect each section of the border fence to look the same, but instead, we see startling variations of form and function as White moves across the United States. The images, when viewed all together, present a visual survey of the U.S.-Mexico border fence in its various iterations.

While well-intentioned, the administration’s efforts to advance the cause of “Internet freedom” as a human right should raise some concerns. First, despite the admirable desire to apply the nation’s enduring principles to the rapidly evolving realm of high technology, framing “Internet freedom” as a human right risks weakening the very concept of human rights. Further, by lending its prestige and credibility to the international cause of Internet freedom, the U.S. government may actually make it more likely that tyrannical regimes will crack down on the Internet [...]

A “right” to use it is a claim of entitlement to a particular technology and thus is based on the nature of the technology, not on the nature of the claimant [...]

tying human rights to the state of technology, however powerful, is an intellectual rabbit hole, at the bottom of which human rights are deprived of the very thing that makes them unique — the fact that we possess them because we are human [...]

In making Internet freedom a subject for discussion among governments, the administration is opening up the possibility of compromising between its version of Internet freedom, based on American political values, and versions embraced by other countries, based in some cases on their authoritarian interests [...]

if unabashedly championing freedom and democracy themselves seems too backwards and Bush-like to policymakers today, the “nearly magical qualities” of the Internet from their perspective leave it as “the only ray of light in an otherwise dark intellectual tunnel of democracy promotion." [...]

Translating our rights and values into cyberspace is a noble goal and one that should ultimately be pursued. But the only way such aims might truly be realized is in the context of societies that recognize and foster individual rights.

At a nearby shop that sells elk-antler chandeliers, the clerk said that the house appeared to a man in a vision and that he built it as a monument to the town. At a filling station, a motorist who had stopped for soft-serve ice cream said that the house was meant to be a lookout tower if an underground volcano in Yellowstone National Park ever erupted. And the teenagers who break into the abandoned structure on Saturday nights point to its writhing balustrades of warped pine and insist it was built by a madman.

This does not mean children can never play video games, or that they should not. Some computer programs can be used creatively. What it means is that the children spend time operating programming created by someone else; they are not exercising their creative potential and abilities. When you read a book, your brain creates images, and gives voice and meaning to the letters. When you watch a television show or play a game program, all the “work” of imagination is done for you. Video games are slightly different than television, in that they are interactive, and some games may provide some opportunity for limited creativity. The games are ultimately “too easy” to truly stimulate the imagination on deeper and more meaningful levels, and in the end produce nothing of any value to anyone except for motor memory skills, which may satisfy the player and, in some games, the opponents. In general, creativity arises from domain specific knowledge, coupled with a creative need and personality. With regard to video games, however, the deeper the player’s knowledge of the program, the less relevant and less productive is creative thinking in playing it. Children are born with creative potential, and time spent playing video games is time wasted insofar as developing and preserving that potential. It is also time spent learning how to avoid being creative, and practicing the “skill” of operating without being creative. Creative thinking is like a muscle, and it needs to be stretched and flexed, or it will atrophy [...]

Recently, Europe and Asia have begun to focus their educational systems on fostering creativity. The intense competition for scarce educational resources in these countries had previously fostered a system of standardized testing and rote memorization. At a very early age, children had to achieve on standardized tests, which we now know to stifle creativity. Therefore, countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have modeled their educational systems after the earlier American education system because of America’s previous success in encouraging creativity in children. Ironically, in the U.S., NCLB now mandates standardized testing and national educational standards, fosters rote memorization, and chokes creativity in children.

Study after study has shown that In early childhood, the arts have been linked to school-readiness, improved cognitive and motor ability. Learning should also not be confined to formal, academic environments, but should continue through adulthood...

@36 re: assessment

[live blog: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/nea-interagency-research-taskforce_n_1120168.html ]

The trip takes only a few minutes, but, especially on weekends, every ferry is full, which makes it feel as if the men are pulling the boat through cement. El Chalan — which roughly translates as “the Barge” in Spanish — is capable of carrying three cars and a dozen people at a time. When it occasionally lingers midriver, the ferry becomes the ultimate in-between: floating proof that what Americans call the border (a hard line to be defended), Mexicans more appropriately call la frontera, a bilingual frontier with a unique mingling of characteristics.

The real purpose of the Metamovement, I would argue, is to re-engage the 99%, from the bottom up, community by community around the world, first to learn how things really work and what is really going on, and then to decide what actions need to be taken in response. In every nation and community the situation is different and the response that is needed will inevitably be different.

The purpose of the Metamovement is education and then organization. That means countering the official propaganda and refusing to support, with complacency, with tax dollars, with consumer dollars, with obedient wage-slave labour, or with the acceptance of crushing debt, the existing political and economic systems that are currently run for the benefit of the corporatists. It means curing the epidemic of anomie that has infected so many of us, everywhere. It’s a hugely ambitious goal [...]

I believe that the massive and chronic crises we will all be facing will consume so much of our time and attention that the Metamovement will fall by the wayside.

a little aggregator that pulls pictures from Flickr with the tag #occupywallst and flows them through a reverse-chronologic river. 

http://occupyresearch.wikispaces.com/

dialect maps, displaying what terms and pronunciations are used, and where they are used.

What older white generations need to realize is that they're in a partnership with the country's increasingly Hispanic younger people, said Myers, the USC professor.

It's in everyone's interest that these diverse young people succeed, he said, because they will serve as a backbone of the national economy and will support social programs older Americans rely upon, such as Social Security.

[end] : These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.
This is why “Why did we have to buy this book?” was such a great question. The student who asked it was not complaining. He was trying to understand how the magic worked. I (a Theory 2 person) wonder whether students at that college are still asking it.

created to address the Due Diligence & Housing Compliance sections of a Real Estate Purchase Contract

data from state air quality monitors

Back in the years of the Cold War, our public schools were blamed for contributing to the alleged missile gap and the prospect of losing the space race. Federal initiatives resulted in curricular priorities in our schools given to mathematics and science, to be led by university scholar-specialists. What students learned from these initiatives was that they did not like math and science. The consequence was that university enrollments in those disciplines plummeted, leading the president of the American Chemical Society to declare in his 1967 address at the society’s annual meeting, “We have committed a crime against a generation.” Earlier, Harvard University President James B. Conant had called for a moratorium on national testing. The situation is far worse today.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.” [...]

To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self [...]

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

This is not, however, what this issue of The American Interest means by plutocracy. We mean not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others. As the introductory essay to this issue shows, this influence may be exercised in four basic ways: lobbying to shift regulatory costs and other burdens away from corporations and onto the public at large; lobbying to affect the tax code so that the wealthy pay less; lobbying to allow the fullest possible use of corporate money in political campaigns; and, above all, lobbying to enable lobbying to go on with the fewest restrictions. Of these, the second has perhaps the deepest historical legacy.

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society [...]

Why has a significant increase in income inequality in recent decades failed to generate political pressure from the left for redistributional redress, as similar trends did in earlier times? Instead, insofar as there is any populism bubbling from below in America today it comes from the Right, and its target is not just the “undeserving rich”—Wall Street “flip-it” shysters and their ilk—but, even more so, government policies intended to protect Americans from their predations. How do we explain this? [...]

But as it turned out, Obama was not riding a tide of left-wing populism. While the Democratic majorities in Congress succeeded in moving this ambitious legislative agenda forward, the results fell far short of expectations. The stimulus package did not produce stunning economic successes. The healthcare bill did not include a public option, and failed to address the real sources of cost inflation. Above all, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform bill did not change the perverse incentives that led to the crisis in the first place. Indeed, while Wall Street brought considerable opprobrium on itself, it was arguably the sector of the U.S. economy that suffered the least in the long run. Bank earnings were restored after a couple of quarters. And though the banks now face tougher regulation, Congress failed to do anything about the fact that investment banks are still too large and too interconnected to fail, and will surely be bailed out again when they get in trouble. Indeed, the U.S. financial sector is now concentrated in fewer hands than it was before the crisis [...]

here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds—a tightly knit world in which everyone shared the same views about the self-regulating and beneficial effects of open capital markets. The alliance was enormously profitable for everyone: The academics got big consulting fees, and Wall Street got legitimacy. And it has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis.

Another set of ideas was of even more direct help to the wealthy: Reaganomics. Supply-side economics provided a principled justification for the rich paying lower taxes on the grounds that entrepreneurial incentives unleashed by lower marginal tax rates would not merely trickle but pour down both via public finance and through the creation of employment. This argument was likely true at the near 90 percent marginal rates that prevailed after World War II, but those rates were reduced in several waves beginning in the 1960s. Clinton’s tax increases of the early 1990s brought rates up only slightly, and didn’t have the growth-killing effects widely predicted by Republicans—just the opposite, they preceded one of the great economic expansions of recent memory. The benefits of the Bush-era cuts flowed overwhelmingly to the wealthy, and yet were promoted on the grounds that lower rates would redound to everyone’s benefit. This is still a gospel that many people continue to believe, including, oddly enough, all too many of those left behind.

Children with access to arts programs are better students, higher achievers than those who do not have the benefit of arts education. At risk youth who are able to participate in arts programs are more likely to stay in school and continue into higher education than those deprived of that education. Why would any politician want to eliminate funding for a government program that leads to more competitive students and lower drop out rates?

growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

[...]

Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

individual health behaviors, education and jobs, to quality of health care, to the environment

with clusteralliance.org

The comparison of higher education to an “industry” (with implications that it is beginning to look like a rust belt), then the claims that eleven other countries are doing better in “higher education attainment” and that we are not preparing students for jobs in the “new economy,” capture a number of the contradictions I find in some of the other crisis books under review.

On the one hand, all the critics of the American university claim to be partisans of the liberal arts, to want students to study philosophy and literature, even the arts, and to learn “critical thinking” (the currently accepted mantra—not a bad one). On the other hand, the tests proposed always seem to have to do with job preparation—even as the critics in the same breath deplore “vocationalism” and point to the impoverished education that many majors in business or accounting receive. And one would like to know whether the level of higher education attainment measured by the OECD is in fact liberal education or simply technocratic training at a high level (a point raised by Martha Nussbaum in Not for Profit, the welcome outlier among the books under review) [...]

The proposals are not new, a number of them have been acted upon in one form or another, others are underway—no university that I know of is oblivious to the revolutions of network and Web. As for mandatory retirement, Taylor seems to forget that this was not abolished by the universities, which would love to bring it back, but by an act of Congress. Regulation is a more sinister matter, I believe. Who or what is to regulate American universities? The Department of Education that brought us the Spellings Commission report? Some national board armed with the Collegiate Learning Assessment? Or perhaps Representative Darrell Issa, chair of the House Committee on Oversight?

[...]

On the whole, one has to say that the relative autonomy of the American university has been far more beneficial than the contrary. American higher education is a nonsystem that is messy, reduplicative, unfair—just like American society as a whole—but it has made genuine commitments to quality and to a greater degree of social justice, to the extent that is within its control, than most other institutions of the society. It has brought new blood into old elitist institutions, and indeed has thoroughly scrambled the hereditary caste it began with.

Eleven charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth. Figuring out why so many of our intellectuals and experts are so poorly equipped to play a constructive role — and figuring out how to develop the leadership we currently lack — may be the most important single thing Americans need to work on right now [...]

the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level. Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true [...]

America today has many technical intellectuals – people like doctors, engineers, and others who are able to carry out complex tasks – and we are extraordinarily rich in specialist intellectuals who have a deep knowledge of a particular subject. Our educational and professional systems are set up to train and support the large numbers of people needed to fill these roles. We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience. The more complex a society and the more rapidly it is changing, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesizing intellectuals who are focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience. Otherwise, a gap grows between the technical and specialist intellectuals and the values and ideas of society at large [...]

There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism [...]

Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires [...]

...a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

American education is far from perfect, but it has a few unique characteristics that makes it a system that cherishes individual talents, cultivates creativity, celebrates diversity, and inspires curiosity and a system that many other countries are working hard to emulate. The characteristics include: a broad definition of education, broad definition of talent, multiple criteria for judging success, decentralized decision making, and a strong belief in individual differences.

Unfortunately, these features have been precisely the target of the current reform. The definition of what education means has been reduced to what is tested—reading and math. Talent in schools has been reduced to the ability to obtain good test scores. Decentralized decision making and local autonomy have been viewed as the source of inequality and inefficiency. Respect for individual differences has been criticized as holding low expectations of students.

The intertwined history of America and Mexico and their common border make Hispanics a somewhat different demographic group than, say, Irish or Italian immigrants used to be. On the one hand, many Latinos are not only citizens but have deeper roots in what is now America than many Anglos do. Leticia Van de Putte, a Texas state senator from San Antonio with relatives on both sides of the border, points out that “our family was there when it was Spain, when it was France, when it was Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, the Confederacy. Our family’s always been in the same place; it was the damn government that kept changing." [...]

Arturo Rodríguez, the president of the (very Hispanic) United Farm Workers union and son-in-law of César Chávez, the founder of that union and the equivalent of Martin Luther King to Chicanos, recognises that Latinos are probably changing America more visibly than the Italians, Irish, Chinese or Germans did. This, he said, will cause some Anglos anxiety. But, he adds, a backlash against immigrants who are among the most downtrodden in the world is the wrong answer, and one that his movement will fight. “In the long run we’ll win,” he says. “Why? Because we have the numbers.”

Gulf of Mexico
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/now_that_the_oil_well_is_cappe.html
Floods in Pakistan
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/continuing_pakistani_floods.html
Fires in Russia
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/continuing_russian_wildfires.html
Landslides in China:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/landslides_strike_zhouqu_count.html
Earthquake tsunami volcano in Indonesia
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/10/dual_disasters_in_indonesia.html
10 months after the earthquake in Haiti
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/11/haiti_ten_months_later.html

real-time lightning locator network

Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media. News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington. Dodd, who came to the Senate in 1981 and will leave next January, told me, “I used to have eleven Connecticut newspaper reporters who covered me on a daily basis. I don’t have one today, and haven’t had one in a number of years. Instead, D.C. publications only see me through the prism of conflict.” Lamar Alexander described the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” [...]

On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

[ see also: Todd Purdum's "Washington, We Have a Problem"
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?printable=true&currentPage=all ]

After the U.S. emerged from the darkness of World War II into the daylight of economic expansion, ad executives reignited their efforts to develop proprietary theories that could both define advertising's value and link it to an agency's own offerings. As often as not, these theories derived from contemporary psychology. The improbably named Norman B. Norman, a creator of the TV game show "The $64,000 Question," anchored his Norman, Craig & Kummel agency to the theory of "empathy." An elegant British import, David Ogilvy, said it was "brand personality" and not "any trivial product difference" that drew consumers to products. His one-time brother-in-law, Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency, disagreed. To Reeves, repetition of a "Unique Selling Proposition" -- he explained it as "getting a message into the heads of most people at the lowest possible cost" -- was the foundation of advertising.

Battles between agencies over their scientifically designed products began to resemble religious crusades. Brand image, George Gallup huffed, was just a "passing fad." For a time, Ogilvy and Reeves stopped talking. "Each shakes his head," wrote Martin Mayer in his delightful chronicle of advertising in the '50s, "Madison Avenue U.S.A.," "over the way the other wastes his clients' money."

No wonder: there was vast wealth at stake. The end of the war and the march of suburbanization were fueling a demand for consumer goods unlike any the country had ever seen.

[downloadable pdf]

What makes the picture an even more compelling find is that several art experts said it was created by the photography studio of Mathew Brady, a famous 19th-century photographer known for his portraits of historical figures such as President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Stapp said the photo was probably not taken by Brady himself but by Timothy O'Sullivan, one of Brady's apprentices. O'Sullivan took a multitude of photos depicting the carnage of the Civil War.

In 1862, O'Sullivan famously photographed a group of some of the first slaves liberated after Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

All-American Canal carries water from Colorado to San Diego

With Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education’s guess may just be wrong. National curriculum has not proven to be the silver bullet for raising achievement or closing gaps (I have written about this before on this site and in my book); charter schools have not been proven to be THE solution either (they are plenty of good ones and bad ones just as public schools); teacher merit pay or associating teacher evaluation and job security to student test scores has not been proven to raise teacher quality either; and longitudinal data systems are based on a very mechanical view of student growth and development, ignoring individual differences and the human aspect of education. All these measures, mandated by Race to the Top, are very likely to result in more bureaucracy, cheating, and narrowing children’s educational experiences, and stifle creativity and innovation [...]

Instead of assuming that the best solutions need to be determined, prescribed, driven or ‘authorised’ from the centre, policymakers should create more opportunities for communities to develop and deliver their own solutions and to learn from each other.

Mass localism reflects a broader trend that is increasingly apparent across the economy, culture and society, that of finding distributed answers to problems and delivering solutions with citizens. It represents a shift from mass production to distributed production. Just as forward-thinking businesses are opening up their R&D processes to their suppliers and customers, so policymakers should look for solutions beyond established organisations and experts. They should look also to citizens and communities.

[The Nixon Administration's] cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution [...]

Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids [...]

What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come [...] dynamism in the U.S. has actually been in decline for a decade; with the housing bubble fueling easy (but unsustainable) growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice. Phelps and Tilman finger several culprits: a patent system that’s become stifling; an increasingly myopic focus among public companies on quarterly results, rather than long-term value creation; and, not least, a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering [...] Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people [...] people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking [...] Income inequality usually falls during a recession, and the economist and happiness expert Andrew Clark says that trend typically provides some emotional salve to the poor and the middle class. (Surveys, lab experiments, and brain readings all show that, for better or worse, schadenfreude is a powerful psychological force: at any fixed level of income, people are happier when the income of others is reduced.) But income inequality hasn’t shrunk in this recession. In 2007–08, the most recent year for which data is available, it widened [...] We are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come. We have a civic—and indeed a moral—responsibility to do everything in our power to stop it now, before it gets even worse.

[slideshow and maps - Amtrak passes through here:

http://bit.ly/a7Cozh (Google Map) and

http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/states/texas/texas-railway-map.html

McClatchy piece on Juarez & cartels (w/ video):
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/14/92181/in-mexicos-murder-capital-residents.html ]

The town has only a few paved streets, one restaurant near Interstate 10, a feed store, a small grocery, a gas station and a couple of general stores. Irrigation canals carry water from the Rio Grande to alfalfa and chili fields, set amid the cactus, sand and mesquite of the Chihuahuan Desert.

About 2,000 people live here, in ramshackle trailer homes, weather-battered recreational vehicles and well-kept brick houses. The water tower boasts of the high school’s six-man football team having won the state championship five times between 1986 and 1991.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index™ has been developed to provide the official measure for health and well-being. It's the voice of Americans and the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to measure what people believe constitutes a good life.

Over the next 25 years, the Well-Being Index will collect and measure the daily pulse of the nation's well-being and provide best-in-class solutions for a healthier world. By helping Americans understand how work impacts life and health and conversely how life affects work and health, we can work together to improve well-being for a better way of life.

In the 1990s, the country’s poverty rate fell, its incomes soared, and the population of uninsured
dropped considerably. But since 2000, each of those indicators has turned in the wrong
direction.

But while China’s war is conscious, efforts by other countries to encircle the Net are not. To see what I mean by that, read Rebecca MacKinnon’s Are China’s demands for Internet ’self-discipline’ spreading to the West? Her short answer is yes [...] The Obama administration is negotiating a trade agreement with 34 other countries — the text of which it refuses to make public, citing national security concerns — that according to leaked reports would include increased liability for content hosting companies and service providers. The goal is to combat the global piracy of movies and music.

“Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry,” Hemingway concludes evenhandedly. “Eating is wonderful too.”

Still, Hemingway’s two kinds of hunger--the hunger that gnaws at the belly and the hunger that fuels artistic ambition--are central to any discussion of how poverty is represented by American artists and writers. Now three books have appeared that seek a fresh understanding of depictions of the poor in American life--what Morris Dickstein calls “the starvation army.” Edmund Wilson--who crisscrossed the desperate country as a roving reporter for this magazine in 1931 and 1932, contributing to what Alfred Kazin called “the vast granary of facts on life in America put away by the WPA writers, the documentary reporters, the folklorists preparing an American mythology, the explorers who went hunting through darkest America with notebook and camera”--once observed “how difficult it is for persons who were born too late to have memories of the Depression to believe that it really occurred, that between 1929 and 1933 the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces.” Perhaps the experience of the past year has made it somewhat easier to imagine.

It is good to be reminded that poverty did not enter American literature with the crash of 1929 and the stark photographs of the Farm Security Administration.

Invention and innovation involve a combination of left-brained and right-brained skills; while a factual understanding of the concepts involved are usually necessary, they are almost never sufficient, there is always an element of pure creativity involved. This argument is outlined in the 2008 New Yorker piece, The Eureka Hunt which discusses the work being done in creative cognition at Northwestern University by Mark Jung-Beeman, a cognitive neuroscientist. For my purposes at least, the work illustrates the vital role played by both hemispheres of the brain in moments of “insight” solutions to problems. The essence of innovation is the creation of solutions to problems, even if they are problems that most people didn’t realize they had, therefore innovation and invention require a combination of left-brained and right-brained skills and activities.

Daniel Pink posits that there are six right-brained directed “senses” which are essential to the kinds of creativity and innovation which are going to be increasingly necessary going forward into the 21st century. These are: design, story, symphony, play, empathy and meaning [...] [*disagree]: Teaching a child the best way to score high on a multiple-choice test teaches just that, it doesn’t teach critical thinking, it doesn’t encourage creativity, it absolutely precludes the development of higher order thinking skills, whole mind thinking, the kind of thinking that will be increasingly necessary in the new economy.

China, Japan, Singapore are actually trying to move away from the traditional centralized, standardized, authoritarian approach to a more autonomous, localized form [that allows for different definitions of success]...project-based learning, innovative, localized education that can serve on a global scale

wow

"We've squeezed everything we can out of a system that was designed a century ago," says Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, and vice chairman of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which produced the report. "We've not only put in lots more money and not gotten significantly better results, we've also tried every program we can think of and not gotten significantly better results at scale. This is the sign of a system that has reached its limits."

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

the objectors say little to nothing about the impact of the settlement on consumers, who already benefit from Google's efforts and would benefit even more, if the agreement is approved.
The interests of information users ought to be the top priority of U.S. copyright officials, but Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, condemned the original agreement. She spoke on behalf of the theoretical owners of orphan works--authors and publishers, in other words, who were given a powerful monopoly and then abandoned it. Peters accused Google and the organizations who sued the company of conspiring to execute an "end-run around copyright law as we know it."
There's the real problem. Copyright "as we know it" is a disaster and an embarrassment. Rather than complain about the ingenuity, leadership, and careful diplomacy of Google in trying to clean it up, why doesn't Peters focus on the job she was hired to do: urging Congress to bring copyright law in line with the realities of the 21st century?
Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that "hate" is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here's what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It's a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it's painful to consider, it's possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart -- an empire in decline.

In its annual report on hunger, the department said that 17 million American households, or 14.6 percent of the total, “had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year.” That was an increase from 13 million households, or 11.1 percent, the previous year.

Of the big three American sports (baseball, basketball, and football), only football has failed to catch on anyplace else. While Nicaraguans and Japanese practice their fast-balls and Croatians and Argentineans work on their jump-shots, nobody else is interested in playing American football. Why is that?

I'd propose it's because nobody else takes as much conflicted pleasure in war as we do. American "smash mouth" football is all about war: long bombs, "blitz" surprise attacks, grinding out the ground game, specialized units, penetration of enemy territory, clearly-defined hierarchical chains of command

Law.Gov is an outgrowth of 3 years of work we've done at Public.Resource.Org along with our numerous colleagues in the open law movement across the country. There have been a series of piecemeal successes which have demonstrated that there is a demand and a need for more legal information to be more broadly available. I'm hopeful now that a truly national movement may have coalesced and that there is at least a chance we can bring this across the finish line and create a new function inside of government, the publication of America's operating system on an open source platform.

Mazatlán was one of Mexico’s first popular resort towns for vacationers from “the other side,” as the United States is routinely called there. In the 1950s, a tourism boom began in what was then a small, coastal city with an active port, expansive beaches and European architectural character. Modern hotels were built along Olas Altas, the old town’s wide beachfront boulevard.

Route 7 is, in other words, one of the old roads of America, a trail first broadened for horses, and, before that—and if I say probably it’s because I don’t really know—worn by Indians, most on foot, most of these feet in moccasins. It’s instructive to study how such a road begins, which (in this case) is in the wilderness of Champlain, and how such a road ends, which (in this case) is in the knot of car dealerships at the bottom of 7, as, in its journey from north to south and then to now, Route 7 re-creates the journey of the nation. What began in wilderness culminates in showrooms. What began in Indians culminates in salesmen. The car itself, the platonic idea of the car, is really a concrete expression of all that road, its products as well as its creator.

...in the Jim Crow south (Charlottesville, VA)

A study by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission released this year found 9,758 migrants who had been kidnapped as they tried to cross the border into the United States between September 2008 and February 2009. The commission noted that migrants were typically terrified to report such crimes out of fear of being deported by Mexican immigration authorities and that the actual number of victims was probably much higher.

Here at the beginning of the academic year, a wealth of talented writers are about to enter the system. They've got more to work with than ever. They should be thinking about what Joyce's characters were thinking when they started repeating the word "galoshes": about the weirdness that is currently seeping into our lives from all angles in a country that appears to have lost touch with itself. They should check out CNN and wonder what's going on as our national discussions turn into bizarre rants. They should assume that 50 years from now, people will read stories to figure out who we are, not what we feel when we wish we could have been something else. That's what Joyce was doing in 1914 when Dubliners was published. That's why people still read it. That's what young Americans writers should be trying to do every time they start clicking away. But they shouldn't try to rob from the dead, because there isn't anything there left to steal.

With the US Senate bogged down in the fight over reforming health care, American leaders have said that the senators might not move on climate legislation until 2010, well after the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That drew a sharp response from John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation: "The United States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference," Bruton said, "but the United States emits 25% of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce. I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position"...Europe has proposed far-reaching reforms designed to impose new rules on executive pay and bonuses, requiring that banks link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance...

Editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to "points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable." With this in mind, they've produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found.

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.

However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.

the protracted drought in the Southwest has led water managers to rethink the possibilities for the wastewater, placing the preservation of the wetland, the Ciénega de Santa Clara, at the center of a delicate balancing act between the growing thirst of California, Nevada and Arizona and the delta’s ecology.

They're back. Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country. "Paper terrorism" — the use of property liens and citizens' "courts" to harass enemies — is on the rise. And once-popular militia conspiracy theories are making the rounds again, this time accompanied by nativist theories about secret Mexican plans to "reconquer" the American Southwest. One law enforcement agency has found 50 new militia training groups — one of them made up of present and former police officers and soldiers. Authorities around the country are reporting a worrying uptick in Patriot activities and propaganda. "This is the most significant growth we've seen in 10 to 12 years," says one. "All it's lacking is a spark. I think it's only a matter of time before you see threats and violence."

Weary of shelters, the couple pitched a pup tent in Roger Williams Park, close to a plaque bearing words Williams had used to describe this place he founded: “A Shelter for Persons in Distress.” But someone complained, so Mr. Freitas set off again in search of shelter. The March winds blew.

Down South Main Street he went, past the majestic court building and the upscale seafood restaurant, over a guardrail to a gravelly plot beneath a ramp that once guided cars toward Cape Cod. Foul-smelling and partially hidden, a place of birds and rodents, it was perfect.